Tom Coburn

Mr. Chairman, again, what the gentlewoman just said is it is against the Federal law to use Federal dollars for abortion, but in fact when the FDA approves a drug whose sole purpose is to kill unborn children, that is spending Federal…

I want to seriously question what was just said, and I want to quote: ``The Obey amendment affirms the value of American families.'' Sending $100 million of Social Security money to Jordan is affirming the value of American families? The…

All that is is Washington double-talk. What that is saying is we cannot deliver services more efficiently. What we are hearing is hearing an appropriator say we do not want to cut spending. The Federal Government is not efficient. Nobody…

Absolutely. And it needs to be raised and continue to be talked about so that Washington hears. I know what that answer is in the American public. It is the same everywhere. ``Get your hands off my Social Security money. Make the hard…

And the other answer to that is, when are we going to start? And we have to start now. Now is the opportunity. The American public is awake and knows that there is a problem with Social Security. It is time to be totally honest about that…

What the gentleman is saying is, if we had had a 12 percent rate of return rather than 6/10ths of 1 percent of real rate of return, we would not have a problem with Social Security.

Let me make a little correction. We hope to achieve real surpluses if the tendency of Washington is restrained to throw money at everything, and so that is our job. We are going to be talking here in a little bit about how what the…

If I can interrupt the gentleman, the difference between what we borrowed and what the deficit was is what we stole from social security.

This is a nonpartisan group. This does not have anything to do with Republicans or Democrats. This has to do with our international relations and our assessment of human rights status, and we do this on every country that we deal with, it…

This is from the United States Department of State Report on Human Rights Practices for 1998. This is our government's own evaluation of these two countries.

One cannot tell which is which from these excerpts from the Human Rights Report.

Let me just summarize. We have about 30 seconds left. A surplus is a surplus is a surplus if it reduces the debt, reduces the debt, reduces the debt. We need to not allow anyone to spend the first dollar of Social Security on anything…

This next chart kind of brings it home. Every man, woman and child in 1997 owed $19,898. That is the debt divided by the population. In 1998 it went up to $20,123. This year, under the budget that we are operating now, the appropriation…

One of the things we want people to understand about this is this concept of surplus. I have a little history for us and a little proposal for what we have today. It makes sense, if we have a surplus, that the national debt should not go…

If we borrow the money from Social Security and we buy off treasury bills, we really do not lower our debt. We still pay the same amount of interest, we are just paying it to ourselves, but our children are still going to have to pay it…

Reclaiming my time, let me reemphasize first, if I can, four options. One, save the money. Do not spend any of the seniors' Social Security money by growing the government. Number two, raise taxes. Number three, cut benefits. Number four…

Actually the Social Security Administration, since 1955, gives a real rate of return of 0.6 percent.

So what are our options? Three are listed here, but there is four. The first is we can save 100 percent of seniors' money. Remember, when we do that, when we save 100 percent of seniors' money, we are doing two things. We are following the…

Let me just jump in here for one second. I want to make sure the American people understand. We do not really care who gets the credit. Right now what we are concerned about is our grandchildren, because if we steal social security money…

We are about to run out of time. I just want to leave the American public with something that Martin Luther King said in his last speech at the National Cathedral. He said that cowardice asks the question, is it expedient? And we have seen…

And that means we have to be honest about what the numbers are. We cannot use this as a political tool to win a political race. We have to be honest. This should be above politics. This should be above, about keeping our commitment to our…

So let me ask the gentleman from Michigan a question. Can we solve the Social Security problem and can we meet the obligations to seniors in this country and can we do that honestly?

That to me says we certainly do not want to waste this money and that we want that in the green so they will have more of that flexibility. And that is the contrast here. Hundreds of billions of dollars of additional Social Security being…

Let us say that in a little plainer words. If you put X amount of dollars into Social Security and you were born in 1970, what that says is you would have to live to be 110 years old until you got that money back. That is not in real…

The whole idea is with a guarantee that nobody would ever get less than what they are committed to now in terms of Social Security. There will always be that guarantee there.