What I've Concluded from Watching Greece and California and the Rest

Debt is not a cause of a problem, it is a symptom of a problem. Dittos for prison incarceration rates. A society's value system establishes the asymptotic limit of its pathologies.

That is, as we incrementally decided that marriage was not a prerequisite for children, we established our prison incarceration rate which we have gradually approached. As we incrementally decided that the government borrowing money was just fine, we established a level of debt that we proceeded to approach.

I think you could argue that's not substantially Barack Obama's fault that the deficit is $1.6T. Really, President Obama is a symptom of our culture. That his notions of social justice have disconnected him from fiscal realities is a symptom of our notions of social justice.