Unless changes come, taxpayers will face heavy burden, he warns
 
The nation's chief accountability officer scolded the federal government Monday for avoiding problems with Social Security and Medicare, criticizing the existing benefits systems as outdated for baby boomers moving toward retirement.

The "demographic tidal wave" of retirements will place a hefty strain on taxpayers unless Congress imposes spending caps on itself and restructures some entitlement programs, U.S. Comptroller General David Walker said at a conference on the nation's elderly.

"This wave will not recede, and we are not prepared," said Walker, head of the Government Accountability Office, the congressional office that conducts audits and reviews government efficiency.

In a speech to delegates at the White House Conference on Aging, which is held once a decade, Walker warned that such changes will be far more difficult to enact in the future, when older Americans become a larger proportion of the voting population.

The consequences of inaction would grow as well, he said. By 2040, balancing the federal budget would require either a 60 percent cut in federal spending or tax increases that would more than double the current tax burden, according to projections by the GAO.

President Bush's attempts this year to overhaul Social Security foundered because retirees feared that his plan to create private accounts would undermine the popular program.

Henry Aaron, a senior economist at the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution, said the doomsday scenarios projected by some Social Security reformists were overblown.

"The problem is really rather small and can be dealt with quite readily," using modest spending cuts, tax increases and changes to eligibility requirements, he said.

Walker's recommendations for Social Security included pay-as-you-go rules for spending and automatic cuts in the event of budget overruns.

Just as important, he said, are changes to Medicare and Medicaid, the nation's health-care programs for the elderly and poor. To sustain the widely used programs, he said, the government might consider raising the age of eligibility for Medicare and increasing the income floor for Medicaid.