Here’s a pretty sobering interactive map of the overall debt (public + private) of many industrialized countries, coming out of the financial crash. As bad off as you think America is, we’re in much better shape than Britain and Japan. In the same way us Louisiana folks got used to saying, “Thank God for Mississippi,” because that state was often the only one that kept us from scraping the bottom of the barrel in this or that measure, we Yanks may start saying, “Thank God for Britain.”