“Isn’t it a shame,” the late journalist Earl Wilson once asked, “that future generations can’t be here to see all the wonderful things we’re doing with their money?”

New projections show once again that Washington’s budget woes need to be addressed sooner rather than later. Sticking with the status quo — including “automatic” spending programs and a tax system badly in need of reform — means that younger Americans and future generations will be saddled with massive government debt. Yet elected officials and candidates for federal office this year have largely ignored the subject.

Voters should insist on credible plans to put the nation on a more responsible fiscal path.

The Congressional Budget Office projects that federal budget deficits will add trillions of dollars to the debt over the next decade.

Federal debt held by the public is expected to reach 77 percent of GDP this year, far above its historical average. Under current laws, it could increase to 86 percent within a decade and to 141 percent of GDP within 30 years. That would far exceed its historical peak of 106 percent shortly after World War II.

Continued inaction on the nation’s fiscal challenges will mean a weaker economy, lower standards of living, fewer government services, higher tax burdens and less control by future generations over their own destiny.

A large debt can limit the nation’s ability to respond to unforeseen problems, reduces national savings and requires spending more and more tax dollars on interest payments rather than investments in the future.

Like other economic downturns, the Great Recession held down federal revenue while increasing government spending. This produced extremely high deficits for several years, followed by a period of falling deficits as the U.S. economy recovered.

But the federal deficit is now rising again, even with a stronger economy. This reflects underlying structural problems in the federal budget that create a long-term mismatch between government revenue and spending plans.

In July, the Treasury reported that the deficit was more than $48 billion higher than at the same time last year and was on track to reach nearly $600 billion for this fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. That would be the first annual increase since 2009.

In August, CBO made a similar projection, that Fiscal 2016 will close with a deficit of $590 billion, which is $152 billion larger than in 2015.

With the aging of the population, federal spending on health care and Social Security is rising rapidly. Interest on the debt is expected to climb as well in the years ahead. After years of procrastination in Washington, the time for small policy tweaks has passed.

According to the CBO, simply maintaining the current debt-to-GDP ratio in the decades ahead would require spending cuts or tax increases totaling 1.7 percent of GDP each year. In 2016, that would amount to more than $300 billion.

Continuing to postpone reform will only make the job more difficult and could put critical areas of government investment — such as infrastructure, national defense and research and development — at risk.

In recent years elected officials in Washington should have been taking advantage of the breather brought about by abnormally low interest rates and by economic growth — which increased federal revenues and brought some cost savings — to start repairing the budget. Unfortunately, that opportunity has largely been wasted.

The longer we wait, the more difficult the changes will be. Unfortunately, many of this year’s candidates for federal office are ignoring the big fiscal challenges. Instead they are recycling tired campaign rhetoric while proposing tax and spending plans that would ignore the challenges we face — or even make things worse.

Some of the recent talking points on Medicare and Social Security in both parties, for example, ignore the repeated warnings by the programs’ trustees that they are not on sustainable paths and require changes in the near future.

We need strong, responsible leaders who will attack such problems, stabilize the national debt and eventually put it on a downward trajectory. Candidates this year should offer concrete, credible plans to do so — and explain how they would pay for any new promises they are making.

As citizens and voters, we should hold the candidates accountable. Failure to do so could put us deeper in debt and leave future generations mystified over what we did with their money.

Chase Hagaman is the New England regional director for The Concord Coalition, a non-partisan organization that advocates for generationally responsible fiscal policy.

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