Just in case anyone needs yet another good reason to throw out the Republicans on November 7, the head of the GAO just provided it. While the Republicans claim to be running on `the robust economy', the nation's chief accountant gave another frightening take on the matter just last night. Speaking to a packed hall in Austin, Texas, he declared that the ship of state is sailing straight into economic doom and that, "We the people have to rise up to make sure things get changed."
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David M. Walker, comptroller general of the United States, has embarked on what he is calling the Fiscal Wake-up Tour. He plans to tour the nation through the 2008 election explaining the disturbing truth about the American economy to anyone who will listen. Apparently bonddad is not the only one who sees the writing on the wall.
While greedy Republicans gloat over short term gains for the richest 1%, the long term prospects for the American economy get worse and worse as the deficit balloons and borrowing from foreign governments goes unabated. According to the guy who ought to know, we're in big trouble.
Walker is not running for public office and has no reason to lie. He is serving a 15-year term as head of the GAO that runs through 2013. The only thing he hopes to gain is the attention of the American public.
"You can't solve a problem until the majority of the people believe you have a problem that needs to be solved," Walker says.
Polls suggest that Americans have only a vague sense of their government's long-term fiscal prospects. When pollsters ask Americans to name the most important problem facing America today _ as a CBS News/New York Times poll of 1,131 Americans did in September _ issues such as the war in Iraq, terrorism, jobs and the economy are most frequently mentioned. The deficit doesn't even crack the top 10.
Yet on the rare occasions that pollsters ask directly about the deficit, at least some people appear to recognize it as a problem. In a survey of 807 Americans last year by the Pew Center for the People and the Press, 42 percent of respondents said reducing the deficit should be a top priority; another 38 percent said it was important but a lower priority.
So the majority of the public appears to agree with Walker that the deficit is a serious problem, but only when they're made to think about it. Walker's challenge is to get people not just to think about it, but to pressure politicians to make the hard choices that are needed to keep the situation from spiraling out of control.
Source
Accompanying Walker on his Fiscal Wake-Up Tour are a slew of economists and budget analysts from across the political spectrum. Joining him in Austin last night were Diane Lim Rogers, a liberal economist from the Brookings Institution, and Alison Acosta Fraser, director of the Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
"We all agree on what the choices are and what the numbers are," Fraser says.
Their basic message is this: If the United States government conducts business as usual over the next few decades, a national debt that is already $8.5 trillion could reach $46 trillion or more, adjusted for inflation. That's almost as much as the total net worth of every person in America _ Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and those Google guys included.
A hole that big could paralyze the U.S. economy; according to some projections, just the interest payments on a debt that big would be as much as all the taxes the government collects today.
And every year that nothing is done about it, Walker says, the problem grows by $2 trillion to $3 trillion.
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A series of converging problems including health care, Social Security, Medicare, and the aging `baby boomer' generation are combining to paint a bleak picture of our economic outlook. Walker projects that a doubling of corporate income taxes would be required to resolve the issues in our favor. Of course politicians of neither party want to touch that one. Therein lies the problem. Without the political will to make the necessary changes nothing will be done, and the ship of state will sail unimpeded to its doom.
Irresponsible political leadership has led to continued borrowing from foreign governments like China and Japan, putting our nation in a very precarious position. Should our debtors suddenly lose their enthusiasm for lending us money, we would see dramatic rises in interest rates with disastrous consequences for the economy.
The federal government balanced the budget and actually produced a surplus during the 1990s, thanks to the fiscal restraint of the Clinton administration, but the Republicans promptly pissed that away and embarked on a disastrous course of tax cuts to billionaires - all the while spending taxpayer dollars like drunken sailors and pouring hundreds of billions into the catastrophy in Iraq.
To save ourselves we have to dump the Republicans like a hot rock and hold the Democrats' feet to the fire. We have to demand responsible political leadership, and make damn sure we get it. If we don't, we are headed for financial doom.
The Republicans running on the economy is nothing more than yet another bad joke at the expense of the American people. Let's be done with these fools.