Tom Coburn: “The point we are saying is we do not truly have a surplus until we quit borrowing money external to the United States.…”

“The point we are saying is we do not truly have a surplus until we quit borrowing money external to the United States. Until our debt stops rising we have not achieved a surplus, and it is not proper to tell the American people that our books are balanced until we quit adding to the debt for our children and grandchildren. We have three options when we get to the year 2014 at that time. We can, one, save 100 percent of the social security surplus, transition to a system with a portion of that in individual accounts, so that what we invest in social security we get a decent return on. Right now the average over the past 30 years has been about 1.2 percent on our investment. We could have had it in a passbook savings and done three times better. Number two, we can repay the money taken from the trust fund by raising everybody's income taxes, and it is important to understand what that does. That lowers the standard of living for our children and our grandchildren, because the politicians in Washington have not had the courage to be honest and not spend money that belongs to the social security system. Or we can delay the benefit structure. We can say we are going to wait until we are a certain age, or we can cut the benefits. There are only three things that we can do to fix social security. There are not more than three things to do. We have to do one of those three things.”