Editorial: Spending like no tomorrow

Sunday, Nov. 26, 2006 | 7:42 a.m.

W hen it comes to gloom and doom, U.S. Comptroller General David Walker is the purveyor of the hour as he describes a nation on the brink of fiscal collapse - the United States.

Walker heads the Government Accountability Office, which audits the federal government. Last week the GAO released a copy of Walker's so-called "Fiscal Wake-up Tour" - a series of presentations he has made around the country that were sponsored by the Concord Coalition. The nonpartisan organization is dedicated to informing the public about paying off debts to help future generations.

The United States is, literally, going for broke. The nation's long-term commitments and unfunded obligations soared from $20.4 trillion in 2000 to $46.4 trillion in 2005, Walker says. That translates into a financial burden of $411,000 for every household, or $156,000 for every person, in the United States.

And it is not getting better. As members of the Baby Boom generation - people born from 1946 through 1964 - grow older, funding for such programs as Social Security and Medicare are going to run out. Meanwhile, the Bush administration and its supportive, Republican-led Congress has been cutting taxes for industry and the wealthiest Americans, creating new government agencies and making deficit projections that fall short by failing to include such costs as the Iraq war.

Republicans are supposed to be fiscal conservatives who favor small government. But Bush has gone completely in the other direction, leaving the incoming Congress with a bloated government and the deepest financial morass this nation has ever seen.

These missteps helped Democrats win big in the recent elections. But this is how it always happens - Republicans run up huge deficits for a term or two, and then the Democrats are called upon to balance the budget without penalizing the poor.

Walker is dead-on in predicting that this national debt is going to be a nightmare to unravel. And it is a terrible burden to lay at our children's feet.