There has been lots of talk about the piece in the FT today by David Walker warning that the US could lose its AAA rating. The piece is written by a former Government Accountability Office official who is now running The Peter G. Peterson Foundation. Peterson was one of the founders of the Concord Coalition and has been advocating for greater financial responsibility by the US federal government for nearly 20 years.
This is not to say that Walker’s warnings are without merit, but it is to say that this is the foundation’s stock-in-trade, being a clarion call for fiscal responsibility in a Washington that has gone all but deaf over the last decade. In other words, it is not “new” news…It could have been written any time over the last 10-years, though it is a bit more pertinent today given the massive jump in government spending.
