[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 147 (2001), Part 10]
[House]
[Pages 14014-14015]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



             BRINGING SOCIAL SECURITY INTO THE 21ST CENTURY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Kerns). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio) is recognized for 5 
minutes.
  Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, today the scare tactics began. A year ago 
today we had in hand a Social Security Trustees' report that was 
actually kind of optimistic. Things were looking up for the system. The 
day in which it would not be able to pay 100 percent of benefits was 
put off until the year 2039. That is, Social Security had in hand, 
under conservative estimates, enough money from our taxes, from the 
taxes of working people, not the wealthy, because they do not pay on 
any income over $80,000, but the working people had put enough money in 
the trust fund to secure it through the year 2039.

                              {time}  1045

  No question. After that, with no changes, under pessimistic 
assumptions, it would only be able to pay 73 percent of the benefits. 
But here comes the Bush administration and the so-called Bipartisan 
Commission on Social Security loaded with people who have been trying 
to destroy the system, including, sadly, a couple of Members of the 
House and Senate who are ostensibly Democrats for more than a quarter 
of a century. They are doing the work of Wall Street.
  Wall Street cannot wait to mandate that individuals put money into 
individual accounts. When they can charge 250 million people a little 
bit of money to maintain accounts, they make tens of billions of 
dollars. Guess where the tens of billions of dollars comes from? It 
comes from future benefits that people would have realized under the 
current system.
  This document is extraordinary in that it echoes Treasury Secretary 
O'Neill. It says that the United States government might not honor the 
trillions of dollars of obligations it has in special bonds to the 
Social Security Trust Fund. They are saying the crisis starts the day 
Social Security has to begin drawing on the funds, the savings we have 
put aside for our retirement.
  The Bush administration is questioning whether the full faith and 
credit of the United States government will be delivered on those 
debts, those obligations. If that is true, everybody around the world 
and across the United

[[Page 14015]]

States better begin cashing in their Treasury bonds. If the United 
States Treasury in 2016 under the leadership of President Bush and 
Secretary O'Neill does not put the full faith and credit of our 
government behind those depository instruments, money that we, the 
working people, have paid into the Treasury for our retirement, then we 
are in bigger trouble than I thought.
  Mr. Speaker, this is an unbelievable distortion of the facts. There 
is a simple solution to the Social Security problem, but we will not 
hear it from this administration or Secretary O'Neill who is worth 
hundreds of millions of dollars, or President Bush who is worth tens of 
millions of dollars, because it would require that they pay the same 
amount as every other American. They would rather talk about defaulting 
on the obligations of the Federal Treasury to honor Social Security 
Trust Funds than talk about the easiest way to solve this problem: Make 
every American pay the same amount of Social Security tax on every 
dollar they earn. They consider that a radical proposal.
  If that one simple step were taken, if we lifted that cap, if people 
who earned over $80,000, that small percentage of the people, if they 
paid in the same Social Security that a minimum wage earner pays, a 
flat tax, I hear from the other side of the aisle, give us a flat tax. 
When I suggested this to the Republican chairman of the Committee on 
Ways and Means, he almost had a stroke. Oh, no, not a real flat tax. We 
are talking about a flat tax that cuts taxes on the wealthy, not a flat 
tax that would give them the same obligation to pay as working people.
  If we took that one step, Social Security under current assumptions 
would be solvent forever; and, in fact, there would be so much money 
flowing into Social Security that we could give a tax break to working 
Americans. We could say you do not have to pay any Social Security tax 
on the first $4,000 or $5,000 of income, a big tax break to minimum 
wage people and others at the lower end of the spectrum.
  Mr. Speaker, all we have to do to secure the future of Social 
Security is just say, hey, the Bill Gates of the world and all of those 
other people earning hundreds of millions of dollars, the head of 
Enron, the company which is ripping off ratepayers by manipulating 
energy prices, he got $123 million in stock options this year. If he 
paid Social Security taxes on that, on $123 million, tens of thousands 
of Americans would be assured that their retirement would be made good.
  The scare tactics have begun, and the American people are not going 
to stand for it.

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