Ed Markey: “Thank you, Madam President, very much. I am very proud to be a cosponsor of the SAVE Benefits Act. I think we owe an…”

“Thank you, Madam President, very much. I am very proud to be a cosponsor of the SAVE Benefits Act. I think we owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Senator Warren, my colleague from Massachusetts, for the legislation she has introduced because she is going to make sure the Social Security benefits for seniors, for veterans, and for those who are disabled will be protected, and I applaud her for the enormously innovative way she has framed this debate for our Nation. The Social Security Administration has recently determined that seniors will not receive an increase in their benefits for the next year. That means approximately 70 million American seniors, veterans, and the disabled will not receive any increase in their benefits, including the 1.4 million people in Massachusetts who are dependent upon these benefits. That is completely unacceptable. What Senator Warren has done is to say that for these seniors, for many of them, Social Security is their sole basis for having any income at all, and for most seniors it is the majority of their income in their retirement. Those seniors depend on these benefits to pay for food, rent, medicine, and the electricity bill. In their world, prices for food, clothing, and medicine are not going down, they are going up. These are the necessities of life, and our seniors should not have to choose between eating and heating. We have a simple question to ask ourselves: Who contributed most to our country over the last generation?…”