Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I hope not to use all our remaining time. But I come to the floor to talk about an issue that should be very important to every American. In less than 20 months, the Social Security Disability system will be bankrupt--out of money. That may sound like just a scare tactic, but that is what the trust fund trustees say. And we have known this for some time. My colleague Carl Levin, as chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and myself as ranking, have spent a great deal of time oversighting Social Security disability. We issued a report that had some pretty remarkable findings in it. I thought I would go through some of those findings today, because I have two major concerns. One is that those people with true disabilities are going to see in 18 months a 20-percent cut in what they get paid each month, and they are barely surviving on the disability payments we give them today. The second thing is the failure of the Justice Department, when handed an absolutely, totally perfect case to prosecute criminals taking advantage not only of people with disabilities but other people of this country. Social Security disability insurance is an important safety net for a large number of people--about 11 million--in this country. In the past 5 years, we have gone from 11 million to 14.1 million applications for disability--some of that is associated with our recession, but some with true injury.…”