Malcolm Wallop: “I would urge the Senator from California to go as well and get the copies of the airport trust fund and the highway…”

“I would urge the Senator from California to go as well and get the copies of the airport trust fund and the highway trust fund and the Social Security trust fund and all the other trust funds that are around. These are not--and her own language says precisely that--these are not what the public thinks of when it thinks of ``trust fund.'' I believe I quote correctly when the Senator says, ``that we must appropriate more to it. That is the only time in which money exists in the funds.'' It does not. And we fool ourselves and Americans by telling them that this is anything more than an accounting gimmick which is designed to do just precisely that, to persuade Americans that there is a little door somewhere down in Treasury and we can go in it and we can build airports, and we can go in it and we can build highways, and we can go in it and we can build parks. It does not work that way. Many of us wish that it would, but it has not and it will not. And the Appropriations Committee will not allow it to, for starters, because that is an infringement on their authority.”