Kent Conrad: “It was a disappointing way to do business. I think the result has suffered. I will follow up on the point the Senator…”

“It was a disappointing way to do business. I think the result has suffered. I will follow up on the point the Senator made about slower productivity growth. We saw in the first quarter, instead of 1 percent increase, it was negative one-tenth of 1 percent. If we were to have 1 percent less productivity growth per year, the projected surplus of $5.6 trillion would be reduced to $3.2 trillion. That is the hard reality of how dramatically affected the ultimate results are by very small changes in the assumptions in these forecasts. That is something we should all understand.”