Kent Conrad: “the President says the deficit for 2008 will be $410 billion. If you look at his proposals, you see the debt will…”

“the President says the deficit for 2008 will be $410 billion. If you look at his proposals, you see the debt will increase under his plan by more than $700 billion. Let me repeat that. Under the President's plan, the debt will not increase by the advertised deficit of $410 billion; the debt will increase by more than $700 billion. Why the big difference? The biggest reason is that, under the President's plan, nearly $200 billion in Social Security money is being taken to pay other bills. If you were doing that in the private sector, if you were taking retirement funds of your employees to pay operating expenses, you would be on your way to a Federal institution. But it would not be the House of Representatives or the White House; you would be on your way to the ``big house'' because that is a violation of Federal law. But here the President can propose a budget that does it. In fact, that is what he has done the entire time he has been in office. He has taken trillions of dollars in Social Security money and used it to pay other bills. The problem with that, of course, is that while none of it is counted in the deficit calculation, it all gets added to the debt. The result is that here is what is happening to the gross debt of the United States. At the end of the President's first year--and we don't hold him responsible for that year because he inherited a budget from the previous administration--the debt was $5.8 trillion, the entire debt of the U.S.…”