Roscoe Bartlett: “I thank the gentleman. And this is an interesting curve. When the gentleman said we are increasing our spending by about…”

“I thank the gentleman. And this is an interesting curve. When the gentleman said we are increasing our spending by about 7 percent a year, that seems to be a steady rate of increase. But it is interesting that when we have a steady rate of increase, the amount that we are increasing rises exponentially. And that is just the characteristic of this kind of a rise. So if this continues, just at the 7 percent, this curve gets steeper and steeper and steeper and steeper as time goes on. It is compounding interest. There is a namesake of mine, I guess he is my namesake, because he is a bit older than I, at the University of Colorado who says the biggest failure of our industrial society is our inability to understand the exponential function. That exponential function, if we keep on increasing spending at this rate, will eventually bury us. Let me put this original chart back up for a moment, and I just want to talk for a moment about these trust funds and lockboxes.”