[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 38 (Wednesday, April 6, 2005)]
[House]
[Page H1787]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 RAIDING OF SOCIAL SECURITY TRUST FUND

  (Mr. EMANUEL asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. EMANUEL. Mr. Speaker, yesterday the President visited the Bureau 
of Public Debt and promptly announced ``There is no Social Security 
trust fund, just a bunch of IOUs stacked in an old filing cabinet.''
  Well, that may be an old filing cabinet to you, Mr. President; but to 
middle-class Americans that is their lifetime retirement savings. It 
may be filled with just IOUs to you, but when you borrowed $700 billion 
from that trust fund, it was a very opportune filing cabinet because 
you stuck your hand in there and took $700 billion from the Social 
Security trust fund to use. It was not an old filing cabinet. It was 
not just a bunch of IOUs.
  Those are the taxes that Americans put away; the resources they put 
away for their life savings, and that is how every President and every 
Congress has treated it. It is the obligation of this Congress to 
strengthen Social Security, not to weaken it.
  For middle-class Americans and for everybody who is saving for their 
retirement, it is high time we begin to strengthen Social Security by 
paying back the $700 billion you have borrowed from it. And if you want 
to talk about IOUs, the IOUs we have run up, which is nearly $2 
trillion in debt that now Communist China and Japan own and are our 
bankers, that would be a good place to see where the IOUs are.

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