This third paragraph doesn't have to be true. Microloans in developing nations prove you can have a large entrepreneurial sector without collateral. The 2/3 of people who are good rickshaw drivers and farmers in Bangladesh is probably a smaller % in the developing world's service economies. I don't have any specific solution, but lots of potential consumers can be small business owners without collateral, if an analogous small business motivation equivalent to survival can be found in the developed world. I guess I'm saying you need to threaten to starve the middle class…not really what I meant.

If you recall, Reagan-Bush left trillions of dollars of debt which we are paying off even today. That debt is causing the dollar to crash as we try to get out of the present pickle. And it will eventually create inflation as bad or worse than Reagan inherited.

If Reagan got it right, why is the legacy of his tax cuts causing a later generation such misery?

I will never listen to James Galbraith with eyes as wide open again. His Dad would never, ever, ever have said something this perverse.

First, progressive states, which back then included Texas, had laid quite a solid foundation for spending money in ways that bear scrutiny today. They were not terribly scalable inasmuch as they could only build one courthouse per county and were constrained on hospitals by the supply of Protestant doctors and Catholic nursing sisters. The farm-to-market road had not been invented yet.

Still, the land-grant colleges and their agricultural agents and research stations were a fabulous template for, well, the now-taboo “industrial policy”.

Only with “Military Keynesianism” did military-patriotic patriotism do quantitively what mere progressivism had not done enough of. (Note the great hydroelectric damn projects, the TVA, Bonneville, and so on, became mostly “cover stories” for, in fact, the Manhatton (bomb) Project.

Sadly, in the interest of military efficiency and actual preparedness, we need to actually cut the defense budget, unwind the Edwardian/Stalinist Pentagon, and open the now wholly corrupt “black budget”.

So, can we realize necessary fiscal aggregates and employment objectives with “green energy” or … what?

Do we really want to build more roads and McMansions, SUV's, and suburban shopping malls?

That is all most senior Democratic office-squatters and the Congressional Democrats know how to do!.

The federal government is little more than public management silos bargaining with private management silos over how to avoid risks or, failing that, to diffuse responsibility, all the while blabbering about their three dozen top priorities. So, let's spend-up on this or that. But, look at America's Defense Meldown. The people who know how to cut a budget are the ones who know how to spend money on something besides financial engineering.