Date: 2005-04-26
Speaker: WASSERMAN SCHULTZ (democrat)
Chamber: H

Mr. Speaker. I thank the gentleman for yielding to me. I think it is really safe to say that both of their remarks are cogent. and I think it is safe to say that we are really disturbed about the direction that this country is going in and the direction that the leadership is taking us. It is time to restore some balance. We have got a Congress that sees nothing wrong with inserting itself in the midst of a private family tragedy a few weeks ago. Now they want to take Social Security. the most successful program that supports Americans throughout their retirement years. 70 years of success. they want to take it off the tracks. They want to yank the safety net out from under our retirees and under our generation. Because if the President is ensuring that people 55 and over are going to be okay. what is he saying to the rest of us? "You may not be okay but I do not care." I mean that is a really foreboding message that he is sending to our generation. And I tell the gentleman from Florida I do not think he has to worry about standing alone. because there were more than 3.000 people at that rally with us today. more than 100 Members of Congress. and it appears in the feedback we have gotten from across this country that we are standing together. not alone. that we have lots of people behind us and they are trying to send a very strong message to the leadership of this Congress and to the President that privatization needs to be dropped. that we need to stop talking about it. that we need to come to the table together and compromise. that we need to right the train. And I am going to just take the privilege of my gender here for a couple of minutes. since I am the woman of the three of us. and just talk about the possibility of privatizations impact on women. because it is disproportionate. It really is. More than 40 years after the Equal Pay Act. women still only earn 76 cents on the dollar for what a man earns. 76 cents. One cannot save what they do not earn. This proposal will disproportionately impact women. In fact. because of childbearing years and care for sick or elderly parents. on average. women are generally out of the work force for about 12 years. Older women are less likely than older men to receive pension income. Only about 28 percent of women compared to 43 percent of inen have a pension. So when they do receive pensions. the benefit to women is only about half what a man will receive. So what that boils down to is that when a woman received her Social Security retirement benefits in 2003. the average monthly benefit for a woman was only $798. which is about $241 less than the average mans monthly retirement. What will happen to women. because we have got 20 percent of single women who are widowed. who are Social Security beneficiaries who are collecting Social Security today. about 20 percent of those women. the only source of their retirement income is Social Security? We are just yanking out the security and the safety that we have guaranteed where we are going from a guaranteed benefit to a guaranteed gamble. And that is what the gentlewoman from California has been saying and leading us at the rally today and all the way leading up to today. We cannot shift the whole nature of Social Security from a guaranteed benefit to a guaranteed gamble. We have to keep the security in Social Security. That is the bottom line.