Political Quotes

“I thank the Presiding Officer most graciously. CBO has flatly called this in a letter, at my request, double- counting. Can my colleagues imagine the Congressional Budget Office saying that the U.S. Congress is double-counting? Actually, in that case, in dealing with the Affordable Care Act, $500 billion of money extracted out of Medicare was being used to claim it would pay for the Affordable Care Act when it was Medicare's money. So I am talking at this point and just sharing an example from Social Security and the chained CPI, but the principles are the same because both are trust funds. So it is double-counting. In fact, any Social Security or Medicare trust fund savings so produced are legally assets of the trust fund, and debt instruments of the U.S. Treasury are issued and interest paid from the U.S. Treasury to Social Security and to the Medicare trust funds on the monies that are borrowed in that way. If the savings, as is likely, do not result in a trust fund surplus, then there is really no surplus that they can borrow. It simply tends to show more income to the U.S. Treasury-- falsely showing that because, again, the money is committed off-budget to Social Security. The critical fact is that all of those moneys are already obligated to Social Security and Medicare and will be needed by those programs, and more money, actually, is going to be needed by those programs to meet the future obligations of those trust funds, which are insolvent.…”