Obama and Congress have finally come to an agreement the day before the deadline. I hardly care about the bickering between grown adults about “no take-backs.” What I care about is that this same thing happened two years ago.

America hasn’t been the best at finances, but its political dysfunction is starting to spill over into all of its other aspects, making it even worse. As we see this unfold, we need to ask ourselves, “Should America be the leader in the global economy?”

In all honesty, I don’t think America is the greatest nation in the world. For a nation founded on 18th-century ideals, the first 200 years of it filled with hypocrisy, injustice, war crimes, and flip-flopping, it definitely isn’t deserving of such a title. I guess you could say it’s the country with the greatest intentions in the world.

Although, I can say the United States is one of the most important. We are still a very large nation; we have a lot of military power, and, although it hasn’t had the greatest humanitarian track record, our nation has recently been making good on the promises its founders had planned for it. Regardless of all of this, America has been proven unworthy to uphold the world economy, ethics or not.

America owes a lot of countries money, and Congress has fought for the third time in the last five years to avoid almost defaulting on our debt. If this political gridlock keeps up and we actually miss the deadline, we aren’t the only country getting hurt. The US dollar is the most-used form of currency in the world, and if that value (which is already decreasing by the minute) falls, we are looking at another global recession, just like the one in 2008 with the housing crisis that was America’s fault too! If our politicians keep playing chicken with the financial welfare of its people and, subsequently, its neighbors and business partners in trade, you can bet the rest of the world will start to plan a change.

In fact, there have already been plans from 2009 at the G20 Summit to do just that in a few years’ time. The U.S. is not proving to be reliable in the economy and it is because of our terrible legislation process.

Let me be clear. If there is any way we can change things so we won’t have to lose our economic power, I’d take it, but our country has been pretty irresponsible with this power lately. It may be a bad thing now, but I just don’t know how this is going to get better for us either way. Do you?