Byron Dorgan: “the budget that is presented in the Senate has on page 5 their estimate of what the debt should be in the year 2009.…”

“the budget that is presented in the Senate has on page 5 their estimate of what the debt should be in the year 2009. This is recommended policy. By 2009, we should have a debt of $10.2 trillion, they recommend. Every year getting there we should have budget deficits, each and every year, of over $400 billion a year. Maybe it is something in the water. Maybe it is the food. One would expect there to be some conservative impulses here to decide that a fiscal policy ought to add up. This simply does not add up. I mention one additional point. It was not very long ago when the Senate considered a proposal to spend a substantial amount of money, $20 billion--do you know how hard it is to get $20 billion for anything? It is a huge amount of money. The proposal was to spend $20 billion to reconstruct the country of Iraq. We must have it, they said. We won't pay for it; just have to have it. I said, Iraq has the third largest reserves of oil in the world. The Iraqis can pump their oil and pay for their own reconstruction. They said, We will not hear any of that. We demand the $20 billion. The majority party, the same folks who have written this budget said, we demand that money. We do not want to pay for it, just borrow it and spend it in the country of Iraq for reconstruction.”