Bernie Sander's on the tax cut bill: "This is the beginning of an effort to destroy Social Security"

[Better Believe It]

Remarks of Senator Bernie Sander's during his Senate "filibuster" speech.

Congressional Record: December 10, 2010 (Senate)
Page S8735-S8781
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access wais.access.gpo.gov
DOCID:cr10de10-20

While this idea of lowering the payroll tax sounds like a good idea,
in truth, it really is not a good idea. This idea originated from very
conservative Republicans whose intention from the beginning was to
destroy Social Security by choking off the funds that go to it. This is
not just Bernie Sanders' analysis. There was recently--I distributed it
recently at a meeting we held--a news release that came from the
National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare. The
headline on that press release is ``Cutting Contributions to Social
Security Signals the Beginning of the End. Payroll Tax Holiday is
Anything But.'' What the National Committee to Preserve Social Security
and Medicare, which is one of the largest senior groups in America,
well understands is that there are people out there who want to destroy
Social Security. And one way to do that is to divert funds into the
Social Security trust fund and they don't get there.

What the President and others have said is not to worry, this is just
a 1-year program--just 1 year. In fact, they say, the General Treasury
will pay the difference. So the Social Security trust fund is not going
to lose funding.

The reason we have a $2.6 trillion surplus today in Social Security
and the reason Social Security is good for the next 29 years to pay out
all benefits is because it comes from the payroll tax. It is not
dependent upon the whims of the Congress and the Treasury.

The President and Republicans said: This is just a 1-year program.
Don't worry.

I do worry. I worry that once we establish this 1-year payroll tax
holiday, next year our Republican friends will say: Do you want to end
that? You are going to be raising taxes on workers. And enough people
will support that concept, and this 1-year payroll tax holiday will
become permanent. And when we do that, we will be choking off, over a
period of years, trillions of dollars that we need to make sure Social
Security is viable and is there for our children and grandchildren.

But don't listen to me. Listen to somebody who knows a lot more about
this issue than I do. Barbara Kennelly is a former Congresswoman from
Connecticut. She is the president and CEO of the National Committee to
Preserve Social Security and Medicare. This is what Barbara Kennelly
says:

Even though Social Security contributed nothing to the
current economic crisis, it has been bartered in a deal that
provides deficit busting tax cuts for the wealthy. Diverting
$120 billion in Social Security contributions for a so-called
tax holiday may sound like a good deal for workers now, but
it is bad business for a program that a majority of middle
class seniors will rely upon in the future.

The headline is ``Cutting Contributions to Social Security Signals
the Beginning of the End.''

This is not a good approach. Providing and figuring out a way that we
can get more money into the hands of working people, as we did in the
stimulus package, does make a lot of sense. Going forward with a
payroll tax holiday is a backdoor method to end up breaking Social
Security. It is not anything we should support.

Let me mention a quote from a gentleman who understands this issue
very well. He understands the politics of what is going on here. His
name Bruce Bartlett, former adviser for Presidents Reagan and George
H.W. Bush. He recently wrote the following in opposition to this
payroll tax cut. This is what Mr. Bartlett wrote:

What are the odds that Republicans will ever allow this
one-year tax holiday to expire? They wrote the Bush tax cuts
with explicit expiration dates and then when it came time for
the law they wrote to take effect exactly as they wrote it,
they said any failure to extend them permanently would
constitute the biggest tax increase in history. . . . if
allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire is the biggest tax
increase in history, one that Republicans claim would
decimate a still-fragile economy, then surely expiration of a
payroll tax holiday would also constitute a massive tax
increase on the working people of America. Republicans would
prefer to destroy Social Security's finances or permanently
fund it with general revenues--

Switch the revenue base from the payroll tax to general revenues--

than allow a once-suspended payroll tax to be reimposed. Arch
Social Security hater Peter Ferrara once told me that funding
it with general revenues was part of his plan to destroy it
by converting Social Security into a welfare program, rather
than an earned benefit. He was right.

In other words, what this issue is about is breaking the bonds we
have had since the inception of Social Security where Social Security
was paid for by workers. You pay for it when you are working, and you
get the benefits when you are old. That is the deal. There is no
Federal money coming in from the General Treasury.

This gentleman, Mr. Bartlett, former adviser to Presidents Reagan and
George H.W. Bush, thinks--and I suspect he is quite right--this is the
beginning of an effort to destroy Social Security.

The real debate about Social Security is not one about finances.

There has been a lot of misinformation and disinformation out there.
I hear from some of my friends on the Republican side that Social
Security is going bankrupt; it is not going to be there for our kids.
That is absolutely not true. Social Security today has a $2.6 trillion
surplus. Social Security can pay out every benefit owed to every
eligible American, if we do not start diverting funds, for the next 29
years, at which point it pays out about 78 percent of benefits. So our
challenge in 29 years is to fill that 22-percent gap. That it is. Can
we do it? Sure we can.

President Obama, when he was campaigning, and I think he has repeated
since, the very good suggestion that instead of having a cap in terms
of which people contribute into the fund at $106,000, what we should do
is do a bubble, and people who make $250,000 or more should contribute
into the Social Security trust fund. If you did that and nothing else,
you have essentially solved the Social Security problem for the next 75
years. Very easy. It is done.

So what this payroll tax holiday is doing, in my view, is pretty
dangerous. I do not think enough people understand that. I think that
is one of the strong reasons this agreement should be opposed.

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Bold in text is my emphasis. BBI