Date: 2005-11-08
Speaker: GEORGE MILLER (democrat)
Chamber: H
State: California

Mr. Speaker. the gentleman points out that this raid is taking place on. pensions. .The President. in the middle of the Enron debacle said what is good from the captain is good for the crew. and then we have heard nothing. from the President again. The President has done nothing to shore up the existing system that is under threat. And in the middle of that. what does the President do? He attacks the Social Security .plan. which is the single largest source of pension benefits for these very same people. So while he lets the corporations dump pension" benefits into bankruptcy. lets corporations dump them into the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. which co~ts the pensioners billions and billions in dollars of pension benefits. then at the same time he conducts a raid on Social Security by trying to cieate some private accounts that adds trillions of dollars in new debt to Social Security. So.now what you have is the poor American worker. whether it is their private savings. whether it is their employer pension plan or Social Security. it is all under threat. It is all under threat. The tragedy is that. given what is going on in the private sector with the manipulation of pension plans. with the uncertainty about the future of pension plans.- with corporations fully prepared to just throw them into bankruptcy. Social Security is emerging as the most secure retireiient system in the Nation. There is not a single corporation. not Delphi. not General Motors. not AT&T. -not Lucent. not Kodak. not Microsoft. that can look you in the eye and tell you. 75 years from now 85 percent of your benefits will be there and they will be there like clockwork. Social Security can. and that is the one they have targeted for extinction. Their proposal is to leave the worker in this country. the employee who has struggled for the success of the companies that they work for. to leave them with nowhere to turn. All you have to do is just go out into any public gathering and you will start to get feedback from people who are telling you about how nervous they are about their retirement benefits and how much they have couiated on them. and now they do not know if they are going to be there or not. They are uncertain and they have no ability to plan. We have a plan. and that plan is. just as we did with employer and employee contributions to pension plans. just as we did to employer and employee contributions to Social Security. the idea is if we work together as a society. we can bond together and provide these resources so people will have decent retirements. Because we went through many generations in this country Where peoples retirement was only about poverty. But because of Social Security. because of Medicare. we have lifted millions and millions of Americans out of poverty to have a decent retirement plan. They have contributed with their personal savings and their employers have contributed with their employee pension plans. Now all ofthat appears to be at risk. This Congress must step in and start to deal with this problem because the economic livelihood of millions of American families and individuals is at stake here and the system we have now was designed when few companies went .out of business. Today. these companies understand that you simply take all of your liabilities. you dump them on the taxpayer. and this is what Bethlehem Steel did. you get rid of those liabilities. and then the company continues on. We absorbed billions of dollars in liability from the steelworkers. Mr. Ross got all of the steel companies together. and then he sold them to Mitel. the Indian steel company. and they are off and running as part of one of the largest steel companies in the world. Thank you. American taxpayer. and thank you the steelworkers who lost .Asbig chunk of their pension plans. They.6ubsidized that activity. Mr. Speaker. that cannot be allowed to continue. I thank the gentleman for joining me here today.