Mountains of Debt: Crisis and Change in Renaissance Florence, Victorian Britain, and Postwar AmericaByMichael Veseth
Publisher:Oxford University Press1990 |256 Pages | ISBN: 0195064208 | PDF | 16 MB





Like the United States today, Renaissance Florence and VictorianBritain were the richest, most dynamic economic systems of their times.Yet each succumbed to a fiscal crisis brought on by public debt andtaxation and eventually fell into long-term economic decline. Now,public debt and taxation dominate the America policy agenda. Must theUnited States follow the same dismal pattern of fiscal crisis andeconomic decline? Mountains of Debt argues that it is not too late forthe United States to change directions and suggests a comprehensiveprogram for reform of American fiscal institutions that would reducethe deficit problem and at the same time reverse the long-termstructural trends that are both the cause and the effect of the fiscalcrisis today. Offering proposals for reducing the deficit, this newanalysis could alter the current course of the United States economy.