Chris Murphy: “Senator Booker, I am going to pose to you a pretty simple question here, but, first, let me lay down a little bit of a…”

“Senator Booker, I am going to pose to you a pretty simple question here, but, first, let me lay down a little bit of a predicate. You know, we have heard already some talk tonight about this extraordinary statement, but not terribly surprising, from the Secretary of Commerce, who is a close friend of the President, somebody who is very close to all of the decisions being made in the White House, where he said, you know, that if a Social Security recipient misses their check for a month, then they should not complain. My mother-in-law wouldn't complain. That is easy for him to say, you know, maybe you wouldn't complain if your son-in-law was a billionaire. You probably are not going to be harmed by missing a Social Security check if you have got a billionaire in the family. But 99.99 percent of Americans do not have a billionaire that they can get on the phone if they miss a month, and 1 month's Social Security check disappearing is a cataclysm for a lot of families. As I was listening to you, I just did a little bit of, you know, easy, back-of- the-napkin math. So the average Social Security check, on a monthly basis, in this country is somewhere around $2,000. Obviously, it varies based on how much money you put in and what your income was, but, on average, it is about $2,000. Now, some Americans have supplemental retirement income, but fewer and fewer do today because it is just not the case any longer that employers are going to provide for you a defined benefit plan.…”