[anm89]

It's also worth pointing out that austerity would probably fail miserably given the specifics of our situation. The time for Austerity was maybe circa 2004 or 2011 when debt to gdp was half of what it is now. We are WAY past that point.

We are massively overleveraged, both externally and internally. If we just tighten our belt, we are going to cause a massive debt default deleveraging. Austerity works when a single sector is slightly over leveraged and just needs to shift numbers around for a year or two to make the math work. That's not even close where we are at. Every single sector of the US economy is massively overleveraged. There is no playing with the math. We either grow the pie (roughly, GDP) or the system needs to get massively overhauled. There is no "beautiful deleveraging" in Ray Dalio terms.

Through that lens, the choice is either inflate or massive systemic failure. It's not hard to see which direction we are heading if you do buy that premise.