The former comptroller general for Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush said Wednesday that the nation’s huge national debt is a sign that the U.S. has strayed far from the original reasons the country was founded.
“From a broader perspective, the United States has strayed from many of the key principles and values that it was founded on and which made us great,” former Comptroller General David Walker told a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee in prepared remarks.
“The federal government has also grown too big, promised too much, and needs to enact a variety of reforms in order to help create a better future for our country and its citizens,” he said.
Walker said the country was founded on principles such as individual liberty, personal responsibility and limited government. But he said those values are now at “significant risk.”
He said the adoption of the income tax, the creation of the Federal Reserve, and direct election of U.S. senators are major factors that have contributed to the debt. All of those events happened in 1913.
More than 100 years later, the federal government is now 10 times larger, relatively, than it was in 1913 before those changes took place.
“The bottom line is, Congress has lost control of the budget, our debt burdens are escalating to imprudent levels, and our collective future is now ‘at risk,'” he said.
He said the U.S. is adding debt faster than the rate of growth of the economy, and said resetting the U.S. on a path of fiscal stability would take massive change.
“Defusing our nation’s ticking debt bomb will require an unprecedented public education and engagement effort as a prelude to major budget, tax, Social Security, Medicare/Medicare, healthcare, defense, government organization/operations, and political reforms,” he said.
