David Thomas: “Mr. Speaker, the previous two speakers, the gentleman from Tennessee and the gentleman from Texas, talked about the…”

“Mr. Speaker, the previous two speakers, the gentleman from Tennessee and the gentleman from Texas, talked about the national debt and how much it has increased from 1994 to 2004, and those numbers sound scary to people. But most of that debt, Mr. Speaker, is debt that we are paying to the Social Security trust fund, to the Medicare trust fund; and surely those gentleman are not suggesting that we should not be accumulating that debt in those trust funds and paying interest on that debt. So I just want to make clear that for several years under the Republican majority we paid down the debt held by the public while we were continuing to accumulate debt in the trust funds. Economists and market watchers distinguish between the publicly held debt and total government debt, and that distinction needs to be made here on this floor. So, Mr. Speaker, while the figures they gave are technically accurate, they are far from the truth when it comes to fiscal responsibility in this House.”