At times during his 90-minute talk, David Walker sounded like a Tea Party activist. At other times, he sounded like a radical progressive. If his package of ideas – combining cuts to Medicare and Social Security with campaign-finance reform and universal health care – doesn't fit neatly in today's left-vs.-right political taxonomy, that's exactly his point. Walker, a former U.S. comptroller general, is crisscrossing the country during election season, but he is not talking about candidates or parties. Rather, he's trying to focus audiences' attention on a 14-digit electronic display that shares the stage with him. He calls it the Burden Barometer, and it read $70 trillion, $579 billion, $104 million and change when he brought it to Washington University on Tuesday. The better-known National Debt Clock is only at $16 trillion and counting, but Walker says it understates the government's debt problem. To get to $70 trillion, he adds unfunded liabilities of Medicare, Social Security and other programs. Walker calls his cross-country journey the $10 Million A Minute Tour, and by the time he was done speaking at Washington University, the debt tally had jumped by more than $800 million. Source: The Coming Crisis
