Political Quotes

“on the issue of Social Security, on the issue of total public debt, it has been suggested by Vice President Gore that we start using the surplus coming in from Social Security and borrowing that money to pay down what is called the debt held by the public. Just for a brief review, we now owe about $5.7 trillion total debt. That includes what I call the Wall Street debt, the debt held by the public, at about $3.7 trillion dollars. It includes what we owe Social Security at approximately $1 trillion and what we owe the other trust fund at approximately $1.1 trillion. The suggestion is that if we use the surplus coming in from Social Security and pay down the Wall Street debt, the debt held by the public, then the savings in interest, which represents about 15 percent of our budget now, pretty bad, we should pay down that debt, using all of that savings to apply to the Social Security Trust Fund so it becomes another giant IOU of a future promise that somehow the Federal Government will come up with the money, but it is sort of like taking one credit card and paying off another credit card because we still owe the money to Social Security.”