Sylvester Turner: “it sounds like to me if the gentleman's constitutional amendment had been the law in the Federal Government, that the…”

“it sounds like to me if the gentleman's constitutional amendment had been the law in the Federal Government, that the trust funds of the Federal Government would be just like the trust funds that I am familiar with from my service in the Texas legislature. Because at the State level, and I suspect in every State in the union, when they set up the State employees' retirement trust fund and the teacher retirement system trust fund, the legislature actually puts dollars into those funds that are truly locked away and invested over time in real assets that are earning interest and increasing the value, the cash asset value of those trust funds. But because in Washington, we created trust funds that we allowed the government, the Congresses of years past to borrow from to do other things, what we are left with in Washington is trust funds with no cash, with no investment value, other than the fact that they hold an IOU, a Treasury obligation that does earn interest, but ultimately can only be paid through the taxing power of the Federal Government, because there is really no money there to pay the benefits that are guaranteed to the Social Security recipients, to the Medicare recipients, to the Federal employees who retire, to the military retirees. It is the taxing power of the future that will have to be used to honor those commitments.”