Assuming that public authorities’ borrowing decisions should lay on careful and complete analysis of the financial and nonfinancial effects that could occur, both in terms of the present effort and effects and, especially, of the future ones, this paper aims to provide thorough judgements on the intergenerational effects of public indebtedness, as support for rational debt policy making. In organizing this paper, we first briefly overview the main theories underlying this issue, formulated over time in the literature. Subsequently, seeking to identify the potential shortcomings of these theories, we aim to achieve more detailed judgements on the real content of the burden passed on to future generations, taking into account not only the duty to repay the debt contracted in the past but also the phenomena that conducted to public indebtedness (debt financed public expenditures),by whose positive effects, depending on the effective destination of borrowed resources, may benefit not only the present generation but also future ones.