America faces long-run and short-run problems: decaying infrastructure, weakening educational systems, and a dysfunctional health-care system that produces sub-standard outcomes at twice the cost of any other industrial country. Solving any of these three problems would go a long way toward resolving the long-run financing imbalance between current tax rates and America’s long-run social-insurance promises that the debt-ceiling debate’s instigators supposedly want to address.
美国面临着长期和短期问题：破败不堪的基础设施、江河日下的教育体系，还有那功能障碍、事倍功半的医疗体系。解决这三个问题中的任何一个都将是迈向解决美国长期财政失衡——当前税率与美国债务上限争论煽动者所欲解决的长期社会保障费用之间的矛盾——的重大进步。