Alison Fraser, an economic-policy expert from the Heritage Foundation, was on the stage in Maxwell Auditorium, manipulating a graph projected on the screen behind her. It showed expected federal spending over the next 40 years, indexed against assumed tax revenue. The tax line stayed flat, while the colored bands representing expenses grew quickly, until they soared off the top of the graph. It was not a pretty picture.

The software allowed Fraser to alter spending and display the net effect. So she tried eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts or foreign aid. The impact was barely perceptible. She tried a more radical move: eliminating the entire military. There was a sizeable immediate dip, but the mushrooming deficit soon returned. The problem, it turns out, lay in the three fat and ever-broadening bands that represented Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; their growth easily overwhelmed any other cutbacks. Fraser called them “a spending tsunami” and said “we can’t be thinking about anything unless we really, fundamentally have a conversation about what we want these three programs to look like.”

That’s pretty much how it went all evening. Fraser was at Maxwell on April 4 as part of the Fiscal Wake-Up Tour, a roadshow of economic experts hell-bent on convincing citizens that the federal budget deficit is important and that their elected representatives ought to be talking about it. Max­well was the tour’s 22nd stop thus far.

The tour is sponsored by the Concord Coalition—a grassroots organization advocating “generationally responsible” fiscal policy—in conjunction with the Brookings Institution and the Heritage Foundation. Each of those organizations sent a speaker to the stage, as did Maxwell, in the person of University Professor and Dean Emeritus John L. Palmer (a trustee on the board that oversees Social Security and Medicare).

With them was David Walker, comptroller general of the United States since 1998, who has decided it’s part of his job description to make voters care about the budget. With a passionate, steely sense of mission, Walker provided a torrent of mind-boggling numbers—unfunded long-term obligations of the federal government now amount to $440,000 per American household, for example—and then declared current fiscal policy unsustainable and irresponsible.

“If the next President doesn’t make fiscal responsibility one of their top three priorities . . .,” he said, “we’re in trouble.”

According to David Bixby, director of the Concord Coalition, the timing of the tour, in advance of the 2008 Presidential campaign, is no accident. He wants to see budget policy emerge as a prominent campaign issue. Previously, he said, citizens have not known how to discuss the budget, and their representatives have been afraid to do so.

“In some ways we’re like a marriage counselor,” Bixby said. “The public doesn’t trust the politicians and the politicians are scared to death to talk to the public about these things. . . . We’re trying to make it safe to have a rational conversation about this.”

Another metaphor that arose was global warming, as it became clear federal budget choices have a compounding, almost exponential effect. Delays simply exacerbate the problems, making the fixes even tougher.

Walker views this as not just a budget problem, but a moral imperative. “We the people,” he said, “are responsible and accountable for what does or does not happen in the capitals of this country.” Ultimately, he added, it comes down to stewardship, and he then showed his final PowerPoint slide: snapshots of three young children named Christi, Grace, and Daniel.

“These are my three grandchildren. . . .,” Walker concluded. “They will pay the price. They will bear the burden. They do not have a voice. I am their voice.”