Correction of Brad DeLong
He is wrong to suggest that I am calling for deflation. He draws his conclusion by citing advice which is a thought experiment and which I call "patently absurd" elsewhere in the post. I also left this comment on his blog:
I am not calling for deflation, this is simply a misinterpretation of what I wrote. Further an unemployed person with debt is even worse off than an employed person at a lower wage. *And* even our fairly wimpy Fed is not going to allow a high rate of deflation and thus a big real increase in the debt burden.
Here is an earlier column of mine, entitled "How a Little Inflation Could Help a Lot." While I am increasingly unsure how much good such inflation would do, I have been arguing for a year that it is worth trying and for instance just yesterday I wrote in the Brad-cited post "I favor a more expansionary monetary policy".