Now, I'm no economist, but if I read the charts in this report correctly , if U.S. federal governments do not either cut spending and/or raise taxes, the United States deficit -- not debt but the current excess of spending compared to revenue -- will hit 5 per cent of US GDP within the decade (it's somewhere around 3 per cent now -- and will hit 10 per cent by 2030.... It couldn't be more different in the U.S. In his recent book, The Age of Turbulence, arch-Republican and former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan has almost nothing nice to say about the fiscal management abilities of Presidents Reagan, Bush and Bush, but nice things to say about Democrats.

"...if we wish to grasp the true significance of evil—what Hannah Arendt intended by calling it "banal"—then we must remember that what is truly awful about the destruction of the Jews is not that it mattered so much but that it mattered so little.... But there is another banality: the banality of overuse—the flattening, desensitizing effect of seeing or saying or thinking the same thing too many times until we have numbed our audience and rendered them immune to the evil we are describing.