Oregon Media Insiders

This comment ["Sadly amusing"] is irrelevant to the topic at hand and highly misleading. Today's economic woes are not caused by government spending, but by the growth of private debt, which outpaces public debt better than 2:1, the fact that that debt was based disproportionatly on inflated housing prices that rose when "the bubble" shifted from the high tech sector to the financial sector, to the increasing reliance on foreign oil and the fact that it has historically been pegged to the dollar, and on the decline of the US manufacturing sector.

Public debt is often not a problem when it is reinvested in infrastructure in the US. What makes it such a drain on the economy now are the facts that so much of it is being used to finance the war and reconstruction in Iraq and, to a smaller extent, Afghanistan ... and the fact that is is largely foreign financed. The problem is not the existence of public debt, but that the debt is producing no economic benefit in the US.