Massive economic contraction.

Meanwhile, executives at large multinational industrial companies are privately reporting their future order books look worse for the first quarter of 2010 than they did for the first quarter of this year when the effects of the current crisis were being realized.

[Vox Day, author of "The Return of the Great Depression"] told WND he believes there is "no way of avoiding an economic contraction of massive proportions because there is no way of escaping the debt bomb that does not involve very serious economic costs."

* * * *

"Regardless of whether one traces the roots of the problem back to the 1971 creation of the 'full faith and credit' debt-dollar, the 1933 abandonment of the gold standard, or the 1913 establishment of the Federal Reserve, this is not a crisis that developed overnight and it will not sort itself out quickly either," he writes.

This, if reasonably accurate, would be a good reason to back off efforts to engineer a massive restructuring of the health care industry (1/6 of the economy) and abandon idiotic cap and kill tax hikes on energy consumers.

One would think.

If one believed, i.e., that the political class weren’t fixated by trifles, chimeras, and utopian flapdoodle.

But it is.

"Get ready, America: Great Depression 2.0." World Net Daily, 10/25/09 (emphasis added).