> I don't know about Italy and Belgium and Greece--wouldn't the question with
> any OECD country (in addition to getting the actual public debt right) be
> productive capacity?
Three points:
(1) Japan, recession or no, has continued to invest in its economic base (29% of GDP, compared with 18% of GDP in the US and 21% in the EU). This bodes ill for the US in the long-term.
(2) Private debts of all kinds are at least twice as large as public debts, globally speaking. Much of the Italian and Belgian public debt, for example, was run up by state-owned companies as part of a deliberate industrial policy (meaning, the money wasn't wasted on consumption but was productively invested).
(3) In the wonderful world of late capitalism, there's no upper limit to how much debt you can take on, so long as new debts are available to roll over old debts. As good little radicals, we might want to think seriously about a sustained program of *expanding* the public debt -- while soaking the hell out of large-scale capital along the way. Let there be one, two, many Finlands!
-- Dennis