[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 11]
[Senate]
[Pages 16754-16755]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




               STRENGTHENING SOCIAL SECURITY ACT OF 2013

  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, this past Monday I visited a senior center 
in Youngstown, OH, and met with seniors and others, talking about what 
they hear as threats to Social Security. They hear some of the wise 
people in this town, if you will--some of the people on television and 
the political pundits and the economists and the newspaper editorial 
boards--saying that we need to restructure entitlements or reform 
entitlements, and that scares them because they don't get very 
specific. They often, in those statements about reforming entitlements, 
don't--the people saying it and the reporters asking the questions 
don't really scratch underneath the surface and say: What does that 
really mean? It usually means cutting Social Security benefits, but 
more on that in a second.
  I spoke with a woman named Gloria, a 70-year-old widow, currently 
living in subsidized housing. She has lived on Social Security since 
her husband's death. Her benefits barely cover the costs of housing and 
groceries, not to mention health care. She told me that without Social 
Security, she would not know what to do to be able to get along in her 
life.
  We owe it to our children and our grandchildren to deal with this 
Nation's deficit. That means everything from eliminating farm 
subsidies--the directed payments we are doing in the farm bill, and 
Senator Thune and I wrote the language to do that. It means closing the 
carried interest loophole for Wall Street hedge fund managers. It means 
eliminating tax breaks for oil companies and stopping the idiotic--for 
want of a better term--practice of encouraging and enticing, through 
the Tax Code, companies to actually invest overseas, so that if you 
shut down a plant in Steubenville or Toledo and move it to Wuhan or 
Xi'an, China, you actually can get tax breaks to do that.
  I am a grandfather a couple of times and about to be a third time. I 
guess as we get older, we look at the world, not surprisingly, from a 
different perspective. I see, because of Social Security and Medicare, 
that hundreds of thousands, millions of Americans get to spend more 
time with their children and grandchildren. That is because of Social 
Security and Medicare. Forty-five years ago, before Medicare, 48 years 
ago, half of America's seniors did not have health insurance. Today, 99 
percent have it. We know that means people live longer, healthier 
lives. It means not just that they get to see their grandchildren, 
which is the pleasure and the delight of almost all grandparents, it 
also means they get to impart their wisdom and knowledge and values to 
their grandchildren.
  Margaret Mead once said wisdom and knowledge are passed from 
grandparent to grandchild, because there is this sort of natural 
tension--or there might be--between children and parents, but between 
grandchildren and grandparents it makes for a richer society. Because 
of these two Social Security programs, Medicare and Social Security, we 
are a richer, better country.
  Today, 63 million Americans receive Social Security benefits. In my 
State it is 2 million. Let me give a couple of statistics, because this 
is really a moral question of what we do with our retirement system. 
For two-thirds of seniors, Social Security is more than half of their 
income in my State and in the State of the Senator from New Hampshire, 
who is sitting here. In the State of the Senator from Connecticut it is 
not much different. No State is much different from this. Social 
Security provides more than half of the income for about two-thirds of 
seniors. For more than one-third of seniors, Social Security provides 
essentially 90 percent, or all, of their income. For one-third of 
seniors, without Social Security, they would have zero or close to zero 
income.
  It lifts 15 million Americans out of poverty. In my home State of 
Ohio, if Social Security did not exist, almost half of seniors would 
live in poverty.
  Looking forward, improving Social Security's adequacy is the best way 
to address the retirement crisis. That is why I am working with Senator 
Harkin and Senator Begich and Senator Hirono and Senator Schatz on the 
Strengthening Social Security Act.
  My colleagues will talk about strengthening Social Security, but what 
do they mean by that? They usually mean that strengthening Social 
Security means we make cuts in benefits. Those cuts in benefits can be 
raising the retirement age, it can be something called the chained CPI, 
which is cutting the Social Security cost-of-living adjustment. It can 
mean some kinds of means testing, so people get less, if they are a 
little wealthier. It can mean a whole host of things, but each of them 
is a cut to Social Security.
  So the debate here seems to be not: How do we make seniors' lives 
better--when a third of seniors on Social Security get almost all their 
income from Social Security. And they are not doing that great with 
Medicare either. With some of the copays and the deductibles and all 
that, some get some help that way. But the debate should not be all 
about cutting Social Security--which it really is, this whole 
strengthening. We have to strengthen Social Security, is the way they 
talk about it. We have to reform entitlements. We have to worry about 
the sustainability of Social Security and Medicare, and I do worry 
about them. But the fix is not to debate cutting these programs and 
giving these seniors less.
  As the Presiding Officer knows, defined pension benefits are less 
than they used to be. Fewer and fewer people retiring now have defined 
pension benefits. Unless they have a government job or a good union 
job, fewer and fewer and fewer have retirement benefits. Fewer people 
are able to save money because we know in the last decade savings rates 
have gone down because incomes--while the wealthy have done better and 
better and better, profits have gone up and up and up, productivity in 
the workforce has gone up and up and up--wages have decoupled with 
that. They have not kept up. That means people are saving less.
  So originally as to Social Security, you would have Social Security, 
you

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would have a pension, and the third of the three-legged stool is you 
had savings. Well, now the savings and the pension--whether it is a 
401(k) or a defined pension--are less than they used to be. So Social 
Security is more important.
  So why are we even discussing the whole idea of cutting Social 
Security? That is why we need a fairer COLA to start with. The Harkin 
bill would formalize a Consumer Price Index for the Elderly that 
calculates the Consumer Price Index, the cost-of-living adjustment, not 
the way it does now--a 40-year-old in the workplace--it calculates it 
based on a 70-year-old who is retired. A 40-year-old in the workplace 
has a very different set of expenses for their standard of living than 
does a 70-year-old. Obviously, the 40-year-old spends less on health 
care, on the average, than the 70-year-old, on the average, spends on 
health care. So we should calculate the cost-of-living adjustment that 
way.
  That is not what so many people in this body want to do. There is 
just something about a bunch of Members of Congress, who have good 
salaries, who have good taxpayer-financed health care, making decisions 
to cut Social Security and cut Medicare.
  I will close with this because I know Senator Shaheen is scheduled to 
speak and I will not take much longer.
  But I hear these self-appointed budget hawks, most of whom will not 
be relying--almost none of whom, colleagues here, will be relying--on 
Social Security to make ends meet in their retirement. I take a back 
seat to nobody in what we do about budget cuts because I have been 
involved with a lot of colleagues on both sides of the aisle on how we 
deal with budget deficits. But when you hear these self-appointed 
fiscal hawks, these so-called wise men--and they are mostly men--
talking about how we need to reform entitlements, scratch a little 
deeper. Ask them what they mean by that. They will probably say: Well, 
we can't sustain this. Ask them: Well, what do you mean by that? Then 
they will probably say: Well, we need structural reform. Ask them: 
Well, what do you mean by that? Ask them the question--what do they 
really mean? What is their idea? Their idea, almost always, is either 
raise the retirement age or cut benefits in some ways, cut the cost-of-
living adjustment, something like that.
  I will close with this. As to that townhall I was attending in 
Youngstown, I was there 3 years ago at a townhall, and a woman stood up 
and said: I have two jobs, both $9 or $10 an hour jobs. I have worked 
all my life this hard. She said: Do you know what. I am 63 years old. I 
just have to find a way to stay alive until I am 65--just for another 
year and a half--so I can have health insurance.
  Imagine. This is a woman living right on the edge. She will not have 
much from Social Security. She has no savings. She just wanted to stay 
alive until she got health insurance.
  That is why it matters so much what we do on social insurance, why it 
matters that we protect Medicare--really protect Medicare, not protect 
it by privatizing it. And it really matters why we protect Social 
Security and not ``strengthen'' the program by cutting the benefits. 
That is why our work matters. That is why it is so important we pass 
the Harkin-Begich-Hirono-Schatz-Brown bill.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor to the Senator from New Hampshire.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Hampshire.

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