The U.S. government already sent the country over the [fiscal] cliff years ago; it’s just taken this long to (possibly) acknowledge reality. Legislators may strike a “compromise deal” that will postpone the crisis yet again, but soon enough it will return and with greater vengeance. …

This insidious logic of how an inflationary spiral feeds on itself is what Hayek dubbed having “a tiger by the tail.” The U.S. government is insolvent—bankrupt—according to standard accounting principles. Rather than heeding the advice of Krugman and others to simply print our troubles away and/or raise taxes on “the rich,” the responsible thing to do is cut spending. This is the best solution to a government debt crisis, as the Canadian experience in the 1990s showed, and as mainstream surveys of numerous case studies document.