Persistent deficit spending can create problems for monetary policy. When fiscal authorities run large deficits, they leave central banks with a troublesome choice.

Overflowing red ink can divide monetary and fiscal authorities on the importance of price stability. Weakening the consensus on fighting inflation only increases the temptation for political meddling in monetary policy.

And to preserve their independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers.

We don't have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven't taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much.

There is a more plausible explanation for the spending slowdown, namely the withdrawal of fiscal and monetary stimulus from a household sector whose finances remain stretched,

Monetary policy is not a panacea.