As for the attitude of the economists -

My understanding is that some, if not even many, economists do not have a problem with the national debt. As I understand it, their perspective is that tax revenues will keep going up, which will allow for paying for the debt. In other words, additional debt boosts the economy, which boosts tax revenues, which allows for paying of additional debt, then the additional debt will boost the economy even more, which boosts tax revenues, which allows for paying of additional debt, then the additional debt will boost the economy even more, etc.

And that has, in fact, been happening already. For a long time. Decades.

Here is my problem with that line of thinking. Yes, an economy can grow in percentage terms at a reasonable rate for a long time. But an economy is incapable of growing continuously on an ongoing basis at a large degree of scale. That is to say, in absolute terms. Productive capacity is simply incapable of doing that. There can and will be massive bursts of productivity along the way from time to time. That has happened often enough already. But it will not happen virtually continuously throughout the economy on an ongoing basis at a large degree of scale. But if one keeps adding to debt and adding to debt and adding to debt and adding to debt, the debt will eventually be growing continuously on an ongoing basis at a large degree of scale. Mathematically guaranteed. Inevitable. Unavoidable. In other words, if the process goes on for long enough, the debt will get big enough to overwhelm the economy. I think we are getting close, at least in the big picture, with regard to the national debt of the United States. And by the looks of it also with regard to the national debt of many other countries.

If the economists have the line of reasoning that I just described above, then my sense of it is that they are a product of the society they come from. A society that has passed a law against recessions.

 

I studied economics in college. But it was not my major.

I eventually, after I was out of college, concluded that real economics is much simpler than what I was taught in college. I concluded that after additional information came my way.

 

And I also concluded that economists have a degree in what they want to see happen.

In my considered opinion, real economics can be fully described, in full detail, in at most one book. And if one wants to sufficiently summarize it to describe what is going on, that can be done in far less space than that. But to understand economics correctly, one has to get rid of the most basic assumption that the economists make. I think the reason why people think it takes a PhD to truly understand economics, especially including among the economists themselves, is because their approach is not in sync with the real world, at least not in the long run. If one is not in sync with the way things really work, things can get quite complicated.

If one goes by the Kondratieff wave and includes the law against recessions, in other words patches the law against recessions into the Kondratieff wave, then everything that has been happening makes sense.

Noting, by the way, that when I did that once I found out about the law against recessions in the summer of 2001, I predicted the downturn of 2008, both its severity and its approximate timing, more than 7 years in advance. That was very easy for me to do.

 

(Was anyone willing to listen to me? No.)

 

The Kondratieff wave actually describes the cyclicality of capitalist economies in the long run.

And the cyclicality cannot be avoided or eliminated. Because of human nature.

It can only be stretched out. And that is exactly what has been and is happening, ever since the end of the 1980s.