John Maynard Keynes was an English economist who taught that the way to get out of a recession was to stimulate the economy by borrowing money and spending it on public works and so forth. The United States moved from classic economics to Keynesian economics during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and we have been a borrower nation ever since, to the point that we now owe over 17 trillion dollars to mostly foreigners, mostly Chinese, with little prospect of ever paying it back. Has a country like the United States ever declared bankruptcy? Three more years of Obama and we may find out. In the meantime there are loud voices crying we have to get off the Keynesian borrowing tit. I spoke to a Keynesian economist the other day and asked why he thought people were moving away from the economics of borrowing money to pay back borrowed money, and he indignantly replied,

When things go good no one complains
When things are good it’s hurrah Keynes
But come a little bump or glitch
And folks begin to grump and bitch
Borrowing’s the way to go
It pumps things up when things go slow
It creates jobs where there were none
And let me tell you we’re not done
A trillion here a trillion there
It doesn’t matter, who should care
It’s only paper, print some more
Who cares if you run up the score
The printing press will save us all
Some stocks go up while others fall
No one can lose, it’s all a game
If things go wrong then you’re to blame
There lived no greater man than Keynes
For after ruin comes the gains