[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
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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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