[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 8 (Tuesday, January 19, 1999)]
[House]
[Page H251]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




            TIME IS RIGHT TO SAVE SOCIAL SECURITY TRUST FUND

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. LaHood). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentleman from California (Mr. Royce) is recognized for 5 
minutes.
  Mr. ROYCE. Mr. Speaker, the time is now to save the Social Security 
Trust Fund. And I say that because it has been 30 years that the 
Federal Government has run chronic budget deficits, until last year. We 
were looking, 4 years ago, at budget deficits which were $200 billion a 
year, and we anticipated that they would go out as far as the eye could 
see. But, instead, we took some actions in the Congress. We slowed the 
rate of growth of government spending and we reformed welfare.
  We reformed welfare, and close to 40 percent of the people on welfare 
are now in working jobs. When we slowed the rate of government growth 
and brought the revenues and expenditures into balance and eliminated 
much of the wasteful government spending, we found that the interest 
rates dropped by 2 full percentage points, and this has helped the 
economy.
  When we instituted the cut in the capital gains tax to 20 percent and 
reduced that capital gains tax, we found that that further stimulated 
the economy. As a matter of fact, it brought in more in revenue than we 
had raised off the capital gains tax, a higher tax, the prior year. So 
we have cut taxes.
  We have instituted a $500 per child tax credit. At the same time, we 
have balanced the budget so that now we have a surplus instead of a 
deficit.
  So what should we do with that surplus? My bill, H.R. 160, would 
designate 90 percent of the total budget surplus to buy marketable U.S. 
securities that are out on the market. They are interest bearing.
  Right now what we have in that trust fund is $757 billion worth of 
IOUs, three-quarters of a trillion dollars of IOUs that we print up and 
put in a drawer, in a file folder, and we say this is an asset. Well, 
how about replacing those IOUs with marketable U.S. securities, a true 
asset, which is interest bearing? And we can do this if we show the 
same discipline that we showed over the last 4 years as we eliminated 
that budget deficit.
  That is why I am asking my colleagues to cosponsor this bill. I 
believe that not a dime of America's social security savings should be 
used for anything except social security, and that is what this bill 
will ensure. It will ensure that within the next 10 years the three-
quarters of a trillion dollars owed to social security will be replaced 
with these marketable interest-bearing securities.
  I also believe that as we look at the projections of $4.5 trillion in 
surpluses over the next 15 years, it will do us little good to take 
credit for what we have done in terms of balancing the budget and 
reducing expenditures if we simply return to the old practice of tax 
and spend, not putting in place a plan that is dedicated to setting 
aside money year by year, by statute, with a program which will, by 
2013, have refunded this money.
  Now clearly this is not the only challenge that social security 
faces, this three-quarters of a trillion dollar debt that has been 
borrowed out of that trust fund. That is not the only challenge, 
because we as a society have seen demographic shifts. We know that we 
used to have more people working for every person who is retired. We 
used to have four people per family, and now we have two people per 
family, and that means that the number of people that are working 
relative to the number of people who are retired are shifting from 
four-to-one to two-to-one.
  Then we have a second problem. It is not really a problem. It is 
something actually we should feel proud about. But when social security 
came into being, people lived to 68 years of age, and then it went to 
78, and then 88. And who knows what the future will bring? But one 
thing we do know, we cannot continue to borrow out of the Social 
Security Trust Fund and not have a plan to take care of the fact that a 
larger and larger percentage of our society are going to be seniors who 
are living longer and are going to be needing to depend on that social 
security.
  So, yes, there are other long-term changes we need to make in the 
program. But as we begin to plan for those long-term changes, it is 
absolutely essential that we dig ourselves out of the hole that we have 
put ourselves in over the last 30 years and replenish the account, 
starting this year. And we can do it with H.R. 160. And that is why I 
urge my colleagues, please cosponsor this bill. Let us not just have 
the rhetoric, let us have a plan in place that starts today, and over 
the next 10 years replenishes that trust fund.

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