As John Taylor points out, our debt situation today is much scarier than it was after World War II. When the war ended, we stopped accruing war debt. As GDP grew, the ratio of debt to GDP shrank. I would describe our current debt not as war debt but as entitlement debt. Entitlement debt is not frozen. It is growing. It is growing faster than GDP. Very different.

Thanks to Russ Roberts for pointing out John Taylor’s new blog. Of course, I will be disputing Taylor’s monetarism. Taylor is one of those in the “monetary shocks” column of my table classifying various macroeconomists.