Marcy Kaptur: “Social Security, our Nation's largest retirement insurance program, is supposed to be one leg of a three-legged stool of…”

“Social Security, our Nation's largest retirement insurance program, is supposed to be one leg of a three-legged stool of retirement security for all Americans. The other two legs are private savings, private savings like certificates of deposit, for example, and private pensions like IRAs and 401(k)s, or defined benefit and contribution plans. However, in an age when personal savings are virtually nonexistent, and company pensions are being scaled back or often stripped away, Social Security has become the basic retirement insurance plan for most Americans, and surely for women. That is one reason why we have to protect it from those who would harm it. Unfortunately, President Bush wants to dismantle the one guaranteed element of retirement income that Americans have, by privatizing Social Security, by making retirement security a gamble. In fact, he is borrowing down the Social Security trust fund to mask huge shortfalls in other places in his budget.”