Political Quotes

“I am going to present sort of a tutorial on Social Security, and if my audience listens up, if they can stick with me for the next 25 or 30 minutes, they might know as much about Social Security as a lot of individuals in Washington, which is probably one of our most successful programs, but probably one of the programs that is most at risk as we continue to overspend, as we continue to have government take the surplus coming in from the Social Security taxes and spend them on other programs. Social Security is the largest Federal expenditure. As we view this chart, we can see Social Security is now spending 22 percent of the total Federal budget, 22 percent. This is more than defense, more than all of the discretionary programs of the 13 appropriation bills that we are agonizing over, more than all of the other entitlements put together, more than Medicare and Medicaid combined. Social Security is spending $475 billion this year in 2003. The risk to Social Security is that we are faced in the demographics of having the baby boomers retire. So 76 million baby boomers are going to start retiring in 2010, and that means they stop paying into the Social Security tax and they start taking out at the highest rate.”