I will give a more nuanced answer.
I fully acknowledge that the United States is profligate with their deficit.
Every MP here should listen to the blog with David Rosenberg last May, with former deputy prime minister John Manley and David Dodge, talking about the 1995 downsizing and the current problem in the States. All three argued that it's not sustainable. They're going to run into a fiscal wall. It won't ruin the United States, but they'll be doing a haircut on all their social programs, because they're the three largest drivers of the deficit. Seventy-five per cent of all the spending of the U.S. government is social security and medicare. You know that.
To your question, the reason I said I want to nuance it is that there's no reason to run deficits. This is straight out of Keynes. There's no reason to run deficits when the economy is growing. You run deficits when the economy is in the tank, and then you pay them back. That just violates fiscal policy.
Second, I don't quite agree with the statement made by the government comparing itself to other countries because they're cherry-picking. They're taking the federal debt and saying that it is a percentage of total GDP. The OECD and all econometricians do not measure it that way. They measure the totality of government debt—federal, provincial, municipal—because there's only one taxpayer. When you use that number, we are nowhere near doing as well as is claimed.