Karen Thurman: “one of the things that is missed in this debate is that we watched the Social Security solvency, as well as Medicare…”

“one of the things that is missed in this debate is that we watched the Social Security solvency, as well as Medicare, increase by year. Every year we were moving ahead, not backwards. So at first when we heard about Social Security, it was going to be 2029. All of a sudden we were able to increase the solvency until 2037. The reason for that was because of a strong economy, people were working and unemployment was low. People were paying into Social Security and Medicare. We watched Medicare go from something like 2011 when we did the 1993 bill. We took some of those dollars and we transferred them into Medicare from the Social Security part of it to make sure that we could keep Medicare solvent. We pushed the number out into the future. So not only is the economy affecting us with the whole issue of whether or not we have any surplus left, but it is also reducing, because unemployment is going up, those dollars that would be going into the system that would be extending these programs. So we are really kind of getting a double whammy here. It is not like we can forget without the growth in the economy, it also dwindles the dollars that goes into these programs. So not only are we talking about what the options are, we have to try to figure out how to extend the solvency from where we are; and the best way to do that is to make the economy grow.”