Maurice Hinchey: “Well, thank you very much. I want to express to you my appreciation for you engaging and initiating this discussion…”

“Well, thank you very much. I want to express to you my appreciation for you engaging and initiating this discussion here. It's something that's very important; it's something that needs attention, and it certainly needs relief. As I think we all know, we are facing-- involved in one of the most serious economic crises in the history of this country. We haven't had an economic downturn as serious as this one since the Great Depression, which happened in 1929 and ran through the thirties. One of the most interesting things about the way in which this economic recession has come about and continues is the failure, in fact, in many ways, the refusal of responsible people to understand what happened back in the 1930s and the relationship between what's happening now, the kinds of circumstances that caused that Great Depression similar to the circumstances that are causing this deep recession that we are experiencing now. And it's only a recession because we have Social Security now, which went into place after the Depression in the 1930s as a means to sort of fight against that Depression, and a number of other things which were engaged in to try to deal with it effectively. There are a lot of people who are trying to eliminate some of those effective things. In fact, we had a President recently come in and say that we should privatize Social Security.…”