Date: 2005-04-05
Speaker: WASSERMAN SCHULTZ (democrat)
Chamber: H

Right. Stacked up would equal a foot. A billion dollars would equal the height of the Empire State building in New York. One trillion dollars. stacked up on top of each other. would be a thousand times the height of the Empire State Building. . So if you are trying to think about how much $7 trillion is. that is how large that number is. That is not something that almost anyone can get their arms around. And think about the unbelievable irresponsibility that that is. and that there currently appears to be almost no regard for that problem and how to deal with it. and no focus here on how we are going to get a handle on the sheer size of that number and shrinking it. and no realistic proposal. only conversations like that of privatizing Social Security. which are going to make that number ever larger. .It really starts to boggle your mind. Yet. when we go home. as we just did. and I spent the last couple of weeks at home going around my district and had town hall meetings. I had a town hall meeting in my district on Social Security. and it appeared as though there is an inverse relationship between the more the President talks about his vague outlines of a proposal and the more people hear about his vague outlines of a proposal. They are moving in opposite directions. In fact. for our age group. which is his target audience. because he has been assuring people 55 and over they will not have to be concerned about their continued checks and the continuation of Social Security for them. and if you believe that. which I found in my district. and I have a very large population of senior citizens who are Social Security recipients. they are very. very skeptical about how a program the size of Social Security. with as monumental a change as this would be. how it is that they can be assured that a monumental change like that is not going to affect them. So there is a healthy amount of skepticism as it is. but the target audience. which is our generation and people younger than 30 years old. the polling that has come out recently. and the Pew Research Center did a March 24 poll. which shows support for private accoiints among young adults absolutely plummeting. The more young people have heard about this proposal. the less they like it. They are more than twice as likely to oppose private accounts when they have heard a lot about it. And that is illustrative of the inverse relationship between the Presidents canned town hall meetings. for lack of a better term. Because what we .have been doing out in our districts. as Democrats. we are not ticketing our events. We are not handpicking the audience. We are saying. come on in and talk to us about Social Security. Let us talk to you about what we hear about this proposal. and you tell us what you think. What is going on in the Presidents meetings is he is saying. do you agree witt me? Oh. okay. you can come in then. and booting people who do not agree with him. That is really not very deniocratc. It does not show a real ability or desire to actually get input. It is more my way or the highway politics. which is not the way we should be shaping this debate.