Karen Bass: “I, too, join him in expressing the fact that I am proud of this Congress for what we have done today and what we have…”

“I, too, join him in expressing the fact that I am proud of this Congress for what we have done today and what we have done for the last 10 months of this year. As a member of the Committee on the Budget, we began the year seriously wondering whether or not we were going to have the integrity and the fiscal discipline to put aside the money that we need to put aside to save Social Security. I recall early on in the year going through hearings which within the Committee on the Budget we debated how we would go about doing it, understanding that in the previous year we had committed 90 percent of our surplus to saving Social Security and the President had called for putting aside 100 percent of the surplus for Social Security. Then in his State of the Union address, he had said, well, let us put 60 percent of the surplus aside for Social Security and to this day he says that we should try to put as much as we can aside for Social Security. Make no mistake about it. The Committee on the Budget made a commitment along with the leadership to put 100 percent of the receipts from the Social Security taxes plus all the interest which is accruing to the Social Security system aside, and that is a number that is in excess of $120 billion. Indeed, that goes to paying down the debt.”