Byron Dorgan: “I find it interesting, and I wonder if he sees the same irony as I do, that the very people that now bring us the notion…”

“I find it interesting, and I wonder if he sees the same irony as I do, that the very people that now bring us the notion of a lockbox, because they are worried about the Social Security trust fund, were just a few years ago on the floor of the Senate ridiculing the Senator from South Carolina, myself, my colleague from North Dakota, and others, because we said what you want to do with a constitutional amendment to require a balanced budget is to put a provision in the Constitution that says Social Security revenues must be counted not as part of a trust fund, but as part of the ordinary operating revenues of the Federal budget. In other words, they wanted to put in the Constitution the misuse of the Social Security trust funds and decide that you have a budget surplus only when you have used the Social Security trust funds to get there. So we said no; if you are going to do something in the Constitution about a constitutional amendment to balance the budget, let's at least be honest with the trust funds and say the budget is only balanced when you have not misused Social Security trust funds.”