None of the options is anywhere near a silver bullet. Tax increases and public spending cuts are likely to damage the economy, at least in the recovery phase. The call for inflation coupled with fiscal repression is superficially attractive but my research on managing the UK National Debt (with Andrew Scott, forthcoming in American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics) suggests this is unlikely to be successful. Whilst it is true that inflation reduced the debt to GDP ratio by 137.3 percentage points after WWII, that was almost exactly offset by nominal interest payments pushing up the debt to GDP ratio by 139.2 over the same period. The real interest rate on the national debt was therefore almost zero (thanks to financial repression, otherwise maybe it would have been +2%) but it was far from being negative. To put it simply, with inflation and financial repression we can more or less stand still on the debt to GDP ratio, but we will not reduce the debt by much. The problem is that nominal rates rise with inflation, so any refinancing of debt becomes more expensive and gains are reduced. Consols are similarly unlikely to work, since if they are issued with the express aim of inflating them away in the future then investors will demand hefty inflation risk premia. This leaves GDP growth as the best and probably only medicine for substantially reducing deficits and debts. BTW, we no longer have consols in the UK so I don't know what the current yields are in the text.