Lloyd Bentsen: “No. The Republican economic program has solved that problem. There is no risk now of our paying down the national debt.…”

“No. The Republican economic program has solved that problem. There is no risk now of our paying down the national debt. In fact, if the gentleman will look here on the projections what we received from the Congressional Budget Office, last year the debt baseline was looking like it would go down, and really by 2008 we would have paid down the publicly held debt completely. What has now occurred as of this August is our baseline has the debt actually going up from where we are today. The bigger problem goes beyond this because this is just a current service debt. This does not tell us anything about the public debt that will be required at the time that the baby boomers begin to retire in earnest and we have to convert the bonds held by the trust fund in the public debt. So not only do we not have the trillion dollars that we were told was being set aside in the Social Security Trust Fund to fix Social Security for the long haul, we, in fact, are going to have to borrow several trillion more dollars in order to, one, just to meet obligations that already exist on the books, not to mention the trillion or so more that will be necessary to ensure that every American in the Social Security System gets the benefits that this country long ago decided was something we want do.”