Bus Tour Promoting Fiscal Responsibility Comes to Wash U

David M. Walker, former U.S. comptroller general, will bring his “$10 Million a Minute Tour” promoting fiscal responsibility to the Washington University in St. Louis campus today.

David M. Walker, CEO of the Comeback America Initiative, is leading a national monthlong bus tour to bring attention to the economic and fiscal challenges facing the United States.

Walker, CEO of the Comeback America Initiative (CAI), is leading a national monthlong bus tour to bring attention to the economic and fiscal challenges facing the United States.  

Walker and Joseph J.Minarik , PhD, senior vice president and director of research at the Committee for Economic Development, will lead a conversation from 4-6 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 18, in the Laboratory Sciences Building, Room 300, on the Danforth Campus. The event is free and open to the public.

Minarik served on two national commissions committed to reducing the national budget deficit, the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Debt Reduction Task Force and the National Academy of Science’s Our Fiscal Future project. He was the chief economist of the Office of Management and Budget during the Clinton Administration.

The CAI tour bus will be parked outside the Mallinckrodt Center on Sept. 18.

The two-hour interactive forum with Walker and Minarik will focus on the national economy, exploring how the national debt affects voters, offering bipartisan solutions and showing voters what they can do to encourage reform.

Walker’s organization hopes the tour will encourage voters, especially those in swing states, to press candidates running for national office on what they would do to address the country’s fiscal crisis.

The bus tour, which began Sept. 7 at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, N.H., and ends with three events Oct. 9 in Washington, D.C., will visit 17 states.

Walker, who also is the former trustee of Social Security and Medicare, says the tour is fact-based, bipartisan and non-ideological.

He says the tour’s name reflects the country’s financial challenge: The total debt burden is going up by $10 million a minute.

The CAI developed a U.S. Financial Burden Barometer to supplement the National Debt Clock. The initiative considers the Burden Barometer a more accurate measure of the nation’s financial situation because it includes both total liabilities and unfunded social insurances promises, such as Social Security and Medicare.

The 100-pound red-lit Burden Barometer travels on the tour and will be  displayed during Walker’s WUSTL forum.

“We are at a crossroads in America,” Walker says. “Our political leaders can keep hiding their heads in the sand and continue toward economic catastrophe. Or, they can take an honest look at our situation and lead us by pursuing nonpartisan solutions that can address our challenges in an effective, equitable, moral and sustainable manner.”

Visit the bus tour’s web site at 10MillionaMinute.com for graphics of the Burden Barometer; a list of national leaders supporting the bus tour, including two former heads of the Democratic National Committee and two former heads of the Republican National Committee; and the tour itinerary.

The Danforth Campus stop on the bus tour is co-sponsored by Washington University’s Assembly Series, College Democrats, College Republicans, Gephardt Institute for Public Service, Student Union, and the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy.

Gray Panthers of Kansas & Western Missouri

A second bus tour, which aims to protest the first tour, will also be at Washington University Tuesday.

The Gray Panthers are a group of seniors and veterans who will head from Kansas City to St. Louis  to stage a protest against Walker’s bus tour and presentation pushing for severe cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and veterans’ benefits. 

For all the details on the Gray Panthers' visit, see the group's announcement uploaded to University City Patch.