Savings Bind

Newsweek flies the red and yellow flag about the coming Fiscal Tsunami in the U.S.

David Walker, comptroller general of the U.S. and head of the Government Accountability Office (an audit and investigation arm of Congress), has some excellent sound bites on the big economic Phillips-head bearing down on us. Here's one:

Just for perspective, can you compare the size of this fiscal "tsunami" [to the size of particular spending programs]?
Well, you could decide not to renew the Bush tax cuts, you could eliminate all foreign aid, eliminate all earmarks, eliminate NASA, eliminate the National Endowment for Humanities and eliminate the entire Defense Department tomorrow, and you still wouldn't solve the problem.

Also, some generally damning, responsibility-oriented things that someone needs to be saying:

When people see these statistics, eyes tend to glaze over. There is not a sense of urgency out there in the land. So why should people feel a sense of urgency? Politicians aren't expressing a sense of urgency. No one feels that the crunch is coming tomorrow.
We have a failure of leadership in America, and it is a bipartisan problem.