Gilbert Gutknecht: “Just for the Members who may not know, these are principally people born between the years 1917 and 1926. And there is…”

“Just for the Members who may not know, these are principally people born between the years 1917 and 1926. And there is almost something cynical about this. Most of my seniors are not particularly cynical people, but it does almost seem as if Members of Congress in the past said, well, if we just let this thing go eventually all of these people will die off, and it is not a problem anymore. I hope that we are bigger than that. I hope we are better than that. I think, hopefully, we can find the funds this year within the budget to take care of those people. I would also like to talk a little bit about how important and the work that has gone, and I am not certain how many of your slides you have shown tonight talking about the seriousness of the debt and how far we have come. I think we need to remind ourselves once in a while that under the old accounting standards, and going back to about 1964, and what we call the unified budget, we have literally taken those excess Social Security funds and used them to mask the deficit. Now, some people say that happened because people back in the mid- 1960s wanted to hide the cost both of the Vietnam War as well as the great society. And this was a way of being able to spend the money without having to recognize the trust fund obligations that we had ultimately to Social Security. So I think the time has come, because we have come so far with balancing the budget. We have eliminated over 300 programs.…”