Political Quotes

“There are a lot of important issues before the House this week, but I wanted to take an opportunity to raise an issue that we have been working on in our office for quite some time. We, as a body, Mr. Speaker, will be faced with an opportunity, hopefully, to resolve this issue here shortly in the next few months, and that is the issue of the Social Security disability insurance trust fund. Not a lot of people are aware--and I just read the Social Security trustees report over the summer--that the disability trust fund goes insolvent in 2016. That means millions of Americans who rely on Social Security disability benefits are looking at a situation where their benefits are going to be cut 20 percent because of the insolvency of the Social Security trust fund--2016, Mr. Speaker, that is right around the corner. When I raised this issue 2 years ago with the White House, with Jack Lew--our Treasury Secretary--in our Committee on Ways and Means hearing, I asked him 2 years ago: What is the plan? What is the solution to this problem? What I was ultimately told was this is what we are going to do: we are just going to take money from the Social Security retirement fund and move it over to the disability trust fund and bail it out. Well, in my private life in business, I knew a lot of businessowners, and what that essentially was, it is robbing Peter to pay Paul because the Social Security retirement fund is on a path to insolvency just a few short years down the road.…”