Roscoe Bartlett: “The trust funds are money that are taken from the American people for such things as Social Security, and we now do not…”

“The trust funds are money that are taken from the American people for such things as Social Security, and we now do not need all the money we collect. In the future, we will need a whole lot more than we will be collecting then. In fact, the second biggest trust fund is the Civil Service Retirement trust fund, and then there is the Medicare trust fund. There is the Transportation trust fund, and there are about fifty of these trust funds, and collectively, the current surpluses in those trust funds are about $200 billion a year; and as I mentioned previously, the only thing that can be done under law by those moneys is to invest them in nonnegotiable U.S. securities, and we are not going to bury that out in the back forty or put it under our mattress. We are going to spend it. The present law really needs to be changed, and we have got to have something else to do with trust fund surpluses or we will always be running deficits because that law prescribed that the only thing we can do with a surplus is to invest it in nonnegotiable U.S. securities which assures that the debt will increase. I would just like to note that the interest on the debt now is nearly as large as our budget for the military.”