Tom Carper: “what I want to do is to follow up today on the comments by Senator Feingold, who has been talking about pay-go as a tool…”

“what I want to do is to follow up today on the comments by Senator Feingold, who has been talking about pay-go as a tool to begin reducing our budget deficit. As I do that, though, I want to say there are a lot of things we can do to reduce our budget deficit. First of all, the fact is, the budget deficit last year was over $300 billion; this one we expect to be over $400 billion. That is on a cash basis of accounting. David Walker, the Comptroller General of our country, tells us if we were to use an accrual basis of accounting, which we require by law our businesses, our corporations to use, our budget deficit for the current year would be over $700 billion. But we operate under a cash basis of accounting, so we are told it is going to be over $400 billion. As we look forward, down the road, by monkeying with the rules, by making some misassumptions, we can pretend the deficit is going to get smaller over the next several years. We can pretend, for example, we are not going to be spending more money in Iraq or Afghanistan, and we can pretend we are not going to fix the alternative minimum tax. We can pretend a wide variety of things. But the truth is, as the baby boomers get ready to retire and we play this game of pretend, the budget deficit does not get any smaller. I think we are on a road to ruin.…”