Roscoe Bartlett: “when my colleague noted the unfunded liability for Social Security, that depends on when we put the money into the…”

“when my colleague noted the unfunded liability for Social Security, that depends on when we put the money into the system. The earlier we put the money in, the longer it will collect interest and the less we have to put in; but I have seen some data which indicates that Social Security, if we put no money in, it will run in the red something like $100 trillion during the retirement of the baby boomers. These are big, big numbers. Neither Medicare nor Social Security are solvent for the long haul. We must address both of those. The encouraging thing is that today we can talk about Social Security. Five years ago to mention Social Security was interpreted by seniors as being a threat to Social Security and they would vote against you. So we could not even talk about it 6 years ago, but now we are talking about Social Security. We have not done anything about it, and I am sorry that some people believe that the lockbox had anything to do with Social Security. The only thing it could possibly have to do with it is we have paid down something of the public debt which might make us more debt worthy so that we could more easily borrow money, but I have not noticed we had any problem borrowing money. That is the only possible link we could make between the trust fund lockboxes and Social Security.”