[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 12 (Tuesday, February 8, 2005)]
[House]
[Page H375]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            SOCIAL SECURITY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, Social Security should remain a guarantee of 
one's earnings, not a gamble, and surely not a gamble by well-connected 
investors who might have some political connections.
  President Bush and his Republican Party are proposing radical and 
reckless changes to Social Security. Nothing they have attempted to 
date, even shifting major portions of the tax burden to the middle 
class from the most wealthy in our country, are as brazen and audacious 
as this misguided plan to undermine our Nation's most successful 
insurance program for retirement and disability, affecting millions and 
millions of our people who have earned these benefits.
  Social Security is security for the majority of the American people. 
Social Security represents the best, the best, in the American Union. 
Like the preamble says, ``We the people,'' not I alone withdrawing from 
the Union.

                              {time}  1945

  The Democratic Party has long championed we, the people, surely, to 
collect those earnings that people need in their retirement years, and 
one out of six families need in the event of unexpected disability. The 
system does not work if we make it every man and woman for himself or 
herself, something the President and his party, unfortunately, now are 
advocating. It is our patriotic duty as Democrats to oppose this 
privatization scheme.
  The President claims that the country will save money because of 
privatization. Again, I say he needs a better set of accountants in the 
White House. What he does not mention is that his plan requires 
trillions of dollars of borrowing, and I might say, from foreign 
countries now, because we are not saving as a society, leading to 
higher taxes in the future and interest that we pay them, not 
ourselves.
  Yes, he is borrowing for a savings plan. What kind of sense does that 
make? Well, you would really think maybe he never had to think too hard 
about handling his own finances by the cavalier manner in which he is 
trying to affect the earnings of the vast majority of the American 
people. Borrowing $2 trillion to finance so-called private accounts 
will further increase America's escalating debt. President Bush has 
already increased the national debt to the point that the currency's 
value is dropping internationally, and a family of four's share of that 
debt has increased by thousands of dollars.
  In addition, his plan actually cuts benefits in the future, and 
really those earnings should be the source of any true savings for the 
Social Security program. This is because he creates an offset, almost 
like a new downward notch in Social Security, that would cut guaranteed 
Social Security benefits over the next 75 years by $3.6 trillion. The 
cut would apply to all beneficiaries, whether or not they have chosen a 
private account.
  And this chart actually shows what happens. The blue represents the 
benefits that you would get based on your earnings. The red represents 
what his plan would do. In essence, down the road, every succeeding 
decade you would actually receive less than in the current Social 
Security program. These private accounts he is proposing will not even 
make up for the 46 percent cut in benefits that Republicans have 
proposed. For example, a 20-year-old who enters the workforce this 
year, if they can get a good job, would lose $152,000 in Social 
Security benefits under the Republican plan. A private account is 
unlikely to make up for this benefit cut because the plan would also 
take back 80 cents of every dollar in the private account. It is like 
an offset. It really is not your money. In fact, it appears no one will 
get back the money that they would put in these private accounts. They 
would only get back some share of the interest those accounts earn. So 
you do not get your principal back.
  We should not sacrifice the retirement and old age and disability 
security of our families at the altar of short-term political gains. 
And surely we should honor our father and our mothers. We should value 
our children, and we should prepare through an insurance program for 
the unexpected.
  We must keep Social Security strong so it is there for years to come. 
Believe me, we need to fight to save a program that truly is sacred. It 
represents the best values that are in us as a people, and it must 
continue to be a guarantee and not a gamble.
  When I first came to Congress during the 1980s, Claude Pepper, a 
beautiful Member from Florida, stated some of the following words when 
we refinanced Social Security in the spring of 1983. He said, ``This is 
the people's program, intended by President Roosevelt and those who 
were authors of the measures in those early days as some measure of 
assurance that those who retired would have a decent sustenance upon 
which to live, that those who died would have a measure of protection 
to transmit to their widows and their children, that those who became 
disabled under another phase of the system would have some support.''
  We need to rise to that original vision.

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