[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 86 (Thursday, June 19, 1997)]
[House]
[Pages H4073-H4074]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           THE AMERICAN DREAM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Cooksey). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentleman from South Carolina [Mr. Sanford] is recognized 
for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SANFORD. Mr. Speaker, I have been hearing a fair bit about taxes. 
I think that is going to be the subject of debate over this next week 
and the week after.
  When we talk about taxes, I think we are talking about something much 
more important than taxes alone. What we are really talking about is 
the American dream. It strikes me that there are two ways to get at the 
American dream. One is to let somebody keep more of what they are 
earning. The other way is to let somebody earn more on what they are 
earning.
  What do I mean by that? What I mean is, I heard a story here just 
last week about a woman by the name of Osceola McCarthy. My colleagues 
may have already heard this story, but Osceola McCarthy was a 
washerwoman down in the southern part of Mississippi. And she was in 
her late 70's. She goes to the nearby school. She had spent her life as 
a washerwoman, her entire lifetime washing people's clothes, never 
earned much money over the course of her lifetime.
  She goes to this nearby university and she said, I would like to help 
out. And they figure, well, she is going to give us a cloth doily or 
something. But instead of a cloth doily, she hands them $150,000. 
Everybody at the university cannot believe it. How in the world did 
this washerwoman come up with $150,000 for the university?
  What she said is, I just put a little bit away over a long period of 
time. In fact Einstein was once asked, what is the most powerful force 
in the universe. His reply was, compound interest. It is amazing what 
you can end up with at the end of a working lifetime if you simply put 
a little bit away over a long enough period of time and let it grow and 
compound.
  And that simple idea is a very powerful idea that gets at the second 
part of the American dream, again one part of the American dream being 
we can get there by letting people keep more of what they are earning, 
which is what tax cuts are about. But the second part is letting people 
earn more on what they are earning, because what the Social Security 
trustees have said is that Social Security today, while it has done a 
fabulous job for my mother and my grandmother, what they have said is 
that it will not do such a great job for my three young boys. Marshall 
is 4; Landon is 3; Bolton is 1.
  And what they have said is that for a worker today, the average rate 
of return is 1.9 percent. And what they have said for my three little 
boys is that the rate of return is negative. And the fundamentals 
behind what is driving that are not going to change.
  One is that we are living longer as a country. Each of us, average 
life expectancy when Social Security was created was 62 years of age. 
Today it is 76. Every year that I grow older, I hope that the medical 
folks keep making advances so that life expectancy continues to move 
out. That is a phenomenon we are not going to change. The other 
phenomenon we are not going to change in terms of Social Security is 
that people are having fewer kids. We have gone from having big 
families on the farm to having relatively small families today.
  We have got three boys. The idea of mentioning to my wife, Jenny, why 
do

[[Page H4074]]

we not have another 6 or 7, I think we could help solve the Social 
Security problem, is not going to fly at home.
  What we have been wondering is, is there a third way out. I think 
there is. This idea of personal savings accounts, which are built on 
the simple idea that Osceola McCarthy's wealth was built on. Because 
what we ultimately want to see in America is everybody building wealth, 
not just a few people at the top. And this simple idea of personal 
savings accounts. Personal savings accounts has been tried in a host of 
countries around the globe. It has been tried in a number of States and 
counties within our own country, in fact.
  Down in south Texas, Galveston, Matagorda and Brazoria Counties down 
in south Texas, prior to 1983, you could create your own Social 
Security system. You could stay on the Federal version or you could 
create your own version at the State or local level. Those counties 
did. What they found was those county workers got more in the way of 
disability insurance. They got more in the way of survivor benefits, 
and they got more in the way of retirement income. In other words, 
there was a third way out.
  And not only was there a third way out in terms of having more in the 
way of retirement income, there were a whole host of other benefits. 
For instance, choosing for you when you want to retire. If you stop and 
think about it, you can go down the grocery store aisle and look at 25 
different kinds of detergent. You could look at 35 different kinds of 
toothpaste. But you cannot pick for you when you want to retire.
  Yet you think about it, why should a Congressman or a Senator or a 
bureaucrat in Washington decide for you when you want to retire. Why do 
not you get to pick for you when you want to retire?
  One of the benefits that would come with the idea of personal savings 
accounts is somebody making that decision for themselves. There are a 
host of other benefits that would come with the idea of personal 
savings accounts. It is not something we want to impose on seniors, but 
I think it is something we want to begin talking about for people that 
are juniors.

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