[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 37 (Tuesday, April 5, 2005)]
[House]
[Pages H1769-H1774]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       30-SOMETHING WORKING GROUP

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania). Under the 
Speaker's announced policy of January 4, 2005, the gentleman from Ohio 
(Mr. Ryan) is recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to be 
here. I have a slight cold so please forgive me, but we are back with 
the 30-something Hour, and I will be joined by my two colleagues from 
Florida here in a few minutes.
  We want to continue this debate that we have been having in the 
United States over the past several months, a debate that the President 
has initiated in saying after the campaign that he wanted to have a 
national discussion in regards to the issue of Social Security and the 
Social Security solvency and where Social Security is going to be in 
the next few years and the kind of changes that we have to make in the 
country in order to deal with it.
  Those of us on this side, and I think many on the other side, have 
very many concerns about this because Social Security, quite frankly, 
has been one of the most successfully administered Federal Government 
programs in the history of the United States of America.
  We have talked over the past few months on how Social Security runs 
with only a 1 percent administrative cost. So there are a lot of 
government programs I think we all agree in this Chamber and across the 
country that are inefficient, that are ineffective, that maybe do not 
work, that maybe take too much money without getting the kind of 
results that we ultimately want.
  Social Security is not one of those programs. Social Security has 
been an enormous success, and I think what is great really about Social 
Security in trying to advance this argument, I think why the President 
is having so much difficulty is that Social Security is a program that 
touches all of our lives.
  We here in the 30-something Caucus watched our grandparents receive 
Social Security, and the story of my great-grandfather when Social 
Security was first implemented, he could

[[Page H1770]]

not believe when he got to America that he could retire and walk down 
to the end of the driveway and get his Social Security check and he 
would have dignity in his final years.
  This program has been successful, and the President is having great 
difficulty making an argument that we need to somehow radically change 
the Social Security system.
  The President's proposal is to say that those of us who are in our 
20s and 30s and 40s, instead of putting our percent, our 6.2 percent 
into the Social Security system, will be allowed to divert a certain 
portion of that over into some private annuity or private account that 
we would be allowed to set up, and there are all kinds of math involved 
in this in the President's proposal that lead to someone who does put 
money into a private account to not receive the kind of benefits that 
they thought they were going to get in the first place.
  But the main point is this: the Social Security system, the Social 
Security program may need change, may need to be tweaked, but it does 
not need to be privatized, and the President's plan does not fix the 
problem. It in no way, shape, or form fixes the long-term solvency 
issues that Social Security has, and there are many other ways we can 
go about fixing this program. It is good until 2042, into 2050 and even 
after that you will still get 80 percent of your benefits if we do 
absolutely nothing.
  So there is no need to get crazy. There is no need to get crazy and 
try to make some radical changes to this program like privatizing it 
and somehow jeopardize and slash benefits for our seniors and our 
grandparents and our parents.
  I am joined by the gentlewoman who has been on all the talk shows 
over the past few weeks and did a fantastic job. I yield to the 
gentlewoman from Florida.
  Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Ohio 
(Mr. Ryan), and it is good to be here with you once again.
  Quite honestly, it is good to be here to talk about once again an 
extremely important issue and that is Social Security. I can tell you 
that I wish that that is what we had been able to talk about for the 
last 2 weeks as opposed to some of the other issues we have been 
focused on, but I am glad we are able to refocus again.
  What we have been trying to do in our 30-something Working Group over 
the last several months and prior to my arrival here in Congress, you 
and our other colleagues have done yeoman's work on getting the message 
out about the facts as its relates to Social Security because our 
generation, your friends, my friends, when you go home and you sit down 
and you are having coffee or you are having a beer, which we may 
occasionally do among our friends, and the conversation may turn to 
whether you think or your friends think that there is going to be 
Social Security there for you when you retire. Most people our age, 
they believe the myth that has been put out there by the President and 
by the leadership of the Congress. They believe that Social Security 
will not be there.
  My colleague and I being in our 30s and we are trying to get the word 
out to other people our age across this country, the solvency issue to 
which you just referred, literally, before there is even a concern 
about a potential drop in benefits, is not for 37 years from now, at 
the earliest. More likely, 47 years when in my case, I will be 75 years 
old in 37 years and 85 years old in 47 years, long past retirement age, 
long past the point after which I would begin collecting Social 
Security.
  So like my colleague said, we are not suggesting that there is not a 
problem that needs to be addressed. What we are suggesting is that 
there is not a crisis; that there is no need to sound the alarm bells; 
that we need to make sure that we approach this problem responsibly; 
that this is a 70-year program of success, probably the most successful 
program in our Nation's history, established as an iron clad safety net 
that no one should have to worry about it being there upon their 
retirement, which is why that if we are going to make changes, which we 
should to ensure its long-term solvency, that we take the time to do it 
correctly and responsibly and not rush to judgment and not make drastic 
changes which privatizing Social Security, I think by anyone's 
definition, would be drastic.
  We have got to make sure that we preserve Social Security into the 
future, and what is ironic is that most of the talk coming from the 
White House and in the leadership of this body has been about 
privatizing Social Security, setting up private accounts, and this has 
just been mind-boggling to me because, like you said, privatization 
does nothing to deal with the solvency issue. We could privatize Social 
Security, and all we would be doing is adding to our deficit and 
putting our Nation more in debt than we already are, and we are badly, 
badly in debt.
  So you can go that far and still have to address Social Security 
solvency problems, and we need to make sure that we responsibly make 
changes to preserve Social Security into the future.

                              {time}  2215

  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Absolutely.
  And, Mr. Speaker, when you just look at how the privatization process 
would be set up, you are actually taking money that would be going into 
the system out away from the system. And we do not even know, and the 
President's proposal from all the ones I have read, is that the 4 
percent that I would be able to take and move into the side account, 
the business match will not go into the Social Security account either. 
So you put in your 6.2, the business puts in theirs, but if I divert 4 
percent, then that is 4 percent less that the employer has to put in. 
So you are talking about taking out trillions of dollars. And I think 
if there is one point we want to make tonight, that will be it.
  We brought our handy-dandy charts here. Privatization equals massive 
borrowing. There is only one way to fill the gap. We do not have money 
to plug a $2 trillion hole. And it says in the first 10 years of the 
plan, anywhere from $1.4 trillion to $2 trillion in borrowing, and over 
the next 20 years it will be $5 trillion that we will have to borrow 
just to plug holes in the President's plan. We are running a $400- to 
$500 billion trade deficit in a year, and we are going to go out and 
borrow $5 trillion? Where are we going to get $5 trillion to plug the 
hole in the Social Security plan? We are borrowing the money from 
foreign countries, and we are shifting the burden on to the next 
generation. It is irresponsible. It is lunacy. There is no reason to 
have to do this. So, again, push the taxes off.
  Now, this is the chart I like, and Tom Manatos, from our staff, is 
responsible for this. This is it. The national debt, my colleagues. 
There are so many numbers here. And this is always changing. You can go 
to the United States Treasury Web site, and this ticker here will keep 
going and keep adding, but it is $7.7 trillion. And we are going to go 
out and we are going to borrow $5 trillion? This is our debt now, 
almost $8 trillion. And if the President gets his way and we have to 
implement the private accounts, we are going to go out and have to 
borrow $5 trillion, which is more than half the national debt that we 
have right now.
  But here is the number you will love the most, your share of the 
national debt. Your share, one person sitting at home right now, if you 
are sitting there or if you are born today, you owe $26,000. That is 
what you owe because we spend more than we take in. Now, if we are 
going to add $5 trillion to this over the next 20 years, this number 
will almost double.
  So when you think about a baby that is born today that owes this, and 
if we keep going at the rate we are going, running $500- to $600 
billion annual deficits, and this number keeps going, and we are out 
borrowing money and paying more interest on it, and you live your whole 
life and this number keeps going up, and then at 18 you go out and 
borrow money to go to school, to get a bachelor's degree, master's 
degree, Ph.D., become a lawyer, you are going to borrow more money, 
what does this number look like? How are we providing opportunity for 
our children in the next generation?
  We are being irresponsible here. The gentleman talked earlier here 
about the trade deficits and how we have to balancing those off and 
balancing the budget, but we are not being very kind to the next 
generation coming up.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield once again to my colleague.
  Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. I thank my colleague, Mr. Speaker.

[[Page H1771]]

  I think that statistic and those two numbers there are so 
illustrative. They really are. People can feel, touch, taste and 
understand what $26,000 means. For every single person, including an 
infant in this country, that is their share of the national debt.
  I think people have a harder time, though, I mean none of us 
literally have an understanding of what $7 trillion is; 
$7,781,336,014,734.14. That is the national debt.
  Now, what does that mean? If you are going to try to break it down 
into what $7 trillion is like, and there are people actually out there 
figuring this stuff out to try to translate that concept of a trillion 
dollars into more understandable bites of information, for example, if 
you stacked a thousand $1 bills, you took a thousand $1 bills and 
stacked them on top of each other, $1 million would equal 1 foot high 
of thousand dollar bills. That is how high.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. One bill that equals $1,000 stacked. Okay.
  Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Right. Stacked up would equal a foot. A 
billion dollars would equal the height of the Empire State building in 
New York. One trillion dollars, stacked up on top of each other, would 
be a thousand times the height of the Empire State Building.
  So if you are trying to think about how much $7 trillion is, that is 
how large that number is. That is not something that almost anyone can 
get their arms around. And think about the unbelievable 
irresponsibility that that is, and that there currently appears to be 
almost no regard for that problem and how to deal with it, and no focus 
here on how we are going to get a handle on the sheer size of that 
number and shrinking it, and no realistic proposal; only conversations 
like that of privatizing Social Security, which are going to make that 
number ever larger. It really starts to boggle your mind.
  Yet, when we go home, as we just did, and I spent the last couple of 
weeks at home going around my district and had town hall meetings. I 
had a town hall meeting in my district on Social Security, and it 
appeared as though there is an inverse relationship between the more 
the President talks about his vague outlines of a proposal and the more 
people hear about his vague outlines of a proposal. They are moving in 
opposite directions.
  In fact, for our age group, which is his target audience, because he 
has been assuring people 55 and over they will not have to be concerned 
about their continued checks and the continuation of Social Security 
for them, and if you believe that, which I found in my district, and I 
have a very large population of senior citizens who are Social Security 
recipients, they are very, very skeptical about how a program the size 
of Social Security, with as monumental a change as this would be, how 
it is that they can be assured that a monumental change like that is 
not going to affect them.
  So there is a healthy amount of skepticism as it is, but the target 
audience, which is our generation and people younger than 30 years old, 
the polling that has come out recently, and the Pew Research Center did 
a March 24 poll, which shows support for private accounts among young 
adults absolutely plummeting. The more young people have heard about 
this proposal, the less they like it. They are more than twice as 
likely to oppose private accounts when they have heard a lot about it. 
And that is illustrative of the inverse relationship between the 
President's canned town hall meetings, for lack of a better term. 
Because what we have been doing out in our districts, as Democrats, we 
are not ticketing our events. We are not hand-picking the audience. We 
are saying, come on in and talk to us about Social Security. Let us 
talk to you about what we hear about this proposal, and you tell us 
what you think.
  What is going on in the President's meetings is he is saying, do you 
agree with me? Oh, okay, you can come in then, and booting people who 
do not agree with him. That is really not very democratic. It does not 
show a real ability or desire to actually get input. It is more my way 
or the highway politics, which is not the way we should be shaping this 
debate.

  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. And that is not the way we did it in 1983. And 
everyone has been talking about this monumental national discussion and 
Tip O'Neill sitting down with President Reagan and Bob Dole, and we had 
all the great political figures of that generation coming together to 
say we are going to put politics aside, and we are going to fix the 
problem.
  And we are not here to bash the President or to bash the Republicans 
or to bash anybody, but we are here to say we have issues here that are 
going to affect the long-term interest of the country. In many 
districts across the country we are losing manufacturing jobs. One of 
the main problems we have with this whole thing is we do not have 
enough taxpayers working and making a good living and paying into the 
Social Security System. My own opinion is that is what would really 
help fix this long term. But we are just here to say we want to sit 
down and work with you.
  You cannot have a national discussion if you do not include the 
opposition into your town hall meetings. Boy, it would be great to go 
to a meeting and never have anybody stand up and question any votes you 
have had or anything like that. We cannot get away with that in our 
congressional seats, nor should we be able to. And so the President 
needs to come to Congress and work with us. We want to help him figure 
this out.
  Now, private accounts, for us, are off the table. That is ridiculous. 
That is not going to happen. But we want to work with the President
  Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. And, Mr. Speaker, my colleague is just 
absolutely right on target. We are more than willing to sit down and 
hash out in the spirit of compromise, like the gentleman referred to 
what they did in 1983. But, at least in my experience, with compromise, 
you have to be singing off the same song sheet. You cannot start from 
two completely different places and define the problem in completely 
different ways and ultimately reach compromise.
  So if the President and his supporters on this concept would come off 
of the concept of crisis and get to where we are and where the reality 
is, because every factual description, including from the Social 
Security trustees that just released their report 2 weeks ago, points 
to a problem, a problem looming on the horizon that needs to be dealt 
with.
  So when we are singing off the same song sheets, then we will be able 
to move forward and talk about a compromise that will actually address 
the solvency question, because private accounts do not address the 
solvency question, they just cause more debt.
  What is unbelievable about the private accounts is that the 
President, at least in my listening to him, has sold them as almost 
like it would be an addition to your Social Security benefits. But the 
reality of his vague plan is that you would not get your private 
account and your Social Security benefits. There would be a 
commensurate cut in your Social Security benefits in proportion to what 
is in your account; approximately a 46 percent cut in your Social 
Security benefits.
  And let us not forget also that his proposal does not leave out the 
one-third of Social Security recipients who are not earners. You have 
people who are beneficiaries of Social Security recipients who have 
passed on and who are not earning an income. You have children and 
dependents, and you have the disabled community. Now, they are not able 
to benefit from private accounts because in order to have a private 
account, you actually have to have an income. So we are not even 
thinking about how we would address the huge pure cut that they would 
suffer from.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. And, Mr. Speaker, when you look at when you would 
want to actually take out the money, our colleague, the gentleman from 
New York (Mr. Weiner), who was here a few weeks ago with us, had a 
great explanation. The stock market goes up. The stock market goes 
down. The stock market goes up. The stock market goes down. Well, what 
if you are going to retire at the wrong time? What if you were planning 
on retiring in 2001, 2002, and your private savings account was cut in 
half? Now all of a sudden you are not retiring.
  Social Security grows at a steady pace and keeps up with inflation 
and makes sure that you would be able to maintain the kind of buying 
power that you would normally have, and it is stable, and it is safe, 
and it is guaranteed.

[[Page H1772]]

  Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. That is why we call it Social Security.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Social Security, exactly, instead of having the up 
and down. And that is the kind of risk you are going to have to take on 
if you are going to put your money into some of these private accounts.
  One point more before I pull up another slide here. Your share of the 
national debt is $26,000, and I think we really need to start looking 
in terms like this, because not only do business people always worry 
about what the next quarter's earnings are going to be, what is the 
next quarter's profits going to be, and we tend to always think what is 
the next election going to be like, because we get elected every 2 
years, so there is no real long-term thinking. So I think it is 
important for us, especially during the discussions the 30-something 
group has, is to have this broad discussion: What does this look like 
to a baby born today and you add this on?
  Then we have got the number here that the average college student has 
$20,000 of debt after going to college; plus a credit card debt, plus a 
car payment. So what we are trying to say here is that a baby born 
today has a tax on their head of at least, at least, and that is today, 
if the clock does not run, of at least $50,000 by the time they are 22 
years old and graduating.

                              {time}  2230

  Mr. Speaker, you add in inflation and the fact college tuition is 
doubling, add in all of the other factors, and the bankruptcy bill, 
which I will not go into, we are not serving our country well and we 
are not serving the next generation well when we do this. I think we 
are being very shortsighted and selfish. It sounds good; we are going 
to borrow money. Wall Street is going to make a killing on the whole 
deal. It sounds good, and sometimes if it sounds too good to be true, 
most often it is.
  Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman is so right. We 
need to boil this down in terms that people deal with every day. When 
we have these conversations on the floor, I try to zero in on the 
impact that this proposal will have on specific groups. For example, we 
have some information about the impact Social Security has on children. 
Social Security survivor and disability benefits help 6.4 million 
children. We talk about welfare assistance and TANF, which is Temporary 
Assistance For Needy Families, funding and how important a program that 
is to helping sustain the lives of millions of children, but Social 
Security survivor and disability benefits help almost twice as many 
children as welfare does. That, I think, is something that people just 
do not realize. I did not realize it until I received this information, 
and that is according to our nonpartisan Congressional Research 
Service.
  Social Security is currently the largest source of Federal funding 
that prevents children from falling into poverty. Social Security 
benefits have kept 920,000 children out of poverty, and more than one-
third of families with Social Security income would be poor without 
these benefits.
  If we look at the effects that privatization of Social Security would 
have on women, women comprise the majority of Social Security benefits. 
They represent 58 percent of all Social Security recipients at the age 
of 65, and women represent 71 percent of all beneficiaries by the time 
they are age 85. Privatization disproportionately harms women, 
especially because women really end up having much less because of the 
differences in earning potential, much less opportunity to benefit from 
Social Security when they are planning for retirement.
  There are a number of factors that leave women even more vulnerable 
to this really radical proposal. Women and poverty in old age is often 
rooted in the reality that their lives are shaped on. We earn less 
money. We are at 76 cents on the dollar compared to the same job that a 
man does. The reality of care giving, we are primarily responsible for 
caring for loved ones, both children and our older parents, and women 
have jobs more often that offer very few benefits. So women who have 
been in the workforce are far less likely to have IRAs and pensions and 
other outside extra benefits. Social Security for women ends up being 
the vast majority of the time their sole retirement benefit. So it 
disproportionately is pulling the rug out from under them.
  I think we have to talk about how these proposed changes would impact 
people. What I have noticed in the time I have been here, and this is a 
big room and there are a lot of Members, 435 of us, and we talk about a 
lot of really important issues here. At a certain point, I think 
Members of Congress forget that the decisions that we make here affect 
individual people. It is really easy to forget about that. It is easy 
to talk about numbers in the trillions, and we forget that Mrs. Smith, 
Mrs. Jones, Mrs. Goldstein, those are real people where our decisions 
hurt them. Members need to think about them sitting in their kitchens 
and scratching out how they are going to buy groceries, cover their 
medication, and pay their electricity bill.
  The report that came out from the Social Security and Medicare 
trustees 2 weeks ago shows that the crisis we should be talking about 
is Medicare and the looming problem that is going to present because 
that is what is facing insolvency. But, of course, that problem, 
according to the leadership here, has been taken care of. They took 
care of that, according to the leadership here, in the bill that took 3 
hours to twist enough arms, from what I understand, to get them to have 
the votes to pass it. I am not sure why in that legislation they would 
not have taken steps to address what appears to be the real crisis.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. The fix there to save Medicare solvency was to 
spend an additional 500 to $600 billion, not to do anything with the 
cost of prescription drugs, not to allow for reimportation, not to 
allow the Secretary of HHS to negotiate down the drug prices with some 
of these drug companies.
  The gentlewoman is exactly right. When I think of a crisis going on 
in my district right now, many of the school districts that I 
represent, half the kids live in poverty. That is a crisis because 
those kids are going to be taking from the system instead of creating 
wealth and paying taxes and contributing to the system. That is a 
crisis.
  In Mahoney County, which encompasses the city of Youngstown, there 
are thousands of kids who have lead poisoning. There are 2,000 kids, 
young kids who have lead poisoning in Mahoney County at a level by 
which it actually affects their cognitive ability which puts you on a 
level of slight retardation. It is unbelievable. Those are the crises 
we have in the country: health, education, making sure that the poorest 
among us have some kind of security.
  If Members went to Youngstown, Ohio, and tried to convince the 
residents there that the biggest crisis in the country starts in 2042, 
they would laugh at you.
  Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman is so right. I 
represent a community where it is not just the poor we are concerned 
about; it is the regular middle- to lower-middle class who are 
struggling. I have hundreds of thousands of senior citizens in south 
Florida who struggle every single day because Social Security for the 
vast majority of them is their primary source of income. They are much 
more focused. It is what I hear when I am stopped at a picnic or at the 
supermarket. They are concerned about how they are going to pay for 
their medication. Some of them cannot even make their co-payments. They 
are concerned about the increase in their premiums for Medicare that 
just happened.

  That is the handwringing that is going on. They are not that 
concerned about a problem that does not face them for another 37 years. 
Quite honestly, in the senior citizen community, most of them realize 
37 years is not something they are going to have to worry about. But 
2017 is when the Medicare trustee report says is the point at which we 
would literally be paying out more in Medicare benefits than we are 
bringing in in premiums. That is a serious problem.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. And to not do anything about cost for the 
prescriptions I think illustrates and speaks to the point better than 
anything else that too much money drives what is going on down here. 
They are not worried about Mrs. Jones and Mrs. Smith and Mrs. 
Goldstein. Sometimes the decisions here are about who raises us a lot 
of money.

[[Page H1773]]

  Mr. Speaker, who would pass a $500 billion prescription drug bill 
that is now $700 billion, $800 billion, $900 billion, we do not even 
know what the real number is, and not do anything about trying to 
control the price of prescription drugs, and then turn around and come 
in and say drugs are not the issue, cost is not the issue, Social 
Security is the biggest crisis in the country now?
  Let us not forget as we begin to start wrapping things up, we gave 
this administration a lot of leeway, a lot of rope with the war, with 
the prescription drug bill and the war that the taxpayers would not 
have to pay anything more than $50 billion because we would use the oil 
money for reconstruction and be greeted as liberators. We are going to 
be in and out, and all of the things we heard before the war turned out 
not to be true.
  Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. And the report said gross misrepresentation, 
grossly inaccurate facts when it comes to reports of there being 
weapons of mass destruction.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. And everyone who was telling them there were no 
weapons of mass destruction, they ignored them; and to now push the 
blame off on some bureaucrats is unfair. And that was the war. We all 
know that. And then the prescription drug bill started off $400 billion 
as we sat in this Chamber, because many of our fiscal friends on the 
other side of the aisle did not want to spend more than $400 billion. 
After the bill was signed, 2 months later, all of a sudden the real 
price was $500 billion and an actuary was threatened not to give the 
real numbers to Congress.
  After the election a few months ago, we find out this is going to be 
closer to a trillion dollars in cost. I am saying the track record here 
is not good for when the administration comes forward and says trust me 
because we have, we have been burnt; and we are certainly not going to 
let this happen with the Social Security system.
  Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, I want to ask the gentleman 
because the gentleman was here. The thing I talked about and heard 
about on the campaign trail last year was how we ended up with a 
Medicare bill that added a prescription drug benefit but did not allow, 
in fact prohibited, the negotiation of discounts for prescription 
drugs. I know that the VA, the Veterans Administration, already has 
that ability and drugs made available to our veterans through the VA 
are significantly less than they are on the private market. So maybe 
the gentleman can help clarify that for me because I was not here. 
People out in the real world do not understand that.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, the only answer I can come up with is 
the pharmaceutical companies did not want it. It is amazing because we 
have obviously signed numerous free trade agreements with every 
country. In my area we have been devastated by a lot of the agreements. 
All of a sudden we say if we are going to free trade everything else, 
let us free trade pharmaceuticals. As long as they have good safety 
standards, let us let them come in from Canada and drop the price down. 
But the kibosh was put on that.
  When we look at the pharmaceutical industry had three or four 
lobbyists for every Member of Congress and donated $100 million to 
Congress over the course of that period when we were negotiating that 
drug bill, the money comes in here. The pharmaceutical industry did not 
want that. So they got what they wanted. They got that language removed 
or not put in. So now the Secretary of Health and Human Services is not 
allowed to negotiate. Not only are we not allowed to bring drugs in 
from Canada, but the Secretary of HHS is not allowed to sit down with 
Pfizer and say Pfizer, Merck, if you want the Medicare drug contract 
for X drug, and of course they do, so you say we are going to talk 
price, just like any other business would do.
  Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, I thought it was very interesting 
that just last week the former Secretary of Health and Human Services, 
Tommy Thompson, in a speech to the Kaiser Foundation said it was his 
biggest frustration in the negotiations on the Medicare prescription 
drug reform bill because he believed the Secretary should have that 
ability, that the Secretary, just like they do in the VA, should have 
the ability to negotiate those discounts, and it absolutely ties the 
hands of the Health and Human Services Secretary.
  In talking about this in his speech to the Kaiser Foundation, he 
said, unfortunately, membership of the leadership of his party, 
including the President, did not agree, and he was not able to get 
through to them that that was an important component, to reduce those 
prices.

                              {time}  2245

  What we have here is we have a Social Security plan, or an outline of 
a plan, that is going to harm young people and hopefully not harm older 
people who are imminently collecting benefits or already collecting 
benefits.
  It is hard to get young people to think about when they are going to 
collect Social Security. We are having town hall meetings for younger 
people and trying to get them to come, and talk to them about why they 
should think about this, because it is not looming on the horizon of 
their lives. And then we have Medicare. We also with our generation 
have a group of people who just are not thinking about whether Medicare 
will be there for them. They just feel like they are invincible, and 
there are no major health care issues for most people in our 
generation.
  We have got to make sure that we continue to pound the drum on this 
issue and talk to as many people as we can, because if we do not, we 
will all get caught asleep at the switch. As a result, this train will 
run smack into a wall at the point in our lives when we do need to 
worry about it.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. The gentlewoman makes a great point about just kind 
of how the whole system is working right now. Basically by not having 
the Secretary of HHS be able to negotiate down the drug prices and by 
not free-trading pharmaceuticals, it is basically corporate welfare. It 
is basically public taxpayer, hard-earned money coming down here, and 
we are giving it to the pharmaceutical companies and inflated drug 
costs through the Medicare program. So we have corporate welfare going 
to the most profitable industry in the world right now. Then you give 
tax cuts to those people who make more than $350,000 a year so they do 
not have to pay. You reduce the corporate tax rate so those 
shareholders, and those people who benefit most from moving jobs 
overseas get the tax benefits there, too. And then you are cutting 
services here with Medicaid and food stamps and education, the Pell 
grant and everything that we have talked about. And now you want to go 
try to mess with Social Security.
  So if you see what is happening down here, if you take a step back 
and you see the whole process, there is all this corporate welfare 
going to all the big major corporations, they get all the tax cuts, the 
people who run those companies get tax cuts, and the rich get richer, 
and the poor are getting poorer. They say, well, that's class warfare. 
Mark Shields had a great line. He said, The war's over. The rich won. 
There is not much there anymore. But that is the way things are going, 
and that is why it is so important that at the bare minimum we keep 
that basic Social Security system in place.
  I think having discussions like we are having tonight and town hall 
meetings, I think it has been very successful. The response I am 
getting, and I know the response the gentlewoman is getting down in 
Florida, and the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek), who could not be 
with us tonight, is getting, and all our colleagues on both sides of 
the aisle are getting it.
  I yield to the gentlewoman for any final comments that she may like 
to make.
  Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Just a couple, because I think we again need 
to maybe finish up by zeroing in on the impact that this proposed 
privatization scheme would have. The private accounts do not make up 
for the 46 percent cut in benefits that would be part of this proposal. 
A 20-year-old who enters the workforce this year would lose about 
$152,000 in Social Security benefits under the Bush proposal.
  Social Security provides disability insurance that young families 
need, and there is no private insurance plan that can compete with the 
Social Security disability benefits that are offered. The cost of those 
benefits bought privately would be beyond most people's

[[Page H1774]]

ability to pay for them. For a worker in her mid-twenties with a spouse 
and two children, Social Security provides the equivalent of a $350,000 
disability insurance policy, again not one that most people can afford 
to pay out of pocket for. And suppose, God forbid, you have a young 
parent that dies suddenly. Social Security provides for the children 
who are left behind. Social Security survivors benefits will replace as 
much as 80 percent of the earnings for a 25-year-old average-wage 
worker who dies leaving two children and a young spouse. For that 
parent, Social Security survivors benefits are equivalent to a $403,000 
life insurance policy.
  What we have been trying to do in our Thirtysomething Working Group 
is explain to our generation what the reality would be in their lives 
without Social Security as a continued safety net.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Absolutely. I hope from the responses we have been 
getting, it sounds like some people are listening.
  T[email protected]. Send us an e-mail, or you can go 
to the Web site, democraticleader.house.gov/thirtysomething, and join 
in our discussion. We will be happy to read some of the e-mails. We 
have been off for the last few weeks, so maybe next week we will read 
some.
  I would also like to say before we close up, the President of the 
Ukraine, Victor Yushchenko, is going to be here tomorrow. If you had 
followed everything that was going on with the West and the Russians 
and the poisoning, it was like a soap opera going on. I think it is an 
important point for us to make, he is going to be talking to a joint 
session of Congress, his election and his uprising and his move to 
power in the Ukraine was led by young people.
  We need to continue to try to encourage, not everyone has to run for 
office, not everyone has to be involved to the extent they make a 
career out of it, but it is so important when you see what is going on 
down here day in and day out and the lack of, I think, long-term 
vision. It is important because the young people are the ones who are 
going to be involved in the system longer than all of us are because 
they are younger. It is important for their voice to be heard.
  I thank the gentlewoman from Florida. We missed the gentleman from 
Florida, but I know he will be back with us next week.

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