I am not so sure. What is the root cause of America's failure to get to grips with its debt? It can be argued that the problem is not really economic or even political; it is a cultural inability to face up to hard choices, even to acknowledge that the choices are there.
I should make it clear that my reporting of the United States, in the years I was based there for the BBC, was governed by a sense that too much foreign media coverage of America is negative and jaundiced.
Are Alaskans fooling themselves about the viability of their state? Take Alaska. The author and serious student of America, Anne Applebaum makes the point that, as she puts it, "Alaska is a myth!"
People who live in Alaska - and people who aspire to live in Alaska - imagine it is the last frontier, she says, "the place where rugged individuals go out and dig for oil and shoot caribou, and make money the way people did 100 years ago".
But in reality, Alaska is the most heavily subsidised state in the union. There is more social spending in Alaska than anywhere else.
To make it a place where decent lives can be lived, there is a huge transfer of money to Alaska from the US federal government which means of course from taxpayers in New York and Los Angeles and other places where less rugged folk live. Alaska is an organised hypocrisy.
Too many Americans behave like the Alaskans: they think of themselves as rugged individualists in no need of state help, but they take the money anyway in health care and pensions and all the other areas of American life where the federal government spends its cash.
The Tea Party movement talks of cuts in spending but when it comes to it, Americans always seem to be talking about cuts in spending that affect someone else, not them - and taxes that are levied on others too.
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Analysis is on BBC Radio 4 on Monday, 27 June 2011 at 2030 BST and Sunday 3 July at 2130 BSTAnd nobody talks about raising taxes. Jeffrey Sachs has a theory about why this is.
America's two main political parties are so desperate to raise money for the nation's constant elections - remember the House of Representatives is elected every two years - that they can do nothing that upsets wealthy people and wealthy companies. So they cannot touch taxes.
In all honesty, I am torn about the conclusions to be drawn. I find it difficult to believe that a nation historically so nimble and clever and open could succumb to disaster in this way.
But America, as well as being a place of hard work and ingenuity, is also no stranger to eating competitions in which gluttony is celebrated, and wilful ignorance, for instance regarding (as many Americans do) evolution as controversial.
The debt crisis is a fascinating crisis because it is about so much more than money. It is a test of a culture.
It is about waking up, as the Americans say, and smelling the coffee. And - I am thinking Texas here - saddling up too, and riding out with purpose.
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