When I was a child 50+ years ago, some adult thought I should try stamp collecting, and I was given a large cardboard box of miscellaneous stamps. The ones I've never forgotten are from the Weimar Republic , where you'd see a 20 pfenning stamp overprinted with 400,000 or 2 million reichsmarks.

Thats how governments who don't have the political strength or will to tax pay for things that the public demands but refuses to pay for. They print money and destroy the savings of the rentier middle class. When Gross is talking about cutting expenditure or raising taxes, he forgets option 3.

In addition to the bailout, we have two ongoing wars, a deteriorating international position, and a donwardly mobile middle class strongly indisposed to share any more of its stagnant or declining real income with the government. Both government and public insist on living as if this were 1955, when the USA was the only mature, undamaged industrial economy on the planet, and a net oil exporter to boot. Nobody wants to accept the fall in living standards that would reflect our actual position and the real cost of our ambitions. So the easiest way out for people who want to get reelected is to do what has been done for the last 8 years, borrow, and inflate the currency.

One wonders how long our foreign creditors will continue to carry us.