Porter Goss: “Mr. Chairman, the blizzard of numbers and figures that define our annual budget deficits and the accruing national debt…”

“Mr. Chairman, the blizzard of numbers and figures that define our annual budget deficits and the accruing national debt sort of tends to numb us. It is a sort of my-eyes-are-glazing-over type of situation. We talk about the billions, the trillions, the several hundred billion dollar annual deficits we face, the $4.5 trillion in rising debt we are passing along to our children. These aggregate numbers can often seem very far away and unreal, especially when you are standing in a wonderful place like this. But when we bring those numbers down to the individual level of our daily lives, when we realize that our debt translates into approximately $18,000 of liability for every man, woman, and child right now, today, in our country, that is a tremendous burden to carry. I do not know whether there is a distinction there about cash flow or not, but I have not heard any serious proposals to sell Yosemite or the Grand Teton Park or any of those places, so I would suggest those may be assets, but they are not liquid assets, and that $18,000 of liability is real. And it is real at tax time, because we are paying a huge, huge interest on an incredibly enormous national debt.”