Daniel Henninger, in the Wall St. Journal, thinks the US must return to its roots:

So this is a taste of what it will be like when the American superpower starts shrinking. Enjoying it yet?
After the humiliation of the United States losing its AAA credit rating; after watching the American stock market descend into chaos; after living for two years in a $15 trillion economy unable to grow beyond 2%, with unemployment rates rarely experienced in the U.S., Americans have their first whiff of inhabiting an empire in decline.
You could divide the country between those who think that it wouldn’t be the worst thing for the U.S. to enter the long, falling autumn of its life, as has Western Europe; and those who refuse to go down, who’d do whatever they must to hold the world’s No. 1 ranking…
Going back at least to the Clinton presidency, Democratic policy analysts have promoted, as a middle way, various Western European “mixed-economy” models for the U.S.—generous national systems for health and welfare, with the economy kept going by tax-supported “investments” (spending) in infrastructure, education, research and the like. This of course is what Barack Obama has sought from day one.
The Democratic argument has been that the country could maintain its remarkable economic success while performing all these social goals, though with cutbacks in defense spending…
A central attribute of our exceptionalism has been flexibility. U.S. economic success is a story of adaptive, efficient responses to history’s headwinds and speed-bumps—until now. A national infrastructure bank would be the opposite of that tradition. It’d be too big and too slow. The Obama health-care plan, run through the 46-year-old turbines of Medicare, is wholly at odds with the needs now of a huge, complex country.
Washington is not America, and so optimism is possible. Out in the country, some states are showing with their public-pension reforms that government flexibility in the face of economic crisis is possible. A Washington able to recognize the immediate needs of the downgraded superpower would lift every identifiable burden from the states and the private economy…

As for the UK:

George F. Will: British state spending is ‘morbidly obese’

Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
The Yorker, Aug.10, 2011 – This is an excluded underclass reacting to commercial taunting and temptation, economic misery, and total exclusion from communities and from society.
Telegraph, Aug.10, 2011 – He was remanded in custody for a week and will miss his final exam in electrical engineering…”
We used to shoot looters. What ever happened to that?

CRRAAAZY, Craaazy, crazy…
h/t marina