Roscoe Bartlett: “If you are in debt but you balance your budget and have surpluses for 5 years in a row, at the end of that time will you…”

“If you are in debt but you balance your budget and have surpluses for 5 years in a row, at the end of that time will you owe more or less money? If you are an individual, you will owe less money. But if you are the Federal Government, you will owe more money, almost $1 trillion more between now and 2002. How can this be? Here is the ugly truth. There is no budget surplus. The so-called budget surplus is a figment of clever Federal Government accounting. In 1988, the Congressional Budget Office, CBO, projects there will be a surplus of $8 billion and the national debt will be $5.5 trillion this year. In 2002, after 5 years of balanced budgets and surpluses, the national debt will be $6.4 trillion, almost $1 trillion more. The national debt will grow because the Federal Government does not count the billions spent each year from government trust funds like Social Security. Clearly, there is no surplus and the budget, obviously, is not balanced.”