The lonely vigil

You've got to hand it to David M. Walker, the Comptroller General of the United States, on his lonely mission to warn the rest of the country (and the world) about the government's >long-term obligations and the nation's worsening finances.

Listening to the White House and the Treasury Department talk, you'd think we were on track to close the budget deficit in just another year or two and that we're headed for surpluses again in the next decade.

The Washington Post reports on Mr. Walker's continuing efforts:

Walker is the tour's rock star, profiled on "60 Minutes" and interviewed by faux-pundit Stephen Colbert. A former Arthur Andersen accountant, Walker heads the Government Accountability Office, a legislative agency that aims to improve government performance through audits and investigations.

With six years to go on a 15-year term, Walker has the stature and independence to say what he wants. For the past five years, since Congress ignored his advice and created a hugely expensive prescription-drug program for Medicare beneficiaries, Walker has put the looming fiscal crisis at the top of his agenda.

"People are on the beach having a beach party while you can see a tsunami of spending on the horizon. And you've got people saying, 'party on,' " Walker said in an interview. "We're headed for very, very rough seas, like we've never seen before in this country."

With his Southern-fried accent and flair for apocalyptic turns of phrase, Walker's job on the tour is to breathe life into the dry details of the federal budget. By his reckoning, the heart of the problem is this: The annual budget deficit, which is the difference between revenue and spending, was $248 billion in fiscal 2006, down from a high of $413 billion in 2004. It is expected to decrease further in the fiscal year that ends in October, and both the White House and Congress are projecting a balanced budget by 2012.

But the numbers hide massive cracks in the budget's structure. First, they rely on borrowing from the Social Security trust fund, which today collects more in taxes than it needs to pay benefits. As the baby boomers retire, demands on the trust fund will grow, and the yearly surplus will likely disappear by 2017. Without that surplus, last year's deficit would have been $434 billion. Eventually, the money the government has borrowed from Social Security will be needed to pay retiree benefits, and it will have to come out of general revenues.

Which gets to the larger problem: More than half the federal budget is on autopilot, eaten up by interest payments and entitlement programs that provide benefits to anyone who qualifies. The biggest entitlements are Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, which together account for about 40 percent of federal spending. Interest on the national debt accounts for another 9 percent and is the fastest-growing budget category at $227 billion, or nearly twice what was spent last year on the war in Iraq.

Congress created the big entitlement programs, and it can change or limit them at any time. But the programs are so popular that in practice, Congress rarely tinkers. Unlike such other government functions as education and transportation, known as discretionary programs, entitlement spending grows more or less automatically. That makes it easy to project spending, and the outlook is sobering.

Being in low tax bracket for the foreseeable future has its advantages - my sympathy is with those of you now looking at decades of (higher) payroll taxes ahead of you.