Debbie Wasserman Schultz

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Florida for yielding to me. It is a pleasure to be here with my 30- something colleagues once again. I did have townhall meetings in south Florida last week. I had three townhall meetings, and more than 500 people attended those meetings. Other than two, two out of those 500 hundred, every single person left with the feeling that they were completely opposed to the President's privatization plan. They understood first and foremost that it is incredibly disturbing that the privatization proposal he has put forward does not even solve the problem. We, I think, have tried to stress as Democrats that we are not saying there is no problem, that there is a problem that needs to be addressed. But, for example, and one of the examples I used in my meetings, was that the earliest that we have a problem where we are taking in less than we are paying out is in 2042, and many of the studies show that it really could last until 2052. Our generation, when I talk to my friends at home and ask them whether they think Social Security is going to be there, they do not think it will. Let me just throw out an example. I am 38 years old. In 2042, I will be 75. I will be 85 in 2052. So that shows you that Social Security will be there for our generation. What we need to do is we need to make some changes to Social Security, shore it up, help preserve the safety net; but we need to take the time to do it right. We do not need to perform the radical surgery the President is proposing, and that was the overwhelming message I got from my constituents. Mr. Speaker, I yield back to the gentleman from Florida.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. So is their theory, if they say it enough times, it will become true?

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, I know we are using Congressional Budget Office numbers, and that needs to be understood. We are not just making this up to fit the picture that we want to show here. But the question I have is, when I sat in the Chamber and listened to the President deliver the State of the Union address, my understanding of the President's proposal was that he would try to put forward a proposal that would ensure future retirees would have more money. The illusion that he has created is that by privatizing Social Security, putting the future of Social Security into the stock market, he led people to believe Wednesday night that they would retire with more money than they would have if we left the system as it is. But each of the graphs I have seen here tonight shows consistently there is less money for each scenario, whether you are the youngest future retiree or the oldest future retiree. How are we wrong and he is right? How is it that he does not see that he is costing the government trillions of dollars, pulling the rug out from under our retirees and causing them to have less money, not more? What are we not getting here?

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, I want to bring up something that maybe has not been discussed and that is the disproportionate impact that the President's plan will have on women. Women are already starting far behind the eight ball as compared to men in their earnings. There are a number of factors that leave women even more vulnerable to this radical proposal than it leaves men. In 2003, for example, the average monthly Social Security benefit for a woman was only $798. That is $241 less than the average man's monthly retirement. Women's earnings are 77 percent relative to men back in 2002. Women who reach retirement age live, on average, at least 3 years longer than men, and Social Security is the only source of retirement income for one in three unmarried women. Without Social Security, 52 percent of white women, 65 percent of African American women, and 61 percent of Hispanic women would live in poverty upon retirement without the safety net that Social Security provides. It provides more than half of the total income for female widows and for single women. So when the President talks about the different groups that his proposal would disproportionately benefit, he does not seem to care that we would leave women in this country completely out in the cold.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. I thank my colleague, Mr. Speaker. Another important point, and why the three of us are here tonight highlighting this, is because our generation needs to understand the President has laid out a rosy scenario under his proposal that simply does not exist. No group of Americans has more reason to fight the privatization of Social Security than young Americans and young workers and their families. The President's proposal cuts benefits, it pulls the rug out from underneath our retirement security, and it adds trillions to the debt. Privatization will ultimately result in a crisis that means millions of young people will basically be forced to work into their 70s, when right now, under the current system, they could retire far earlier with a guaranteed benefit. And they would have to ultimately pay higher income taxes for the rest of their lives. I want to talk just briefly about the simple terms that I described earlier. This is how the President's proposal hurts everyone. The costs of privatization clearly explode the national debt. Most Americans understand what happens when you run up your credit card bill and do not pay it off. It is impossible to get out from under that debt, never mind trying to get a bank loan based on the credit you have, because your credit is gone. That is exactly what the President is doing here, essentially. He is using up America's credit, yours, mine, our children's, even our grandchildren's to fund a radical and untested program that puts the safety of America's workers and retirees at risk. That is really the bottom line. Because of the misplaced spending priorities, the national debt has grown so large that an average family of four pays thousands of dollars each year to pay down the government's debt, which is just like the interest that you pay on a credit card when you do not pay off that debt every month. Imagine what that family is going to owe when trillions of dollars are added to their monthly statements in the form of new and higher taxes. And what do they get for all that spending? Benefit cuts, removal of their retirement security, all of which is subject to the whims of politicians and the stock market's fluctuations. And that is totally inappropriate public policy, and young Americans should be as deeply disturbed as we are.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague so much, and I have to say that it is a tremendous pleasure to join my 30-something colleagues, my colleague from Florida and the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan). I am glad to see the ranks of the 30-somethings are expanding, especially on our side of the gender balance. No offense to my colleague. It is especially exciting that I can rejoin the Meek- Wasserman Schultz tag team that we enjoyed in the Florida legislature. I am so glad my colleagues have been spending some time this evening talking about the significant disparities between the President's proposal and the crisis, the so-called crisis, it seeks to address and the facts. So I would like to spend a few minutes separating fact from fiction and maybe boil this down to some simple terms. Because often in Washington we talk about trillions of dollars, which is really an unfathomable amount of money. It is so hard for anyone to think about what $1 trillion means, never mind several trillion. So I want to spend a little time about what this means to real people. Clearly, the President's proposal makes Social Security weaker, not stronger. It does nothing, as the gentleman laid out, to resolve the funding challenges that currently face the system. The President's plan costs nearly $2 trillion to implement in the first 10 years alone and several trillion more dollars each decade after that. And his privatization proposal bankrupts the entire system faster than it would, that is the term he used, which was an inappropriate term, but it literally bankrupts the system in only 15 to 20 years. And as my colleague stated, without doing anything, which no one here is advocating, we have another 50 years to go and we can still pay 80 percent of the benefits. There is a funding gap. We all agree with that. And we have to address that funding gap. But it does not have to be closed by reducing or cutting benefits. That is a totally inappropriate solution. The real crisis here is not in Social Security; the real crisis is the poor management of the Federal budget. That is the bottom line. We have someone here who has been mishandling the direction of the Federal budget, and it needs to be fixed. When I see a problem in my household budget, what my husband and I do is, we make sure that we do not give that problem an overdose of medicine. When we address a problem with our budget, we address it in a way that is proportionate to the size of the problem. We give the problem not an overdose of medicine, but we give the problem an aspirin. And that is the difference here. We saw earlier this week that the President's budget does not even cover the cost of any Social Security reform. This is despite the fact that extending the tax cuts permanently costs five times more than fixing Social Security for you, for me, for our children, and for their children. If we rolled back the President's tax breaks for just the wealthiest 1 percent, it would cover most of the funding gap right there, most of the funding gap just by the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans, rolling back their tax cut and not making it permanent. Of course, the Bush administration today eliminated any discussion of limiting tax breaks for the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans or anyone else just to ensure Social Security's solvency. The bottom line is that privatized accounts put Americans' hard- earned retirement savings at the whims of the stock market. I do not know too many people out there that have had a tremendous amount of confidence in the stock market these days so that they would trust their entire retirement future and the security of that to the whims of the stock market.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Chairman, the most troubling aspect of this bill is that related to asylum. Today's laws for seeking asylum are the result of lessons learned after World War II. After the war, America reflected with shame on how this shining beacon of democracy and freedom turned its back on 1,000 Jews who fled for their lives on the ship called the St. Louis. We turned the St. Louis away, not even allowing it to dock in America. It is estimated that over half of those refugees eventually died. Today, in Haiti, Cuba and other countries, thousands face death, religious persecution, torture and property confiscation. This bill virtually closes the door to those who might seek asylum in America. Let us not forget the lessons of history. I urge my colleagues to keep the doors open to those seeking justifiable refuge. Regarding driver's licenses, the 9/11 tragedy has been referred to here on this floor referencing the terrorists who obtained driver's licenses. Let me remind my colleagues that this bill would not affect that situation at all, as all of the terrorists were in this country legally and could have obtained driver's licenses regardless of this law. We should heed what Florida Governor Jeb Bush said last year when he was talking about driver's licenses for illegal immigrants. He said, ``We shouldn't allow them to come into the country to begin with, but once they're here, what do you do? Do you basically say that they are lepers to society, that they do not exist?'' He concluded by saying, ``A policy that ignores them is a policy of denial.'' I agree and I urge my colleagues to vote against this bill.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, the Students at University School of Nova Southeastern University mobilized one of the first school-based tsunami relief campaigns in South Florida upon returning to school in January. Like others throughout the world, these students were struck by the enormity of what has been described as the worst natural disaster in modern human history. In a single unified effort, students at the K-12 college preparatory school collected $26,220.74 in their 1-day fundraising drive. They called the event ``jeans day'' and contributed $5 to trade their uniforms for jeans on the designated day--Friday, Jan. 7. In addition to the $5 donations, some students brought in money they'd saved, others prodded their parents to contribute, and one elementary school student brought in her entire piggy bank. The Lower School, University School's elementary school, contributed $12,375.74. The money collected will support UNICEF's South Asia Tsunami Relief Efforts. University School is the only independent college preparatory school in South Florida that is part of a major university. The school offers programs of studies designed to prepare students for college and for effective citizenship beyond the college years. The academic environment is marked by high expectation, as students master skills, acquire new knowledge, improve their ability to think critically, and develop a sense of civic responsibility.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Madam Speaker, Libusa Breder, a Jewish prisoner, said, ``There was no God in Auschwitz. There were such horrible conditions that God decided not to go there.'' With the passage of time, it has become more difficult for my generation to grasp what happened 60 years ago. The contributions and courage of the Greatest Generation enabled my generation of Americans to grow up in peace and be the first generation in decades to live without facing conscription. In Auschwitz, at least 1.5 million innocent people suffered unfathomable pain and ultimate death. They were from many different nations, over 90 percent of them Jews. South Florida, where I am from, is home to the second largest population of Holocaust survivors in North America, the majority of whom live in my home county of Broward. The concept of ``never again'' was instilled in me for my entire life. Unfortunately, in recent times, we have had vicious criminal acts against humanity, and we must remember that we must stay vigilant and not let the passage of time weaken our resolve. We are all proud of the Greatest Generation; but with today's resolution and the anniversary approaching, we focus on the Lost Generation. It is our solemn responsibility to make sure that these lost souls did not die in vain. We must never forget what happened to them, and we must use the lessons of Auschwitz to stop modern-day atrocities such as the ethnic cleansing in Sudan. History can and will repeat itself unless we stand in the way and fight against evil.