A voice of grim fiscal reality

Two and a half years ago, David Walker brought his "Fiscal Wake-Up Tour" to Charleston. Then serving in his 10th year as U.S. comptroller general, he was leading a bipartisan chorus warning that our nation was on a path toward fiscal calamity. Though he's no longer comptroller general, he's still sounding that alarm.

And due to an ominous -- and ongoing -- acceleration of reckless spending policies in Washington, Mr. Walker has justifiably intensified his pleas for a long-overdue commitment to budgetary responsibility by both elected officials and the U.S. public.

As president and CEO of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, he's running an organization with a stated mission of increasing "public awareness of the nature and urgency of key economic challenges threatening America's future." The Foundation seeks "sensible, sustainable solutions that transcend age, party lines and ideological divides in order to achieve real results."

As an accountant, he knows a daunting day of reckoning looms (see Steve Chapman's column on today's Commentary page). He also knows the fundamental unsustainability of federal entitlement obligations that preceded the current recession.

In a recent speech to the National Taxpayers Union, he offered this evidence for his diagnosis of what he calls our nation's "fiscal cancer":

"Our off-balance-sheet obligations associated with Social Security and Medicare put us in a $56 trillion financial hole -- and that's before the recession was officially declared last year. America now owes more than Americans are worth -- and the gap is growing."

Mr. Walker rightly stresses that entitlement reform, particularly Medicare reform, should be Job One. While he favors other health care reform measures that could reduce medical costs, he opposes the package advocated by the White House and the Democratic leadership in Congress.

He recently told The Wall Street Journal: "President Obama got the sequence wrong by advocating expanding coverage before we've proven our ability to control costs."

Mr. Walker is no right-wing ideologue bent on scoring political points against a Democratic president. He was first appointed comptroller general -- basically the federal government's auditor as head of the Government Accountability Office -- by President Clinton. He has rightly decried massive waste and scant financial accountability at the Pentagon. He has consistently advocated reducing the deficit not just by cutting spending but by raising taxes.

And he's persisting in his efforts to translate Washington's immense and growing financial burdens into understandable terms: "Our $56 trillion in unfunded obligations amount to $483,000 per household. That's 10 times the median household income. So it's as if everyone had a second or third mortgage on a house equal to 10 times their income but no house they can lay claim to."

In other words, the federal government isn't just broke. It's in record-breaking debt -- and diving ever deeper into the red.

Mr. Walker and others have long sounded this alarm in vain. The longer we wait to heed it and take the difficult steps required to restore fiscal sanity in Washington, the more costly the consequences.