Barack Obama hasn’t reached that point yet. But it wouldn’t take very much.

All he has to do is to go along with his National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform and the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, and he’ll drive us into a full-fledged depression with an increasingly shredded social safety net and a deeper hole to dig out of because the automatic stabilizers that both cause much of the “good deficits” we are now experiencing and contribute mightily to ending recessions will have gone the way of the safety net.