[Urbane Guerrilla]

Actually, said "rigid ideology" is better called adult thinking. Being sloppy about this drives inflation more powerfully than anything else: I'll predict that the Act will cause noticeable inflation at a greater rate.

Simply put, Government debt drives inflation, and the Government is going to create dollars out of nothing. Real antiinflationary measures mean retiring at least eight tenths of that debt. Libertarians like me consider that outside of genuine emergencies like prosecuting a war, there's really nothing a government does that necessitates borrowing money to cover anyway.

You cannot, however, absolve the Democrats of fiscal blame -- not while Barney Frank yet lives and whose record is one of mandating that financial institutions make those poorly secured loans rather than erring on the side of security; nor can you with the Democrats' record of doing things that declare their economic illiteracy. I've never encountered a display of sound, conservative, anti-deficit management by Democratic Administrations in all my fifty-two years. Clinton may possibly have approached it, some argue, but we'd've needed another ten years of peacetime to actually have achieved a paydown of the national debt or a genuine surplus.