My father had an expression that I heard many times when I was young, "Your chickens came home to roost." It means something bad happened, which you should have been able to predict, but didn't.
After hearing this declaration about a hundred times over the years, I finally asked what chickens had to do with anything. My father was born and raised on a farm. There were always a few chickens that had become semiferal and no longer stayed in the chicken yard and slept in trees. At sundown this small flock would fly to the tree limb to sleep for the night. The spot under this tree was covered in chicken manure because the last thing a chicken does before falling asleep is defecate. So, at just about the same time, just at sundown, a shower of chicken shit hits the ground, and anyone standing under the tree is covered in it. They're your chickens and you knew they were there, so it's nobody's fault but your own.
This is the situation where we find ourselves. After about a century of governments taking on the task of regulating the economy, we know all the rules about maintaining a balance between borrowing and spending to keep things in balance. The stock market surge of the Trump years was fueled by corporations using money gained by their tax cuts to buy back their own stock. This drives up stock prices and increases the value of the corporation, but without a commensurate increase in productivity. In the meantime, the government has to borrow to cover the necessities of governing. This is a formula for a slow moving disaster.
We are standing under the tree, watching the sunset and wondering what this stuff is that were standing in.
