Kent Conrad: “If we had not done the first TARP, we would have faced an outright economic collapse.”

The bottom 20 percent of earners get a 35-percent increase over what is scheduled, a more than 60-percent increase over what is payable.

It takes guts to do that, and Chairman Arrington, you have certainly led the charge on having a commission.

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…

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.