You submitted your mottoes, more than 300 strong.
You voted on the six finalists.
So you, dear blog readers, are solely responsible for having chosen the United States’ new six-word motto.
The finalists were:
1. Consumption’s the Cure That Ails Us. (Submitted by Quin.)
2. We Will Get It Right, Eventually. (Herb)
3. We Are Too Big to Fail. (Jonathan)
4. The Streets Are Paved With CASH4GOLD.COM. (James)
5. Learn to Live Within Your Means. (Greg)
6. Wow, Can You Believe This Place? (Ms. Fortune)
In an incontrovertible landslide — it’s a motto we can believe in — the winner was:
We Are Too Big to Fail.
I think this would look really good inscribed on our currency and T-bills. Congratulations to Jonathan, the winner, who’ll receive his choice of Freakonomics schwag.
Here are the percentages gleaned by each of the six finalists:
We Are Too Big to Fail. (48 percent)
Consumption’s the Cure That Ails Us. (18 percent)
We Will Get It Right, Eventually. (10 percent)
The Streets Are Paved With CASH4GOLD.COM. (9 percent)
Learn to Live Within Your Means. (8 percent)
Wow, Can You Believe This Place? (7 percent)
Last year’s winning motto was “Our Worst Critics Prefer to Stay.” That would seem to have been proven true.
Hopefully this year’s motto will turn out to be just as true.
[NOTE: I discussed the motto contest on The Takeway.]
and 
. You can also watch it on 
Jonathan, can you clarify something for me? Does your motto mean that the U.S. is too big to be allowed to fail, or that the “bigness” is the reason the U.S. won’t fail? Thanks and congrats on winning.
Greg, I voted for your motto. Sure, it’s preachy. But it’s the exact advice that many people in the U.S. need to follow – and if they had been doing that in the first place, we wouldn’t be in as big an economic crisis as we are now.
Wasn’t that General Motors motto. No that’s right, it was,
” what is good for General Motors is good for America”.
RZ -
I think it’s simply the attitude (hope) of most Americans, not a statement of fact.
Congrats to all of the finalists!
I have to say, though, that seeing that “Learn to live within your means” only appealed to less than 1 out of every 12 respondents says a lot about how America got INTO the current mess…
Its funny how the Romans also thought they we’re too big to fall…which made me realize…they could’ve been huge in territory but then how could they defend themselves from so many possible fronts? They would’ve needed alot of time to grow within their Empire… Which is very similar to the present case of the US economy; it expanded too much economically by giving credit to those who didn’t have payment capabilities thus making people fall short on mortgage payments causing systematical breakdowns.
New pic eh?
Nice
I intended the phrase to mean a lot of things, from a cynical comment on the financial industry to the sheer size of our resources to confront our problems to our extremely large determination.
BTW, if we as well as the Roman Empire … it lasted for nearly 400 years. We’ve been a dominant power since WWII, which is a piffling amount of time.
How about:
We are too arrogant to fail.
Who would have thought that Americans would have chosen a self-aggrandizing motto over a self-effacing one, like my favourite: Learn to live within your means