Cuellar Stands with Fellow Democrats to Oppose Administration's Proposal to Privatize Social Security
CUELLAR STANDS WITH FELLOW DEMOCRATS TO OPPOSE ADMINISTRATION'S PROPOSAL TO PRIVATIZE SOCIAL SECURITY
March 1, 2005
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Today, United States Congressman Henry Cuellar commented, "I have taken a great deal of time to carefully review the proposal and to listen to all sides of the debate. After thorough analysis I have come to see clearly that the President's proposal to privatize Social Security does not pass my legislative test: It will not make our families stronger."
"The current proposal to privatize Social Security jeopardizes our safety net by pulling the Security out of Social Security. It takes our guaranteed benefits and gambles them on the stock market. It threatens to pose benefit cuts, raising the retirement age and finally assures adding a tremendous sum to our existing seven trillion dollar debt."
"Social Security should not be undermined by stock market risk. As millions of Americans found out earlier this decade, the stock market is an inherently risky venture. Replacing the bedrock guarantee of Social Security with the inherent risks of playing the market is a mistake that would undermine the promise our government has kept, in the form of Social Security, for the last 70 years."
"The plan to privatize social security would affect every worker in Texas. If the plan were in place today, the guaranteed monthly benefit for the over 2 million people receiving Social Security benefits in Texas would drop to $378- a cut of almost 50 percent."
"In addition to these benefit cuts and risking our savings on the stock market, privatizing Social Security would bring the federal government even deeper into debt. Switching to a private account system requires borrowing more than $2 trillion from foreign countries and will increase our debt for the next 60 years. We are in the deepest debt in history, and continuing to borrow more from foreign creditors only gives other nations an increasing amount of control over our nation's agenda and our children's future."
"In the end, we aren't talking about numbers and projections- we are talking about the future of the American people. Social Security has always been the one source free from risk, designed to serve as a bedrock guarantee for our seniors."
"The system was created and has served for generations as social insurance, not social investment and we owe it to our seniors and our children and ourselves to preserve that guarantee. I hope that we can come together, on both sides of the aisle and find a reasonable, bipartisan solution to this problem."
http://www.house.gov/cuellar/pr050301.html