[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 18 (Thursday, February 17, 2005)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1586-S1588]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         SOCIAL SECURITY REFORM

  Mr. DAYTON. Mr. President, I rise today because my friends in the 
Minnesota Republican Party have started a petition online urging me to 
support President Bush's proposal to strengthen Social Security. I want 
to take this opportunity to assure the people of Minnesota that I would 
like to strengthen Social Security just as much as anyone else, and if 
President Bush or anyone presents a proposal that would actually 
strengthen Social Security, would protect its ability to pay its 
promised benefits to present and future retirees and other 
beneficiaries and also create opportunities to provide additional 
benefits, I will certainly support it.
  I have not yet seen a proposal, including that from the President, 
that would improve upon the present system while continuing its current 
benefits.
  For all the President's fine talk about helping Social Security's 
financial future, his current fiscal policies, the ones that are in 
effect right now, are seriously hurting Social Security's future 
finances and also weakening the financial strength of the entire 
Federal Government.
  It is a mystery to me why the President is so alarmed by the crisis 
that he says will occur when Social Security starts running deficits at 
variously said times, such as 2018, 2028, or 2042, when the rest of the 
Federal Government's budget, everything else besides Social Security, 
is running enormous deficits for this year, last year, and for every 
year projected in the future under his proposed budget.
  Last year's on-budget deficit was $567 billion. A deficit of $588 
billion is expected for the current fiscal year, 2005, and almost $2.5 
trillion more in deficits are projected over the following 5 years 
under the President's proposed budget. That is the real financial 
crisis the

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Federal Government is in right now, running huge operating deficits, by 
far the worst in our Nation's history, requiring massive Federal 
borrowing to finance them, adding over $1 trillion to the national debt 
over the last 3 years, and another $2 trillion over the next 5 years, 
with no end in sight.
  No wonder the nonpartisan Concord Coalition, a Government watchdog 
organization founded by former New Hampshire Republican Senator Warren 
Rudman and businessman Warren Buffett, has called the President's 
fiscal policies the most reckless in our Nation's history.
  In fiscal year 2000, which is the last full fiscal year under 
President Clinton's terms in office, the Federal Government ran 
surpluses in both its Social Security and on-budget funds. The Office 
of Management and Budget just a month after President Bush took office 
in 2001 projected surpluses in both of those major Government funds for 
each of the next 10 years. President Bush and the majority in Congress 
turned those surpluses into oceans of red ink by cutting taxes and 
increasing spending in each of the last 4 years. We also had 9/11. We 
have undertaken two wars. We went through a recession. There are 
certainly other factors.
  In the midst of those, cutting taxes excessively was a primary 
contributor to these record deficits, and continuing those policies 
will only extend those deficits into the future. Yet that is what is 
being proposed again for this year's budget, next year, and the next. 
In fact, the proponents want to make future deficits even worse by 
making those previous tax cuts permanent, which would pile up trillions 
more in public debt which must be paid off, with interest, by today's 
children, teenagers, and young workers, the very people President Bush 
tells us will not have Social Security when they retire.

  Unfortunately, with his current policies they will not have a country 
when they retire. The so-called ownership society will be the owe-the-
ship society.
  The second financial disaster that is happening in this country right 
now is that Social Security's current surpluses are being spent to pay 
for other Federal programs. Remember the Social Security lockbox that 
President Clinton established so Congress would not spend the annual 
Social Security surpluses but, instead, would invest it in ways that 
would truly strengthen the program for its future? Well, in 2000, 
Presidential candidate George W. Bush promised to protect that lockbox. 
Guess what. It is unlocked and it is empty.
  Last year's $155 billion surplus is gone. The previous year's $160 
billion surplus is gone. This year's $162 billion surplus is going, and 
the next 5 years' surpluses in the Social Security trust fund, which 
would total over $1 trillion, will also be gone under the President's 
proposed budget. They are gone to cover and to help continue part of 
those much larger deficits in the Federal Government's current 
operations. So that instead of cash or other investments, the Social 
Security trust fund is left with IOUs from the main Federal fund that 
borrowed them.
  President Bush is correct when he says that when those IOUs must be 
repaid with interest to enable Social Security to meet its future 
obligations some date in the future, those additional payments will 
require additional Federal revenues from either higher taxes, less 
spending, or more Federal borrowing. If the President is right, if 
Social Security or even the entire Federal Government then faces a 
drastic financial meltdown, a bankruptcy, because workers and 
businesses at that time cannot afford those additional tax burdens, so 
the Federal Government cannot meet its obligations, whether to Social 
Security or to other Government programs and services, it will be a 
disaster that his fiscal policies have created, and that Congress 
through support or complicity created and made even worse, more severe, 
by the current deficit spending which the President proposes to 
continue doing right now, while at the same time he is talking about 
Social Security's long-term future.
  As long as the current fiscal follies continue, whatever anyone says 
about doing whatever to Social Security years from now, as 
Shakespeare's McBeth said, is ``full of sound and fury, signifying 
nothing.''
  All of these Senate speeches, all of those Presidential forums, all 
the millions of dollars of industry advertising, all sound and fury, 
signifies nothing, except signifying the financial greed that has 
driven the current fiscal policy and the political cowardice that is 
allowing it to continue.
  What is needed right now, as my sons would say, is to get real, to 
stop all the speeches, forums, and advertising about what might or 
might not happen many years into the future and act on what is 
happening right now. It is very damaging to our country right now, and 
it is even more damaging to our country's future unless we act right 
now, this year, to stop it.

  Acting right and acting now will take a lot of political courage. The 
President's budget shows a little but not nearly enough. It reduces 
spending by some $20 billion next year. That leaves another $560 
billion to go in order to balance the Federal operating budget and 
leave the Social Security surplus in its lockbox--in other words, just 
to restore us to the level of fiscal responsibility that President 
Clinton left. That is a lot of political courage. It would require a 
major truth telling to the American people about how we got into this 
fiscal mess and how we are going to get out of it, starting right now, 
with no gimmicks, no games, just straight, honest accounting to balance 
the Federal budget without spending the Social Security money; to 
protect Social Security's surpluses and use them only for Social 
Security; to stop borrowing for current spending and adding that to the 
increasing national debt and then to start to pay down that debt.
  If the President and the Congress are really serious about 
strengthening Social Security's future, that is what we must do now, 
and that is the best that we can do now. Straightening out the current 
budget mess and putting the Federal Government back on a responsible 
and sustainable course of balanced operating budgets and accumulating 
Social Security surpluses is a real action plan. Everything else is 
just posturing and pretending. Because sound Federal fiscal policy now 
contributes to future economic growth, it increases the likelihood that 
Social Security, as it is currently structured, will be able to pay its 
promised benefits with future revenues and income for many decades to 
come.
  Because Social Security's financial future is not cast in stone, 
there is nothing preordained that will happen at some future date. 
Social Security's finances will depend upon the future growth in the 
U.S. economy. The Social Security trustees make this very clear in 
their annual report by making three long-range projections based on 
different assumptions about the country's future economic growth. Their 
intermediate forecast is the one many people cite, incorrectly, as what 
will happen to Social Security. That projection assumes that growth in 
the U.S. economy over the next 75 years will be less than two-thirds of 
the past 40 years.
  In the last 40 years in this country, real GDP grew at 3.3 percent a 
year. The trustees' intermediate forecast projects real GDP growth of 
2.9 percent from 2004 to 2013 but then only 1.8 percent from 2015 to 
2080.
  Another one of the trustees' forecasts assumes real GDP growth of 3.4 
percent per year over the next decade and then 2.6 percent per year 
from 2015 to 2080. That still is less on average than the 3.3 percent 
over the last 40 years. Yet with that rate of growth the Social 
Security trust fund's annual income is more than enough to pay for all 
promised benefits beyond the year 2080, the last year in the current 
report.
  Social Security, under that growth scenario, runs an annual surplus 
every year into the indefinite future. In fact, in the last year in the 
projection, 2080, it would have income of $4.2 trillion, make promised 
payments of $3.5 trillion, leaving a surplus in that one year of $700 
billion, which would add to its assets that would end that year at 
almost $18 trillion. That is not bankruptcy, that is prosperity.

  What we need to do right now to assure not just Social Security's 
future solvency but its future prosperity is to keep the U.S. economy 
healthy and growing. The best help we can give to the future of Social 
Security is a sound fiscal policy right now of balanced operating 
budgets and minimal Federal spending. On the other hand, the worst

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that we could do to jeopardize Social Security's future solvency and to 
necessitate the kind of drastic across-the-board cuts in future 
retirement benefits that are in the President's proposal is to continue 
the current fiscal policy of deficits and more deficits, to continue 
the proposal of making the tax cuts for the rich permanent, abolishing 
the estate tax, cutting capital gains, eliminating or reducing the tax 
on dividends, as if the rich are not rich enough already in this 
country and the superrich are not superrich enough. And, if the truth 
be known, most of them already pay far less than their fair share in 
taxes and many pay no U.S. taxes at all.
  To continue the tax giveaway frenzies and the fiscal follies of the 
last 4 years is to doom Social Security's future and this country's 
economic future. To borrow more and more money from the rest of the 
world and spend the Social Security surpluses so the rich don't have to 
pay their share of taxes is, as the Concord Coalition said, ``reckless 
fiscal policy.'' It is also destructive social policy, and it is the 
wrong public policy--wrong for the future of Social Security and wrong 
for the future of America.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Hawaii.
  Mr. AKAKA. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for 10 
minutes on the Veterans' Administration.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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