The corporate world is ending a five-year binge on capital spending, which has left it with a much higher ratio of fixed costs than when we started this recovery in 1991.
There is only one instance since World War II of the U.S economy increasing the employment-population ratio by five percentage points in a decade: the recovery that followed Ronald Reagan's tax cuts in 1983.
That would help stop the debt-to-GDP ratio rising, and would also ensure that the authorities did not prematurely choke off a recovery because of concerns about inflation.