Warren Brussee's "The Second Great Depression" & Herman Cain's Nutty Economics

So one of the truisms that is sometimes voiced about our current Great Recession is that “Nobody saw it coming.” Which is nonsense, a myth propagated by dimwit media types who would like to believe this fiction, or who actually don’t read much, so they’re not up on what’s being published, and what some people warned might very well happen. Case in point: Years ago (back in 2007, I believe) I read Warren Brussee’s The Second Great Depression: Starting 2007, Ending 2020 (2005), which is all about debt, personal and governmental (mainly personal, if I remember correctly), and how it would drag down the U.S. and global economy for many years. I wasn’t too impressed with the book, although I did think it offered a cogent vision and argument, rather wonky. It might seem a bit too simplistic at times, a bit too monolithic—the one idea of debt overshadowing all other economic movers and shakers—but there is also virtue in its simplicity.
But in 2011, with the global economies limping along, Brussee seems to be a regular Nostradamus. I hope he’s wrong about how long it takes to emerge from this stagnation. Unfortunately I recently saw an article that seemed to back up his gloomy timeline.
Enter Herman Cain and his motivational speaker economics. Tim Egan in the NY Times, as always, does a good riff on it here: