This is why I said I feared we are going down this road in the post a few responses up. America especially seems to have a unique fiscal irresponsibility that has plagued our government (recently). Its really sad that most of our debt (12/17!) came from Bush and Obama.
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The point was that your comment about social democracies being characterized by high debt is incorrect. It would seem that they are better at handling debt than we are.
I don't necessarily think the US should become a social democracy, but we should still be realistic when talking about the systems. The social democratic countries are democracies, not socialist totalitarian states (or even a mild version of them) like you seem to say.