Sylvester Turner: “It seems to me that this debate comes right back down to where the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Tanner) said we were in…”

“It seems to me that this debate comes right back down to where the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Tanner) said we were in his remarks earlier this evening. The question that must weigh on the minds, I hope, of every Member of this Congress is, are we going to leave this country in better shape for our children than we found it? And it seems to me, I say to the gentleman, that in order to do that, we are going to have to exercise some significant fiscal discipline over the years ahead. I really commend the gentleman on the presentation he has made. As I said to the gentleman earlier, he exposed, once again, the best kept secret in town up here, and that is that there is really no trust fund. And when we lock box the trust fund, all we have lock boxed is an IOU that some day is going to have to be paid by the taxpayers of this country, back into those trust funds so that the recipients of Social Security in the years ahead and the beneficiaries of the Medicare program in the years ahead will be able to have the commitment that we made to them honored and made good, and that is going to take a tremendous amount of effort on the part of this Congress and future Congresses. I hope that we have the wisdom to begin now to prepare for those very, very dire days when the baby boomers retire and the demands on Social Security and Medicare could literally overwhelm this government.”