Frank Pallone: “Seniors understand, when we talk to them and when we have town meetings, that there is essentially no surplus; that the…”

“Seniors understand, when we talk to them and when we have town meetings, that there is essentially no surplus; that the so-called surplus that we talk about is essentially what is owed to Social Security, and that we have to pay back a lot of money to the Social Security trust fund over the next 5 or 10 years if we are to have enough benefits to pay out to Social Security recipients. That is why this Republican tax proposal is really the wrong way to go. What will happen, essentially, is that we will, in fact, increase the debt and, ultimately, may have to raise taxes in order to provide the benefits that Social Security recipients need. So what I say is we spent a lot of time last year on a bipartisan basis to pass a Balanced Budget Act. We have a balanced budget, but we still have this problem that we have to pay back Social Security. We do not have a surplus. We do not have one to spend. Let us not, in the few weeks we have here in this Congress, waste our time trying to kid the American people that somehow we are going to give them tax relief. It is not really there to spend.”