David Price: “Then the next chart shows that the story is worse than that, because the Bush budget omits a number of 10-year costs.…”

“Then the next chart shows that the story is worse than that, because the Bush budget omits a number of 10-year costs. The repairing of the AMT I have already mentioned, over $600 billion. The cost of social security privatization, $750 billion. The realistic estimate of war costs, beyond what we are appropriating this year, almost $400 billion. Paying interest on all of this accumulated debt, $267 billion; that is another $2 trillion. Where is it going to end? This is a deeper and deeper hole that we are digging, and very little of it has to do with domestic discretionary spending. But the main victims are these domestic investments that we are seeing every day on the Appropriations Committee squeezed mercilessly, and squeezed in a way that really do shut off growth and opportunity for our people. Just think what we could do with the interest alone on this growing debt. This chart shows how interest payments are dwarfing appropriations for other priorities. The red bar is interest. The blue is education spending. The brown is environmental spending. The dark bar is veterans spending. And then you look ahead to 2010, you see the disparity is even more. That is money down the rat hole, money that anyone in our hearing tonight could think of better public and private uses for that money that we are paying mainly to foreign purchasers of our national debt. But that is where the money is going. It would be more than enough, of course, to fix the Social Security problem totally.…”