Judd Gregg: “I rise to discuss again what I consider to be the single largest quality-of-life issue we have confronting us as a…”

“I rise to discuss again what I consider to be the single largest quality-of-life issue we have confronting us as a nation. That is the issue of how we pay for my generation, the baby boom generation, which is about to begin to retire and the effect our retirement as a generation will have on the capacity of our children to be successful and have a quality of life that is equal to what we have had as a nation. We confront a conundrum. The baby boom generation has been the most productive and most resilient generation in the history of the Nation. As a result, through each decade of its growth, beginning in the 1950s when it added a lot of elementary schools, right through the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and into the 2000s, when it created a huge engine of economic activity in this country because there are so many of us, so highly educated and so aggressive as a productive engine for the whole Nation, we have been able to contribute to society and to our Nation the highest quality of life in the history of our Nation--in the history of the world, for that matter. But now this generation, which is the largest generation in our history, is going to begin to retire. All of the retirement systems were built up over the years in order to benefit people who retire in our Nation, to make sure they can retire with dignity, Social Security, Medicare and, to a lesser extent, Medicaid.…”