That's what i was thinking, too. The joys of a fiat money system is that, at the extreme of things, it can all be rewritten and handwaved away. To the detriment of big banks and major stockholders, but what have those folks done except screw us over in the past four years anyway?

None of these come close to addressing the deficet. That's a drip in a giant bucket of water.

Honest truth that is if you want to "fix" the debt you'd have to basically slash social security, medicare, and military spending by 1/2 at least. 

Good luck with that. 

The US is too big and too vital to the global economy to be allowed to fail it's that simple. Who's going to buy all that crap made in China? Who's going to eat all those cheeseburgers and get 100 pounds overweight? The world needs the US, lol. If the debt ever got to a point where it serious impacted the US' vitality, basically what I think would happen (someone else mentioned it) is that debt would just be wiped clear and everyone would agree to start at 0, because the alternative is simply non-feasible. 

that's why we all should buy the last of us and similiar games, to train for these situations and to know what to do when the world is going under for whatever reason

Somehow the bankers will come out of this fine, lol. It'll probably be the regular joe that gets screwed over (as always). 

Money is really just an instrument of power, if you have it, you have power and thus any type of future regulation would protect the rich first and foremost as they're the ones writing the rules. 

These changes can't eliminate the deficit today, but you would expect to see the deficit eliminated over the next few years ...

The initial cuts would just reduce the deficit to 5% to 6% of GDP, and you would probably see this fall by 1% to 2% of GDP every year. When you're in a surplus position that money needs to be spent to pay down the debt or to fund unfunded liabilities, and over the next few years the financial outlook of the country would change dramatically.

In many ways Canada was in worse shape in the late 1990s but a combination of policies enacted at the end of the Mulroney years as well as the actions of the Cretien government reshaped Canada's financial position in the world. The same basic policies can be enacted in the United States.

The US and Japan have too much debt, so that they cannot fail. See, if the banks stop lending these two countries money like in the case of Greece, and USA or Japan do a haircut or go bankrupt, the banks will lose enormous sums. The truth is - greece has too few debts to be a real risk for global banks. That's different for US and Japan. So banks will lend them more money in fear to lose the sums they already have lent them.

Seems to be a bit excessive.

If anything i'd guess we'd just end up in a modest depression for decades as we struggle to find new ways to create credit.

That's what many have been suggesting for a while. They call it "the new normal," right?

America is simply too strong to fall. The most powerful civilization in history after Rome.

This may sound slightly ironic since we all know Rome fell, but I truly believe history won't repeat itself in America's case.

More or less.

The arguement being that society's economic growth was mostly based on debt, and people are reaching their max level of household debt.  There are a few options to take.

1) Use government spending to maitnain "the new normal." for decades kind of like Japan.  Argueably at some point there would be a crash down the line after that.

Downside is, it's not really solving the problem, option 2 will probably happen at some point.

2) Don't government spend, bottom out and hope for the best.   Put in programs to help people transition from doing but in debt, to being poor.  With so many people defaulting, credit will be a lot easier to get again and build up... meanwhile, those at the top will proportionatly lose the most money by a huge factor.  So ideally, people will go broke, but be ready to try and regain their living, while the gini coefficent drops and credit becomes more available.

Downside, we probably have a lost generation or two as people in their 40-60's get caught in the middle of the transition.

3)  Use govenment spending, but not as stimulus.  Cut the deficit by a few trillion, but then go around and take that stimulus and throw it all at a couple of big possible technologies that could greatly bring down costs for products and essentially make everyone richer in doing so to try and recreate a new "industrial revolution."

Downside of course being, it's risky as hell... and government has to pick out something that's likely to work, while simaltaniously mostly ignoring the poor.

Worst case scenario is, we spend all that money and end up in a very prolonged state 2.