Unfortunately the three simple policy ideas that neither Dee nor Dum will discuss have been relegated to the end of the article. See the original at http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2011/05/09/land-of-the-tweedles/ .

To avoid a lost decade, debts that can’t be repaid must be written off or written down as soon as possible. One way to encourage write-offs and write-downs is to stop taxing interest and start taxing debt, in the hands of creditors, at (say) 2.5% per annum. As the same creditors would be paying roughly the same amounts of tax as before, there would be little effect on revenue or interest rates. But creditors would suddenly have a strong incentive to write off or write down debts on which the actual repayments don’t justify the tax.

How can evasion of the tax be prevented? By making every debt enforceable only up to the amount on which the tax is paid: if no tax is paid, the debt is not enforceable at all. The tax would then be a “stamp duty” in the original sense: a tax on a contract, payable on pain of invalidity, by the party who has an interest in its validity.

Yes, well, of course Dee and Dum have got essentially the same style of fiscal and economic management…um….mismanagement!

What would we expect?

They are both totally in the pockets of the big business sector and beholden to economic rationalists. Well, they’re not just their pockets, they ARE them!

Politicians are very largely businessmen and economists who are innately governed by the profit motive for themselves and by a desire to stay in the good books with potential lucrative employers in their post-political lives, and anything done for the good of greater society takes a far distant second, third, tenth or hundredth priority!

This is the critically fundamental flaw with our whole governmental system.

Not only this but they’ve got the system sewn up so that those on the other side of the political divide just don’t get a look-in, or I should say; get to peer in to the land of Tweedledom but not to partake in a meaningful way.

Sure, Steve Keen is right about the Land of the Tweedles, but I think that he is looking at it with far too much of a narrow focus, and is essentially examining a symptom of the problem, without even thinking about why it is so or how we might reform it.

The Dees were appointed by the Dums

Some good stuff Steve but I’d like more.

You focus on debts and expenditure and relate this to the US economics. As most of us are aware even at a domestic level, we need to understand gearing. You provide nothing that tells us about the sustainability of debt for either the US or Australia.

How do the two economies compare in their ability to sustain the levels of debt. For all we know it may be possible for the US to sustain their debt more readily than we could or vice versa.

How about addressing the income side of the ledger? Then relate these to both Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee policies. You've given us half a story.

Yes Ludwig we could “reform it” by reducing the number of unproductive elements and increasing the number of productive ones in the Community.

Say, if one wants to be an Economist ‘he can’, after work. I mean after a productive work that has supplied the basic necessities of his/her physical existence or, conversely, wait until retirement.

This modality, if applied to all, Politicians, Lawyers, Estate Agents and sundry idlers would make our nation very rich indeed.

Rich: For age, experience and material disinterest does, no doubt, increase the substance of contributions to the community discourse.

Who, in his/her right mind, can believe any one’s opinion when it, the opinion, is linked with personal material interests?

We who peruse On Line Opinion should, by now, Know at least so much.