Kent Conrad: “As we see these deficits, we go back to this chart, and the President is saying they will be in the $200 billion range…”

“As we see these deficits, we go back to this chart, and the President is saying they will be in the $200 billion range at the end of this 5-year period. We do not see that at all. As we can see, they will be in the $350 billion range. Of course, this, too, understates the real magnitude of our problem because it does not capture all that is being added to the debt. Look where this goes the second 5 years--to deficits of $620 billion. In a moment I will get to how much is being added to the debt under this budget because I think that is critically important for people to understand. Our friends on the other side of the aisle talk a lot about deficits these days. They never talk about the debt. The debt is the accumulation of all the deficits. Obviously we face a big demographic challenge going forward. I have indicated all of this is happening at a bad time because the baby boomers are about to retire. Here is what we see. We are going to go from about 40 million people eligible for Social Security and Medicare to 81 million eligible. That is a key reason we ought to be running more balanced budgets at this time. The President told us back in 2002 that: None of the Social Security surplus will be used to fund other spending initiatives or tax relief. That is what he told us. None of the Social Security money would be used to fund other spending initiatives or tax relief.…”