WASHINGTON – When the ink on the federal balance sheet is red all over, somewhere a Texan is sounding the alarm.

Last year's deficit was $1.4 trillion. The national debt soared past $12 trillion.

San Marcos obstetrician Alan Parks says the nation's "house is burning down." Parks is president of Americans for a Balanced Budget Amendment, a small organization with a big cause that not long ago dominated American economic and political debate.

It's been a slog.

"Until I can get some big money coming into the organization – until I can get Ross Perot, Bill Gates or Warren Buffett to take it up as their cause – we may be stuck," he said.

Texans like Perot, Phil Gramm and Charlie Stenholm made deficit-reduction economics folksy. Perot used his presidential campaign chats and charts. Gramm had a test for congressional spending based on its impact on Mexia businessman Dickey Flatt. Stenholm looked at federal spending with "West Texas tractor-seat common sense."

"We Texans have traditionally seen the common-sense side of balancing the budget in good years, and then if you don't make a crop or that well doesn't come in, you make the adjustments in the next year," said Stenholm, a Stamford Democrat who served in Congress from 1979 to 2005.

The catastrophes foretold by these modern-day Cassandras have not come to pass. Social Security's finances were rebalanced with help from a bipartisan commission in 1983. The stock market collapse of 1987 – blamed by some economists on cold feet among foreign lenders – quickly ended with a stock market rebound.

Perot's warnings of peril were followed by four years of balanced budgets crafted by Republicans and Democrats between 1998 and 2001.

Current debt

The Great Recession and financial meltdown of the last two years have brought debt and deficits back to the forefront of national debate.

The nation's current level of debt – and $3.7 trillion in indebtedness to other countries like China – has Stenholm, Gramm and others more alarmed than ever.

"People are frightened about it. I would have to say I am frightened about it. It scares me," said Gramm, a former Texas A&M economics professor who served as a Democrat, then Republican, congressman and U.S. senator until 2002.

Perot, who declined an interview request for this story, resumed the alarm during last year's presidential campaign with a Web site called Perot charts.com. After the economic meltdown, Perotcharts.com has been less active.

Still, "Perot showed you don't have to win the presidency to make a difference. Bill Clinton had to make fiscal responsibility a national priority because of Ross Perot," said David Walker, a debt Cassandra who is the former U.S. comptroller general and former head of the Government Accountability Office.

Thanks to the state constitution, balanced budgets come naturally to Texas. Twenty members of the state's congressional delegation, from both parties, are co-sponsoring a resolution to amend the federal Constitution with a balanced budget requirement.

Between Austin and Washington, there is sometimes a disconnect. Lyndon Johnson handed Richard Nixon a balanced budget in 1969, but it was quickly overwhelmed by the costs of Johnson initiatives like Medicare and the Vietnam War.

George W. Bush took office in 2001 facing the happy prospect of trillions of dollars in budget surpluses. But tax cuts and post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan helped turn that around. The national debt more than doubled during Bush's eight years in office.

Texas politicians such as U.S. Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Dallas, and Gov. Rick Perry are loudly critical of Washington spending. But these days, an 83-year-old, Nebraska-born billionaire titan of Wall Street, Peter G. Peterson, may be the leading prophet of financial doom.

He's been at it for more than 30 years, helping launch the Concord Coalition of deficit fighters and warning in books, magazine articles and opinion columns that borrowing will eventually wreck the economy.

In 2008, Peterson put $1 billion into a campaign to raise awareness of the nation's economic folly. In December of that year, his Peter G. Peterson Foundation calculated that the nation's indebtedness and commitments to programs such as Social Security and Medicare exceeded the collective net worth of its citizens.

Peterson hired Walker to run the foundation.

Like most debt Cassandras, Peterson and Walker put this in generational terms.

Peterson has long warned that the retirement of the baby boom generation will break the finances of Social Security and Medicare and impose crippling burdens on future generations of Americans.

"Deficits are deferred taxes, with interest," Walker said. "The American dream is not to own a house but to nurture the ability of every individual to achieve his or her potential, and to leave each generation better off than the one before it. The baby boom generation is failing that test."

The Peterson Foundation has poured money into media programs aimed at younger Americans, including films, MTV, Facebook, Twitter and a video game. Separately, Peterson has funded a news service called Fiscal Times to generate more stories about deficits, debt and international economics.

To Peterson's critics, his campaigns are threats to the pay-as-you-go economic model of Social Security and Medicare. These critics say private savings, whether invested on Wall Street or in a mattress, will never provide the elderly with sufficient levels of social insurance.

Raising awareness

Peterson shies away from arguing for privatizing federal entitlement programs or a balanced budget amendment, instead concentrating on raising awareness.

"I have never supported such a constitutional amendment because the federal government must have the flexibility to run deficits in periods of recession, and the current environment is a perfect example," he said.

Gramm, now 67, is vice chairman in New York with Swiss banking giant UBS. He is among those who say old financial models need to be abandoned, including health care.

"Eighty-five percent of the problem boils down to the fact that last year the average person in America who consumed health care paid about 10 percent of the cost out of their pocket, and somebody else paid the other 90 percent," Gramm said. "That's a huge incentive to over-consume. Can you imagine having grocery insurance, where every time you went to the grocery store 90 percent of it was paid for by government? You would eat differently, and so would your dog."

Stenholm remains active on the debt-and-deficits issue He recently co-chaired a commission, funded in part by Peterson, urging President Barack Obama and Congress to commit stemming the growth of the nation's indebtedness.

Stenholm, though, despairs over the nation's deeply polarized political climate.

"Our political system is broken. It ain't bent. It's broken," he said.