Janice Schakowsky: “I want to thank you so much, Congressman Ellison, for pulling this together, because we are in the midst of an…”

“I want to thank you so much, Congressman Ellison, for pulling this together, because we are in the midst of an incredibly important debate about how to deal with all of these fiscal issues. Mainly, to me, it's about who shall pay, not about what are the dollar figures and how do we take a little bit from this and that. It's about who exactly in our society is going to be responsible. I want to focus on the entitlements. In addition to some of our Republican colleagues--I'm talking mainly about the CEOs now, the fix- the-debt group, who say quite piously, by the way, and self-righteously that we have to cut entitlements. In listening to them, you would think that the United States of America is poorer today than it was 50 years ago when Medicare and Medicaid became part of our social contract, or 70 years ago when we created Social Security. Now they say it's unsustainable. Is it because the United States of America is actually poorer today than we were then? I wanted to quote from something in The Washington Post, an article that Ezra Klein wrote, entitled, ``Why Rich Guys Want to Raise the Retirement Age'': The first point worth making here is that the country's economy has grown 15-fold since Social Security was passed into law. One of the things the richest society the world has ever known can buy is a decent retirement for people who don't have jobs they love and who don't want to work forever. I think that's right. It's like--really?--we can't afford it?…”