Political Quotes

“I am delighted to join my good friend, the chairman of the Finance Committee, in supporting all of the measures for all of the reasons he said, but I will touch just a moment on why the public has a sense of uneasiness about Social Security, and perhaps the creation of an independent Social Security agency can alleviate that sense of fear a bit. The chairman of the committee indicated that, at the moment, we are collecting more in taxes than we pay out. That was a deliberate choice, because the Chair will recall that around 1979, 1980, and 1981, we had high rates of inflation. The Social Security benefits were tied to the cost of living, and they were going up with that high rate of inflation--10, 12, 13, 14 percent. But the tax base, the revenues to produce the money to pay the Social Security benefits, was not indexed to any kind of cost of living. So we finally got to the place, in the early eighties, where we had a surplus of barely, as I recall, 2 to 3 months. If the revenue ceased to come in, we could pay benefits for 2 or 3 months, and that is it--gone. In fact, even with a bad recession and the revenues falling, we were very near to a touch-and-go situation. So we changed the system to make it more like a private insurance actuarial system in which we said we will collect more money now and set it aside so that we will have the money to pay off the baby boom when it starts to retire.”