What do you want exactly? I don't get it. Blaming people isn't wrong when they deserve it, right? Is it better to pretend the world was created in 2009? What the hell do you people want?

The reason the debt is high is that, on the average, "U.S. Is One of the Least Taxed Developed Countries" See just how big the gap is here:
http://ctj.org/ctjreports/2011/06/us_one_of_the_least_taxed_developed_countries.php

Canadians pay around 1% more than Americans do in income taxes, but that includes free healthcare. Its estimated that health insurance equivalent to what every Canadian gets would now cost a family over $50,000 a year in the US. If they could even find it. US medicine is under so much pressure to not diagnose anything that even rich people find they are getting terrible healthcare - its becoming an ingrained habit in the medical profession. The kind of medicine you see on TV where doctors do the tests they need to diagnose illnesses thoroughly is rare to nonexistent. Privately, Ive had both nurses and doctors tell me that they cannot deliver real healthcare anymore in this system, its criminal. Many are retiring, or wish to.

Americans who can who have health issues should, if they can afford to, try to go somewhere else until this problem is solved.

Don't hold your breath.

$13 Trillion
Another number that, without any context, is completely meaningless, but makes lazy people feel warm and fuzzy.
Oh the innumeracy of it all!

I have a mortgage. My debt is almost 200% of my GDP. Am I irresponsible? Or did I make an investment I am perfectly capable of paying for over 30 years?

What if I lose my job, and for a month or 2 I have an extremely reduced income (a personal recession). Now, for a few months, my debt service compared to my income is crazy high. If I am confident that I can get a job again, it's no big deal if I borrow against my 401K or credit cards to tide me over, right?

It all depends on the context.

Every soldier in Afghanistan costs $1 million a year to keep there, a cool million. Most of that money goes to well connected defense contractors. If you investigate the thousands of grants that have been given to rebuild this or that, a huge percentage of them were never completed. Its like a huge scam. Steal as much you can. Thats the kind of spending we should cut. You respond with 9-11. You know, there is a certain group of people here in the US for whom 9-11 was a financial windfall. I think that we need to be very wary of terrorism as being actually coming from where they say it is. I would also like to point out that many members of Osama Bin Laden's family were close friends of the Bush family. In fact, one of OBL's half brothers is on the record as partnering with a young George W. Bush in an airline venture in the 1980s. While GWB's father was the President. Yes, they were business partners. Business partners.

Nicholas, I sympathize with your feelings and if I didn't know what I do i would say they were true, but I think your assumptions are wrong. I think the rules of the game are changing and we need to realize that this recession isn't like the others, its different. Jobs are vanishing because business practices are changing. The kind of high paying, easy job that many Americans grew up doing, are vanishing very quickly. It used to be that if you spoke English well, could do basic arithmetic, and could handle, say MS Word and Excel on a computer, you could probably get a job. Now, its a very different landscape but we still are not getting it. People who are not studying every possible hour to build up their skills are going to find they cant get a job. Any job. We all have to wear many hats. And the kinds of jobs that pay the kinds of wages that somebody can support a family on without a very substantial skill level are doomed.

When I walk into an office, and see the things that most people spend 90% of their time doing, I know that the big job losses are still ahead of us. Because they are all too frequently easily automated. The owners of the businesses just don't realize it.

By committing to insurance through jobs, Obama walked into a trap. Because those jobs are going away NO MATTER WHAT, and now, the GOP is going to happily blame it on him.

Jeez, ROC, I guess I have more faith in the US than you do.

As I understand it, the debt divided by the number of individual Americans is substantial. But the benefits of all that excess spending have disproportinately gone to a very few. It would be very unfair to do as the right suggests and charge people who got absolutely nothing (except having their jobs exported for a tax break) to pay for the money that was stolen by a very few. But thats what this hype is leading up to.

I hope those paid bloggers get paid well. They will NEED it.

Ask the experts.. They tell us that the US, which used to produce more VALUE than any other nation in the world, has changed its approach. Now instead of producing a growing amount of our so called wealth, we hire the people of other nations to produce it, and then we try to mark it up, at a profit. That is the classic superpower mistake, and it never works.

We need to take 3/4 of that money we throw into a black hole we call "defense" and use it to defend our future by building the kinds of skills in our people they can build real wealth with in the future. We need to call an end to the big Ponzi scheme and start fresh, on a much less grandiose path. We can do it. But we have to LOSE THE HUBRIS.

We spend as much on "our" "defense" as the next 10 largest nations combined.

But nobody is telling the truth about that. Neither "party" is.

And thanks to the gridlock in Washington, in ONE DAY, the interest on it just became around 15-20% more expensive. We went from one of the AAA countries, to a second tier country, in the same league as dysfunctional Belgium and tiny (but beautiful) New Zealand. Also, we gave the rest of a world a unavoidable message that our once stable government's mandate to rule is increasingly threatened by unfettered greed- and potentially dysfunctional.

Funny about context, ROC, when I spent less-than 5 minutes looking at that table you linked to.
For 2008, it says the deficit was 455bn. Let's put aside for a moment that this represents a 600bn increase in the deficit during GW's administration. Funny thing is that TARP, a creation of GW, somehow goes under the "D" year of 2009, which balloons the deficit by a cool trillion. Neither you nor the author of the table makes that distinction. Funny, no? So, if we assume that TARP was about 800bn, that means Obama only "owns" about 600bn for 2009, less than GW spent in a month of that same year.

We all know that you were all nice n' quite like while GW went from a 150M yearly surplus to a 1.2 trillion dollar yearly deficit in 8 years. Everyone knows it. The VAST majority of the right was happy when GW used the power of the purse to forward their agenda, spending be damned.

When Cheney said deficits don't matter, he didn't mean they didn't matter financially. He meant they didn't matter POLITICALLY, because you are your ilk don't punish republicans for it. You love it.

You know and I know the right couldn't care less about the deficit. What they want to do is end all social programs, and reverse the gains we saw since the nation almost exploded from the huge inequalities that were exposed in the Great Depression. Now things are almost as bad as they were then for many people, but we have a very modest patchwork quilt of social programs. Without those programs, many poor people would literally starve. Without better skills, better schools, we can give up on half of the people in the country, they just wont have the skills to get and keep a job at any wage. We need to re-prioritize.

The very same small businesspeople who most complain about "liberals" are the group that will be hurt the most if the economy implodes. Their businesses will die from lack of customers. There is nothing more heartbreaking that people whop beleived something for their entire lives and then they realize that it was all a lie. Its not a pretty sight. They should try to put themselves in others shoes. then they will be surprised to find that others who they might expect were against them look out for them too.

We should all try to look ahead a few years. What we are doing now is not sustainable. In many places, post tax cutting, schools dont even have current schoolbooks. The teachers - the underpaid, often struggling themselves, teachers have to buy paper and pencils for the kids themselves.

I would hope they start admitting the existence of, and then, cut that black budget, since it officially "does not exist". Its a HUGE amount of money, and its completely unregulated.

Unfortunately, they have a good point. We need new leaders.. (and I think the GOP is more at blame, than the Dems for the huge debt. After all, they are the ones who keep giving gifts to the rich. Many fo the rich they profess allegiance to would not mind paying higher taxes. They have pointed out to me that they CAN afford to.

You can't take it with you.