A scary article by Richard Wolf in USA Today says, in part:

From the political left and right, budget watchdogs are warning of fiscal trouble:* Douglas Holtz-Eakin, director of the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, dispassionately arms 535 members of Congress with his agency’s stark projections. Barring action, he admits to being “terrified” about the budget deficit in coming decades. That’s when an aging population, health care inflation and advanced medical technology will create a perfect storm of spiraling costs.

* Maya MacGuineas, president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, sees a future of unfunded promises, trade imbalances, too few workers and too many retirees. She envisions a stock market dive, lost assets and a lower standard of living.

* Kent Conrad, a Democratic senator from North Dakota, points to the nation’s $7.9 trillion debt, rising by about $600 billion a year. That, he notes, is before the baby boom retires. “We’re not preparing for what we all know is to come,” he says. “We’re all sleepwalking through this period.”

* Stuart Butler of the conservative Heritage Foundation projects a period from now until 2050 in which tax revenue stays stable as a share of the economy but Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security spending soars. To avoid big tax increases, he says the government has to “renegotiate” the social contracts it made with its citizens.

* Alice Rivlin and Isabel Sawhill of the centrist Brookings Institution put their pessimism into a book titled Restoring Fiscal Sanity. Rivlin, who became the first director of the Congressional Budget Office in 1974, says it will take an “economic scare” such as the 1987 stock market crash to spur action. Sawhill likens the growing gulf between what the government spends and takes in to a “Category 6 fiscal hurricane.”

I’ve reprinted just a bit of the middle of this long article that also inclues such phrases as “the nation’s finances are going to hell” and “the United States can be likened to Rome before the fall of the empire.”Read it all here.

Hat tip: Tim Chapman at Townhall.com