[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 31 (Monday, March 20, 2000)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1450-S1452]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  SENIOR CITIZENS FREEDOM TO WORK ACT

  Ms. COLLINS. Mr. President, Americans today are leading healthier and 
longer lives than ever before. By the year 2030, one-fifth of our 
American population will be age 65 or older. Given the demographics of 
the 21st century, it is clearly in our national interest to encourage 
people to stay in the workforce longer. Today, however, older Americans 
age 65 through 69 are currently discouraged from working since they 
lose $1 in Social Security benefits for every $3 they earn over 
$17,000. I am, therefore, very pleased this week the Senate will 
consider H.R. 5, the Senior Citizens Freedom to Work Act, to eliminate 
the Social Security earnings test that unfairly penalizes senior 
citizens who need or want to keep working.
  The elimination of this penalty will be particularly helpful to 
women. Women frequently have interrupted work histories because they 
take time off to raise their families. Historically, unfortunately, 
they also earn less than men. As a result, women are twice as likely to 
retire in poverty as men. Many women do not have sufficient savings or 
a private pension, and they depend upon the money they earn to 
supplement their Social Security benefits in order to make ends meet. 
These low-income seniors are particularly hard hit by the earnings 
test, which amounts to a 33-percent tax on their earned income over and 
above what they are already paying in Federal, State, and Social 
Security payroll taxes.

  Moreover, the Social Security earnings penalty takes money away from 
seniors that is rightfully theirs. According to the Social Security 
Administration, 800,000 senior citizens sacrificed some of their 
benefits last year by exceeding the earnings limit. These were benefits 
they had earned through a lifetime of hard work in contributions to the 
Social Security system.
  Finally, this penalty is most burdensome for those seniors who have 
to work and depend upon their income for survival. More well-to-do 
seniors generally supplement their Social Security benefits with what 
we refer to as ``unearned income'' from savings and investments, none 
of which is affected by the current earnings limit.
  Earlier this month, in an overwhelming display of bipartisan 
cooperation, the House of Representatives voted unanimously to repeal 
this unfair penalty on our senior citizens. They voted to say no to 
discriminating against seniors and discouraging them from working. It 
is my hope the Senate will follow suit this week with another unanimous 
vote on this historic measure.
  Our Nation's seniors should be free to work without penalty. Older 
workers have the skills, the wisdom, and the judgment that all 
employers value. Given our tight labor market and our historically low 
rate of personal savings, it simply does not make sense for Washington 
to discourage the most experienced workers we have from remaining in 
the workforce when they want to do so. I hope all of our colleagues 
will join me in passing this important legislation before the end of 
the week.
  Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. HUTCHINSON. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the 
order for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Collins). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.
  Mr. HUTCHINSON. Madam President, I associate myself with the eloquent 
remarks of the Senator from Maine regarding the elimination of the 
Social Security earnings test.
  I rise in support of the Senior Citizens Freedom to Work Act, H.R. 5. 
I am pleased the Senate is considering this legislation expeditiously 
and that the legislation reflects the intent of Senator Ashcroft's 
bill, S. 2074, of which I am a cosponsor.
  Arkansas is a State that has one of the highest percentages of senior 
citizens in the Nation. We traditionally are just behind Arizona and 
Florida--very high. When you look at the population of our State, there 
are about 2.6 million senior citizens.
  But when you look at low-income or lower income senior citizens, we 
are easily at the top and by far the leading State as a percentage of 
our population that has senior citizens who are in economic deprivation 
or lower income. These are the individuals, as the Senator from Maine 
so eloquently said, who are most in need of equity in the way we treat 
their Social Security income.
  Earlier today I had lunch with a doctor who is a dentist in Arkansas 
and has his practice in primarily a retirement population area. He was 
relating to me how many of his patients are now 65-plus, many 70, 75 
years old, and about the remarkable health that they enjoy today and 
the opportunity, from a physical standpoint, that they have to go out 
and be a part of our labor market. In being a part of that labor 
market, they can use the experience and the expertise they have gained 
through a lifetime in our society and contribute that to the economy of 
today.

  I think this is long overdue. The law that we are proposing to change 
is truly a vestige of the 1930s. It begs for its elimination. Our 
Nation's working seniors deserve immediate relief from the earnings 
limit--a longstanding and outdated provision of law. Persons aged 65 to 
69 are losing $1 in program benefits for every $3 they earn beyond 
$17,000, creating a very clear and a very real disincentive to work at 
all.
  According to the Social Security Administration, more than 800,000 
seniors lose either part or all of their Social Security benefits 
because of the program's earnings limitation. That is almost one 
million working seniors. That is 12,755 people in the State of Arkansas 
whose lives will improve if we pass this legislation and the President 
signs it into law.
  Since I was elected to Federal office on the House side a few years 
ago, I have witnessed a steady commitment among the Republican 
leadership to provide greater flexibility, training, and financial 
relief to our Nation's workforce. We have advocated legislation that 
would provide private sector workers with the choice of flexible weekly 
work schedules--a perk that has been enjoyed by all of us on the 
Federal payroll for over 20 years.
  In 1998, we passed a comprehensive overhaul of America's job training 
laws, giving more funding and flexibility to States, municipalities, 
and businesses to provide essential job skills to its employees. More 
importantly, though, we have an impressive record for putting taxpayer 
money back into the pockets of those who need it most, the American 
people.
  The legislation before us complements our leadership's commitment to 
giving advantages to the worker--in this case, our country's most 
seasoned and experienced employees.
  This bill would end that longstanding practice of penalizing seniors 
for working--something that we ought to encourage; something we should 
commend. No different than providing tax relief to all working 
Americans, we want to help senior employees who choose to remain in the 
workforce.
  I disagree with the notion that ``you can't teach an old dog new 
tricks.'' In fact, we could learn a thing or two from our seniors. We 
could learn a lot from our seniors. That is why we are debating this 
bill.
  This legislation would not just help our senior workers; it also 
benefits employers, too. President Lincoln said: ``You cannot lift the 
wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.'' Social Security's 
antiquated barriers not only

[[Page S1451]]

penalize seniors who want to work but employers who want to hire them. 
Seniors are turning down employment opportunities that business owners 
need to fill in order to compete in the global economy.
  America posts one of the lowest unemployment rates in four decades, 
making good, plentiful workers harder than ever to find. Employers and 
our most experienced employees stand to gain considerably from the 
passage of this legislation.
  H.R. 5 passed the House of Representatives 422-0. I anticipate it 
will pass the Senate with a similar kind of margin with great success.
  The bill's language has the support of a bipartisan coalition of 
Senators who advocate comprehensive Social Security reform--reform 
based on a continuation of existing benefits while ensuring the 
program's financial long-term solvency. In fact, H.R. 5 is part of many 
of the comprehensive reform packages introduced in the last 2 years. It 
has been included in a lot of the plans to totally reform Social 
Security. We all understand that if left unchanged, the future of 
Social Security is in jeopardy as the program begins running deficits 
in about 2013 when 71 million of my fellow baby boomers begin 
collecting their retirement benefits. We know the number of retirees 
will double between 2008 and 2018, narrowing the ratio of workers to 
beneficiaries to less than 3 to 1. When Social Security first started, 
there were 45 people working to take care of 1 retiree. In 1950, there 
were 16 workers working for every beneficiary. We all know that all 
trust funds will be completely exhausted in the next 30 years when the 
beneficiaries far outnumber the working contributors.

  I remember back in December 1998, when the President hosted the White 
House Conference on Social Security, Members of Congress were asked to 
participate and share their ideas, with the common understanding that 
restoring the program's financial solvency was not only necessary but 
imminent. The Speaker and the majority leader reserved the first bill 
in the House and Senate for the President's legislation. It was to be 
accompanied by several bipartisan bills offered by our colleagues. 
Although several bipartisan bills were introduced by Members of this 
body, H.R. 1 and S. 1 remain vacant.
  Although H.R. 5 represents an important step toward equitable reform, 
it definitely sets aside provisions that would address the future 
financial stability of this vital program. We must not allow the 
passage of this legislation to be the ``last rites'' of Social Security 
reform. Frankly, I am disappointed by the President's lack of 
participation in this important debate.
  The next step after passing H.R. 5 should be to lock up the Social 
Security surplus. Not only do our working and retired seniors need 
penalty relief, they deserve assurances that their future benefit 
checks are not being spent on other Federal programs, no matter how 
good those other programs may be.
  The very reason Social Security has a solvency problem is that it is 
a federally administered program that has IOUs disguised as trust 
funds. Our Nation's seniors deserve a program that delivers long term 
and is based on real money. I am confident that passage of H.R. 5 will 
open the door for more bipartisan legislation that enhances the 
strength of the Social Security program.
  In time, Presidential leadership will mean more than words and with 
it will bring forth reform that preserves the program's financial 
stability for our children and our children's children. I ask my 
colleagues to continue supporting that cause and join me in supporting 
H.R. 5.
  I thank the Chair and yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Idaho is recognized.
  Mr. CRAIG. Madam President, I am pleased to come to the floor this 
afternoon with my colleagues from Maine and Arkansas and others who are 
here to discuss the Senate's consideration of H.R. 5.
  It is an interesting moment for me because when I first came to 
Congress in 1981, one of the first pieces of legislation I cosponsored 
was the elimination of the earnings limit test on those seniors who 
were taking Social Security and, as we know, limited in the amount of 
money they could earn at that point in time.
  In 1983, the Congress decided, along with then Speaker of the House, 
Tip O'Neill, and President Ronald Reagan, that an entire reform of the 
Social Security system was necessary and that there should be a 
substantial tax increase to create solvency in the Social Security 
system. It seemed reasonable to me and my colleagues in the House at 
that moment; why should we not encourage those who were retiring and 
taking their Social Security benefits at age 62 or 65 to go on and earn 
an income beyond the Social Security benefit and pay into the system.
  We were still caught in the Depression-era mentality that somehow you 
took an older person and shooed them away from the labor market by some 
kind of, what I called, perverse incentive; that is, we will tax you 
out of the labor market if you choose to be a productive citizen in it. 
As a result, we did not put the reform into Social Security in 1983 as 
we should have.
  We know Social Security today is very solvent. It is solvent as a 
result of that 1983 initiative that was a bipartisan effort on the part 
of the House and the Senate.
  The reform we are here to discuss today is one that was clearly 
debated at that time and denied, denied by a Congress that was still 
under the control of groups in this country that had dominated labor 
policy for years and believed that at age 65 you left the labor force 
and went into retirement and some younger person took your slot. They 
had failed to recognize that economies expand and grow; If you treat an 
economy right, there is not only always need for new hires, but there 
is oftentimes a tremendous demand for the kind of knowledge, what I 
call institutional knowledge, that older workers bring to the 
workplace. Of course, we know that is very much the case today.
  I guess my mother would probably have called me strong willed in my 
youth. That was a polite way of saying I was bullheaded. I would 
persist, if I could, until I won the issue in which I was interested.
  Over the years, I and others of the House and the Senate have 
persisted. Every year, we went out and introduced the earnings 
limitation elimination. Every year, we were either defeated or the 
appropriate committees simply would not recognize it. That was through 
the 1980s and the early 1990s. Of course, as we know, the economy in 
large part has dramatically changed.
  During that period of time, my father considered retiring from the 
farming and ranching business in his midsixties. He found it was of no 
value to do so because he would have denied himself a substantially 
larger income than he could have ever received from Social Security. So 
it wasn't until after age 72, when the earnings limitation did not 
apply, that my father and my parents, along with a good many other 
seniors in our country who were self-employed and who were clearly 
entitled to receive Social Security benefits, simply denied themselves 
the benefit because they couldn't afford to take it. They waited until 
much later in life to decide to retire or, as my dad said, slow down a 
little bit to 12-hour workdays instead of 18-hour workdays, which was 
quite typical of his generation in the labor force. Now, at age 84, he 
still thinks a 12-hour workday is a modest effort for any one 
individual to make in his or her contribution to society. I say that 
with a bit of jest, but it is very true of that workforce.
  It was only at that time I think they recognized that my persistency, 
along with others of my colleagues in trying to eliminate the earnings 
requirement, was the right and appropriate thing to do.
  So we were saying to seniors, age 65 through 69, they could only 
continue to earn up to a certain limit, $17,000 a year, while receiving 
the full benefits of Social Security. But for every additional $3 of 
earnings beyond that limit, the Government reduced their benefit by 
$1--in other words, again, still penalizing them, still saying: We want 
you out of the workforce. Even if you are healthy, even if you are 
productive and can be a major contributor to the workforce, get out, if 
you want to receive the full benefits of the Social Security system 
that you had paid into all of your productive life and that you were 
certainly entitled to receive.

[[Page S1452]]

  Well, as we have worked this issue over the last decade, one thing 
has changed. The President, for example, instead of expressing open 
opposition, is now saying this is a bill he will sign. As my colleagues 
from Arkansas and Maine have said the House, in almost a unanimous 
vote, declared their support for H.R. 5 in the last several weeks. I 
think the Senate will respond in kind this week.
  I have set forth a lot of the reasons it is important. It is 
fundamentally important because it is fair. That is the No. 1 reason we 
ought to be doing it. It is fair for an individual who has paid into 
the system all of his or her productive life, at age 62 or 65, to gain 
those benefits and go on to continue to work if they wish.
  Do we say to a young Federal employee who has vested his or herself 
in the retirement program of the Federal system and who chooses to step 
out and gain those benefits that they can't go on working? Do we say 
that to a military retiree? In fact, quite the opposite--we expect them 
to go on working.
  Now, of course, as our seniors live longer and find out that some of 
their retirement benefits are simply not enough and they are outliving 
them, there is not just the accommodation of fairness to a senior in 
the workplace, there is the accommodation of necessity.
  Many of our seniors find it necessary to work beyond age 65 to 
provide for themselves, to try to sustain the lifestyle they had when 
they were once full employees at a different period in their lives. So 
a combination of other forces is now working out there. I am proud 
that, as a Republican, I and many of my colleagues have worked over the 
last several years to change the character of the workplace, to 
recognize the flexibility that is necessary in a new and very different 
world from 1935, or 1945, or 1955, or 1965, or 1975, or even 1985.
  We know that the workplace of the year 2000 is even different than 
the workplace of 1995. Now both spouses are working. Now we offer 
flexibility in kind. Now we allow people to stay home and work from 
their homes as major contributors in the workforce, and we offer 
flextime, and so forth. Yet we have said this up until now to a senior 
at the appropriate age of receiving full benefits from the Social 
Security system: If you go out and find a job, you can only earn up to 
a certain limitation and beyond that we will penalize you substantially 
until you are probably old enough not to want to work anymore, and then 
you can have the full benefits even if you do work.
  Shame on us. Shame on a Congress and a Government that has held that 
policy as long as we have. Now, of course, as my colleague from 
Arkansas states, this is the longest sustained period of near full 
employment that our country has seen in decades. Now we need the senior 
in the workforce more than ever, for all of the right kinds of reasons. 
As the House has spoken, I hope the Senate will speak in a unanimous 
vote and that we can send this to the President and say: Mr. President, 
the Congress of the United States is ready to knock down the decades-
old law that no longer fits the American workforce or the American 
culture--if it ever did. And we have done this in a unanimous way.
  That is the kind of expression I hope the Senate will make this week. 
The House has already spoken. I think that is probably due to my 
persistence, along with many colleagues over the past decade and a 
half; we have argued that this is something that is right and fair, in 
the first instance, and now is a combination of necessity, in the 
second instance, as the culture and economy of this country have 
changed significantly over the period of time in which this provision 
has been a part of the labor and Social Security laws of our country.
  Madam President, I will proudly vote for H.R. 5 and encourage all of 
my colleagues to do the same.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. HATCH. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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