Karen Thurman: “Social Security is a very important issue, and certainly I think she laid out to the public what is happening here in…”

“Social Security is a very important issue, and certainly I think she laid out to the public what is happening here in Congress. And I agree with her that we should not be spending the Social Security money on anything other than Social Security. And quite frankly, this is something that almost every Member of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, agreed to last year by overwhelmingly passing the lockbox for Social Security and Medicare. Unfortunately, as has been pointed out, the Social Security trust funds would lose two-thirds of its surplus under the President's budget. And the Congressional Budget Office projects that $740 billion of this money would be used to fund things other than Social Security benefits such as the tax cuts. In the Nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, they estimate that the size of the tax cut is more than twice as large as the Social Security financing gap. So we could have used these resources that we were talking about and we continue to talk about to actually fix the Social Security instead of being used for this tax cut.”