Roscoe Bartlett: “In a former life I was a teacher for 24 years, Mr. Speaker. An old adage in teaching is that repetition is the soul of…”

“In a former life I was a teacher for 24 years, Mr. Speaker. An old adage in teaching is that repetition is the soul of learning. So, at risk of repeating something that the gentleman said, I want to go through just a brief explanation of the debt as I understand it. The total debt owed by our country is called the national debt. That is made up of two parts. That is roughly $6 trillion. One part is the public debt. We have heard a lot about the public debt, and I will come back to that in a couple of minutes. The other part of it is the trust fund debt. Lockboxes and paying down the debt, let us talk about that for a moment and see what really happened. We put a lockbox first on Social Security, and then we decided, since that was such a great idea, we would put one on Medicare. I have had people who ought to know better say that somehow we secured or protected Social Security and Medicare by putting a lockbox on them. Let me explain what that lockbox did. What the lockbox did was simply to say that if we have a surplus, and we do, for the moment, have a surplus, Mr. Speaker, in these two funds, if we have a surplus, we cannot use that surplus for ordinary spending; we must use it to pay down the public debt.”