Who else are we supposed to vote for? Ron Paul? Mickey Mouse?

Yes.

To even attempt to deal with a debt pile of that size you need both serious tax rises and serious spending cuts. Unfortunately, neither party will do both.

The Republicans will generally cut spending but will then also cut taxes. The military, which is sucks up a massive amount of resources, but seems almost immune to austerity.

The Democrats will (try) to raise taxes but will also increase the level of spending, in the process getting a lot of negative press-attention from more vocal right-wing 'patriots'.

People always want short-term, quick fixes but for an issue like this there is no such thing, any solution is long-term and will likely cause problems in the short-term, creating a backlash and only serving to make it worse.

It's this defeatist, submissive attitude that's exactly why we're limited to only these two major parties today. If more people would realize that a change CAN happen and they actually try to do something about it, we won't have to be stuck with the lesser of two evils.

I assure you, this is not the case. The problem is, the cuts come out of personnel funding (see: monthly wages), while the REAL financial vacuums are allowed to keep eating away at our national budget. I enlisted for job security. What I ended up getting was pay freezes, annual cost-of-living raises that are half that of the actual increase of cost-of-living, and constant threats to be separated over the tiniest little potential infractions.

Yeah, this is a big part of the structural problem with government agencies and organizations that get government grants. No one ever makes their career by streamlining an agency or spending less money. They move up by bloating it.

That's not true at all ...

In Canada we had great success (dramatically) reducing our debt by cutting spending to reduce the deficit and then controlling the increases in government spending to be below the rate of growth:

While the dollar value of the debt didn't fall dramatically, its portion of our GDP has; and we have essentially reduced our debt in real terms.

An analogy would be a household that had $40,000 in credit card debt and eanred $60,000 per year deciding to stop adding debt through credit card purchases, paying down the minimum, and watching the debt become under-control as their income increased to $100,000 per year (over the next 20 years).

There were many people who argued for a more agressive debt repayment scheme, the Reform Party (for example) suggested the use of budgetary surpluses to pay down the debt (which would have eliminated it sometime between 2005 and 2010) but they didn't have the power to implement those necessary changes.

What on earth are you talking about Ryan? President Hu will step down as party leader in november 2012 and a few months later in 2013 as President of China...

Fed audited and caught giving out 16 trillion to banks in the US and places around the world. Goobye Bernanke and thank you Ron Paul. :)

http://beforeitsnews.com/economy/2012/09/first-audit-in-the-federal-reserves-nearly-100-year-history-were-posted-today-the-results-are-startling-2449770.html

Hu's the president of China?