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Fiscal Wake-Up Tour Calls for American's to Wake Up
to Soaring Deficits, Strangling National Debt,
and Fiscal Responsibility to Future Generations

See an online video of the Fiscal Wake-Up Tour's stop at MSU.

Watch Comptroller General David Walker's interview with
WKAR-TV Capitol Correspondent Tim Skubick.

"If there's one thing that could bankrupt America, it's healthcare," the nation's seventh Comptroller General David Walker told more than 125 people attending the “Fiscal Wake-Up Tour's” visit to Michigan State University. "We've written a blank check."

The Fiscal Wake-Up Tour, a campaign of some of the nation's best thinkers on the federal budget, stopped at MSU on Thursday, Dec. 6.

The goal: To encourage Americans to call on their local, state and federal-level elected leaders to craft long-lasting solutions that will contain the nation's budget, end deficits and shrink a ballooning national debt. The Fiscal Wake-Up Tour brings together Washington, D.C.-based think tanks of competing views about how to solve the nation's fiscal woes.

Though they disagree on the solutions to the fiscal problems, they agree that the nation can't continue on its current fiscal course, that cutting waste and fraud alone won't bring the budget under control and that the solution must include public and bipartisan agreement. Current generations should not saddle their children and grandchildren with a debt they did not incur, members of the Wake-Up Tour agreed.

"This is truly a moral issue," said Harry Zeeve, of the Concord Coalition, which sponsored the MSU visit and is helping to organize the campaign which visited its 25th state with the Michigan stop. "Our time to act as generational stewards is now."

MSU’s Institute for Public Policy hosted the town hall-style forum in conjunction with MSU Extension State and Local Government programs.

Featured speaker U.S. Comptroller General David Walker took the lead of a panel of budget analysts from The Concord Coalition, The Heritage Foundation, Brookings Institution and the U.S. Government Accountability Office. MSU Economics Professor Charles Ballard provided Michigan counterpoint.

PANELISTS AND THEIR SLIDE PRESENTATIONS

	David Walker, an accountant who heads the U.S. Government Accountability Office, and is the nation’s seventh Comptroller General. See his slide presentation.
	A. Harry Zeeve, National Field Director for The Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan group dedicated to fiscal responsibility. View his slide presentation.
	Brian Riedl, Senior Policy Analyst, Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies, The Heritage Foundation, a Washington, D.C. organization following foreign and domestic issues. See his slide presentation.
	Paul R. Cullinan, Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C.-based public policy research organization. View his slide presentation.


	Charles Ballard, Ph.D., MSU Professor of Economics, will add Michigan commentary to the forum. See the slide presentation.