Roscoe Bartlett: “The budget that was balanced was the unified budget. That is all the money that comes into Washington and all the money…”

“The budget that was balanced was the unified budget. That is all the money that comes into Washington and all the money that leaves Washington, but about 10 percent of the money that comes into Washington should not be Washington's money to spend because they have taken it from the citizens, presumably to put in trust fund for them, but they take and spend that money anyway, and make the silly statement that the Social Security surplus and the other surpluses offset the deficit. They did offset the advertised deficit, but they did not bother telling us that what this amounted to was a monumental intergenerational debt transfer. Our kids and our grandkids are going to have to pay this. Now, we cannot run the government today on current revenues; we cannot do it. For all the while, these last 3 or 4 years, that we were told that the budget was balanced, the budget which was balanced was the unified budget, but they were taking about $200 billion a year of trust fund monies that we owe to the trust funds, they are going to have to be paid back by our children and our grandchildren, and they were using those to run the government.”