With apologies to all drunken sailors who will no doubt resent – quite reasonably – being compared with a dysfunctional government.<\/p>\n
The big news today (and yesterday – different time zones confuse these things) is that the US government has grasped<\/a> just a bit of sanity and has stepped back from the abyss. Well most of them did, but the lunatic fringe of the Republican<\/a> party (also known as the Tea Party<\/a>) still persisted in trying to block the government from doing any work and paying any debts it owes.<\/p>\n But it is only temporary, and unless some more sanity returns to US politicians, we will get to see this mess repeated in January.<\/p>\n Ultimately this is all the fault of a fanatic wing of the Republican party who believe it is their right to\u00a0undemocratically<\/em> block the government budget until their favourite hobby horse is taken care of. Obamacare<\/a>. Whether it is a good or a bad thing, it is a done deal, and it is undemocratic to try to sabotage it without first giving it a chance.<\/p>\n Yes the US has too much public debt, but too much is made of the so-call US ‘debt crisis’. The overall figure is immense<\/em> to be true – so big that it is impossible to understand; so big that we have clever means to make it understandable, and to understand it in terms of affordability. If you look at the US debt as a proportion of GDP (in other words how affordable it is), you will see that the US is in 35th position<\/a>\u00a0(according to CIA figures) with a figure of 73.6% of GDP. Or 9th position (using the IMF figures).<\/p>\n Not a good position certainly, but hardly a basket case.<\/p>\n Now there’s a great deal of sense in reducing US government debt, but not in this way. Simply by stopping US government cheques would cause a\u00a0catastrophic<\/em> effect on the US (and world) economies.<\/p>\n Perhaps those with a vote in the US would like to remember this when it comes to voting next time. Your current set of politicians look dangerously dysfunctional; even in comparison to politicians in other countries.<\/p>\n