I have been fighting for federal fiscal sanity and sustainability for over thirty years from various positions on the battlefield. It started when fellow Social Security and Medicare Public Trustee Stan Ross and I issued the first Public Trustee’s Report in the early 1990s noting that these important social insurance programs were unsustainable in their present form.
In 1998, President Clinton nominated me, and the U.S. Senate unanimously confirmed me as the seventh Comptroller General of the United States and CEO of the GAO. The federal government had surpluses in Fiscal 1998-2001 and reduced debt held by the public in two of those years. In early 2001, CBO projected that the federal government was on a path the eliminate all federal debt held by the public and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve was worried about it. I knew better given our political process which consistently promotes more spending and lower taxes.
By 2003 it became clear to me that the Congress and the President had lost their fiscal bearings, and I included an emphasis paragraph in the consolidated annual audit report of the federal government. That paragraph noted that the federal government was on an unsustainable fiscal path and that substantive spending and tax reforms were needed.
From 2008 through 2013 I served as CEO of the Peter G.........