Meanwhile in Canada, with whom we share a long border and (except for Quebec) the same language, there is no comparable crisis.  How is this possible?  Every state in our union (maybe Sarah Palin's Alaska, thanks to oil, is a bit immune) is sucking wind, but Canada has had twelve years of budget surpluses, relatively stable housing prices (compared to ours) and according to the 2008 World Economic Forum, the world's healthiest banking system (ours is 40th).

I got these numbers and an explanation of how Canada is weathering this storm from a column in Newsweek by Fareed Zakaria.  He reports that Canada did not deregulate its financial institutions as we did so today, their banks are leveraged at 18-1, compared with U.S. banks at 26-1 and European banks at 61-1.  As for housing, Canada does not permit deduction of home mortgage interest, which is a nice benefit but lures buyers who ought to be renting.  Despite that, the rate of Canadian homeownership is the same as America's, 68%.

We are told that Canada's government run health care system is terrible, but it accounts for 9.7% of GDP there, according to Zakaria, compared to 15.2% here; and guess what, life expectancy in Canada is 81 years, just 78 in the U.S. of A.

And if the present is good in Canada, the future may be even better because unlike the United States, which is closing its borders in the name of "national security" and protecting American jobs, our friends to the north have much less restrictions.  They award visas based on education level, work experience, age and language abilities, not job availability or the name of a sponsoring employer. The result is that skilled immigrants are choosing Toronto and Montreal over Detroit and Pittsburgh and says Zakaria, "companies are noticing".  Microsoft for instance is opening a research center, not in Seattle, but Vancouver to take advantage of the brilliant software engineers from India and China, many of whom were trained in American colleges but were sent home because we have no "room" for them.

If President Obama and Congress are looking for a good role model, says Zakaria, look north; before more of our own talented citizens figure it out and go there first to escape our mounting dysfunction.