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Here’s a prospectus from one Abhishek Shrma, writing in the Financial Times about the threat of deflation from falling commodity prices  and the steep plunge that has occurred in consumer spending. Fortunately, he notes, “the Fed and the Treasury are far from being ‘out of ammunition’. They should take the following steps. First, the interest rate that the Fed pays on bank reserves should be reduced to zero (from 0.1 per cent now). Then payroll taxes should be eliminated for the rest of the year (and all those already paid this year by workers and employers refunded) until the deflation abates. This is much more efficient than more federal spending.Social Security Can Play the Market

“The Treasury,” Shrma continued, “should also be authorised to swap T-bills for the non-marketable Treasury securities in the Social Security Trust Fund, so that its trustees can sell them and buy common stocks. If this had been done during the 2008 crisis, Social Security would have reaped a gain of trillions of dollars, based on the rise in US share prices over the decade. Share purchases should be done via an exchange traded fund, so that the government has no corporate voting rights.”

If Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and their hero, leftist French economist and author Thomas Piketty, had put their heads together they could not have come up with a better plan for the Democrats to pursue. Let’s hope Pelosi, Schumer et al. don’t read the Financial Times.