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Washington’s seeming willingness to print money rather than tackle tough debt-cutting measures is in sharp contrast to the approaches to relieving the public debts in Europe.  Ireland, for example, plans to nearly double its package of spending cuts and tax increases to try rein in its huge deficit.  Even so, borrowing costs in Spain, Portugal and Greece spiked upward again in late 2010 as investor concern re-emerged that those EU states would be hard-pressed to bring their deficits under control and avoid defaulting on their bonds. In short, the public deficits on both sides of the Atlantic are intractable problems—they being so deep.  Perhaps the only thing that can be said is that relying solely on tax increases or spending cuts is insufficient, and that beginning or continuing tax cuts is foolhardy.  It has been shown that Reagan’s tax cuts did not make produce more revenue for the US Government than it lost from the cuts themselves.  Some combination of tax increases and spending cuts seems inevitable in the West.  The trouble is, the problem is not just economic. “The scale of the deficits are just so big,” said Philip R. Lane, a professor of international economics at Trinity College in Dublin. “The issues are political as much as they are economic.”

See: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/08/business/global/08debt.html?_r=1&hp