Paul Ryan: “I would be glad to do so, but let me first thank my colleagues from Georgia, Indiana and Kentucky for talking about this…”

“I would be glad to do so, but let me first thank my colleagues from Georgia, Indiana and Kentucky for talking about this issue tonight. This is one of the most important issues facing our country, and it faces all generations; our seniors' generation, our worker generation, our children's generation and our grandchildren's generation. We have one problem that my colleagues have done such a good job of talking about, which is the insolvency problem, that when we go from 3.3 workers paying for one retiree to 2 workers paying for one retiree, or put another way, when we go from 40 million seniors to 80 million seniors within one generation, it is bringing the system to insolvency. But the real problem starts not just in 2017 but in 3 years, in 2008, when the oldest baby boomers begin retiring. That is when the revenues coming into Social Security start going down. And in 12 years, we no longer have enough money coming in to pay off all the benefits. But there is one more problem that is coming to Social Security that we also want to fix, in addition to making the program solvent, and that is we want to make this program generationally fair, and it is not right now. Take me, for example. My mom is 70 years old and she gets about a 5 percent rate of return on her payroll taxes that she paid when she worked. It is a good deal for current seniors.…”