This post is in reaction to the fact that I read a lot of economic stuff (technical term, that) - blogs, on-line magazine, e-letters etc. - and, since most of them are written by Americans, they tend to focus, naturally enough, on America's problems.
But, from the outside, the economic issues facing the USA are fairly simple. They've spent thirty years destroying every support pillar on which the middle class was built and giving more and more money and power to a really tiny elite. It was supposed to unleash limitless growth as energy and entrepreneurship were freed. It hasn't worked, to say the least.
Yes, there is a problem with the future path of Medicare which will bankrupt the US government if it is not fixed but, on the other hand, they have the least cost-efficient health care system in the whole wide world so, since just switching to any system of any of the other developed (and even emerging!) nations would sort most of it, it just cannot be a huge deal, conceptually.
But it is - Politically.