Kent Conrad: “if we adopt the President's proposal, this country will be digging a hole so deep that we will face enormously difficult…”

“if we adopt the President's proposal, this country will be digging a hole so deep that we will face enormously difficult choices in the future: massive cuts in benefits, massive tax increases, huge debt, unsustainable, all of them. But that is the direction the President has us headed in fiscal policy. I know people are distracted and thinking about war with Iraq and thinking about a war against terrorism. And those command our attention. But we must also pay attention to the fundamental financial strength of America. The President has us on a disastrous fiscal course, with deficits all the rest of this decade, the President is proposing making them much deeper in the next decade, right at the time the baby boomers retire. We must understand, we are in the sweet spot of the fiscal future of America. Right now the trust funds of Social Security and Medicare are throwing off huge surpluses. Yet under the President's plan, all that money, every dime of it over the next decade, is being taken and used for other purposes, used to fund the tax cuts, to pay for other priorities. What is going to happen when these baby boomers retire and they are eligible for Social Security and Medicare? This is not a matter of projections. The baby boomers have been born. They are alive today. They will retire, and they will be eligible for Social Security and Medicare.”