Tina Smith: “The fact is, the solutions are not easy. There is a little pain in all of the solutions simply because of the statistics…”

“The fact is, the solutions are not easy. There is a little pain in all of the solutions simply because of the statistics where the demographics mean that there are fewer people paying into the Social Security tax and people are living longer. So when we have a program that takes current workers' taxes and uses that money to pay for current retirees and we have a situation where people are living longer to increase the senior population and the number of people working is reduced in terms of their portion of the senior population, it becomes a situation where insolvency is inevitable, and the solutions are tough. There are a lot of solutions. We are going to talk about them, but tonight I am sort of going to start from scratch of what the background and the solutions are.”