mr. chairman , when lem keyserling wrote the full employment act of 1946 , he was an ardent keynesian , and he believed that the government had a major role to play in stimulating an economy , in seeking to maintain full employment . 
and if he believed that theoretically , he believed it even more deeply after the war when the enormous demand generated by the war for once made this a full employment economy . 
the whole country supported the concept . 
keynes believed in deficit financing when the economy was stuck in a liquidity trap and could not get loose . 
but he did not believe in the kind of deficit financing that we are running today . 
i think he would be appalled both by the current account deficit which we are running , $ 618 billion , more than most economists thought was sustainable . 
it exceeds 5 percent of the gdp . 
and certainly i do not think he would find at all pleasing to his understanding of economics a budget deficit expected this year to be $ 427 billion . 
not even maynard keynes would look approvingly on that . 
we have come so far from the year 2000 when after 6 or 7 straight years of fiscal discipline , we finally put the budget in surplus , a surplus of $ 236 billion . 
we had a meeting on the democratic side of the committee on the budget with mr. greenspan about what is the best approach we should take to this surplus that we find ourselves enjoying . 
and it was agreed among everyone there and among democrats and republicans in the house that one thing surely we should do since we now have the resources to do it is no longer borrow and spend the social security trust fund , the surplus in it . 
indeed , our proposal was that we use this surplus in the future instead of funding new debt and buying new government bonds , instead going into the open market , buying outstanding treasury bonds and that way reducing the treasury debt held by the public , increasing net national savings which woefully deficient and lowering the cost of capital and boosting the economy . 
it was the first and best step we could take towards shoring up social security and making it solvent . 
it was a truly conservative idea , and we urged it upon the bush administration when they came into office . 
but they took a much , much different , almost opposite , path , and that is , big tax cuts tilted toward wealthy americans . 
we did not deal then with our long-range liabilities to social security as we could have for the first time in a long time , and today we are suffering the consequence of that . 
we are dealing with second-best proposals . 
what do we have instead ? 
well , instead of being here on this pinnacle with a $ 236 billion deficit surplus , we are down here with a $ 427 billion deficit this year , according to cbo . 
now , the president has told us he has plans and a budget that will cut this deficit in half over a period of about 5 years . 
but when we put back into his budget everything we know is likely to be incurred as a cost , whether it is the costs of iraq and afghanistan , whether it is the cost of fixing the amt , the deficit that we are dealing with today does not get better . 
it does not go away . 
it does not go down ; it gets bigger . 
and by the end of our timeframe , 2015 , we have a deficit of $ 621 billion . 
read the cbo analysis of the president 's budget . 
by the end of that timeframe , we accumulated 5.135 trillion additional dollars as part of the national debt . 
that surely can not be the kind of economy that lem keyserling or maynard keynes had in mind . 
look at this very simple table here , and it tells you a world of facts about what has happened over the last 4 years . 
three times in 4 years this congress at the request of president bush in order to accommodate his budget had to raise the debt ceiling of the united states three times by $ 2.234 trillion . 
at the present rate , we are adding $ 1 trillion to our national debt every year , every 18 months , $ 1 trillion every 18 to 20 months to our national debt . 
nobody in his right mind thinks that that course can be sustained . 
and yet look at the bush budget again . 
it only promises in our estimation more and more debt , not less debt . 
how do we get away with this ? 
no country in the world could have the kind of current account deficit we have or certainly have the kind of budget deficit that we mitigate the effects of it . 
do not feel , do not see the consequences , and therefore do not feel compelled to do anything serious about it . 
we sell much of our debt to foreigners and that mitigates the effect . 
these are not good vital signs for the economy of the united states . 
and surely one of the things we should be about now is the adoption of a resolution which will take us back to where we were in the year 2000 , back to surpluses because we need to be saving , not spending as the baby boomers begin to retire . 
