Lloyd Bentsen: “Last year when we began putting together the budget for fiscal year 2002 and really putting together the Republican…”

“Last year when we began putting together the budget for fiscal year 2002 and really putting together the Republican economic program for the next 10 years, we were told that the unified budget surplus would be $5.6 trillion over the next 10 years after a lot of hard work by the American people, by American taxpayers, to dig us out of the years of deficits and debt that quadrupled the national debt. And, in fact, as the gentleman will remember, we had tremendous arguments about not how much more debt we were going to add, but how much debt we could pay down and how fast we could pay it down. But we were told this is the number, $5.6 trillion, even though the Congressional Budget Office told us there was a margin of error of 20 percent, good or bad, over a short period of time, that these numbers could be off, but that we should accept this number. Lo and behold in really a year's time, we now see that the number is no longer $5.6 trillion, but rather it is $300 billion.”