Mike: Your points are valid to some extent. As for unemployment you could have also mentioned the army of forced early retirees or drop out from corporate America. Many of which are now working from home doing part time consulting or starting new businesses, this is both good and bad. As for the debt, are you talking about private indebtness or national indebtness. I think that both are quite manageable, in the segment segment, corporate indebtness in the US has actually declined in general in the last ten years and most balance sheets are in much better shape than a decade ago. In the private "consumer" segment there are problems at the margins (witness peak in personal bankrupcies), but in general, the increase in debt is well matched by increase in assets for the mainstream of the population. So that is not too bad while not too good.
As for the national debt, I happen to think that while I would have preferred not to be ladden with the few trillions debt we accumulated during the Reagan/Bush years, the current direction suit me fine. I think we can even get into few years of mild surplus, but the worst we can do is to cut the budget so drastically that we have budget surpluses in the $100 B or more, that will surely precipitate a very severe recession which will be, of course, followed up with much larger deficits (reduced revenues due to recession and higher outlays for the "safety net").
You look at the statistcs in the past everytime we run budget surpluses these are followed by mini to macro economic calamities. The wat |
