2016

By the year 2016, most of us will finally realize that we shot ourselves in the foot seriously, and we are well into our "lost decade" or "lost generation", such as that Japan experienced, and still experiences, actually stretching it out now to more than a decade.

We shall realize that all we can do is a good combination of stimulus and debt reduction and wait it out. Ideologies are no answer to our problems, much less the fear we are demonstrating in our politics. It's over: we almost killed the economy, and there's going to be a 20 year hold on life while we die off. That's what happened in the past: the people in the midst of the South Sea Bubble and the Depression of the 19th century just died off and the history books pick up about five or ten years later - not missing a beat - and leaving us with the impression that when the going got tough, the tough got going.
Well, actually, a lot of us folks died off and were killed. History books usually do not go into detail about that. They just say "Whoops! All of a sudden, there were bread lines!" andf "Suddenly, happy days were here again!"

We are going to have to live through it.
Every time a new natural disaster happens, we shall have to look at our diminished purse and see if we can help. Sometimes we won't be able to.

The debt ceiling matters for technical effects on markets. As far as a better quality of life, nothing is going to help except a little stimulus and a little time to get the deficit under control. And there is no reason for requiring a balanced budget all the time. Everybody uses Debt to grow. It's use has to be judicious and reasonable. Our drunken sailor spree is what did us in. We were all aware of it. We mostly bought into it. We believed ourselves to be beyond the science of economics and the revenge of markets.

Obama can't do anything, Bachmann can't do anything, Gingrich can't do anything except to face the bitter reality that all of us are doomed to live in the world of reduced expectations for a generation. We are going to fight back and forth and waste time until we realize just how stupid we are.

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