Date: 2005-03-10
Speaker: WASSERMAN SCHULTZ (democrat)
Chamber: H

Mr. Speaker. if the gentleman will yield. I want to get to some of the emails we received since the last hour. I want to highlight an email we got from a young woman. someone who just passed 30something. she just turned 40. so she is just outside of our generational span here. but she said this about privatization and private accounts: "I am very uncomfortable with the idea of using private accounts for Social Security. My mutual fund lost half of its value and. at the rate it is earning. will take another 5 to 8 years to get to the rate of my deposit. My stocks. bonds and annuities lost. but not as big. but they haveit really earned in about 5 years. My IRAs earned at about 3 percent. Everyone else I know. from my retired father to my peers to my kids who have mutual funds in their names for college funds. have been burned by the private financial sector. In addition. I know people whose employers have defaulted on pension plans." This is the type of risk that we would be subjecting peoples retirement security to if we transition to private accounts. That is what people are afraid of. There is not so much confidence in investing in the stock market. When I had my town hall meetings. and I had three of them. I asked people to raise their hands. and I had more than 200 at two of mine. and 500 or more at all three combined. and I asked people at each town hall meeting for a show of hands. how many of them would feel comfortable in their own ability to make investment decisions or their childrens or grandchildrens ability to make investment decisions to ensure that they would have as much money as Social Security would provide for them when they got to their retirement. And literally. at my first town hall meeting. three people raised their hand. at my second town hall meeting. two people raised their hand. and no one raised their hand at the third one. People do not want to throw their retirement security to the wind. They do not want to subject it to the whims of the stock market. Social Security is not supposed to be a gamble. like investment in the stock market is. You go in with your eyes open when you invest in the stock market. You know you may lose your money. That is not what Social Security was designed to do. Social Security was designed to provide you with security. not designed to stress you out for the -rest of your life and have you pray on your knees every night that you made the right decision and your money is going to be there for you when you retire. Twenty percent of women who are single and retired and collecting Social Security have Social Security as their only source of income. That number is only going to go up because. as we all know. given our age. our generation has not been the generation of savers. Our generation has not squirreled money away under the mattress or in savings accounts. They do not have a significant nest egg. The President is trying to say that this could be their nest egg. The only trick is. if you move to private accounts. he does not really talk too much in his town hall meetings about how there is going to be a commensurate cut in Social Security benefits. You do not get both under his plan.