David M. Walker...has a job as head of the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress that audits and evaluates the performance of the federal government. That makes Walker the nation's accountant-in-chief. And the accountant-in-chief's professional opinion is that the American public needs to tell Washington it's time to steer the nation off the path to financial ruin. The vast majority of economists and budget analysts agree: The ship of state is on a disastrous course, and will founder on the reefs of economic disaster if nothing is done to correct it. There's a good reason politicians don't like to talk about the nation's long-term fiscal prospects. It reveals serious problems and offers no easy solutions. Anybody who wanted to deal with it seriously would have to talk about raising taxes and cutting benefits. Walker...has committed to touring the nation through the 2008 elections, talking to anybody who will listen about the fiscal black hole Washington has dug itself, the demographic tsunami" that will come when the baby boom generation begins retiring and the recklessness of borrowing money from foreign lenders to pay for the operation of the U.S. government. To show that the looming fiscal crisis is not a partisan issue, he brings along economists and budget analysts from across the political spectrum. 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. A hole that big could paralyze the U.S. economy. And every year that nothing is done about it, Walker says, the problem grows by $2 trillion to $3 trillion.

"