John Shadegg: “I rise today to engage, I hope, in a discussion with my colleagues about an important issue confronting our country, and…”

“I rise today to engage, I hope, in a discussion with my colleagues about an important issue confronting our country, and it is an issue on which we have already begun a national dialogue. It is an issue that, at least before the last few months, was an issue of bipartisan concern, and that is reforming Social Security. As you know, Madam Speaker, the former President of this Nation, Bill Clinton, raised this issue during his tenure in office and noted that the Social Security program in its current structure is in trouble and in need of reform. It is facing several serious problems. One of them is the solvency of the program over time. And another is its fairness to the younger generations. There is a new idea here in Washington and a simple idea that has surfaced just within the last few weeks on Social Security reform that does not solve the entire problem in one fell swoop, but would start us on a path and would address the most egregious problem of all, and that is the structure of Social Security which simply is unsustainable in its current form. So I want to focus this discussion this afternoon largely on that new idea. It is an idea that responds as the House should respond to the concerns and the interests of the American people about what is happening with their Social Security taxes, their payroll taxes. Let me begin with some of the basics.…”