Evidently nothing. ; )

Pfft...

http://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/?p=5543

"[The quote] is attributed to the the author Taylor Caldwell, page 483 of the 1965 Doubleday edition of the novel Pillar of Iron – where the central character is Cicero."

Not much. *

Regarding the issue of debt, part of the human condition seems to include the want to work as little as possible. We aren't any better off than we were when slavery existed, (centuries ago type of slavery). Many are born into captivity. You don't even need to conisder financial deficits, evidence abounds regarding certain synchronicities pertaining to free people born as slaves using identification numbers etc...

More generally, we work against powerful people regarding history. Records are secretly kept and public records are periodically burned. Fortunately, everything we need to know exists today, the knowledge that we fucked up in the past clearly isn't a deterrent, so we can learn lessons by looking outside. By the way, work harder isn't a solution since within our lives we couldn't fix the system.

It is a revisionist quote, but there are similarities between now and then. Rome often had a problem of ships arriving full of goods and leaving largely empty, that is, Rome also had the problem of having a huge trade deficit. That this "Cicero" does not mention trade is most telling. Latifundium comes to mind too.

A trade deficit leads to higher unemployment. Higher unemployment leads to a high government deficit (and monetary action in modern times). In short, the quotation misses the (causal) key variable. If you want to go after the government deficit, you should attack the trade deficit directly.

The economic graphs link the trade deficit to unemployment and the economy. With oil shocks (a trade deficit problem) the effect is immediate. Otherwise the effect may lag for one or two years, but it still happens.