America: The World’s Debt Destroyer
The GOP’s biggest issue last year was the dangerous amount of debt the U.S. was piling up. The U.S. is supposedly on the road to bankruptcy just like Greece. Now when confronted with that charge you can call it for the bunk it is. The reality is that the U.S. is one of the few developed countries in the world in which total debt, which includes private debt, has dropped significantly as a percentage of GDP, and household debt payments as a percentage of income is now at its lowest level in 18 years. While Americans were deleveraging, federal government deficit spending was necessary to prevent a dangerous deflationary spiral such as was experienced during the Great Depression, but we were easily able to afford it as our total debt has gone down while other nations such as the U.K., which practiced self-defeating government austerity, have actually seen their total debt go up significantly. During the Bush years, economic “growth” was an illusion fueled by the housing bubble. Now with American consumers shedding the excessive debt they accrued, America is experiencing real economic growth, which is frustratingly slower, but isn’t going to disappear like a puff of smoke as the illusory gains of the Bush years did. If you are really concerned about debt, then you should congratulate the President on the fine job he has done navigating the country through the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression and reward him with a second term of office.