Zakaria - "America is No Greece"

Fareed Zakaria gets it just about right in the Washington Post. America is no Greece. 

Perhaps the largest difference [between the US and Greece] is that the United States has solid growth prospects, based on economics, technological productivity and demography. That may be why the country seems to have little problem financing its debt. Demand for U.S. Treasury bills remains robust, and foreign governments, including China, have increased their purchases recently. The truth is, if you are a foreign central bank and you want to invest large sums of cash -- tens of billions -- and you need an investment that is reasonably safe and liquid (that is, you can sell it off quickly), there is no better place to put it than American government bonds. It is striking that today America spends less to service its debt, as a percentage of GDP, than it did in 1999 when Bill Clinton's administration was posting budget surpluses. (The reason, of course, is that interest rates are much lower today than they were in 1999.)

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Events have conspired to give America some breathing room. Leaders in Washington should take the current climate as a godsend and use it to start retooling the American economy. Everyone knows what needs to be done -- restructure entitlements (including state pensions, which are the next catastrophe); force down health costs; reform immigration, taxes and regulation -- and thus restore the country's competitiveness. Or our leaders could sit around and put off all the hard decisions until America finally does look like Greece.

There are many, many more differences between the U.S. and Greece, and Zakaria is dead-on in arguing that the key to American prosperity in the near and long terms is growing a 21st century economy.