Roscoe Bartlett: “I spent, in a former life, 24 years teaching, and so this is like coming home to me. This is a very interesting graph…”

“I spent, in a former life, 24 years teaching, and so this is like coming home to me. This is a very interesting graph, and it points out some interesting things about the budget and about the deficit and about surpluses. Here we have three curves, and these three curves are labeled. The gross Federal debt. That is more often referred to as the national debt. And then there is the public debt. Now, this is the debt that we advertized that we were paying down during the 4 or 5 years of surpluses. And it is true. You can see that debt fell off slightly during the 4 or 5 years of surpluses. But look at what was happening concomitant with that, and that was the debt held by government accounts. Now, another way of referring to that debt is that this is the debt owed to our children and our grandchildren, in large measure. This is the trust fund debt. These are the surpluses and the trust funds that we have collected from our working people, many of them our children and our grandchildren, to be there for them for their retirement and for their Medicare. We have taken that money and spent that money. So all the while that we told the American people that we were paying down the public debt, the total debt, that is the debt on which interest is accumulating and the debt which we owe, is going up and ever up.”