John Spratt: “Well, the administration avows its aversion to debt. And yet it keeps tacking debt on top of debt. The deficit in the…”

“Well, the administration avows its aversion to debt. And yet it keeps tacking debt on top of debt. The deficit in the year 2003 of $378 billion, a record. A deficit the next year of $412 billion, another record. A deficit this year of $350 billion. And they claim to be cutting it in half, but it does not appear that way if you accurately project it. And then the Bush administration begins it second term with this policy initiative, the first that the President brought forth, namely, to privatize Social Security. In order to privatize Social Security, the Bush administration would allow workers today to take up to a third of their payroll taxes, take them out of the Social Security trust fund account where they accumulate to a surplus, and put them instead into private accounts. That means a diversion of well over $3 trillion over the next 10 years, or the first 10 years during which that program would be implemented. And here is a depiction in bar graphs of how much additional debt would be stacked on top of the enormous mountain of debt already accumulated if privatization took place as the President proposed it. As you can see by the year 2025, 2028, we would have racked up $4.9 trillion in additional debt on top of even more debt incurred in the ordinary budget of the United States.…”