Ahem! Who created all this current debt?
If anyone, from the US government down to Joe Blow, has financial problems and debt, you need to cut spending. The republican congress and Bush both had problems with this. $261 billion of our 2008 budget goes towards interest on the debt. So you need to cut spending. Quit living beyond your means, or else the debt will obviously continue to grow. And you'll have to cut it drastically just to be able to actually start reducing the debt.
Also, it was not Milton Friedman who created this mess but his fiscal philosophy that dominated the Chicago school of economics in the 50s and 60s. The naive belief that capitalism can automatically regulate and control itself without government regulation. There is absolutely no evidence in history to support that belief. Capitalism is the way to generate wealth, no doubt. However, it must be carefully regulated to prevent excessive speculation and criminals like Madoff from screwing things up. Granted, when the good times roll every body wants to get into the act and commonsense goes out the window. The encouragement of low income people to buy houses was not a bad idea in itself, IF carefully regulated. The illusion that housing values would go up forever is what messed up the system. Greenspan further encouraged the speculation by keeping the Feds interest rate too low. The final problem is the innovative creation of bundled securities that nobody really understood and were completely unregulated. Greenspan had no idea how the financial risk was spiraling out of control.
Anyway, we are all in this together!
A democrat decided to buy a used car and went to a dealer who happened to be a republican. The dealer showed the democrat a car and they took it out for a test drive. The democrat took over driving and as they started to cross a railroad track the car stalled. The democrat was frantically trying to get the car started as a train bore down on them. The republican salesman said, forget about getting the car started, I am a republican and I believe the train will stop before it hits us.
