Paul Krugman of Princeton University has come up with the ultimate solution to our fiscal problems: Space Aliens.

It's very hard to get inflation in a depressed economy. But if you had a program of government spending plus an expansionary policy by the Fed, you could get that. So, if you think about using all of these things together, you could accomplish, you know, a great deal. If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months.

The idea is this: in spite of the federal-government spending at the annual rate of 11 percent of GDP more than it is taking in, there isn't enough stimulus to get our woeful economy going. So, the answer is more spending; indeed, much more spending.