Joe Cunningham: “I think this is a healthy dialogue that we have here today. As my colleagues know, the very first time I heard of Social…”

“I think this is a healthy dialogue that we have here today. As my colleagues know, the very first time I heard of Social Security problems was when I first came in Congress. A group came to me and said, ``Hey, Duke, do you know anything about the notch?'' And everybody that is in this body knows about the notch babies and the problems that it has precluded for most of us. Also, I do not believe that Social Security was ever meant to be a retirement system, but for many people, and not so many in my district as we have in other districts, but many of them, especially in our lower income, Social Security is all they have, and I think it would be healthy to look at a dialogue in which we enable people to have more than Social Security. I thought it was wrong in 1993 when the President increased the tax on Social Security because I think we do things backward in this country. I think we tax annuities for savings. I think we ought to give an incentive for taxing annuities, for, excuse me, for saving for our chronologically gifted years and one's time. We tax work. I think we should not tax work, but we ought to give incentive to work. But if we look, we ought to have a national dialogue in which we can allow people to plan not only for retirement, to protect the Social Security. And the first thing we did is say, ``Keep your hands off the Social Security Trust Fund. Because any time you run in a deficit, then you have to put an IOU into that account and draw it back.”