The myth ( or folly ) of the 3% deficit/GDP Maastricht ‘parameter’

The author argues that, for any chosen level of the public debt, a consequent social burden arises as the tax-percentage of GNP that can be imposed to service the debt. In this way, there is an infinite number of steady-state paths that are sustainable (and each of them might well be different from one country to another). When considering Europe, the trouble is that the particular Maastricht couple of 3% Deficit/GNP and 60% Debt/GNP was chosen as a singularity, simply because at the time, those parameters characterized the German Economy.