Don Nickles: “This amendment and the Vice President's proposal is one of the riskiest, maybe one of the most deceitful I have seen in…”

“This amendment and the Vice President's proposal is one of the riskiest, maybe one of the most deceitful I have seen in my years in Congress. It basically says we should have double accounting of interest. It says we are going to take the interest savings from debt reduction and apply that to Social Security, as if we are going to make Social Security more solvent. It would not do that. I will give some quotes from people who studied the proposal. One is from David Walker, Comptroller General of GAO: [The Clinton-Gore proposal] does not come close to saving Social Security. The proposal he is referring to is the Clinton-Gore proposal. Under the President's proposal, the changes to the Social Security program will be more perceived than real: although the trust funds will appear to have more resources as a result of the proposal, nothing about the program has changed. Dan Crippen, Director of CBO: Those transfers would have no effect on the ability of the Federal Government to meet the obligations of those programs. The transfer would not, as some have asserted, strengthen Medicare or Social Security. At most, they might have the opposite effect of imparting a false sense of security.”