John B. Breaux: “It shouldn't be mandatory?”

My opinion is that in order to ever reach an agreement between the two parties, Congress is going to have to combine the best of what government can do with the best of what the private sector can do and put the two together.

I will even go along with saying you can bring it back at 5 percent, if you are going to use it for job creation or research and development, for capital expenditures. And If you are going to use it to rebuild your pension fund for…

the amount that we have in so many of our programs is just incredible in comparison to this one.

I think the whole debate politically about ending Medicare as we know it, I think we want to change Medicare.