Political Quotes

“I am going to talk for a little while about another dilemma facing this country, and that is the problem of keeping Social Security solvent. We developed a program back in 1934 that provided that existing workers pay in their taxes, and then immediately those taxes were sent out to retirees. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, after the Great Depression, seeing many American families going over the hill to the poor house, like Will Carlton wrote about in Hillsdale County, Michigan, where I am from, provided a program which said let us have some forced savings during your working years so you have greater social security in your retirement years. It is interesting searching the archives in which the Senate said that these accounts should be in privately owned accounts, but you can only take them out when you retire. The House, on the other hand, passed a bill which said the government should collect all of the money and then send out the money to existing retirees as those individuals reach 65 years of age. This pay-as-you-go program worked very well in those early years because there was a growing number in the workforce, and most people died before they reached 65.”