Problem is, no one appears to be laying the blame at the doorstep where it belongs... Which means that Barak Obama is NOT getting the cooperation he needs, to resolve the situation.
Baby Bush is the idiot who ran up the tab, then stepped out to let Obama clean up the mess...
Rather reminiscent of Herbert Hoover's two administrations [Republican] which led to the Great Depression...
One major difference between FDR's terms and Obama's present term is that the average American supported Franklin Delano Roosevelt's efforts to pull the country out of the depression. That's why FDR had an unprecedented FOUR terms in office - the American people were SMART ENOUGH at that time to understand WHO had put them into the hole in the first place.
As to how America has ended up owing so much money to China - at the end of the Clinton administration, the U.S. had a balanced budget with a generous surplus. As soon as Bush came to power, he did the same thing with the American government that he'd done with all of his failed business ventures...
He began over-spending without paying attention to the amount of funds available and coming in. The reversal of that so-called "death" tax - which was in reality a tax on wealthy estates worth over 30 million dollars - was just the begnning of the concessions Bush bent over backwards to give to the wealthy elite - a group he'd grown up with and considered to be his 'peers'...? Well, considered them his "base" as he famously called them at an exclusive $over-a-thousand-dollars-per-plate Republican fundraising dinner. [Edited dollar amount per plate - I thought it was as high as $5,000 per plate but couldn't find an actual amount in brief online search...]
"This is an impressive crowd, the haves and the have-mores. Some people call you the elite. I call you my base." George W Bush, Al Smith Memorial Dinner in New York, 19th October 2000 ...
The war in Iraq - a mistaken bit of idocy in which Bush used the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to invade a country that had ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with them - is another huge financial drain that helped cause the current mind-boggling deficit...
Add to that the financial meltdown that began in the last days of the Bush administration - that has carried over to the Obama administration and which many people mistakenly attribute to Obama - but started and was generated by Bush - "Too Big To Fail" is a Bush problem, and it is another factor in the current financial situation.
If one looks at the record of financial depressions, recessions and downturns within the last 100 years in America, one finds that, with the exception of the halcyon post-World-War-II economy of Dwight D. Eisenhower and the national resistance to Jimmy Carter's ahead-of-his-time attempts to reduce American dependence on foreign oil, the recessions and depressions that America has experienced have all originated within Republican administrations.