Gilbert Gutknecht: “I think we should. My colleague mentioned several times about the old accounting standards and how we use Social…”

“I think we should. My colleague mentioned several times about the old accounting standards and how we use Social Security to make the deficit look smaller. I think we need to talk about it. Because the truth of the matter is, and I think the American people understand, we have made enormous progress, if we look at where we were just 4 years ago in terms of the deficit going up. As a matter of fact, we need to be reminded that when the Congressional Budget Office scored the President's budget back in 1995, shortly after we came here, they said by the year 2002 we would be looking at deficits of $322 billion. And that is when we began to roll up our sleeves. We have eliminated 300 programs. We have dramatically changed the way the entitlements worked. We reformed welfare and Medicare and Medicaid. We made a lot of changes. And, as a result, we cut the rate of growth in Federal spending by about 40 percent. So where we were 4 years ago was headed towards disaster. Where we are today is that the economy is stronger, the deficit under the old accounting standards is gone. And I think my colleague and I have been working on some of the numbers. My colleague does a better job, it seems to me, than almost anybody in Washington in terms of predicting where the economy is going and what it is going to mean to our budget. My colleague is predicting, and frankly I agree, that we are going to see a surplus by the end of this fiscal year of somewhere in the area of $50 billion.”