Joe Biden: “it has taken a lot of tough choices here in Washington--and a lot of hard work and restructuring in the private…”

“it has taken a lot of tough choices here in Washington--and a lot of hard work and restructuring in the private economy--to put our country's budget into the black. For the first time in a generation, we have a balanced federal budget. And for the first time in our modern history, we can project substantial surpluses for the foreseeable future. There were times I believed we would never see this day, Mr. President, but our official forecasts now call for as much as one trillion dollars in surplus over the next ten years. That's on top of the two trillion in Social Security surpluses that will build up over that same time, money that is already promised to future retirees. I want to say something about whether we should count on those surpluses actually materializing, Mr. President, but first I want to talk about what most families I know would do if they woke up to the kind of windfall in their household budgets that we anticipate in our federal budget today.”