Political Quotes

“I am going to talk for 5 minutes on the challenge that faces this Congress and America in terms of the growing debt and the growing unfunded liabilities. "Unfunded liabilities" means the promises that government has made, but it needs money to come from someplace to keep the promises we have made, and Social Security is one of those promises. We started Social Security in 1934, and Congress in effect said that instead of people going over the hill to the poorhouse, like they did after the Great Depression money should be saved for retirement, Franklin Delano Roosevelt said let us have a program where we have forced savings during your working years, and that will give you more security, "social security," in your retirement years. So we started the program in 1935, and it was based on current workers paying in their taxes to pay for benefits for current retirees, sort of a pay-as-you-go program. I like the cartoon where Uncle Sam was explaining this to a young worker how Social Security worked, and said, "Well, now, here is a list of names. You put your name on the bottom of the list. You pay everybody on the top of the list, and eventually your name will be on the top of the list and everybody below you will be sending you a check in your retirement." It is a pay-as-you-go program, sort of like a chain letter.…”