There are too many good lines.

The modern Keynesian state is broke, paralyzed and mired in empty ritual incantations about stimulating "demand," even as it fosters a mutant crony capitalism that periodically lavishes the top 1 percent with speculative windfalls.

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Soon Americans stopped saving and consumed everything they earned and all they could borrow. The Asians, burned by their own 1997 financial crisis, were happy to oblige us. They - China and Japan above all - accumulated huge dollar reserves, transforming their central banks into a string of monetary roach motels where sovereign debt goes in but never comes out. We've been living on borrowed time - and spending Asians' borrowed dimes.

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This dynamic reinforced the Reaganite shibboleth that "deficits don't matter" and the fact that nearly $5 trillion of the nation's $12 trillion in "publicly held" debt is actually sequestered in the vaults of central banks. The destruction of fiscal rectitude under Ronald Reagan - one reason I resigned as his budget chief in 1985 - was the greatest of his many dramatic acts. It created a template for the Republicans' utter abandonment of the balanced-budget policies of Calvin Coolidge and allowed George W. Bush to dive into the deep end, bankrupting the nation through two misbegotten and unfinanced wars, a giant expansion of Medicare and a tax-cutting spree for the wealthy that turned K Street lobbyists into the de facto office of national tax policy. In effect, the G.O.P. embraced Keynesianism - for the wealthy.

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Without any changes, over the next decade or so, the gross federal debt, now nearly $17 trillion, will hurtle toward $30 trillion and soar to 150 percent of gross domestic product from around 105 percent today. Since our constitutional stasis rules out any prospect of a "grand bargain," the nation's fiscal collapse will play out incrementally, like a Greek/Cypriot tragedy, in carefully choreographed crises over debt ceilings, continuing resolutions and temporary budgetary patches.

The thing that is so odd about printing money via debt obligations is that the great fear is that those obligations will outstrip your ability to meet them, like Japan's current situation, and Greece, Spain, etc... However, in the end, there is always the possibility that these obligations won't be met. It seems to me that this is where we might be headed with currency wars. And then, maybe the real thing.