Roscoe Bartlett: “The gentleman mentioned lockboxes, Mr. Speaker. It might be wise to spend a few moments talking about lockboxes. We have…”

“The gentleman mentioned lockboxes, Mr. Speaker. It might be wise to spend a few moments talking about lockboxes. We have not heard lockboxes mentioned in the last several months. That is because we now have no surpluses. In terms of the national debt, we never had any surpluses. We had surpluses in terms of the unified budget; but when the unified budget was balanced, the national debt was still going up almost $200 billion a year. That is because it was about $200 billion a year of trust fund monies that we were taking and spending. What were the lockboxes? They were talked about a whole lot and were very popular. What were they, and what did they do? The first lockbox was the Social Security lockbox. What that legislation said was that if there is a surplus in Social Security, and of course there is a surplus, and will be for 10 or 12 years in Social Security, if there is a surplus in Social Security, we cannot use that for ordinary spending; we have to use it to pay down the debt. The only debt we could pay down with that is this public debt, so what they did was to take the monies out of the trust fund and to pay down the public debt, but for every $1 of public debt they paid down, they incurred another $1 of trust fund debt. Notice what is happening to these curves. As this one went down, that is the public debt we are paying down, the trust fund debt went up, so the net effect on the debt was zero.”