Mike Levin: “Point one: Let us remember history, where the deficit came from. I heard one of our colleagues on the Committee on Ways…”

“Point one: Let us remember history, where the deficit came from. I heard one of our colleagues on the Committee on Ways and Means talk about it as if it came when the Democrats were running the show. Most of the deficit occurred in the 1980s when there were Republican Presidents, and we appropriated no more than those Presidents asked for. And the two major deficit reduction bills before last year, in 1990 the majority of Republicans voted no, and in 1993 every single Republican voted no. Secondly, the emergency argument is pure bootstrap. If it is not an emergency, do not include it within the bill. The Budget Act provides for emergency expenditures. It does not provide for raiding the Social Security fund, and we have to amend the Budget Act in order to do it. This bill before us is nothing more than an accounting gimmick, a bookkeeping contrivance that does nothing to protect Social Security. I support the Rangel substitute. Our colleagues are in a box on this, so they come up with a phony lockbox. Ours is a real one. What it does, the Rangel substitute, it takes a hundred percent of the budget surplus each year and transfers it aside to the Federal Reserve Bank to be held in trust for Social Security. But the important point is we should not spend any of the budget surplus until we have first taken action to assure the long-term health of Social Security. Without the surplus in Social Security, there is no budget surplus this year.”