Read the op-ed piece by Jo-Jo the Pinhead(AKA Vice President Biden) in the paper the other day. Not worth discussing since the Sham-Wow Guy's commercials are more to the point.
A couple of John Maynard Keynes quotes:
"The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones."
“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”
It seems that it is impossible to escape from the old ideas of a defunct economist when those ideas give a pseudo-scientific justification for what every politician loves to do: Buy votes with the voters own money or credit.

