I think this is a wonderful idea!  We can use a thread to keep us informed on what is going on and what we need to fight.   Hopefully we will be able to keep it in line for that purpose only. 

Thanks Grassfire!

Its simple realy our goverment is trying to use illegal imagrents for cheep labor and more tax base, to pay off the 69.5 trillion dollars of this nations dept. yes i said it right, thats 159,000 dollars per man woman and child born to this nation. and i will back it up here.>

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The 'budget and leadership deficits'
Posted by Frank James at 4:20 pm CDT

If the world made more sense, what David Walker said today would get a lot more attention than the doings of John Mark Karr, the strange little man arrested on suspicion of killing JonBenet Ramsey or whether Sen. Hillary Clinton will run for president or not.

Walker is comptroller general of the Government Accountability Office, an agency that acts a sort of a truth squad for Congress.

He gave a speech today on the financial reckoning facing America to an American Institute of Certified Public Accountants conference. It is worth paying attention to.

Walker didn’t break any news. But what he said and the way he said it demands that attention be paid.

“We have four deficits: a budget deficit, a balance of payments deficit, a savings deficit and a leadership deficit,” he said. That last deficit is the one that makes all the others so troublesome.

For it’s that last one that has placed the U.S. on the course it’s on now. This is how Walker described the nation’s present fiscal direction.

“The United States government is on an imprudent and unsustainable fiscal path. We do not face an immediate crisis, but we face large and growing structural imbalances that are growing every second of every minute of every day due to continuing deficits, known demographic trends and rising health-care cost. The status quo is unacceptable and unsustainable, and anybody who tells you -- whether they be Republicans, Democrat or Independent, that we can solve this problem through economic growth alone or that we can solve this problem without having to reform entitlement programs, reengineer the base of discretionary spending and have additional tax revenues -- anybody who says that we are not going to have to do all three of those is not telling you the truth. It's as simple as that.”

Walker wanted to get the accountants at the Marriott hotel where the conference being held worked up. He wants to get everyone worked up. He wants Americans to understand the risks the nation is running so that they’ll demand action from their elected leaders.

In the past five years, the U.S.’s unfunded future commitments related to Social Security and Medicare have risen by $20 trillion, Walker said, to $46 trillion.

“How much is $46 trillion?” he asked. The answer is that if you added up the net worth of everyone in America, it would be more than 90 percent of that total.

“It’s $156,000 for every man, woman and child in the U.S.,” he said. “People talk about eliminating the death tax. How about eliminating the birth burden, that $156,000? No wonder newborn babies cry. Somebody’s giving them the bill.”

Walker discussed the accounting tricks the government employs to make the problem appear less bad, like having the Congressional Budget Office only look at the federal budget or program costs over a 10-year period.

“The difficulty is, the U.S. is going to last more than 10 years, I can assure you of that… So we are making decisions today that do not take into account known demographic realities. We should be saving. We should be investing in order to help deal with this tremendous burden. But we’re not. We’re dissaving at record rates, especially when you consider the fact that (in 2005) for the first time since 1933, Americans spent more money than they took home.”

Walker reminded the audience in the hotel ballroom of something many Americans probably don’t know, that the largest tax preference in the Internal Revenue Code is the one given for employer-provided health benefits.

“… The fact (is) that none of us in this room, no matter how wealthy we are, no matter how much money we make and how much net income -- net worth we have, no matter how generous our employer-provided and paid health care is, we never pay a dime of income or payroll tax on the value of employer-provided and paid health care. That is approaching $200 billion a year and growing rapidly. And I'm here to tell you, that's part of the problem with our health care system, not part of the solution, because it disconnects people from the true cost of health care, and ultimately, we're going to have to reform the entire health care system in installments, including a fundamental redivision of responsibilities between government employers and individuals over a number of years.”

Staying on the health-care theme, he singled out the way lawmakers and the White House Medicare prescription drug benefit program to show how an already difficult fiscal situation was being made worst, not better.

“The Medicare prescription drug-benefit bill is a perfect example of what's wrong with Washington, in two ways. When the estimated cost of that bill was calculated, it only considered 10-year cash flow cost. The actuary for Medicare had calculated the number. His number was $534 billion. CBO's was $290 billion.

“The Medicare actuary was told that he could not tell the congress the $534 billion number for risk of losing his job. That not only was unethical, it was illegal. And nobody has been held accountable.

“Congress wanted to spend $300 billion on Medicare prescription drugs when we had a surplus, but at the time that bill was passed, we had large and growing deficits. And four months after the bill was passed, the Medicare Act trustees, based on the work of the actuaries, came out with the estimated discounted present value dollar number that I talked about before. And how much was it: $8.1 trillion, one and a half times what the Social Security imbalance was, and more than the entire total debt of the United States that had been accumulated since the beginning of the republic in 1789 at that time.

“Wasn't disclosed, wasn't discussed, wasn't debated. That's the first problem.

“The second problem is, is that Medicare was underfunded by $15 (trillion) to $20 trillion in current dollar terms before Medicare prescription drugs was passed into law. So we took a program that was designed in 1965, based upon Blue Cross/Blue Shield largely, Medicare Part A and Part B, we added to the unfunded obligations another $8 trillion, and we didn't reform the program in any meaningful way at all. That's irresponsible. And that's not a partisan issue.”

Considering the problems he laid out, Walker seemed anything but pessimistic.

“We can -- we must -- we will, I believe, rise to this challenge. But we need to do it sooner rather than later, and the professions need to be part of the leadership team. We need public education, discussion and debate. It needs to be professional, objective, fact- based, non-partisan, non-ideological, fair and balanced. You cannot solve a problem until a majority of the people realize that you have a problem that needs to be solved and it's prudent to solve it sooner rather than later. Ultimately, elected officials will have to make the tough choices, but they need help, because they're going to have to make tough choices. And realistically, elected officials, especially if they want to be re-elected, are not going to get too far ahead of their constituents. So we need to help prepare the way, and I would like to ask for your help.”

At the start of his speech, Walker had said there were lessons to be learned from ancient Rome, imperial Britain and, of all places, New Zealand. They were indeed examples worth mulling.

“Rome. The republic that has lasted the longest in the history of the world is the Roman Republic. It lasted a little over 500 years. More than a thousand years is an empire, but only a little over 500 is a republic.

There are a lot of reasons that the Roman Republic fell. Let me mention three. Declining moral values and political comity -- that's I-T-Y, not E-D-Y -- at home, overconfident and overextended around the world, and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government. We should learn from history and take steps to make sure that history is not repeated.

The British Empire did not survive the test of time, and they also had their own challenges in Mesopotamia, currently known as Iraq. We should learn from history.

And thirdly, New Zealand versus Argentina, two countries who came to the brink of bankruptcy and chose different paths. Argentina did not make reforms, and they declared bankruptcy. New Zealand made dramatic and fundamental reforms in the role of the federal government, how they did business, and who did their business, and they stepped back from the brink.

And by the way, New Zealand, Australia and other countries now regularly issue long-term fiscal sustainability reports. They're not just focusing on today, they're preparing for a better tomorrow. If New Zealand can do it, we can do it, the sooner the better.”

You didn't have to be an accountant to learn a lot from Walker's speech.