Roscoe Bartlett: “$7 trillion is a very big debt, but I would like to talk for a moment about the debt. If we kept our books like we force…”

“$7 trillion is a very big debt, but I would like to talk for a moment about the debt. If we kept our books like we force companies to keep their books, and some people say that we keep Enron-type of books, if we had to count as debt the contingent liabilities, our debt would not be the $7 trillion. It would be, I am told, between $25 trillion and $30 trillion, and some people think as much as $60 trillion. I think that we need to keep the kind of books that we require businesses to keep. I think the American people have a right to know what the debt is that totally they owe. If you divide this by the number of working families, I think it is, what, about $10,000 for every man, woman and child in the country.”