[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 6]
[House]
[Pages 8395-8396]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                            SOCIAL SECURITY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Petri). Pursuant to the order of the 
House of January 4, 2005, the gentleman from California (Mr. George 
Miller) is recognized during morning hour debates for 5 minutes.
  Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, this last weekend I 
held a town hall meeting on Social Security in my hometown of Martinez. 
I must say that the audience was quite stunned to learn that not only 
was President Bush continuing his drive for the privatization of Social 
Security, which would borrow trillions of dollars from the Social 
Security trust fund and drive it deeper into debt and imperil its 
opportunities to achieve solvency, but now he was offering something 
called progressive indexing, which would be a substantial cut in 
benefits under Social Security to middle-class recipients.
  They were quite stunned to learn that those individuals who pay into 
Social Security every week from their paychecks, every month from their 
paychecks and all year long from their paychecks, that the President 
was now suggesting that they should take a cut in their benefits as a 
way of restoring solvency. They were not just stunned that the 
President was suggesting this one-two assault on Social Security, but 
they were also quite alarmed to learn that the President apparently has 
no intention of paying back the some $700 billion that his 
administration has borrowed from the Social Security trust fund, that 
the trust fund is, in fact, not being honored, the people that pay into 
that trust fund every year to the tune of some $160 billion, that that 
money is now being taken out to use for other functions of the 
government, whether it is the war in Iraq or whether it is the general 
spending of the government.
  It is very clear that they want that trust fund restored. It is a 
trust fund. They are paying into it because they believe that that 
money is going to be put there, loaned to the government, replaced by 
Treasury bills, but it will be there for their use, for their annuities 
that they are buying every week when they pay into the Social Security 
fund.
  But that is not what the President is suggesting. The President is 
suggesting, as he does in the budget that this House passed last week, 
that he will continue to borrow $160 billion out of the trust fund and, 
as he said when he went to West Virginia, it is really not a trust 
fund, there is no trust there, so apparently he is the first President 
since we started Social Security who has suggested that he may not pay 
the trust fund back.

[[Page 8396]]

  That is just unacceptable to my constituents at the town hall in 
Martinez. I think it is unacceptable to the overwhelming number of the 
American public who believe that the reason they are paying into Social 
Security is so that they can have some level of financial security upon 
their retirement.
  Social Security, for the current retirees, supplies over half of 
their retirement income. Sure, we all want to make it easier and better 
and more likely that Americans will save for their retirement. But that 
has not happened. Hopefully it will happen in the future. But Social 
Security is a very important part of people's retirements. When they 
look at the efforts by corporations to get rid of their retirement 
plans, when they look at the difficulty they are having as middle-class 
families to save not only for their child's education but for their 
retirement, they recognize how important it is that the Social Security 
trust fund be maintained.
  But now this President comes along and suggests that that is not the 
case, that he is going to put an assault on that trust fund with the 
privatization of Social Security and then he is going to come along and 
cut the benefits to middle-class Social Security recipients who have 
paid into that trust fund throughout their entire working life. I think 
it is very clear that not only is this plan unacceptable to the vast 
numbers of Americans who have had a chance to take a look at it, but 
hopefully it will become unacceptable to this Congress as stewards of 
that trust fund.
  But first and foremost, what the American people want us to do is to 
stop taking the money out of the trust fund to fund the rest of the 
government. We have got to honor what we set out to do in 1983 under 
the bipartisan agreement of Speaker Tip O'Neill, an icon of the 
Democratic Party, President Ronald Reagan, an icon of the Republican 
Party, when they sat down and hammered out a bipartisan agreement.
  Part of that agreement was to create a trust fund, not some honey pot 
that any Member of Congress could go into and take out for whatever 
purpose they want but a trust fund for the retirement of millions and 
millions of Americans and their families.
  It is important that we honor that, Mr. Speaker.

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