Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) responded today to Washington Post columnist David Broder's piece Sunday that stated Democrats in Congress were using "bookkeeping legerdemain" to "perform a cover-up on the most serious threat to America's economic future" -- the national debt.

But the main device the Democratic budgeteers employed was simply to shrink the budget "window" from 10 years to five. Instantly, $5 trillion in debt disappeared from view, along with the worry that long after the recession is past, the structural deficit would continue to blight the future of young working families.

"I really don't think that's the case in this circumstance," Conrad told reporters on a conference call today, "and here's why. I was very critical of the Bush administration for own putting out five-year budgets so that you can't see the effect of the second five years of their tax cuts. But in this circumstance, the Obama administration put out a ten-year budget. And we have full scoring of that ten-year budget. So I just don't think anything's being hidden from anyone.

"Our budget is a five-year budget because that's what Congress has done in 30 of the 34 years that Congress has written a budget. Congress has done five-year budgets largely because the out years are so uncertain. If you look at the forecast, very small changes now make very big differences in the second five years. And since we already had a ten-year forecast... I think a system is running amuck here."

--------------------------------------------
Follow the RCP Blog on Twitter.
Become a fan of RCP on Facebook.
--------------------------------------------