Economists - just Idiot Savants?

It makes the blood boil when one reads about highly (overpaid?) economists sitting in tenured positions in Academia suggesting outright thievery as their preferred solutions to our economic problems. Debt repudiation and wealth taxes are not the only solution to the problems that indebted nations face. The debt mountain can be reduced the same way it has been built up - by small incremental changes over a long period of time, decades, not years. Deficit spending really came into fashion during the 1970s - on the advice of an earlier generation of  Idiot Savants. That the Nobel prize is now being awarded for what in many cases is only a thinly-disguised for of quackery devalues the prizes given to those for 'hard' science. And let's not even remember the Peace Nobel prize awarded to Obama!