(A DUer asked me to post this as a separate thread. I think I'm on so many ignore lists nobody will read it, but here goes anyway.)
See this list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_b... The IMF arrives at 92.7% by including state debts.
Cutting Social Security and Medicare will shift the cost for caring for very elderly people and very sick seniors to the states. Very few seniors have the money to pay for the kind of medical care that they need in their final years.
The only answer is to raise taxes on the people who earn enough money to permit them to pay higher taxes -- the very rich.
This is a question of patriotism.
My grandmother told me that Social Security was created because up until it was, the very elderly had to go to the "Poor House," which was usually a horrible place maintained at the expense of local authorities, for example, counties.
The debt ceiling did not have to be raised as often during the Clinton administration as it has in some other administrations. That is because, as a Democrat, he handled the economy much more carefully than Bush did.
In fact, Bush was dishonest about the state of the economy, and that is why the burden of "fixing" the economy has fallen to the Obama administration.
Obama is failing in "fixing" it. He should be out here talking to citizens, not sitting in the White House talking to foolish Republicans.
Prior to the 1930s a much higher percentage of Americans lived on farms than live on farms now. When the owners of a farm, the parents, became too old to work on the farm, they either continued to live on the farm with their children or moved to "town" and lived on the income from the transference of the farm to their children or someone else.
In the 1930s, there were a lot of foreclosures of farms. The system in which parents retired based on farm income or gifts from their children was impossible in a time in which there was so much need and so much poverty. That is why Roosevelt set up Social Security -- to prevent a recurrence of the terrible crisis that caring for the aging presented in the 1930s.
And now, the Republicans and especially, Timothy Geithner's protector, Pete Peterson, want to dismantle Social Security and give Wall Street control over all of the nation's retirement funds. That is a horrible idea as all seniors who lost money in the 2008 crisis know. Obviously, Obama is a key supporter of the efforts to privatize Social Security. Were he not, he would not have appointed Tim Geithner as his Secretary of the Treasury.
Obama's role in this is scandalous. He is no Democrat. I strongly support real Democrats, but I will not support Obama. He should have dealt with this issue when he had a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress. The fault for this falls completely and totally on Obama. It is a betrayal of his Democratic supporters.