Comeback America: Turning the Country Around and Restoring Fiscal Responsibility.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: Brief article - Book review

Comeback America: Turning the Country Around and Restoring Fiscal Responsibility. By David M. Walker. Random House, 234 pages. $26.

As comptroller general of the United States from 1998-2008, David Walker was in a commanding position to understand the federal budget and the impact of spending programs, from military outlays to the entitlement programs of Medicare and Social Security. He draws on that knowledge in Comeback America, one man's educated primer on what has gone wrong and what can be done to correct it.

Now chief executive of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, Walker presents his case lucidly and with great conviction. He isn't afraid to sound the alarm bells. "Today, we are both cutting our investments in the future and handing our descendants a mountain of debt," he writes. "That is a double whammy for young people and the unborn. It's not just irresponsible, it's immoral and downright un-American."

Left unchecked, he writes, current trends suggest that by 2030, higher expenditures for mandated programs will force Americans to pay perhaps 45 percent of their income in taxes--a number that could hit 53 percent by 2040. The...