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Absent significant changes on the spending and/or revenue sides of the federal budget, long term deficits will encumber a growing share of federal resources and test the capacity of current and future generations to afford both today's and tomorrow's commitments. Continuing on this unsustainable path will gradually erode, if not suddenly damage, our economy, our standard of living and ultimately our national security. Incremental approaches to budgeting will need to give way to more fundamental and periodic reexaminations of the base of government, ultimately covering discretionary and mandatory programs as well as the revenue side of the budget. Having identified the major fiscal challenge facing the nation, and given our role in supporting the Congress, we believe that GAO also has an obligation to provide policymakers with support in identifying issues and options that could help to address these fiscal pressures. In this report, we draw on our past and pending work-about 90 percent of which is either requested by the Congress or required by law-- to provide policy makers with examples of the kinds of hard choices stemming from these challenges in the form of questions for elected officials and other policy makers to consider.

"It all started with Steven Ing's counseling practice. He was working with all sorts of people who were dissatisfied with their lives in one way or another. A man and wife who couldn't talk to each other about their problems, a woman who felt depressed but didn't know why, an older man who seemed to hate the world. And then there were the people who had committed sex crimes who were court ordered to go through therapy with Ing. As Ing went on with his practice, it became apparent to him that his "regular" clients and his "sex-offender" clients all had similar problems that stemmed from the same place. The problems all came back to their individual sexualities and inability to cope with them. Ing then went further and realized that these problems were societal, no one seemed to be able to have an open and honest conversation about sex. But it was not just because in his own backyard that struggled with this aspect of their lives, it was people and cultures all over the world as well. So Ing decided to start a community called "sexual futurist." He wasn't trying to solve everyone's problems or tell them what to think, he just wanted to encourage people to start having intelligent and logical conversations about sex to ultimately lead to change for the better. If we are able to have these intelligent conversations about sex using reason and logic, perhaps one day we'll start being more comfortable with the topic and therefore able to respect sex as an important aspect of our lives. Perhaps we will be able to encourage the United Nations to help people all over the world by enacting our "Sexual Bill of Rights.""