Bill Clinton: “The answer to that is, there certainly should be. There's no reason for us to let the Trust Fund run out in 2034. What I…”

“The answer to that is, there certainly should be. There's no reason for us to let the Trust Fund run out in 2034. What I have proposed to do, just so you'll know, is--what I propose to do is to allow the Social Security taxes that you pay, which presently have been covering our deficit since 1983--as big as these deficits have been, they'd have been even bigger if it hadn't been for Social Security taxes. You need to know that, because when we put the last Social Security reform in, in 1983, we did it knowing that we would be collecting more. I wasn't around then, but they did it knowing they would be collecting more than they needed, and the idea was to have the money there when the baby boomers retired, as well as to relieve the immediate financial crisis. Now, if you do that, you can pay down the debt some. But in order to lengthen the life of the Trust Fund, what I have proposed to do is, as the debt goes down, the interest we pay on the debt goes down. Obviously, you know, if you've got smaller debt, you have smaller interest payments. Well, you should know that for most of the last 10 years, about 15 cents on every dollar you pay in taxes comes right off the top to pay interest on the debt. So what I want to do, as the debt goes down, I want to take the difference in what we used to pay and what we've been paying and put that into the Social Security Trust Fund to run the life of the Trust Fund out to 2053. And I've made some other proposals and will make some more, because I'd like to see us take it all the way out to 2075. That would be, in the ideal world, we'd have 75 years in the Social Security Trust Fund. That's what I'd like to see, and I'm working on it. But if you get over 50 years, we'll be in pretty good shape, and I'm hoping we'll do that. [The conversation continued.]”