I fully agree that Trump’s economic team is an ideological clown car, but even the blind hog occasionally finds an acorn. Using monetary policy to force unemployment on an already tortured working class would not end well. The only thing that makes this economy appear to be good is Wall St stock buybacks and a mostly fictitious method of calculating unemployment. I’m old enough to remember what a good economy looks like and believe me, this ain’t it.

Until one of the major political forces figures out that investors aren’t going to jump into the retail sector while most workers have nothing to spend and are only praying they don’t have an emergency expense we will not see the proper level of deficit spending to reverse our course of perpetual drain-circling. Those workers with any credit intact after the mortgage fiasco are maxed out so the economy can’t “roll over” its private debt load in growth.

Only the dollars Congress creates in deficit can net retire private debt or be net saved. Since the wealthy will save, come hell or high water, little is left for the “real” economy, even with considerable deficits that are misdirected.

Any budget that doesn’t supply sufficient deficits to compensate for wealth accumulation and trade deficits, both of which Trump has greatly increased, is a step backward for the “real” economy. A balanced budget us just another way to say 100% tax rate and is literally theft of private sector resources by the government. There was a good reason for the founders to mandate that Congress “coin the money for the common welfare” and didn’t write a word about balanced budgets.