Not only do they impoverish the citizenry thanks to an evisceration of savings, they force capital allocators who fund all economic growth to protect their funds in unproductive sinks of wealth (think gold, land and art) over the growth parts of the economy.
Attempts at revitalising growth are being thwarted by pointless and unproductive investment in areas that either leave DPA untouched or actually harm it.
Put simply, this is the point at which a developing country stops being able to achieve rapid growth relatively easily, by simply taking rural workers doing unproductive farm labour and putting them to work in factories and cities instead.