The Agony of the Blogger

 

I’m sorry for the long silence.  I’m having a lot of lower back pain, and sitting at the computer typing seems to be its source.   

I have a friend in the massage therapy business who gave me a long lecture about the muscle groups that are affected by sitting, using crazy alien words like “Psoas” (pronounced, for some reason, “so as”), and iliacus (illy ack us).   These are words I’m sure she made up, but whatever.  She claims that I have a terrible malady that she has called, at least in my case, “Blogger’s Butt”. 

I didn’t think I blogged that much.  I don’t know how the truly prolific bloggers manage to maintain all their body parts in good working order.  Maybe there’s a special blogger conditioning program that I should know about.

So I have to slow down on the blogging for  a few days.  But I’ll get back to the Phantoms topic soon.  I still have to get to the real phantom, the really frightening mystery, which is not really the issue of whether some small amount of debt is a burden on current populations or future populations.  The real phantom is this: is there an upper limit of some kind to the amount of debt a nation can carry before it has a serious impact on the economy?  If we have a debt of 150% of GDP, are we doomed?  What about 300%?  3000%?  If there is a limit, what is it---and why is it?  What’s the theory that explains that limit?

Here’s a quick preview: I’m not sure anyone really knows what the limit is, or even if there is a limit.  And I’m not sure there is a very good theory explaining why there would be one.  Which seems odd, given the importance of the topic.