The Trillion Dollar Meltdown should be required reading for all people in public office. Further, all those people should be administered a test based on this book that, if not passed, would leave them without that feeding-at-the-public-trough job. This book is not an easy read, but neither is it particularly difficult for anybody with a reasonable attention span, and who has the smarts to pass a high school equivalency exam. Oh, darn! That leaves out many people in public office, doesn’t it?

In movies, books, stage plays, and even in bedtime stories about who we’d marry when we grew up, Congresspeople, lawyers, and bankers are inevitably portrayed as these beneficent, wise, caring, super-intelligent people who are the bedrock of the U.S.

Phhffftttt! and Phhffftttt! again.

If what Morris has to say in The Trillion Dollar Meltdown is true, if only 20% of what he says is true, then they should all be hung from a rope tied to the back of a pickup truck and dragged, very slowly, through the Sonora Desert. And be fed a bunch of potato chips and heavily salted peanuts beforehand.

Morris logcially and systematically lays out why it's really no surprise that the United States economy is in the deep doodoo that it is. Actually, what’s surprising is that we aren’t deeper in, and that we didn’t get there much sooner.

“Like gold, U.S. dollars have value only to the extent that they are strictly limited in supply,” explained a Harvard-trained economist during a November 21st speech before the National Economists Club in Washington. “But the U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost. By increasing the number of U.S. dollars in circulation, or even by credibly threatening to do so, the U.S. government can also reduce the value of a dollar in terms of goods and services, which is equivalent to raising the prices in dollars of those goods and services.”

In plainspeak, what the above paragraph means, according to New York Post economics writer John Crudele, is, "we'll just print more money if the economy doesn't respond to traditional remedies."