Where is the US economy headed?

I guess that's why the best argument you ever came up with against him is your ad-hominem slurs about his looks. (You've been repeating them since at least 2004.)

I don't claim to understand all the details of the competing economic models here, but I do note that many serious economists are indeed predicting significantly increased inflation in the coming years. My company is planning on it in our capital allocation decisions, and I believe many others are as well.

My understanding of economic history suggests that when public debt gets as high as it has here in the past few years, inflation is the likely result, both as a result of central bank actions and the government's need to dilute the burden of its debt (by deflating the holdings of all its monetary savers).

Anyone who uses the recent transient improvement of the unemployment rate in Michigan from 14% to 10% as evidence of the rebirth of American manufacturing competitiveness is either incredibly naive or being deliberately deceitful (and likely hasn't visited Flint or Detroit in a very long time).

Is it inflation driving up gas prices, per se?

georgeob1 wrote:

My understanding of economic history suggests that when public debt gets as high as it has here in the past few years, inflation is the likely result, both as a result of central bank actions and the government's need to dilute the burden of its debt (by deflating the holdings of all its monetary savers).

And that's your understanding of whose economic history? Certainly not America's. America's economic history has seen four huge spikes of government debt: After the War of Independence, after the Civil War, after World War II, and after Ronald Reagan. Now look at America's inflation data, helpfully compiled by two economics professors at the University of Illinois. After the war of independence, America has seen both inflation and deflation, for an average of about 1.5% inflation from 1783 to 1813. The Civil War was followed by deflation, not inflation. World War II and Ronald Reagan were followed by historically-normal rates of inflation. On what understanding of American history is inflation "the likely result" of high government debt?

There are very significant differences in the four periods in your recitation. Our economic growth in the first three instances after the revolution, civil war, and WWII respectively each involved periods of unusually rapid economic expansion, though each for different reasons. The boom in railroad construction and the rapid opening of the west for both settlement and the exploitation of readily available natural resources after the Civil war; and the post WWII boom in which we had virtually the world's only undevastated manufacturing plant with which to meet pent up demand. Both of these were profoundly different situations than the one we face today. Unlike these periods, I see no potential for economic growth sufficient to overtake the rate at which public debt has been increasing in the coming years. Inflation will be the likely result.

There are very significant differences in the four periods in your recitation.

I don't believe the future state of multivariable systems describable by highly non-linear parabolic differential equations is predictable at all.

I do not believe that these facts and observations establish that I am immune to evidence at all, though they do suggest that you may be a little too inclined to accept small statistical samples as establishing a rule in such non linear dynamic systems.