30-Something Democrats

30-SOMETHING DEMOCRATS -- (House of Representatives - February 09, 2005)

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Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague so much, and I have to say that it is a tremendous pleasure to join my 30-something colleagues, my colleague from Florida and the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan). I am glad to see the ranks of the 30-somethings are expanding, especially on our side of the gender balance. No offense to my colleague. It is especially exciting that I can rejoin the Meek-Wasserman Schultz tag team that we enjoyed in the Florida legislature.

I am so glad my colleagues have been spending some time this evening talking about the significant disparities between the President's proposal and the crisis, the so-called crisis, it seeks to address and the facts. So I would like to spend a few minutes separating fact from fiction and maybe boil this down to some simple terms. Because often in Washington we talk about trillions of dollars, which is really an unfathomable amount of money. It is so hard for anyone to think about what $1 trillion means, never mind several trillion. So I want to spend a little time about what this means to real people.

Clearly, the President's proposal makes Social Security weaker, not stronger. It does nothing, as the gentleman laid out, to resolve the funding challenges that currently face the system. The President's plan costs nearly $2 trillion to implement in the first 10 years alone and several trillion more dollars each decade after that. And his privatization proposal bankrupts the entire system faster than it would, that is the term he used, which was an inappropriate term, but it literally bankrupts the system in only 15 to 20 years. And as my colleague stated, without doing anything, which no one here is advocating, we have another 50 years to go and we can still pay 80 percent of the benefits.

There is a funding gap. We all agree with that. And we have to address that funding gap. But it does not have to be closed by reducing or cutting benefits. That is a totally inappropriate solution.

The real crisis here is not in Social Security; the real crisis is the poor management of the Federal budget. That is the bottom line. We have someone here who has been mishandling the direction of the Federal budget, and it needs to be fixed.

When I see a problem in my household budget, what my husband and I do is, we make sure that we do not give that problem an overdose of medicine. When we address a problem with our budget, we address it in a way that is proportionate to the size of the problem. We give the problem not an overdose of medicine, but we give the problem an aspirin. And that is the difference here.

We saw earlier this week that the President's budget does not even cover the cost of any Social Security reform. This is despite the fact that extending the tax cuts permanently costs five times more than fixing Social Security for you, for me, for our children, and for their children. If we rolled back the President's tax breaks for just the wealthiest 1 percent, it would cover most of the funding gap right there, most of the funding gap just by the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans, rolling back their tax cut and not making it permanent.

Of course, the Bush administration today eliminated any discussion of limiting tax breaks for the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans or anyone else just to ensure Social Security's solvency.

The bottom line is that privatized accounts put Americans' hard-earned retirement savings at the whims of the stock market. I do not know too many people out there that have had a tremendous amount of confidence in the stock market these days so that they would trust their entire retirement future and the security of that to the whims of the stock market.

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Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. I thank my colleague, Mr. Speaker.

Another important point, and why the three of us are here tonight highlighting this, is because our generation needs to understand the President has laid out a rosy scenario under his proposal that simply does not exist. No group of Americans has more reason to fight the privatization of Social Security than young Americans and young workers and their families. The President's proposal cuts benefits, it pulls the rug out from underneath our retirement security, and it adds trillions to the debt.

Privatization will ultimately result in a crisis that means millions of young people will basically be forced to work into their 70s, when right now, under the current system, they could retire far earlier with a guaranteed benefit. And they would have to ultimately pay higher income taxes for the rest of their lives.

I want to talk just briefly about the simple terms that I described earlier. This is how the President's proposal hurts everyone. The costs of privatization clearly explode the national debt. Most Americans understand what happens when you run up your credit card bill and do not pay it off. It is impossible to get out from under that debt, never mind trying to get a bank loan based on the credit you have, because your credit is gone.

That is exactly what the President is doing here, essentially. He is using up America's credit, yours, mine, our children's, even our grandchildren's to fund a radical and untested program that puts the safety of America's workers and retirees at risk. That is really the bottom line. Because of the misplaced spending priorities, the national debt has grown so large that an average family of four pays thousands of dollars each year to pay down the government's debt, which is just like the interest that you pay on a credit card when you do not pay off that debt every month.

Imagine what that family is going to owe when trillions of dollars are added to their monthly statements in the form of new and higher taxes. And what do they get for all that spending? Benefit cuts, removal of their retirement security, all of which is subject to the whims of politicians and the stock market's fluctuations. And that is totally inappropriate public policy, and young Americans should be as deeply disturbed as we are.

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