Kent Conrad: “We really have very substantial responsibility to the American people on our collective shoulders.”

We also increase the payroll tax very modestly, from the current combined rate of 12.4 percent to 13.4 percent over 10 years.

I wish I could look you in the eye and say, you know, if we just had the will, we could reverse this, and we could go back to a time when defined benefit plans were on the increase. I do not think that is in the cards.

Can I just respond quickly, Mr. Chairman, and say when Simpson-Bowles went down, a group of six of us in the Senate, three Democrats, three Republicans, were asked by leadership to see if we couldn't come up with a way forward to adopt the…

You know, we did have discussions. One of the things on this commission, because of its makeup and the diversity of views on this commission, and the extraordinary difficulty of coming together on Social Security, which we thought was the…