Field of Dreams

My concern over the economy is greater than the obvious impending debt crisis, it is the peculiar management of it. No individual economist, if asked, would suggest the expansion of a household budget with more debt in order to meet an impending insolvency; the economist would examine the budget, the expenses, the assets and the liabilities and start making sacrifices. An expansion of credit, like a bridge loan in business, would be reasonable as an intermediate step towards something definitive--a step to gain time or leverage for some solution--but never as an end in itself. This country's gigantic leverage is clearly dangerous; these economists know this. Yet they suggest more leverage. They give more money to the banks with the hope they will lend more and that the citizen will borrow more. And they increase the money supply to facilitate all this. The argument against the efficiency of a government--big or small--as an angel investor, a venture capitalist, a businessman is glaringly obvious. But these are side points. The real problems are debt and production; government bureaucracies are subplots. Why experienced, knowledgeable economists are behaving this way is inexplicable, as is the almost pathological ignoring of this behavior. How any organization in this much debt trouble could even consider expanding its financial responsibilities into the huge areas of medical care and environmental management--regardless of how misguided or effective--is simply mind numbing.