The Associated Press this afternoon filed a story about David Walker, the head of the Government Accountability Office, who is running around the country making as much noise as he can about the U.S.'s grim long-term economic outlook. What's amazing isn't that Walker has found it necessary to go straight to the people with this message. What's amazing is that people who pay marginal attention to him in Washington started talking about this campaign more than a year and a half ago, when Walker had already been waving his arms for some time.

The AP reporter filed the story from Austin, where Walker tried to raise attention, away from the wars, sex scandals and general incompetence in Washington, DC. Quoth AP:

What they don't talk about is a dirty little secret everyone in Washington knows, or at least should. The vast majority of economists and budget analysts agree: The ship of state is on a disastrous course, and will founder on the reefs of economic disaster if nothing is done to correct it.

In the gee-whiz technoworld that drew me to Philoneist as a contributor, and hopefully you as a reader, it is easy to forget where a lot of gee-whiz things come from: Military, industrial and academic basic research. Big government is Big Science. Other than the military and social welfare programs, such as Social Security and Medicare, one of the government's most important tasks is to keep big science big. To achieve these things, it must keep its financial house in order. That's not happening, and the suffering has begun.

That Walker is running around playing Cassandra about the economy; that the National Academy of Sciences is bemoaning the U.S.'s slipping lead in scientific and technological prowess to China, India, Japan and Europe; that military officers have seen the nation's armed forces squeezed over a war no one who matters appears to have thought about beforehand; that Republican governance is crumbling through corruption and incompetence and perversion of their own standard rhetorical slogans; that I pay attention to politics but can't tell you what Democrats want from the world, all these things, and several more should make people angrier than they seem to be. I mean, right?

From the roof of my building in Washington, DC, I can see the Government Accountability Office, the National Academy of Sciences and the Department of Homeland Security, just by turning my head. Can anyone farther than a block away see these buildings?

[Photo Copyright General Accountability Office]