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

Mr. Speaker. the gentleman is so right. We need to boil this down in terms that people deal with every day. When we have these conversations on the floor. I try to zero in on the impact that this proposal will have on specific groups. For example. we have some information about the impact Social Security has on children. Social Security survivor and disability benefits help 6.4 million children. We talk about welfare assistance and TANF. which is Temporary Assistance For Needy Families. funding and how important a program that is to helping sustain the lives of millions of children. but Social Security survivor and disability benefits help almost twice as many children as welfare does. That. I think. is something that people just do not realize. I did not realize it until I received this information. and that is according to our nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. Social Security is currently the largest source of Federal funding that prevents children from falling into poverty. Social Security benefits have kept 920.000 children out of poverty. and more than onethird of families with Social Security income would be poor without these benefits. If we look at the effects that privat-. ization of Social Security would have on women. women comprise the majority of Social Security benefits. They represent 58 percent of all Social Security recipients at the age of 65. and women represent 71 percent of all beneficiaries by the time they are age 85. Privatization disproportionately harms women. especially because women real.ly end up having much less because of the differences in earning potential. much less opportunity to benefit from Social Security when they are planning for retirement. There are a number of factors that leave women even more vulnerable to this really radical proposal. Women and poverty in old age is often rooted in the reality that their lives are shaped on. We earn less money. We are at 76 cents on the dollar compared to the same job that a man does. The reality of care giving. we are primarily responsible for caring for loved ones. both children and our older parents. and women have jobs more often that offer very few benefits. So women who have been in the workforce are far less likely to have IRAs 4nd pensions and other outside extra benefits. Social Security for women ends up being the vast majority of the time their sole retirement benefit. So it disproportionately is pulling the rug out from under them. I think we have to talk about how these proposed changes would impact people. What I have noticed in the time I have been here. and this is a big room and there are a lot of Members. 435 of us. and we talk about a lot of really important issues here. At a certain point. I think Menibers of Congress forget that the decisions that we make here affect individual people. It is really easy to forget about that. It is easy to talk about numbers in the trillions. and we forget that Mrs. Smith. Mrs. Jones. Mrs. Goldstein. those are real people where our decisions hurt them. Members need to think about them sitting in their kitchens and scratching out how they are going to buy groceries. cover their medication. and pay their electricity bill. The report that came out from the Social Security and Medicare trustees 2 weeks ago shows that the crisis we should be talking about is Medicare and the looming problem that is going to present because that is what is facing insolvency. But. of course. that problem. according to the leadership here. has been taken care of. They took care of that. according to the leadership here. in the bill that took 3 hours to twist enough arms. from what I understand. to get them to have the votes to pass it. I am not sure why in that legislation they would not have taken steps to address what appears to be the real crisis.