That 4, or God forbid,...
8 years go by and our situation has deteriorated in some significant way either through errors of commission or ommission or both on the part of the President. If he turns out to be correct that would mean a chunk of 12-16 lost years in our collective history of reasonable progress. It happens, it has happened in Japan for nearly 20 years now-political ineptitude magnifying and abetting structural and demographic weaknesses that have placed the Japanese economy in a semi-permanent deflation and increased their national debt to 226% of GDP, the highest, it goes almost without saying, in the world by nearly 2X. Italy may be on the same path, as are we probably. There is no silver in bullet in deleveraging and the whole of our economy is deleveraging-the national debt only represents about 20-25% of all the cumulative debt in the economy. Households, small businesses, institutions and smaller government units are all overly indebted and trying to reverse their positions. Of the bunch the national debt is at least the cheapest to finance. Just a few years ago (2008 I think) service on the national debt was 9.3% of GDP, right now it is a bit above 5% even though the total debt has increased substantially-all because of investor willingness to lend Uncle Sam short and long term at stupid low rates. We Americans hold 50% of the debt in one way and another and foreigners hold 50 %. As the Debt Ceiling drama unfolded Treasuries went up in price and down in yield, Hmmm? The cheap credit available is one of the ugly little incentives that Washington has to keep on borrowing-I mean just look at the fact that they borrowed more and yet they are paying out less each quarter for the privelege-how many of these bastards are going to be able to keep their fingers out of that cookie jar? The hand wringing is, and should, be about what happens when the money gets more expensive-and it really has only that direction to go, sub 3% just can't hold with the pressure of global capital being what it is.