John Shaw: “sometimes in this body it pays to read the amendment. The amendment says that at the end of the bill, insert after the…”

“sometimes in this body it pays to read the amendment. The amendment says that at the end of the bill, insert after the last section preceding the short title the following new section: none of the funds appropriated in this act for the Office of Management and Budget may be used for the purpose of implementing the final report of the President's Commission to strengthen Social Security. I do not read the word privatization in this amendment. I have read the report, the interim report of the commission. I do not read the word privatization in that report. I am absolutely dumbfounded why we would talk about the President implementing the recommendations anyway. The recommendations and any implementation is going to have to come back here to the Congress. It is us that are going to have to change the method Social Security is going forward with if it is going to be changed at all. But let us talk for just a moment about the trust fund itself. The trust fund, it is agreed by Democrats and Republicans, will not run out of Treasury bills until 2038. That is an estimate, but it is a pretty good one, and it is one we can count on. But we can also agree on the fact that there will not be enough cash coming into Social Security to pay the benefits beginning in 2016. What, then, is going to happen? The Congress is going to have to do one of several things: either raise taxes and find the money, deficit spend in order to pay off the Treasury bills, cut benefits.…”