Two days ago, President Obama released his 2010 budget, complete with numbers that caused even the most cynical jaws to drop across the nation. The new plan has the U.S. spending a record-setting $3.8 trillion, deepening the deficit to a level unseen in history, growing the government to 2.15 million employees, and requesting nearly $300 billion “for recession relief and job stimulus.”

For years, the U.S. budget has been a disaster. And for years, David Walker, the former comptroller general of the United States, has been trying to give the country a wake-up call regarding our perilous financial condition. Walker has “concluded that our current standard of living is unsustainable unless some drastic action is taken,” 60 Minutes reported in 2007, “And he's not alone. It's been called the ‘dirty little secret everyone in Washington knows’ – a set of financial truths so inconvenient that most elected officials don't even want to talk about them, which is exactly why David Walker does.”

The entire column is here.