[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 62 (Thursday, May 12, 2005)]
[House]
[Pages H3241-H3242]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      THE SOCIAL INSECURITY SYSTEM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, yesterday in the interest of protecting 
Members of Congress, journalists and the general public, officers of 
the Capitol Police advised everyone to run for their lives, and we did.
  Today, I wish that a Capitol Police officer would have been on hand 
at the Committee on Ways and Means hearing to shout the same warning.
  Run for your lives is the very best nonpartisan advice that anyone 
can give the American people over the President's plan to create a 
private insecurity social system.
  The President wants the American people to cut Social Security 
benefits. His proposal would devastate the program, break the promise 
and destroy the trust made between the government and the American 
people.
  The President wants the American people to accept his word that 
privatizing Social Security is in the best interests of Main Street and 
not Wall Street.
  The President, amid much bravado, said his plan is on the table and 
his plan stays on the table, take it or take it. Since the President 
will not take private insecurity off the table, let us look at what 
else the President put on the table with his plan.
  It is the only guaranteed outcome of the President's plan: senior 
citizens retiring into poverty. We need only look back in history and 
revisit the dark and stark reality of our own past.
  Americans by the thousands retired into poverty before Social 
Security was created by President Franklin Roosevelt. They retired into 
poverty because there was no way to protect them. There was no 
security, and that is exactly what the President wants again.
  The President says he does not read newspapers. How about American 
history? Can someone in the White House please get him an American 
history book?
  It did not work. He ought to know that. Americans who have worked a 
lifetime were forced to live in poverty because there was no Social 
Security. Millions of seniors did not have the money for food, clothing 
or shelter.
  You want to revisit America in 1932? My mother still is alive, thank 
God, and she would be the first to tell you that 1932 was not good. It 
was economically and humanitarianly a disaster for America. Millions 
could not afford to eat. Millions had no home to call their own. 
Americans did not have a lifeline, much less a safety net. It was a 
dark and horrifying period of American history.
  Why in the world does the President continue ignoring history? He 
proposes a plan; no, the President demands a private insecurity social 
system. He says he will listen to any idea as long as it is his.
  So, today, the President's water is carried by the distinguished but 
misinformed chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means. I said it 
before and I say it again: The President's plan for a private 
insecurity social system is dead as disco. Nobody goes to discos 
anymore. It does not work. It does not even have those fancy twirling 
disco lights on the dance floor. The President's plan does not offer 
real benefits. It offers real cuts.
  The President's plan reflects America in 1932, a place with little 
security and a lot of greed, a place at a time when Americans suffered 
and lost hope until a great leader renewed a trust with the American 
people.
  A President, in the worst of times, created Social Security to 
provide every retired American with economic security, guaranteed, 
something this President wants to destroy.

[[Page H3242]]

  President Roosevelt created a program that is not Republican or 
Democrat. It is not east or west. It is not north or south. He 
envisioned the Nation strong because it defended the weak, stalwart 
because it valued its people, mighty because it was humble enough to 
care for the sick and the aged. No one was left behind by President 
Roosevelt.
  This President will leave tens of millions behind in a risky scheme 
that rewards the greed of Wall Street while it destroys the values of 
Main Street.
  Americans will not be better off with the President's private 
insecurity social system. Americans will be as vulnerable again as they 
were at the darkest economic moment in our history. It will be back in 
the arms of Wall Street.
  The President offers no plan and no choice. The President offers only 
a stark reality: Slash the benefits right now, and he put it right out 
there a couple of days ago in his news conference; and also cut your 
bond with the American people; cut the ties that bind us together; 
destroy the trust and certainty that senior citizens will not retire 
into poverty because we will not let them. They cannot, if Mr. Bush has 
his way.
  There is only one course open to the Congress and the American 
people. If the President will not remove the private insecurity social 
system from the table, then the American people should remove the 
table. Throw it away before somebody gets hurt. Remove it from 
America's house because it does not belong there.
  We are a Nation of people who want our children and grandchildren to 
have an opportunity for more than we had. We will be the first 
generation to expect our children to have less because we planned it 
that way.
  The President wants to create a Nation of people wanting for the 
basics of food, clothing and shelter. We lived through that once. We do 
not need to live through it again.
  FDR was right in 1935, and he is right in 2005.

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