>It's unclear what your argument is, here. Because I'm not making one. I'm stating what current "mainstream" economic thinking has been doing. >Government exp

>It's unclear what your argument is, here. Because I'm not making one. I'm stating what current "mainstream" economic thinking has been doing. >Government expenditures aren't decreasing or being cut back massively: they're consistently rising, year on year. This isn't merely some artefact of Democratic administrations (which are hardly anomalies and can't be ignored anyway), because even the Ryan budget included year on year increases, albeit at a slower rate (that didn't keep pace with medical inflation, for better or for worse). That is very true! But the prices of commodities and other equities is going up faster, while wages and salaries have been stagnant for decades (gas for example when I was a kid in the 90s was around a dollar, now its 4x that). We can automate all the things in the world, but if the masses can't afford them without massively leveraging themselves to the point they can't make payments (or without refinancing their houses), the economy isn't going to do any better. Printing money and giving it to people and expecting things to be stable is like trying to make two sides of an equation balance out by adding more to one side than the other, it's just inherently unstable. In markets, if consumers have more to spend on things they supposedly need, then sellers will be incentivized to raise their prices on their goods. Boom, your printing just did jack shit for stability. My IB friends talk to me about this all the time… just look at corporate balance sheets vs the DOW (can you say POMO?)… Until the value of things robots will be manufacturing is closer to the range where people can actually afford to buy them (and meet their needs comfortably), you will only see things getting worse. Until then, my crystal ball is for CDS backed by securities student loans/housing/faltering governments and municipalities, Defense Distributed/3-d printing/urban-ag, and cheap valuable land, and writing code to integrate these things…