Published April 15, 2008
UPDATED: Fiscal voice in wilderness visits Seattle today
David M. Walker, former comptroller general of the U.S., is in Seattle today to shed a little light — and therefore gloom and doom — about the nation’s financial situation. “I would argue that the most serious threat to the United States is not someone hiding in a cave in Afghanistan or Pakistan but our own fiscal irresponsibility,” Walker told CBS News’ 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft for a segment that first aired in March 2007. As comptroller general, Walker oversaw the General Accountability Office.Walker is keynote speaker for the conservative, free-market oriented Washington Policy Center’s interactive conference in SeaTac on how to make government work better for taxpayers, according to Jason Mercier, director of the Seattle nonprofit’s Center for Government Reform.Walker, in Mercier’s words, has been touring the U.S. for two years “imploring Americans to ‘wake up’ and deal with the growing fiscal cancer facing the nation.’’Walker makes for an interesting voice in the wilderness at a time candidates for president find it easier to avoid his message — and the tax implications of his words. Just this morning, Republican John McCain announced he wants a summer-long gas-tax holiday, but on the other side of the coin McCain called for a freeze on discretionary federal spending.Walker’s comments were not aimed at any specific politicians, but something that has been in motion for much longer — going beyond today’s Congress to the cumulative effect of entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare. But it’s implied that the situation worsened after Republicans and the Bush administration took over and the days of former President Clinton’s budget surpluses vanished after 2001.According to the “60 Minutes” report:
The cancer, Walker says, are massive entitlement programs we can no longer afford, exacerbated by a demographic glitch that began more than 60 years ago, a dramatic spike in the fertility rate called the ‘baby boom.’ Beginning next year (in 2008), and for 20 years thereafter, 78 million Americans will become pensioners and medical dependents of the U.S. taxpayer. ‘The first baby boomer will reach 62 and be eligible for early retirement of Social Security January 1, 2008. They’ll be eligible for Medicare just three years later. And when those boomers start retiring in mass, then that will be a tsunami of spending that could swamp our ship of state if we don’t get serious,’ Walker explains.
UPDATED to fix Walker's middle initial and title with the GAO.