Every year around this time, the Congressional Budget Office issues a report about just how grim the nation’s long-term financial health is. A few lawmakers wring their hands and say they will get serious about fixing the problem, but then they don’t. We, as a nation, rush toward a debt-induced disaster if no one heeds the warning.

The new forecast offered one glimmer of hope. Short-term, the federal budget is in better shape today than in recent years.

Thank a slowly recovering economy, sequestration spending cuts and a few tax changes. Annual deficits that topped $1 trillion in recent years have shrunk to their smallest level since 2008. They will continue to decline until about 2018.

Then, if nothing changes, everything starts going haywire again.

Budget deficits will increase each year, driving up the national debt.

Washington just isn’t listening. Lawmakers, activists and lobbyists get twisted up over discretionary spending programs that the budget group forecasts will remain basically flat over the next 25 years.

Even now, partisans are bickering over what should be a routine increase to the debt ceiling so that the government can spend money Congress already authorized.

Default and a government shutdown loom while Republicans insist on fighting over the Affordable Care Act again, a battle they cannot win.

The Congressional Budget Office once again has given America a peek at its future.

If it comes to pass, in 2038, Americans will hold few fond memories for those who were warned that fiscal disaster was coming and did nothing.

— Kansas City Star, Sept. 22