David Walker ran the Government Accountability Office for a decade, under both a Republican and Democratic president. Elected officials should take him seriously when he warns that the nation is headed for fiscal blowup.
“The fuse has been lit on our debt bomb,” Walker, who led the GAO from 1998 until 2008, told members of the House Budget Committee last week, “and there are many indications that our time to defuse it is getting short.
“For example, there is an increasing gap between the amount of debt we need to issue to finance our huge deficits and refinance maturing debt and the appetite of traditional purchasers of Treasury debt.”
He went on to say, “The federal government has grown too big, promised too much, subsidized too many, undercut states’ rights and lost control of the budget.”
Walker states the obvious. Unfortunately, the obvious doesn’t always align with the short-term objectives of senators and members of the House. But as the nation spills more and more red ink — the debt now approaches $37 trillion and has doubled in less than a decade — further congressional dithering on the subject could have disastrous consequences.