Marshall Sanford: “I have got a question from the standpoint of accounting. I mean, in the President's budget that was sent up to the…”

“I have got a question from the standpoint of accounting. I mean, in the President's budget that was sent up to the Congress, it listed in it a $9.5 billion surplus, and yet the national debt would go up by $176 billion. That is the equivalent of saying I am going to pay off $95 on my credit card balance, but my credit card balance is going to go up by $1,700. Mathematically that is impossible, with the exception of anyplace but Washington, D.C. Because in Washington, D.C., if you were to break out the budget, what you would see is $103.5 billion borrowed from Social Security, and as you add up the other trust fund borrowings, it comes to this $176 billion number. That number actually may be a little less than that because the surplus is supposed to be greater, but the point is that is not the way you do accounting back home in South Carolina, or Nevada, or Illinois, or anywhere else. That is not conventional accounting.”