Jeff Duncan: “every day we hear all kinds of talk now about how we are going to spend the Federal surplus. Before everyone gets all…”

“every day we hear all kinds of talk now about how we are going to spend the Federal surplus. Before everyone gets all giddy about all this extra cash, however, we had really better take a closer look. Alan Sloan, the Wall Street editor of Newsweek, recently wrote in the Washington Post, ``But get a grip. There is no surplus. If you do math the normal way, instead of Uncle Sam's way, there is nothing resembling a budget surplus on the horizon.'' Mr. Sloan wrote that all the talk about a surplus comes because we are using Federal budget accounting instead of real world accounting. As he pointed out, ``Virtually the entire difference between Federal math and real-world math involves Social Security's retirement and disability funds, whose surpluses are masking the deficit in the rest of the budget.'' If we were not using the Social Security and many other trust funds to offset or mask the size of the deficit, we would still have a huge deficit on top of an already horrendous $5.5 trillion national debt. Mr. Speaker, before we begin celebrating and spending our supposed, alleged surplus, we had better make sure that we really have one. We are very far from it right now.”