Second Great Depression?

Today the New York Times published an article titled "A Second Great Depression, or Worse?" written by a former chief economist of the IMF. It seems the main stream media is finally warmed up to the idea that there could be another Great Depression, or something worse.

Well, during the first Great Depression, the markets dropped 90%, and then we had World War II.  What could be worse than that?  Global thermal nuclear war?

There are two "solutions" to the debt problem in the United States & Europe.  Cutting spending, OR printing lots of money.  Printing money will cause inflation, which the rich class doesn't like. So the Republicans will favor cutting spending.

Cutting government spending, unfortunately, will hurt the economy and reduce employment. (All that spending is paying for retiree's direct income, government & hospitals and company employee's salaries, and many companies' bottom lines.) This will reduce tax revenue and increase social spending and lead to even greater deficit and government debt. This will be followed by greater demand by the rich class to cut even more spending and hurt the economy even more.  So cutting spending will spiral into a great depression.

I suspect the Republicans will initially win the agenda and spending will be cut. This will lead to the second Great Depression, but by then there will be more poor people and more Democrats, so the Democratic agenda will eventually win, and the US will start to print lots of money -- this is how the second Great Depression will be different from the first one.

Printing lots of money will cause high inflation.  The USD is a global currency, so the high inflation will be a global one -- especially when there will be a global competitive devaluation of all currencies. But printing money will solve your debt problem -- if you owe 50 trillion, just print 100 trillion and keep next 50 for yourself.  The US will come out of this relatively intact -- at the cost of global hyper inflation and/or USD losing its global reserve currency status.