John Thune: “I just happen to believe the approach the gentleman has outlined in his legislation is one that will give us the…”

“I just happen to believe the approach the gentleman has outlined in his legislation is one that will give us the discipline, require us to have the discipline that is necessary, because frankly if we do not do something in the area of addressing the $5.5 trillion of debt, it is going to accumulate. As the gentleman mentioned earlier, we continue to borrow from the Social Security trust fund, which is a significant problem. Another issue which his first piece of legislation addresses, that we ought to keep those funds separate. That the dollars that come in ought to pay for future benefits and we continue to borrow against that and add to this already growing national debt, which means that every year as we go through the appropriations process, before we pay for anything else we have to write the check for interest, which is $250 billion a year. I might add if we sat down and figured that out, that is every personal income tax dollar collected west of the Mississippi River and then some. This is a huge problem. What he has done in his legislation is I think taking a very systematic approach, not only to addressing the $5.5 trillion of debt by saying that each year government cannot spend more than 99 percent of what it takes in, I think that is critical and based on current economic assumptions by 2026, we would have wiped out the debt, but also, secondly, to address the issue of Social Security and how are we going to, long term, deal with that important issue.”