Tiger Woods Has The Solution To The Massive US Debt - And Larry Summers Agrees With It

Tiger Woods is back on top of his game, and as Matthew Futterman at WSJ notes, there's a fun comparison to be made between Tiger's career trajectory and that of the Dow Jones which is at all-time highs.

Both the Dow and Tiger hit their low points in 2009, and have been climbing back since.

But even if the connection between Tiger's career and the stock market is coincidental, it doesn't mean that Tiger Woods doesn't have an important message for people who care about the economy.

Yesterday Tiger and his sponsor Nike came out with a new ad that, "raised eyebrows" in the media.

People were annoyed because it states a matter-of-fact truth, that ultimately if you win tournaments and do good, then nobody cares about your past flaws or anything like that.

Of course the message is 100 percent true, which is probably why it bothered people.

But it extends beyond sports to economics.

Back in 2012, at a conference put on by The Atlantic, Larry Summers said (HT: @conorsen):

...the single most important determinant of almost every aspiration the country has, whether it is healthy government finances, or rising wages for middle class families, whether it is reducing poverty, or whether it is maintaining leadership in the world, is the rate of growth of our economy over the next decade. And so, if we do not succeed in maintaining sustained economic growth, at a rate that puts a rising fraction of our population back to work, we will not succeed in anything else, including we will not succeed in repairing the government budget situation. And so maintaining a policy focus on assuring an adequate level of demand, and growth in demand, whether that means promoting exports, whether that means reforming and spending appropriately on infrastructure, whether that means appropriately design tax reform, is a critical issue.

To put it another way: 'Growth Takes Care Of Everything."

As we've said a bunch of times in the past, the only way to close the deficit is to grow. Nothing else will work.

So you see: Winning/Growth Takes Care of Everything.

If you really want to extend this further, watch this old Tiger Woods commercial from early 2010, near his low point where the voice of his deceased father talks to him about learning lessons from his collapse. That was what we were all talking about back then, learning the lessons of the crisis (Less credit! Less irresponsible consumerism! Learning our lesson!). But these days, we're just back to winning, and all that old hand wringing about fixing core fundamental problems has been forgotten about.