Thomas Coburn

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. I would just like to make a correction to make sure we understand. If we borrow the money from Social Security and we buy off treasury bills, we really do not lower our debt. We still pay the same amount of interest, we are just paying it to ourselves, but our children are still going to have to pay it back. So the floated public debt actually does decline, but the amount of money and the lost opportunity for our grandchildren goes up. It is important the American public knows that, because we do want to pay off the debt. We would like to leave our children debt free, but we also want to leave them debt free with opportunity.

Mr. COBURN. This is what the President agreed to in 1997.

Mr. COBURN. It will look just like that. We will be back to those original numbers.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, it is stealing money from Social Security is what it is. We are taking money that is Social Security money and spending it for new programs which will be paid back by my grandchildren and my colleagues' grandchildren at a much higher rate and at a tax rate higher than what we are experiencing today. Going to the first point of the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Gutknecht) is one of all the desires of the seniors in my district is to make sure their children have at least the same standard of living as they have had, not worse, and hopefully the opportunity. What stealing Social Security does and what running a deficit does is takes opportunity away from our children. We are stealing their opportunity. We have to be honest that, with this plan, we are going to be taking money out of the Social Security, we are going to be borrowing that money, and spending it on new programs to be paid back by our children and grandchildren.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, let me jump in here, because one of the solutions to the problem, the first solution is to restrain our spending. I have a graph up here that I want my colleagues to compare. It is, if we restrain spending, what that means is if we live within the caps this we agreed to with the President in 1997, what my colleagues will see in terms of real numbers, not hokey numbers, not supposed surplus, but real surplus and deficit, what my colleagues see is, in the year 2001, that under the CBO estimated numbers right now, we come to a real surplus just by living to the agreement that we made with the President in 1997. In contrast to that, and my colleagues also will note over here in the green that these are real surplus dollars, dollars that we can in turn turn back towards Social Security, turn back towards Medicare, turn back towards education if we get there. There is no absolute guarantee that those numbers are going to be right because we have had the longest nonwar peacetime expansion that we have had since World War II. These are estimates. So if we have a system that is going broke, we dare not trust just estimates. What we dare do is restrain our spending. Now I want to contrast that with what the President has proposed in his budget. These numbers come from his budget numbers. What my colleagues will see is, under his plan, all this red is new spending. Under his plan, with the same revenue projections, we do not come to a true surplus until 2004. So if we restrain spending between now and 2004 by living up to the agreement that we had with the President in 1997, all of this becomes all of this.

Mr. COBURN. That is exactly what we are trying to do. We are trying to say, it is time to be honest, it is time to be straight, it is time to get the hands off the Social Security money that is there and start working on a solvable solution for it but not use it to expand the government and compound the problem associated with Social Security for the future. Remember, in 2013 we are going to be coming back, somebody is going to be coming back--I am not--to the American public and if we have not done our job in this Congress about walling off the Social Security money, we are going to be asking people to cough up a ton more money, regardless of what the economic conditions are. We are going to have to do it to meet the commitments to the seniors that are out there at that time. So we have to start. We have to start today. We have to start this year, this session of this Congress and not let anybody steal the first penny from Social Security for any program.

Mr. COBURN. Let me just summarize. We have about 30 seconds left. A surplus is a surplus is a surplus if it reduces the debt, reduces the debt, reduces the debt. We need to not allow anyone to spend the first dollar of Social Security on anything other than Social Security. I hope the American public can understand what we are trying to do here is to get truth-in-government back in terms of the budgeting process, so that we can start the process of saving Social Security. We will never start that process until we make the firewall and get our hands off the money that is coming in today. Does the gentleman from South Carolina have any closing comments?

Mr. COBURN. I appreciate the gentleman's help.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Speaker, I find it very interesting that the issue of education and the issue of Social Security, not wanting to spend Social Security money for anything other than Social Security, is described as trivial. What we are going to talk about tonight is one of the most important aspects of the future of this country, and that is called honest budgeting, honest numbers, so that the American public actually knows what is going on in Washington. So what we hope to describe for you tonight are the issues surrounding the Social Security Trust Fund, the problems associated with it, how the real problem has been covered up by the Washington habit of spending more money when we do not have it. I have with me tonight, and I would like to recognize, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Hoekstra) and the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Gutknecht), and the gentleman from Minnesota is going to spend a few minutes talking about where we have been, where we are today, and where we are going.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Speaker, I am well past it.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Speaker, CBO is the accounting estimating firm that is part of the Congress that is bipartisan that studies these numbers and makes an estimate.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Speaker, it is important for everybody to understand when we hear those numbers that that includes spending social security trust fund money to offset even further a worse situation, to the tune of anywhere from $80 billion to $100 billion. So if we had been protecting our seniors' money and protecting our grandchildren's future, in those years the deficit would have been at least $100 billion higher.

Mr. COBURN. Let us move in a little bit and just have a discussion about where we really stand on social security, because too many people I find do not have a realistic expectation of how big the problem is; and number two, unfortunately, the Congress in past years has not been honest with the American public about the problem, so part of our goal tonight is to really kind of dive into that. Each year this government takes in billions and billions of dollars of social security money. Last year it was about $580 billion. We paid out about $480 billion to people who were on social security, receiving social security as a benefit. What that means is that we paid in an excess amount of actually about $86 billion last year that were excess payments of social security. As we look at this chart here on the left, and notice what the source of this, this is not a Republican or a Democrat chart, this is the Social Security Administration's numbers, what we saw in this area, and we continue to see until the year 2013, more payments coming into social security than are going to be paid out. But in 2013 something big is going to happen. We are going to pay out more money in social security than is coming in. The purpose of this exercise is to get everybody to realize the size of the problem, because when we start paying out more money for social security than we take in, what will happen is one of three or four things. We will talk about that in a minute. The fact is, people who are working every day are paying money in for a social security benefit that the Congress is then taking and spending on something besides social security. So as we see past the year 2013, what happens is the area in blue is the amount of tax revenue that either has to come from the general budget or increased taxes, just to meet the obligations. If we have a 5-year-old at home this year, when they are 35, that deficit is going to be almost $800 billion per year, one and one-half times the total that we take in. The problem is big. How does the social security trust fund work now? How is it supposed to work, and what is really happening? What is really happening now is the money comes in, comes in, a paper IOU goes in, the government takes the money and uses it for a multiple of other things. Last year we did take $69 billion worth of social security money and buy off external debt, so we did lower the external debt, but it is not a true lowering of the debt, because we still have an interest obligation and we still have to pay the money back. So we did not lower the debt any. What we did was take social security money out of the trust fund and use it for something other than what it was intended for. What is going to happen in the year 2013? The money is going to come in, but we are not going to have enough money to pay. So we are going to do one of three or four things. Most likely, somebody's taxes are going to get raised to be able to meet that. How do we stop doing that? The first way we stop doing that is to be honest about what the numbers are, be honest about what the situation is with social security, and get our hands off of the social security money. Not any portion of it should go to be spent for anything other than for social security. We should not grow the government with new entitlement programs, new programs. I have not found anybody in this country who can tell me that they actually believe that this government runs efficiently. If we need to increase spending in one area, there are more than enough areas for us to decrease spending in areas that are inefficient. We eliminated 400 programs in 1995 and 1996. There are another 400 programs that need to be eliminated that do not accomplish what they were intended to, that spend more than what they were intended to spend, and have never been measured to see if they are effective. Yet, the Congress has not been able to do that because of this disguised budgetary problem. They have not seen the essence of it.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Speaker, let me say to the gentleman, I am a doctor by trade. I practice on the weekends. I delivered 97 babies last year. I fly home every weekend. But my first degree was in accounting. There is no such thing as a genuine surplus. There is either a surplus or a deficit, and one of the things we have to do is to be clear to the American public that we have not had a surplus in this country, we do not have a surplus, and we will not have a surplus unless we quit spending more money. That message has to go out. One of the main reasons that we are coming to this problem to start addressing it is because America is working, and Americans are paying a ton of tax right now. Through their hard efforts and their work, we have government revenues that are rising. We did cut $70 billion the first year we were here in spending that would have been spent. That has been extrapolated each year. That is probably worth about $150 billion that would have been spent this year that we cut, so we have done the cutting part that we could do. We need to do more to be able to get there.

Mr. COBURN. That is a great point. The government still grew.

Mr. COBURN. Let me just jump in here for one second. I want to make sure the American people understand. We do not really care who gets the credit. Right now what we are concerned about is our grandchildren, because if we steal social security money and we allow the government to grow in terms of new programs, our children, our grandchildren have very limited futures. So it does not matter. We did our job and we worked hard to try to slow the growth, but I want the American public to know that we do not have to have credit for it. The thing we want credit for is for our children a generation from now to be able to have an opportunity to have a standard of living at least to the level of the average standard of living in this country today.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, by the way, that is the false deficit.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Speaker, actually the Social Security Administration, since 1955, gives a real rate of return of 0.6 percent.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Speaker, what we can do is we can save 100 percent of the money and start working on a program that allows some flexibility in the options for the younger generation. We can do that by never threatening and never putting at risk any seniors' Social Security or any near seniors' Social Security. So we can meet the obligations that we have. We can devise a plan where we can work our way out of the Social Security quagmire that we have. I want to make one other point before I go to option two. Why are we in the problem we are in? It is not all just demographics. This body has the habit of doing things that are politically pleasing but not asking people to pay for them. So we vote increased benefits and programs but say it is not ever going to cost. What that is, it is a half truth. A half truth, my daddy always told me, was a whole lie, because all these increased benefits are going to be paid for by my grandchildren and my colleagues' grandchildren. All these benefits that have been passed and increased without accounting for a way to pay for them was an untruthful thing to do to the next two generations. It got a lot of people reelected because reelection was more important than being truthful with the American public. That is what this debate is all about, absolutely making sure they understand where we are on Social Security. Second option, we can repay the money taken from the Trust Fund, and we can raise everybody's income taxes. In 2013, the graph that you have up there, something is going to have to happen. Number three, we can decrease the benefits. We can delay the retirement age. We can raise the payroll taxes. The estimate is, if we do not do something, that the payroll taxes are going to be near 30 percent, just the payroll taxes, counting the employer's contribution in 2015 to account for this large, large deficit in the Social Security system. Then of course there is the fourth option.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Speaker, so what are our options? Three are listed here, but there is four. The first is we can save 100 percent of seniors' money. Remember, when we do that, when we save 100 percent of seniors' money, we are doing two things. We are following the obligation that we really have to the American public because they are paying Social Security taxes for their Social Security. But, number two, we are relieving a tremendous burden on their grandchildren.

Mr. COBURN. Absolutely.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. So let me ask the gentleman from Michigan a question. Can we solve the Social Security problem and can we meet the obligations to seniors in this country and can we do that honestly?

Mr. COBURN. Let me get the gentleman to yield for a minute, if he would. That to me says we certainly do not want to waste this money and that we want that in the green so they will have more of that flexibility. And that is the contrast here. Hundreds of billions of dollars of additional Social Security being spent on non-Social Security programs versus no Social Security money being spent on anything except Social Security, and when we do get to a true surplus, then deciding what we do with it.

Mr. COBURN. Let me share with my colleagues, as they both know, I practice medicine on Mondays and sometimes on Fridays and on the weekends, and I cannot use the patient's name because I would be breaking a confidence, but I am going to call her Mattie. Mattie, she has diabetes, she has hypertension, she has congestive heart failure. She is getting her Social Security. Her husband recently died. There is no way she can have on today's payment an adequate living to care for her without her children helping her out. Mr. Speaker, just to fix Social Security we are going to get back to that point, let alone meeting the obligations that we really have for our seniors. So what we are really talking about is getting people back up in the future to meeting what was originally promised and meeting that commitment, but it does not solve all our problems with our seniors. Mr. Speaker, the government cannot solve all those problems. That is why family support is so important, and this young lady, she is 86 years old, would not make it if she did not have a family.

Mr. COBURN. The whole idea is with a guarantee that nobody would ever get less than what they are committed to now in terms of Social Security. There will always be that guarantee there.