The following from Prof. Simon Wren-Lewis (one of Britain's most respected economists) is instructive. Not about how to get there but what the big obstacle is. It concerns the UK, but the same applies in the US ..with bells on.
He calls it "mediamacro", AKA the household fallacy :
"Mediamacro is how the macroeconomics of fiscal policy is presented in the media as if the government was a household. It is as if Keynes, and the General Theory that is often said to have begun macroeconomics as a discipline, had never existed. What every first year economics text book tells students is that the government is not like a household.
Mediamacro has become so ingrained in the UK media for two reasons. The first is that one of the two main political parties, and their associated press arm, have pushed it for all it's worth, while the other political party has not challenged the idea in any systematic way. But if you ask many Labour MPs why they have not challenged it they will say that doing so is too difficult. This leads to the second reason.
Most political journalists are not economists. How households work they do understand, but the idea of using fiscal policy in a recession to support the economy is more difficult for them. What is true for political journalists is also true for most voters, and journalists wish to keep it simple and understandable only reinforces mediamacro. The same thing influences politicians who listen to focus groups."
Unfortunately this gross error has been dominant in British government economic thinking for several decades now - the last Conservative PM to think outside that particuarly stupid box was grocer Heath, and his dumping as party leader in favour of Maggie led to a forty plus year domination of Tory mediamacro. It was so successful in getting the attention of the voters, who were desperate for something that appeared to 'make sense' in their own terms, that the Labour party followed suit - John Smith was the last Labour leader until Corbyn to be prepared to challenge this crazy idea*.
To every problem, there is a solution that is obvious, simple, easily explained and understood, and completely wrong. Mediamacro is just such an idea; And in a representative democracy, opposing policies based on simple-but-wrong ideas that the public widely accept is a brave man's game - and as anyone who has seen 'Yes, Minister' knows, telling a minister or PM that his policies are 'brave' is enough to put a shiver down his spine (or what passes for one amongst Her Majesty's Government, most members of whom are notable for the absence of any backbone).
Of course, this shithouse idea is far from limited to the United Kingdom, and is popular in the USA on both sides of their political divide, and also amongst both major political camps in Australia. I have no idea how to kill it - it has just the wrong combination of truthiness to be almost impossible to dislodge from voters' brains.
no, they'd be real constraints, not bogus ones.
