Floor Statements

Thank you so much, Congressman Meek. We are continuing to try to educate our generation and other generations about the significantly negative impact that privatizing Social Security would have on them. As much as the President, as you have outlined, would like to lead people to believe that privatization is not going to harm people 55 and older, and there is going to be this amazing panacea, this incredible windfall for our generation and for supposedly savvy investors that are from our generation, we know differently. What we

have been trying to do as the 30-something Working Group convened by Leader Pelosi is to try to separate fact from fiction.

To follow up on some of your really excellent descriptions of what the kind of money we are talking about really means for people, you just talked about $5 trillion and what $5 trillion, which is what the President's privatization proposal would cost and add to the deficit in the next 20 years, what that would mean, what we could do with $5 trillion instead of ballooning the deficit.

I was just elected. I am a freshman Member of the Congress. We have had an opportunity to work together over the years. I am still definitely in learning mode, and I have got a learning curve. One of the things that I have noticed in my learning curve is that when you go from being in the State legislature like we were where you are dealing with billions of dollars, with a B, to the Congress, when you are dealing with trillions, with a T, it is hard for anyone, Members of Congress, Members of State legislatures and average citizens to really grasp what that kind of money is. No one deals with trillions of dollars. The current budget deficit is more than $7 trillion. It is $7.7 trillion.

And what the gentleman just described, the President's privatization proposal would add another $5 trillion to that.

So let us just take the $7.7 trillion that is included in the projected deficit now and try to help people get their minds around what that is. If we took $7.7 trillion and can pile enough $1 bills, and there are actually people that figure these things out, on top of one another, it would reach the moon and back.

The Moon is 93 million miles away from here. I am pretty sure that is right, 93 million miles away from here. So that is two stacks of $1 bills that would reach the moon, and that is how much our deficit is.

We would still have almost $6.5 billion left over. With that money, after traveling to the moon and back, we could make 1,329 stacks of $1 bills that would reach up into the stratosphere, however high that would go.

There is a really instructive Web site that the Department of Treasury has, and I think it would be helpful for people to know what that Web site is. It gives what the current deficit is, and it also gives what is each American's share of that deficit. It is a ticker and it is constantly changing. But that Web site is www.house.gov/ budget_democrats. And they can get access to the U.S. Treasury Department's Web page with that information; if they sign on to that Web site, it will link them right to that information.

The national debt as of April 21 is $7,782,705,281,978.34. We could really improve the quality of people's lives with that kind of money.

And the direction that this country has been going in is really disturbing. When I go home and talk to the people that live in my community in Broward and Miami-Dade Counties, and we represent both of the same counties in South Florida, it does not matter whether I talk to people who consider themselves conservative, people who consider themselves moderate, people who consider themselves liberal. After the events of the last few weeks and the concerns that people have over the deficit, their share of it, this privatization plan which the President is suggesting would pull the safety net of Social Security out from under people.

People are really starting to say just hold it a second, we need to get this train back on the tracks and start going in the direction that most people are comfortable with.

And I think we really need to start encouraging people, as we have been doing, to raise their voices to help get that train back on the tracks, because it is moving so far to the right even for people who consider themselves on the right, even people like that are coming up to me and telling me they are disturbed. So I just wanted to share that illustration with people.

We have talked often about the impact that privatization has had, and we had been on a break and we were not able to spend time during our 30-something hour. We did not have a 30-something hour last week because of votes.

So I think it is important, and I am not sure if the gentleman already talked about it, the impact that privatization would have on different categories of people. Particularly as the 30-something Group, we want to explain how it would hurt young people and working families.

The cost of privatization would just explode the national debt, which we have been talking about, but what it means beyond exploding the national debt is that people who collect Social Security would literally experience a 46 percent cut in their benefits.

There has been this portrayal by the President on his 60-day tour of the country to try to sell this plan, which I know the gentleman outlined and talked about, how they restrict access to their town hall meetings and we let anybody come and we are willing to take on the people who stand up and actually ask questions that are not the same as the position that we take in our town hall meetings.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would continue to yield, it is really unbelievable.

I met with representatives of the Egyptian Government today, and they were talking to me about the democratic reforms that they are making and being more inclusive and involving their public in the role that government has. And I just cannot even imagine what kind of example the President is setting to burgeoning democracies and democracies that are trying to become even more democratic.

I mean, if the President of the greatest democracy in world does not feel that the right thing to do is to let anyone into a town hall meeting whether or not they agree with him, then that really sends a terrible message.

I think they made it pretty clear how they feel about the courts.

Mr. Speaker, what I have noticed is that this President treats democracy as an inconvenience. He treats democracy as if what it means is ``I am going to listen to you when you agree with me and I am going to apply democratic principles when I can surround myself with people who tell me what I want to hear.'' And that is just the worst message we could possibly be sending.

When the gentleman and I listened to the State of the Union and we listened to the Inaugural Address, both of which included a treatise on the President's desire to help spread democracy around the world, I really think that the greatest democracy in the world and the leader of that democracy should be setting an example at home. And I think that that is what we expect parents to do.

We ask parents to set examples for their children, and we tell parents that they cannot expect their children to behave any better than they do. And I do not know how the President could expect democracies or burgeoning democracies around the world to behave any better than he does.

There are a couple other things I wanted to highlight for people about the impact of the privatization plan because we got on our soap box for a little while.

Absolutely, Mr. Speaker. And that is because they do not want the facts to go out. Because if light is shed on their proposal, if they are forced to face their accusers, so to speak, if they are forced to respond to people who have the facts, their facts just do not hold up under the sheen of light.

So what I started to say a few minutes ago was what his proposal does is, and like I said, I call it a proposal, but I should say his vague outlines of a proposal, he has promoted across the country the concept or the belief that private accounts would be a windfall and has led people to believe that they would both be able to have the money in their private accounts as well as their Social Security benefits, and that is not the case. There would be a commensurate cut in Social Security benefits, about 46 percent, commensurate in proportion to the amount in someone's private account.

An average 20-year-old, over their 20-year retirement, would lose about $152,000 in Social Security benefits under the vague outlines of the President's proposal.

Let us take disability insurance and survivor benefits, because I am not sure if the gentleman talked about that before I got here; but Social Security provides disability insurance for young families. There is no private insurance plan that could compete with the disability benefits provided by Social Security. For a worker in her mid-20s who has a spouse and her two children, and there are millions of those across this country, Social Security provides the equivalent of a $350,000 disability policy. Most people, especially a young widow with two children, cannot afford to go out and buy a policy on the private market like that. It would just not be available to her.

Suppose, God forbid, there is a young parent who suddenly dies. Social Security provides for the children who are left behind. Social Security provides survivors benefits. Survivor benefits replace as much as 80 percent of the earnings for a 20-year-old average-wage worker who dies leaving two young children and a spouse. For that parent, Social Security survivor benefits are equivalent to a $403,000 life insurance policy.

That is what it means when we talk about what privatization would do to young families. That is real. That would be gone, that benefit. Because when it comes to disability and survivor benefits, privatization does not apply because there is no income being generated. One has to have income in order to have a private account. People who are disabled and people who are widows and widowers do not have that income coming in by its very nature.

Mr. Speaker, if I could jump in here for a second.

That is why we spend an hour on this every week, because there is plenty of information to disseminate. I sit on the Committee on Financial Services, and I have an opportunity to interact with people on the New York Stock Exchange and Chairman Greenspan, who testified before our committee, and representatives of the Mercantile Exchange and the Board of Trade and all of the exchanges. One of the things that I got out of those meetings that was clear and that has been written about in the last few days is, let us remember what the foundation of this whole privatization is built on. It is built on the stock market. It is built on stocks and bonds.

Now, last week, we had one of the most significant drops in the market in over 2 years. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has fallen more than 9 percent in the last 6 weeks, including a drop of 115 points, or 1.1 percent, on Wednesday. Now, I do not know if most Americans are going to want to throw their retirement security to the whims of the stock market. There are two words in the name of this program: social and security. This proposal removes and decimates the concept of ``security'' in Social Security. It would be social insecurity, because there would be no ability to ensure that future retirees would have that investment there for

them when they retired, because we have fluctuations in the market.

Mr. Speaker, that is an important point, and I appreciate the gentleman making that point.

But the point is that from one day to the next, we had a 200-point swing. Now, is that what people are going to be comfortable with in terms of their retirement security, in terms of ensuring that they have at least a minimum amount of money available for them when they retire? Because, for example, 20 percent of single retired women, most of whom are widows, the only source of their income is their Social Security. Now, if we invest it in the stock market and privatize Social Security, what are we going to do for those women when their nest egg that they banked on is not there because of fluctuations like the one that the gentleman from California (Mr. Dreier) just referred to? I just wonder.

That is right.

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman is absolutely right. We have to right the ship of state. I mean, it is keeling over right now. It is going to fall from the weight of the debt. I mean, why the Republican majority here will not listen to Chairman Greenspan when he expresses again and again, as recently as this week, again and again he has warned us about the danger of the increasing deficits.

The leadership here is just ignoring it. It is like they hope that if they ignore the problem long enough, maybe it will go away. Maybe they will wake up, just like my kids hope that the next day something that happened that they did not like the day before will not be true when they wake up, like so many of us do. But the worst nightmare is that when something bad happens, when you wake up the next day, you cannot make it go away just by a night's sleep or ignoring it. It does not work that way. We have to be responsible. That is the whole way we need to deal with this Social Security problem. Problem, not crisis.

We have a problem, but we need to be responsible and take the time that we need to address the problem and do it right. We did not create this problem overnight, and there is no miracle solution; there is no instantaneous solution to this problem. The President has already acknowledged that privatization does not even solve the problem. We need to make sure that we get privatization off the table so we can all sit down together, just like they did in 1983, and find a bipartisan solution that we can all be comfortable with, or at least that the majority can be comfortable with, because we will probably not get everybody. But the majority is willing to come to the table, it is just that the President needs to let go of an untenable proposal that the vast majority of the people do not support. It is time to let it go, Mr. President.

I agree with you. I am ready to stand and fight and make sure that the security remains in Social Security.

And, you know, just to close my portion of this out, the illustrative thing that I want to leave people with is we are both under 40; that is why we are here. Our generation, my friends, your friends, most of them when we chat with them when we are out to dinner, and we ask them whether they think Social Security is likely to be there for them when they retire, it is almost universal that the answer is no.

In 37 years, 36 years, let us say 2041, we are going to be 74 years old. You and I are 3 weeks apart. And I am 3 weeks younger, I might add. We are going to be 74 years old.

Now, when I learned that, I was amazed because I really was one of those people. Social Security will be there, even if we do nothing, which is not what we are advocating. We are advocating take a little slower approach. Let us make sure that we keep the security in Social Security.

In 46 years, the outlying date for which insolvency is less likely to occur, we will be 84 years old. Now, that is well within the number of years, 20 years after retirement, that we can ensure that Social Security will be there for us.

What we have to do is we have to stand with our feet firmly planted on the ground and say you have taken this country this far, no further.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to pay tribute to the honorable Dan Pearl.

Mayor Pearl retired in 1972 to the town of Sunrise, Florida, in Broward County after having served 30 years as a parole officer with the New York Division of Parole.

In 1979, he was first elected to the Sunrise City Council and later served as mayor and deputy mayor. It was during his tenure as mayor that Sunrise made the transition from a strong-mayor system to a professionalized city government administered by a city manager.

In appreciation of his tireless service to his community, county officials took the unprecedented step of naming the Oakland Park Boulevard Library after Mayor Pearl in 1993.

Those of us who had the pleasure of working with Mayor Pearl will always remember his contributions and insights as a public servant. He was a member of numerous boards and organizations, including the Florida League of Cities, the Gold Coast League of Cities, the Broward Planning Council, the South Florida Regional Planning Council, and the American Cancer Society.

His death in 1996 was a tremendous loss to his family, colleagues, and the citizens of south Florida; but we will always remember the warmth, sincerity, and friendliness of Dan Pearl that he shared with everyone.

On behalf of the people of south Florida, it is my honor to salute the life and legacy of Mayor Dan Pearl.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer) very much for yielding and thank him so much for giving us this opportunity to talk to the American people about what is essentially a startling contrast between our vision and our view on what tax reform should entail and what the majority's vision is.

I think that is really what we should ask people to take a look at, because the perception that is out there in America is not what it should be, and really what I would like to spend some time talking about is how the majority talks about making taxes simpler. As we can see, they have plenty of rhetoric that they have thrown around over the years as far back as 1997 and even for the years before that. Yet their actions do not match the rhetoric.

That is really what it boils down to, and I am a person that is all about action. That is what our caucus is about, and I think you have to walk the walk when you talk the talk, and that is not happening with this administration. It is not happening with the leadership of this body.

It is critical that the American people understand the consequences of the years, and I know that they do. Every working family sitting around their kitchen table understands the consequence of the complexities and the carving up of the tax code by the Republican majority here. I mean, that is what they have continued to do, in spite of the fact that they go out in America and talk about how complex it is. Well, it is time that something gets done about it. The time for talking needs to stop.

Their tax policies clearly favor some citizens over others. They pick and choose. They pick winners and loser among businesses and industries, and they do it all under the guise and cloak of tax reform.

One of the most important consequences is that the Federal Government and State and local governments, they do not have adequate resources to pay for the day-to-day services that our constituents need. That is a direct consequence of not having tax reform. There are real needs that are not being addressed because our local governments cannot provide the services because of the tax system as it is currently constructed. That squeeze is being felt all across this country, and particularly in the towns and cities in

my district and in the districts of many of our colleagues.

That is because the debt burden faced by the Federal Government is going to dramatically worsen in the future if the administration's tax cuts are made permanent. If the Bush tax cuts are made permanent, this problem is only going to get worse.

The Government Accountability Office projects that interest on the national debt would nearly equal all of the Federal taxes, including income and payroll taxes that we generate in 2040, not now but the taxes that we generate in 2040, if the recent tax cuts are made permanent.

Current and proposed debt and the rising level of interest that we pay on that debt, which is soon to average about $300 billion a year, which is more than we spend on Medicaid to help make people understand what that means, we weaken Social Security and threaten benefits for today's seniors, for disabled workers and their survivors, much of which affects women disproportionately which I want to address in a moment.

The amount merely required to pay interest on the national debt ultimately will be almost twice the amount that is paid out to all Americans in Social Security benefits. That is unbelievable. The interest on the national debt will be more than twice what we pay out in Social Security benefits.

Unlike interest on the national debt, Social Security has its own dedicated taxes, and the President fails to acknowledge that these costs crowd out resources for other priorities that affect people of all ages, people over 55 and younger people as well, in health care, in education and in homeland security. I want to take a minute and just talk about the impact on women of the Bush administration's policy decisions as it relates to tax cuts and the lack of tax reform.

There are programs serving women and families that are really bearing the burden of deficit reduction. The President's budget now in front of us slashes funding for countless domestic programs.

The administration itself in child care calculates 300,000 additional children could lose assistance by 2009 from the continued freeze in funding. Between 2003 and 2004, 200,000 children have lost child care help.

In Medicaid, the administration would cut $7.6 billion over 5 years, and the House even more.

Education and training: Investment in high school vocational education programs that can help train women and girls for higher paying, nontraditional jobs is totally eliminated.

Supplemental nutrition for women, infants and children: The cut of $658 million could mean 660,000 fewer pregnant women, infants and children receiving WIC assistance in 2010.

I want to boil this down for another few seconds. Millionaires' average tax cut in 2004 was $123,592, which is more than five times the annual income of a typical single mother with children, whose median income is $22,637. That is what their policy translates into for regular, everyday people.

More than one-quarter of single-parent families, who are overwhelmingly headed by women, get nothing from the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.

These tax cuts, the bottom line, and the budget simply makes the wrong choices for women, for their families and for all Americans.

Mr. Speaker, I want to again thank the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer) so much for this opportunity for us to help the American people understand that it is Democrats that are committed both in action, deed and rhetoric, and our actions will match our words when it comes to tax reform.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to have my name removed as a cosponsor of H.J. Res. 23.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan), and it is good to be here with you once again.

Quite honestly, it is good to be here to talk about once again an extremely important issue and that is Social Security. I can tell you that I wish that that is what we had been able to talk about for the last 2 weeks as opposed to some of the other issues we have been focused on, but I am glad we are able to refocus again.

What we have been trying to do in our 30-something Working Group over the last several months and prior to my arrival here in Congress, you and our other colleagues have done yeoman's work on getting the message out about the facts as its relates to Social Security because our generation, your friends, my friends, when you go home and you sit down and you are having coffee or you are having a beer, which we may occasionally do among our friends, and the conversation may turn to whether you think or your friends think that there is going to be Social Security there for you when you retire. Most people our age, they believe the myth that has been put out there by the President and by the leadership of the Congress. They believe that Social Security will not be there.

My colleague and I being in our 30s and we are trying to get the word out to other people our age across this country, the solvency issue to which you just referred, literally, before there is even a concern about a potential drop in benefits, is not for 37 years from now, at the earliest. More likely, 47 years when in my case, I will be 75 years old in 37 years and 85 years old in 47 years, long past retirement age, long past the point after which I would begin collecting Social Security.

So like my colleague said, we are not suggesting that there is not a problem that needs to be addressed. What we are suggesting is that there is not a crisis; that there is no need to sound the alarm bells; that we need to make sure that we approach this problem responsibly; that this is a 70-year program of success, probably the most successful program in our Nation's history, established as an iron clad safety net that no one should have to worry about it being there upon their retirement, which is why that if we are going to make changes, which we should to ensure its long-term solvency, that we take the time to do it correctly and responsibly and not rush to judgment and not make drastic changes which privatizing Social Security, I think by anyone's definition, would be drastic.

We have got to make sure that we preserve Social Security into the future, and what is ironic is that most of the talk coming from the White House and in the leadership of this body has been about privatizing Social Security, setting up private accounts, and this has just been mind-boggling to me because, like you said, privatization does nothing to deal with the solvency issue. We could privatize Social Security, and all we would be doing is adding to our deficit and putting our Nation more in debt than we already are, and we are badly, badly in debt.

So you can go that far and still have to address Social Security solvency problems, and we need to make sure that we responsibly make changes to preserve Social Security into the future.

I thank my colleague, Mr. Speaker.

I think that statistic and those two numbers there are so illustrative. They really are. People can feel, touch, taste and understand what $26,000 means. For every single person, including an infant in this country, that is their share of the national debt.

I think people have a harder time, though, I mean none of us literally have an understanding of what $7 trillion is; $7,781,336,014,734.14. That is the national debt.

Now, what does that mean? If you are going to try to break it down into what $7 trillion is like, and there are people actually out there figuring this stuff out to try to translate that concept of a trillion dollars into more understandable bites of information, for example, if you stacked a thousand $1 bills, you took a thousand $1 bills and stacked them on top of each other, $1 million would equal 1 foot high of thousand dollar bills. That is how high.

Right. Stacked up would equal a foot. A billion dollars would equal the height of the Empire State building in New York. One trillion dollars, stacked up on top of each other, would be a thousand times the height of the Empire State Building.

So if you are trying to think about how much $7 trillion is, that is how large that number is. That is not something that almost anyone can get their arms around. And think about the unbelievable irresponsibility that that is, and that there currently appears to be almost no regard for that problem and how to deal with it, and no focus here on how we are going to get a handle on the sheer size of that number and shrinking it, and no realistic proposal; only conversations like that of privatizing Social Security, which are going to make that number ever larger. It really starts to boggle your mind.

Yet, when we go home, as we just did, and I spent the last couple of weeks at home going around my district and had town hall meetings. I had a town hall meeting in my district on Social Security, and it appeared as though there is an inverse relationship between the more the President talks about his vague outlines of a proposal and the more people hear about his vague outlines of a proposal. They are moving in opposite directions.

In fact, for our age group, which is his target audience, because he has been assuring people 55 and over they will not have to be concerned about their continued checks and the continuation of Social Security for them, and if you believe that, which I found in my district, and I have a very large population of senior citizens who are Social Security recipients, they are very, very skeptical about how a program the size of Social Security, with as monumental a change as this would be, how it is that they can be assured that a monumental change like that is not going to affect them.

So there is a healthy amount of skepticism as it is, but the target audience, which is our generation and people younger than 30 years old, the polling that has come out recently, and the Pew Research Center did a March 24 poll, which shows support for private accounts among young adults absolutely plummeting. The more young people have heard about this proposal, the less they like it. They are more than twice as likely to oppose private accounts when they have heard a lot about it. And that is illustrative of the inverse relationship between the President's canned town hall meetings, for lack of a better term. Because what we have been doing out in our districts, as Democrats, we are not ticketing our events. We are not hand-picking the audience. We are saying, come on in and talk to us about Social Security. Let us talk to you about what we hear about this proposal, and you tell us what you think.

What is going on in the President's meetings is he is saying, do you agree with me? Oh, okay, you can come in then, and booting people who do not agree with him. That is really not very democratic. It does not show a real ability or desire to actually get input. It is more my way or the highway politics, which is not the way we should be shaping this debate.

And, Mr. Speaker, my colleague is just absolutely right on target. We are more than willing to sit down and hash out in the spirit of compromise, like the gentleman referred to what they did in 1983. But, at least in my experience, with compromise, you have to be singing off the same song sheet. You cannot start from two completely different places and define the problem in completely different ways and ultimately reach compromise.

So if the President and his supporters on this concept would come off of the concept of crisis and get to where we are and where the reality is, because every factual description, including from the Social Security trustees that just released their report 2 weeks ago, points to a problem, a problem looming on the horizon that needs to be dealt with.

So when we are singing off the same song sheets, then we will be able to move forward and talk about a compromise that will actually address the solvency question, because private accounts do not address the solvency question, they just cause more debt.

What is unbelievable about the private accounts is that the President, at least in my listening to him, has sold them as almost like it would be an addition to your Social Security benefits. But the reality of his vague plan is that you would not get your private account and your Social Security benefits. There would be a commensurate cut in your Social Security benefits in proportion to what is in your account; approximately a 46 percent cut in your Social Security benefits.

And let us not forget also that his proposal does not leave out the one-third of Social Security recipients who are not earners. You have people who are beneficiaries of Social Security recipients who have passed on and who are not earning an income. You have children and dependents, and you have the disabled community. Now, they are not able to benefit from private accounts because in order to have a private account, you actually have to have an income. So we are not even thinking about how we would address the huge pure cut that they would suffer from.

That is why we call it Social Security.

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 one- third of families with Social Security income would be poor without these benefits.

If we look at the effects that privatization 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 really 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 and 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 Members 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.

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman is so right. I represent a community where it is not just the poor we are concerned about; it is the regular middle- to lower-middle class who are struggling. I have hundreds of thousands of senior citizens in south Florida who struggle every single day because Social Security for the vast majority of them is their primary source of income. They are much more focused. It is what I hear when I am stopped at a picnic or at the supermarket. They are concerned about how they are going to pay for their medication. Some of them cannot even make their co-payments. They are concerned about the increase in their premiums for Medicare that just happened.

That is the handwringing that is going on. They are not that concerned about a problem that does not face them for another 37 years. Quite honestly, in the senior citizen community, most of them realize 37 years is not something they are going to have to worry about. But 2017 is when the Medicare trustee report says is the point at which we would literally be paying out more in Medicare benefits than we are bringing in in premiums. That is a serious problem.

And the report said gross misrepresentation, grossly inaccurate facts when it comes to reports of there being weapons of mass destruction.

Mr. Speaker, I want to ask the gentleman because the gentleman was here. The thing I talked about and heard about on the campaign trail last year was how we ended up with a Medicare bill that added a prescription drug benefit but did not allow, in fact prohibited, the negotiation of discounts for prescription drugs. I know that the VA, the Veterans Administration, already has that ability and drugs made available to our veterans through the VA are significantly less than they are on the private market. So maybe the gentleman can help clarify that for me because I was not here. People out in the real world do not understand that.

Mr. Speaker, I thought it was very interesting that just last week the former Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tommy Thompson, in a speech to the Kaiser Foundation said it was his biggest frustration in the negotiations on the Medicare prescription drug reform bill because he believed the Secretary should have that ability, that the Secretary, just like they do in the VA, should have the ability to negotiate those discounts, and it absolutely ties the hands of the Health and Human Services Secretary.

In talking about this in his speech to the Kaiser Foundation, he said, unfortunately, membership of the leadership of his party, including the President, did not agree, and he was not able to get through to them that that was an important component, to reduce those prices.

What we have here is we have a Social Security plan, or an outline of a plan, that is going to harm young people and hopefully not harm older people who are imminently collecting benefits or already collecting benefits.

It is hard to get young people to think about when they are going to collect Social Security. We are having town hall meetings for younger people and trying to get them to come, and talk to them about why they should think about this, because it is not looming on the horizon of their lives. And then we have Medicare. We also with our generation have a group of people who just are not thinking about whether Medicare will be there for them. They just feel like they are invincible, and there are no major health care issues for most people in our generation.

We have got to make sure that we continue to pound the drum on this issue and talk to as many people as we can, because if we do not, we will all get caught asleep at the switch. As a result, this train will run smack into a wall at the point in our lives when we do need to worry about it.

Just a couple, because I think we again need to maybe finish up by zeroing in on the impact that this proposed privatization scheme would have. The private accounts do not make up for the 46 percent cut in benefits that would be part of this proposal. A 20-year-old who enters the workforce this year would lose about $152,000 in Social Security benefits under the Bush proposal.

Social Security provides disability insurance that young families need, and there is no private insurance plan that can compete with the Social Security disability benefits that are offered. The cost of those benefits bought privately would be beyond most people's

ability to pay for them. For a worker in her mid-twenties with a spouse and two children, Social Security provides the equivalent of a $350,000 disability insurance policy, again not one that most people can afford to pay out of pocket for. And suppose, God forbid, you have a young parent that dies suddenly. Social Security provides for the children who are left behind. Social Security survivors benefits will replace as much as 80 percent of the earnings for a 25-year-old average-wage worker who dies leaving two children and a young spouse. For that parent, Social Security survivors benefits are equivalent to a $403,000 life insurance policy.

What we have been trying to do in our Thirtysomething Working Group is explain to our generation what the reality would be in their lives without Social Security as a continued safety net.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Frank) for yielding me time.

There are a number of things that I would like to correct for the record before I begin. I apologize for not knowing the State that the gentleman is from, but the representation regarding the care of Theresa Schiavo by her husband as represented in the Chamber is totally inaccurate. Theresa's husband, and I am quoting from the guardian ad litem report, the independent guardian ad litem report that was required by Florida law during the special session in October of 2003, it says: ``Theresa's husband, Michael Schiavo, and her mother, Mary Schindler, were virtually partners in their care of and dedication to Theresa. There is no question but that complete trust, mutual caring, explicit love, and a common goal of caring for and rehabilitating Theresa were the shared intentions of Michael Schiavo and the Schindlers. Despite aggressive therapies, physician and other clinical assessments consistently revealed no functional abilities, only reflexive rather than cognitive moments, random eye opening, no communication system, and little change cognitively or functionally.''

And the gentleman referenced the percentage of the medical malpractice damage award being $486,000 going to attorneys' fees and to helping her reach her demise. That is also totally inaccurate. Also quoting from the guardian ad litem report: There was a medical malpractice case filed and pursued. Michael Schiavo and Terri Schiavo were awarded $750,000 in economic damages. The economic damages were put into a trust that was meticulously cared for according to the guardian ad litem and which was managed by South Trust Bank as the guardian and independent trustee. This fund was accounted for and Michael Schiavo had absolutely no control over its use. Michael Schiavo was awarded $300,000 for loss of consortium damages.

That is money that was awarded to him. There is not very much of that left. And there is no truth to the accusation that he would benefit financially from that damage award and there certainly was not $2 million in damages awarded.

Mr. Speaker, I submit for the Record the report of the guardian ad litem.

[Dec. 1, 2003]

A Report to Governor Jeb Bush and the 6th Judicial Circuit in the

Matter of Theresa Marie Schiavo

(Submitted by Jay Wolfson, DrPH, JD, Guardian Ad Litem for Theresa

Marie Schiavo)

Theresa Marie Schiavo was born in the Philadelphia,

Pennsylvania area on 3 December 1963 to Robert and Mary

Schindler. She has two younger siblings, Robert Jr., and

Susan. Through the age of 18, Theresa was, according to her

parents, very overweight, until she chose to lose weight with

the guidance of a physician. She dropped from 250 pounds to

around 150 pounds, at which time she met Michael Schiavo.

They dated for many months and married in November of 1984.

The Schiavo and Schindler families were close and friendly.

Theresa and Michael moved to Florida in 1986 and were

followed shortly thereafter by Theresa's parents and

siblings. Theresa worked for the Prudential Life Insurance

Company and Michael was a restaurant manager.

About three years later, without the apparent knowledge of

her parents, Theresa and Michael sought assistance in

becoming pregnant through an obstetrician who specialized in

fertility services. For over a year, Theresa and Michael

received fertility services and counseling in order to

enhance their strongly held desire to have a child. By this

time, Theresa's weight had dropped even further, to 110

pounds. She was very proud of her fabulous figure and her

stunning appearance, wearing bikini bathing suits for the

first time and taking great pride in her improved good looks.

Testimony and photographs bare witness to these facts.

On the tragic early morning of 25 February 1990, Theresa

collapsed in the hallway of her apartment, waking Michael,

who called Theresa's family and 911. The lives of Theresa,

Michael and the Schindlers were to change forever.

Theresa suffered a cardiac arrest. During the several

minutes it took for paramedics to arrive, Theresa experienced

loss of oxygen to the brain, or anoxia, for a period

sufficiently long to cause permanent loss of brain function.

Despite heroic efforts to resuscitate, Theresa remained

unconscious and slipped into a coma. She was intubated,

ventilated and trached, meaning that she was given life

saving medical technological interventions, without which she

surely would have died that day.

The cause of the cardiac arrest was adduced to a

dramatically reduced potassium level in Theresa's body.

Sodium and potassium maintain a vital, chemical balance in

the human body that helps define the electrolyte levels. The

cause of the imbalance was not clearly identified, but may be

linked, in theory, to her drinking 10-15 glasses of iced tea

each day. While no formal proof emerged, the medical records

note that the combination of aggressive weight loss, diet

control and excessive hydration raised questions about

Theresa suffering from bulimia, an eating disorder, more

common among women than men, in which purging through

vomiting, laxatives and other methods of diet control becomes

obsessive.

Theresa spent two and a half months as an inpatient at

Humana Northside Hospital, eventually emerging from her coma

state, but not recovering consciousness. On 12 May 1990,

following extensive testing, therapy and observation, she was

discharged to the College Park skilled care and

rehabilitation facility. Forty-nine days later, she was

transferred again to Bayfront Hospital for additional,

aggressive rehabilitation efforts. In September of 1990, she

was brought home, but following only three weeks, she was

returned to the College Park facility because the ``family

was overwhelmed by Terry's care needs.''

On 18 June 1990, Michael was formally appointed by the

court to serve as Theresa's legal guardian, because she was

adjudicated to be incompetent by law. Michael's appointment

was undisputed by the parties.

The clinical records within the massive case file indicate

that Theresa was not responsive to neurological and

swallowing tests. She received regular and intense physical,

occupational and speech therapies.

Theresa's husband, Michael Schiavo and her mother, Mary

Schindler, were virtual partners in their care of and

dedication to Theresa. There is no question but that complete

trust, mutual caring, explicit love and a common goal of

caring for and rehabilitating Theresa, were the shared

intentions of Michael Schiavo and the Schindlers. In late

Autumn of 1990, following months of therapy and testing,

formal diagnoses of persistent vegetative state with no

evidence of improvement, Michael took Theresa to California,

where she received an experimental thalamic stimulator

implant in her brain. Michael remained in California caring

for Theresa during a period of several months and returned to

Florida with her in January of 1991. Theresa was transferred

to the Mediplex Rehabilitation Center in Brandon, where she

received 24-hour skilled care, physical, occupational, speech

and recreational therapies.

Despite aggressive therapies, physician and other clinical

assessments consistently revealed no functional abilities,

only reflexive, rather than cognitive movements, random eye

opening, no communication system and little change

cognitively or functionally. On 19 July 1991 Theresa was

transferred to the Sable Palms skilled care facility.

Periodic neurological exams, regular and aggressive physical,

occupational and speech therapy continued through 1994.

Michael Schiavo, on Theresa's and his own behalf, initiated

a medical malpractice lawsuit against the obstetrician who

had been overseeing Theresa's fertility therapy. In 1993, the

malpractice action concluded in Theresa and Michael's favor,

resulting in a

two element award: More than $750,000 in economic damages for

Theresa, and a loss of consortium award (non economic

damages) of $300,000 to Michael. The court established a

trust fund for Theresa's financial award, with South Trust

Bank as the Guardian and an independent trustee. This fund

was meticulously managed and accounted for and Michael

Schiavo had no control over its use. There is no evidence

in the record of the trust administration documents of any

mismanagement of Theresa's estate, and the records on this

matter are excellently maintained.

After the malpractice case judgment, evidence of

disaffection between the Schindlers and Michael Schiavo

openly emerged for the first time. The Schindlers petitioned

the court to remove Michael as Guardian. They made

allegations that he was not caring for Theresa, and that his

behavior was disruptive to Theresa's treatment and condition.

Proceedings concluded that there was no basis for the removal

of Michael as Guardian Further, it was determined that he had

been very aggressive and attentive in his care of Theresa.

His demanding concern for her well being and meticulous care

by the nursing home earned him the characterization by the

administrator as ``a nursing home administrator's

nightmare''. It is notable that through more than thirteen

years after Theresa's collapse, she has never had a bedsore.

By 1994, Michael's attitude and perspective about Theresa's

condition changed. During the previous four years, he had

insistently held to the premise that Theresa could recover

and the evidence is incontrovertible that he gave his heart

and soul to her treatment and care. This was in the face of

consistent medical reports indicating that there was little

or no likelihood for her improvement.

In early 1994 Theresa contracted a urinary tract infection

and Michael, in consultation with Theresa's treating

physician, elected not to treat the infection and

simultaneously imposed a ``do not resuscitate'' order should

Theresa experience cardiac arrest. When the nursing facility

initiated an intervention to challenge this decision, Michael

canceled the orders. Following the incident involving the

infection, Theresa was transferred to another skilled nursing

facility.

Michael's decision not to treat was based upon discussions

and consultation with Theresa's doctor, and was predicated on

his reasoned belief that there was no longer any hope for

Theresa's recovery. It had taken Michael more than three

years to accommodate this reality and he was beginning to

accept the idea of allowing Theresa to die naturally rather

than remain in the non-cognitive, vegetative state. It took

Michael a long time to consider the prospect of getting on

with his life--something he was actively encouraged to do by

the Schindlers, long before enmity tore them apart. He was

even encouraged by the Schindlers to date, and introduced his

in-law family to women he was dating. But this was just prior

to the malpractice case ending.

As part of the first challenge to Michael's Guardianship,

the court appointed John H. Pecarek as Guardian Ad Litem to

determine if there had been any abuse by Michael Schiavo. His

report, issued 1 March 1994, found no inappropriate actions

and indicated that Michael had been very attentive to

Theresa. After two more years of legal contention, the

Schindlers action against Michael was dismissed with

prejudice. Efforts to remove Michael as Guardian were

attempted in subsequent years, without success.

Hostilities increased and the Schindlers and Michael

Schiavo did not communicate directly. By June of 1996, the

court had to order that copies of medical reports be shared

with the Schindlers and that all health care providers be

permitted to discuss Theresa's condition with the

Schindlers--something Michael had temporarily precluded.

In 1997, six years after Theresa's tragic collapse, Michael

elected to initiate an action to withdraw artificial life

support from Theresa. More than a year later, in May of 1998,

the first petition to discontinue life support was entered.

The court appointed Richard Pearse, Esq., to serve as

Guardian Ad Litem to review the request for withdrawal, a

standard procedure.

Mr. Pearse's report, submitted to the court on 20 December

1998 contains what appear to be objective and challenging

findings. His review of the clinical record confirmed that

Theresa's condition was that of a diagnosed persistent

vegetative state with no chance of improvement. Mr. Pearse's

investigation concluded that the statements of Mrs.

Schindler, Theresa's mother, indicated that Theresa displayed

special responses, mostly to her, but that these were not

observed or documented.

Mr. Pearse documents the evolving disaffections between the

Schindlers and Michael Schiavo. He concludes that Michael

Schiavo's testimony regarding the basis for his decision to

withdraw life support--a conversation he had with his wife,

Theresa, was not clear and convincing, and that potential

conflicts of interest regarding the disposition of residual

funds in Theresa's trust account following her death affected

Michael and the Schindlers--but he placed greater emphasis on

the impact it might have had on Michael's decision to

discontinue artificial life support. At the time of Mr.

Pearse's report, more than $700,000 remained in the

guardianship estate.

Mr. Pearse concludes that Michael's hearsay testimony about

Theresa's intent is ``necessarily adversely affected by the

obvious financial benefit to him of being the sole heir at

law . . .'' and ``. . . by the chronology of this case . .

.'', specifically referencing Michael's change in position

relative to maintaining Theresa following the malpractice

award.

Mr. Pearse recommended that the petition for removal of the

feeding tube be denied, or in the alternative, if the court

found the evidence to be clear and convincing, the feeding

tube should be withdrawn.

Mr. Pearse also recommended that a Guardian Ad Litem

continue to serve in all subsequent proceedings.

In response to Mr. Pearse's report, Michael Schiavo filed a

Suggestion of Bias against Mr. Pearse. This document notes

that Mr. Pearse failed to mention in his report that Michael

Schiavo had earlier, formally offered to divest himself

entirely of his financial interest in the guardianship

estate. The criticism continues to note that Mr. Pearse's

concern about abuse of inheritance potential was directly

solely at Michael, not at the Schindlers in the event they

might become the heirs and also choose to terminate

artificial life support. Further, significant chronological

deficits and factual errors are noted, detracting from and

prejudicing the objective credibility of Mr. Pearse's

report.

The Suggestion of Bias challenges premises and findings of

Mr. Pearse, establishing a well pleaded case for bias. In

February of 1999, Mr. Pearse tendered his petition for

additional authority or discharge. He was discharged in June

of 1999 and no new Guardian Ad Litem was named.

Actions by the Schindlers to remove Michael as Guardian and

to block the petition to remove artificial life support took

on a frenetic quality at this juncture. More external parties

on both sides made appearances as potential interveners.

On 11 February 2000, consequent to hearings and the

presentation of competent evidence, Judge Greer ordered the

removal of Theresa's artificial life support. The Schindlers

aggressively sought means by which to stop the removal of

Theresa's feeding tube. Most of the motions in these efforts

were denied, but not without apparent careful and detailed

review by the court, often involving hearings at which

considerable latitude was afforded the Schindlers in their

efforts to proffer testimony and admit evidence.

The motion and hearing process continued through 2000. Then

the Schindlers sought to introduce new evidence that was

believed to be of a sufficiently substantial nature as to

change the court's decision regarding the removal of the

feeding tube. The hearings and testimony before the trial

court leading to the decision to discontinue artificial life

support included admitted hearsay from Theresa's brother-in-

law (Michael Schiavo's brother) and his wife (Michael

Schiavo's sister-in-law) along with testimony from Michael.

The testimony of these parties referenced specific

conversations in which Theresa commented about her desire

never to be placed on artificial life support. The testimony

reflected conversations at or proximate to funerals of close

family members who had been on artificial life support. The

context and content of the testimony, while hearsay, was

deemed credible and consistent and was used by the court as a

supporting basis for its decision to discontinue artificial

life support.

The Schindlers' new evidence ostensibly reflected adversely

on Michael Schiavo's role as Guardian. It related to his

personal romantic life, the fact that he had relationships

with other women, that he had allegedly failed to provide

appropriate care and treatment for Theresa, that he was

wasting the assets within the guardianship account, and that

he was no longer competent to represent Theresa's best

interests.

Testimony provided by members of the Schindler family

included very personal statements about their desire and

intention to ensure that Theresa remain alive. Throughout the

course of the litigation, deposition and trial testimony by

members of the Schindler family voiced the disturbing belief

that they would keep Theresa alive at any and all costs.

Nearly gruesome examples were given, eliciting agreement by

family members that in the event Theresa should contract

diabetes and subsequent gangrene in each of her limbs, they

would agree to amputate each limb, and would then, were she

to be diagnosed with heart disease, perform open heart

surgery. There was additional, difficult testimony that

appeared to establish that despite the sad and undesirable

condition of Theresa, the parents still derived joy from

having her alive, even if Theresa might not be at all aware

of her environment given the persistent vegetative state.

Within the testimony, as part of the hypotheticals presented,

Schindler family members stated that even if Theresa had told

them of her intention to have artificial nutrition withdrawn,

they would not do it. Throughout this painful and difficult

trial, the family acknowledged that Theresa was in a

diagnosed persistent vegetative state.

The court denied the Schindlers' motions to remove the

guardian, allowing that the evidence was not sufficient and

in some instances, not relevant. It set a date for the

artificial life support to be discontinued, as of 24 April

2001.

The decision was appealed to the Florida 2nd District Court

of Appeals (DCA), and was affirmed in January 2001. The

requested appeal to the Florida Supreme Court was denied on

23 April 2001, one day before the

scheduled removal of Theresa's feeding tube. On 24 April

2001, Theresa Schiavo's artificial feeding tube was clamped,

and she ceased receiving nutrition and hydration. Under

normal circumstances, Theresa would die naturally within a

week to ten days.

Two days after the clamping of Theresa's feeding tube, the

Schindlers filed a civil action in their capacity as

``natural guardians'' for Theresa. The trial court, in

emergency review, granted a temporary injunction and the tube

was unclamped. Michael Schiavo filed an emergency motion to

vacate the injunction. This led to the second review and

appeal to the 2nd DCA.

The 2nd DCA found that the intention of Florida Statute 765

with respect to matters such as Theresa's, is to help

expedite proceedings of the court when decisions have been

made by the bona fide guardian. The 2nd DCA also noted that

the Court had acted independently as proxy decision maker

regarding the removal of artificial life support.

In October 2001, the 2nd DCA concluded that the Schindlers

``have presented no credible evidence suggesting new

treatment can restore Mrs. Schiavo.'' The injunction was

lifted and plans moved forward to discontinue artificial

nutrition.

Fresh and exhaustive motions regarding new evidence were

again crafted and proffered to the trial court by the

Schindlers resulting in a lengthy hearing. Affidavits from

medical doctors and others alleged that Theresa's condition

could be improved.

In particular, the sworn statement of a single, osteopathic

physician, Dr. Webber, claimed that he could improve

Theresa's condition and had done so in like and similar

cases.

The quality of evidence in this affidavit was marginal, but

the court allowed it to create a colorable entitlement to

additional medical review. The case was remanded to the trial

court with the charge that each side would select two expert

physicians (a neurologist or a neurosurgeon, according to the

court) and agree between them regarding a fifth, and if they

could not agree on the fifth, the court would select it.

By May of 2002, the physicians were selected by both sides,

but no agreement could be reached about a fifth, so the court

selected one. Curiously and surprisingly, Dr. Webber, who had

served as the basis for this entire process at the 2nd DCA,

did not participate in the exams or the procedure.

Each of the physicians was afforded access to Theresa for

the purpose of conducting a thorough examination. Video tape

recordings were made of some of the examinations along with

segments in which family members interacted with Theresa. The

physicians were deposed and proffered testimony regarding

their findings. Written reports of the examinations were

prepared by all five physicians, and a very detailed hearing

was held in October of 2002.

The clinical evidence presented by the five physicians

reflected their examinations and reviews of the medical

records. Four of the physicians were board certified in

neurology, as suggested by the court, and one physician was

board certified in radiology and hyperbaric medicine. All of

the physicians had excellent pedigrees of medical training.

The scientific quality, value and relevance of the testimony

varied. The two neurologists testifying for Michael Schiavo

provided strong, academically based, and scientifically

supported evidence that was reasonably deemed clear and

convincing by the court. Of the two physicians testifying for

the Schindlers, only one was a neurologist, the other was a

radiologist/hyperbaric physician. The testimony of the

Schindler's physicians was substantially anecdotal, and was

reasonably deemed to be not clear and convincing.

The fifth physician, chosen by the court because the two

parties could not agree, presented scientifically grounded,

academically based evidence that was reasonably deemed to be

clear and convincing by the court.

Following exhaustive testimony and the viewing of video

tapes, the trial court concluded that no substantial evidence

had been presented to indicate any promising treatment that

might improve Theresa's cognition. The court sought to glean

scientific, case, researchbased foundations for the

contentions of the Schindler's physician experts, but

received principally anecdotal information.

Evidence presented by Michael Schiavo's two physicians and

the fifth physician selected by the court was reasonably

deemed clear and convincing in support of Theresa being in a

persistent vegetative state with no hope for improvement.

Simultaneous appeals of this decision and renewed actions to

remove Michael Schiavo as Guardian were initiated based upon

new evidence.

The June 2003 appeal to the 2nd DCA was Schiavo IV. The 2nd

DCA panel of judges engaged in what approximated a de novo

review of all of the facts, testimony and video tapes

presented at trial. The appellate court affirmed the trial

court's ruling and its conclusions, and in addition, ordered

the trial court to set a hearing date for removal of the

artificial life support.

The trial court set 15 October 2003 as the date for the

removal of Theresa's artificial nutrition tube.

The Schindler's renewed efforts to remove Michael Schiavo

as Guardian, and to disqualify judges, were not successful.

Multiple amicus briefs and affidavits from parties supporting

the Schindlers were submitted through the Schindler's actions

and in some instances, independently to the court.

By mid 2003, the landscape and texture of Theresa Schiavo's

case underwent profound changes. National media coverage,

active involvement by groups advocating right to life, and

the attention of the Governor's office and the Florida

Legislature, catapulted Theresa's case into a different

dimension.

The Schindlers, acting on behalf of Theresa, filed a motion

in federal district court seeking a preliminary injunction to

stay the removal of the artificial life support from Theresa,

scheduled to occur on 15 October 2003. On 6 October 2003,

Florida Governor Jeb Bush filed an Amicus brief in support of

the motion for a preliminary injunction. The brief argues

that removal of artificial nutrition, resulting in death,

should be avoided if that person can take oral nutrition and

hydration. The Governor predicates his memorandum on the

pivotal question as to whether Theresa could ingest food and

water on her own. That Theresa is in a diagnosed, persistent

vegetative state is explicitly recognized.

On 15 October 2003, Theresa Maria Schiavo's artificial

feeding tube was disconnected, for the second time.

The Florida legislature, in special session, passed HB 35 E

on 21 October 2003, authorizing the Governor to stay the

disconnection of the artificial feeding tube and required,

among other things, the appointment of a Guardian Ad Litem to

produce this report.

On that same day, 21 October 2003, the artificial feeding

tube was re-inserted per the stay ordered by Governor Bush.

Other suits and actions were initiated immediately the

governor became a named party in the matters involving

Theresa Schiavo.

I just wanted to correct some of those facts for the record, Mr. Speaker. The circumstances that bring us here today are horribly tragic. No matter where you may fall on this issue, the details of Terri's case are heart-wrenching. No one in this Chamber questions the pain, heartache, and personal struggles that every member of Ms. Schiavo's family has had to deal with over the last 15 years. But heartbreaking decisions like this are deeply intimate, personal, and private matters; and the Federal Government and this body, in particular, should not inject itself into the middle of this private family matter.

This very personal matter should not be politicized as it is being here today. Just a few hours ago, I had an opportunity to sit down with Ms. Schiavo's brother, Bobby Schindler. I know that he speaks with great sincerity as I told him about his sister. Indeed, it is important to emphasize that this type of gut-wrenching, angst-ridden decision happens every day across the country among families dealing with the tragic circumstances of a loved one. And I know the pain that this causes families only too well because it happened in my own family not even 5 weeks ago. My husband's family had to make the identical decision to withdraw sustenance to disconnect the feeding tube of my husband's aunt.

Her children came together to make that very difficult decision, and no one in my family felt it was essential that I or any other Member of Congress file legislation to stop it. This type of decision happens every single day to thousands of families across America. Where will we stop if we allow this to go forward? Today will be Terri Schiavo. Tomorrow it will be someone's brother or a constituent's uncle or next week a family member, God forbid, of one of my colleagues or another constituent.

Do we really want to set the precedent of this great body, the United States Congress, to insert ourselves in the middle of families' private matters all across America?

If we do this, we will end up throwing end-of-life decisions into utter and complete chaos; and we cannot and should not do that. We are Members of Congress. We are not doctors. We are not medical experts. We are not bio-ethicists. We are Members of Congress.

When I ran for Congress, I did not ask my constituents for the right to insert myself in their private, personal families decisions; and they do not want me to make those for them. They do not want you to make those for them either. That is the bottom line.

I cannot get into the kind of questions that we are getting into being asked here because we do not know. I have never met Michael Schiavo or Terri Schiavo or the Schindlers and the vast majority of people in this body have not either.

We do not have the expertise or the facts in enough detail to get into these kinds of decisions and make decisions on these kind of cases. We are not God and we are not Terri Schiavo's husband, sister, brother, uncle or relation. We are Members of Congress. We make

laws and we uphold the law and we swore to uphold and protect the Constitution and we are thumbing our noses at the Constitution if we do this here tonight.

Now, I have heard a lot of things said about this legislation and about the very proceeding that we are engaging in this evening. I have heard accusations that because this body is debating this legislation, we are threatening somehow the life of Ms. Schiavo. I think it is really important to note that this is a legislative body created by our forefathers for the express purpose of deliberations and representation.

The accusation that because we have 3 hours of debate on an unprecedented piece of legislation that seeks to insert the Federal Government in between a family while overruling State courts and circumventing the Constitution, that is an outrageous accusation and not worthy of a representative elected to craft and debate legislation.

I notice today that President Bush has returned from Crawford hoping to sign this legislation if it is passed by Congress. I think it is important to note that President Bush when he was Governor of Texas in 1999 signed a Texas law that is on the books today that was just used a few days ago to allow a hospital to withdraw, over the parents' objections, the life support of a 6-month-old boy, over the parents' objections.

President Bush signed a law called the Texas Advanced Directives Act, when he was Governor of Texas. This law, that has been used several times and as recently as a few days ago, liberalized the situations under which a person in Texas can avoid artificial life support. Under it, life support can be withheld or withdrawn if you have an irreversible condition in Texas from which you are expected to eventually pass away.

Indeed, this law, signed by then Governor Bush, allows doctors to remove a patient from life support if the hospital's ethics committee agrees, even over the objections of a family member, only allowing the family 10 days to find another facility that might accept the patient, barring any State judicial intervention.

It appears that President Bush felt, as Governor, that there was a point at which, when doctors felt there was no further hope for the patient, that it is appropriate for an end-of-life decision to be made, even over the objections of family members. That was a law that President Bush did not just allow to become law without his signature, he came back from a campaign trip to sign it.

There is an obvious conflict here between the President's feelings on this matter now as compared to when he was Governor of Texas, so I thought that was an important conflict that should be raised here this evening in our discussion.

Let me just close my remarks by reiterating there is no room for the Federal Government in this most personal of private angst-ridden family matters, in which a family has to make the most personal of decisions when dealing with the course of care of a loved one. We should not politicize this very personal family matter.

Ms. Schiavo made it clear, as opposed to what the gentleman from Wisconsin said, that she would not have wished to remain in a persistent vegetative state, and the guardian ad litem report well documents that. In fact, it documents it to such a degree that it cites the specific conversations referenced by her family members when she attended funerals of loved ones who were in similar situations when they had life support removed; and she had stated that if, God forbid, she was ever in this situation, that she would not have wished to remain on life support.

The court heard that testimony not from Terri Schiavo's husband, not from her parents, but from other family members and friends who heard her say these things. They said that there was enough evidence to render the belief that she had made those statements. She made it clear that she wished not to remain in a persistent vegetative state, which she is in today. And this U.S. Government should not step in to circumvent the wishes of one dying woman.

Mr. Speaker, our colleagues have spent this evening reiterating factually inaccurate information, and I want to make sure we clear it up.

The independent guardian ad litem appointed to represent Terri Schiavo has said in his report that, despite the facts cited by my colleagues on the other side of the aisle who have said that Terri felt pain and laughs and cries, that that is factually inaccurate; that her cerebral cortex has been liquefied, and that is the area of the brain that responds to emotion and reason. So that is impossible what they have detailed here tonight.

Additionally, they talk about six neurologists and eight physicians that have said that she is not in a persistent vegetative state. Also factually inaccurate. Those physicians to which they refer have only viewed Terri via videotape. The five court-appointed physicians that have examined Terri, two appointed on Michael Schiavo's side, two on the Schindlers' side, and one court-appointed physician, who have all examined her, the board certified neurologists who had scientifically- based academically-researched testimony, their testimony was deemed to be clear and convincing by the court that she was and is in a persistent vegetative state. The other physicians' testimony was discounted as anecdotal only.

In addition to that, I want to just close with the commentary from the guardian ad litem. He spent 20 of 30 days with her. He put his face up close to hers and tried to make eye contact, pleading desperately, trying to will her into giving him any kind of sign. He said, I would beg her, please, Terri, help me. You want to believe there is some connection. You hope she is going to sit up in bed and say, ``Hey, I'm really here, but don't tell anybody.'' Or, ``I'm really here, tell everybody.''

But Schiavo never made eye contact. When Wolfson visited her when her parents were there, she never made eye contact with them either, he said. And for all of Wolfson's pleadings and coaxings, he never got what he most wanted: A sign. He said, I felt like there was something distinctive about whoever Terri is, but I was not clear it was there, inside the vessel.

During those 30 days, Wolfson was plagued by nightmares. He concluded that the medical and legal evidence behind Schiavo's diagnosis of being in a persistent vegetative state was credible, but he still felt that for all their expertise, those medical experts would never truly know where Schiavo was.

He was dismayed to learn Friday that Barbara Weller, an attorney for the Schindlers, claimed Schiavo tried to speak. He said, Terri does not speak. To claim otherwise reduces her to a fiction.''

Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New York (Mr. Nadler) for yielding me time.

I stand here as a Member representing the great State of Florida and as someone who served in the Florida Senate when this gut-wrenching issue was debated intensely almost 2 years ago, where we determined that Terri Schaivo would be allowed to have her feeding tube be reinserted by order of the Governor, who had decided that he was going to be able to usurp a court decision. That was ultimately ruled unconstitutional and for very good reason.

There is no doubt that this is a family tragedy. In fact, this is just about the most personal and heart-wrenching of all matters that could arise in any family, but this is a family matter, where there is no room for the Federal Government in this case or in any case that a family has to make the most personal of decisions when dealing with an end-of-life decision.

This case in particular related to Terri Schaivo has been through 10 court decisions, 10 court reviews, and each time the courts have sided with Terri's husband and Terri Schaivo's wishes, where they have ruled that she made it clear that she would not have wished to remain in a persistent vegetative state.

There is no reason on earth why the U.S. government should step in to circumvent the wishes of one dying woman, and the gentleman from Florida, my colleague from the great State of Florida, maintains that Terri is not in a persistent vegetative state. Yet, doctors who have examined her, and I

would imagine that my colleague from the State of Florida has not examined Ms. Schaivo, doctors who have examined her have consistently said that she is in a persistent vegetative state. In fact, it is only physicians who the Schindlers have employed who have said she is not, and they have reviewed her via videotape. The doctors that have actually examined Ms. Schaivo have determined that she in a persistent vegetative state.

The courts independently arrived at the decision that they believe that Terri wished to never remain in a persistent vegetative state. They interviewed her husband, her sister-in-law and friends of the family, but the decision that they reached was based on the testimony independently retrieved from her brother, from her sister-in-law and friends. They all testified that Terri had made her intentions clear.

The court and the doctors that examined Ms. Schaivo found that she has no cerebral cortex; that the reactions and responses that we have seen on TV dozens of time, that she seems to respond to her parents when they talk to her, that those are all reflexive, that they are not direct responses to interaction with people.

The doctors have examined her, again have examined her, that have reviewed her records, that have reviewed her MRIs have said that she is in a persistent vegetative state.

This is a horrible case. No matter what the facts are, it is a horrible case, but Terri Schaivo made her wishes clear, and we should not interject this body, the Federal Government, the United States Congress, into a personal family matter.

We are taking one set of facts for one family, which is the tragedy of one family and applying it to tens of thousands of families who have or will have loved ones in nursing homes, in hospice facilities or even those being kept alive by their families in their own homes. We are reaching all the way into very personal family cases in communities all across the country, and we are trying to apply a one-size-fits-all solution to all of them. That is totally inappropriate, and I think if we ask just about any family in America whether they think it would be okay if the United States Congress made an end-of-life decision for their loved ones, they would resoundingly say no.

I find it particularly hypocritical that those that talk about the defense of marriage now want to interject the Federal Government between a husband and his wife on what was a personal family matter. I ask that we think about how we would feel if, God forbid, our own loved one were in a persistent vegetative state and were in the circumstances and faced the circumstances that Terri Schaivo does. Would we want the United States Congress making the decision or would we want to be involved in that decision ourselves solely on our own?

I think that most families would resoundingly say that they want to make that decision. There but for the grace of God go I.

Once again it is a pleasure to be here with you.

Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding to me. My colleague from Florida is always so eloquent, and one of the things that has struck me from the time I have been privileged to serve in the Congress, for about 10 weeks now, is that we really stand on the shoulders of giants in this Chamber and there are precious few that fall into that category and that deserve that accolade. And Congressman Lehman was most definitely one of them.

I am privileged to represent a good portion of his district. I can only hope, as I am sure the gentleman can because he also represents a portion of his former district, that both he and I and our colleagues from South Florida can even begin to fill his shoes. Certainly it is our responsibility to carry on his legacy, and I know that is what we will strive to do every day on this floor, and I look forward to the hour that will be devoted to his life.

That is right, Madam Speaker. And if the gentleman will continue to yield, the one thing I want to add is that for those who did not know Congressman Lehman, his name was far more widely known because there are far too numerous to mention car dealerships across Florida and, quite honestly, Congressman Lehman was a leader in transportation for good reason, because there are thousands and thousands of drivers who began their driving careers thanks to Mr. Lehman and his family. And he has been not just a pillar of the community but a giant when it comes to transportation, and I think that should not be lost on this body.

Absolutely, Madam Speaker. And I think it has to be said that the gentleman has been an incredible leader in co- chairing with our colleague from Ohio this 30-something Working Group. We are really here to talk to our generation, to talk to the American people in our generation about the policy decisions that are made here in Washington and how it affects them.

I think the gentleman is right. I think we have a number of well- intentioned colleagues on the other side. But, unfortunately, this train is being driven by the right. It is being driven by the right wing of the Republican Congress. They are driving the train here, and the moderate voice is just completely snuffed out. Absolutely snuffed out.

And I think we should spend a little bit of time talking about how the Bush administration's budget affects education because a lot has been said and the President has touted this Pell grant increase as being so fantastic and how he has really made a commitment to expanding access to higher education. When we sift through the facts and the reality as to how he gets to that $100 increase in Pell grants, it is really astonishing that they would claim it is an increase.

Essentially, when he was campaigning in 2000, the President pledged to make college more affordable and accessible by increasing the maximum Pell grant for college freshmen to $5,100.

He broke his promise once again. Once again, he says one thing and does another. They talk about numbers over here, and they are much higher or much lower, the opposite of what they promise, again and again.

Since 2001, just to give the facts, the cost of attending a four year public college has increased by more than $2,300. And what was President Bush's response? To increase the maximum Pell Grant by $10 to $4,150 in 2006. But that would only pay for 4 percent of the college cost increases since 2001.

The way he finances this Pell Grant increase is by cutting, essentially decimating, many, many other student aid programs. We have a chart here that I will move over and try to walk you through.

Essentially the Bush budget completely eliminates the Perkins loan program, a $66 million cut. If that proposal is enacted, more than 670,000 borrowers in 2006 alone would lose out on loan forgiveness if they choose to serve this country by becoming teachers, law enforcement officers or serve in the military. It totally eliminates that program.

The Bush budget forces millions of low and middle income students to pay thousands more for their college loans, because they eliminate the current low fixed consolidation benefits. According to the nonpartisan, their numbers, Congressional Research Service, this change will force the typical student borrower to pay about $5,500 more in college loans.

The President also, in order to give you a measly $100 increase in your Pell Grants, he also completely eliminates the funds for Gear Up, for Upward Bound and for the Talent Search programs. These programs ensure that high risk students succeed in high school and move on to college. If the President has his way, nearly 1.3 million students, 70 percent of whom are minorities, will lose the support they need to make it to college.

This is how we are improving access to higher education in the Bush budget. It is just astonishing.

If the gentleman will yield on the debt, I want to just follow up with what you are saying about debt. If we can come on over to this chart, this talks about how the debt actually impacts families. Because debt, when you talk about trillions, one thing I noticed about this job that we have that our constituents so graciously gave us, is that when you start talking about billions and trillions of dollars, people's eyes start to glaze over. I have learned the difference between a billion and a trillion, and it is a lot of money. And what this debt means is a lot of money to the average family of four.

Going up the scale here with the ever-increasing debt that the Bush budgets have put on us, we are now going to reach, in 2004, the Bush budget raises the debt tax, which is basically what the debt costs every family of four in America, right now it is costing every family in America almost $4,400.

You go up the scale with the Bush budget proposal, and we are not even talking about Social Security, we are talking about what we have got right here, right now, not even talking about privatizing Social Security. By 2015, each family of four would have $10,500 that they essentially would responsibility for in terms of a debt tax and how much the debt was going to cost them.

That is where we have gone in this country. We are just going to keep adding and adding and weighing people down. What happens with our generation, on the front page of the South Florida Sun Sentinel the other day, I was flying up here, and the front page talked about ``Generation Debt.''

Our generation is Generation Debt, because we are not the generation of savers. Our parents and our grandparents were the generation of savers, but we are not. So we are already shouldering a tremendous amount, way more than we should, in personal debt. On top of that, the President heaps this on top of us also, and it is just wrong.

If you are going to talk about what we are doing here, you have to talk about jobs and technology and how that is going to affect our generation.

The number one issue for young people right now, for our generation, is finding a job. We supposedly have this fantastic reemergence of the economy, but job creation is still totally flat.

The current unemployment rate for individuals 16 to 19 is 17 percent. And, more and more, those young people need a job. We are not just talking about a paper route anymore, we are talking about kids who are 16 to 19 years old who need to earn a salary to help pay the family's bills. If they do not have a job, then their family is falling down flat. And the President's budget contains absolutely no job growth stimulation proposals, it squanders $1.6 trillion on tax breaks to people who do not need them.

Job training: We have no proposals for job training. In fact, the President cuts job training in his budget. He consolidates it into a single block grant, and then cuts the funding for these programs, for job training programs, by $146 million.

He eliminates the Advanced Technology Program, and I am trying to speed along also, which funds research and emerging technologies.

His budget slashes by nearly 60 percent the funds from the Manufacturing Extension Partnership Program, which is a program that helps small manufacturers with new technologies.

And lastly, our generation cares about the Internet. There are so many opportunities in expanding access to high speed Internet. This President has proposed to slash broadband assistance guaranteed loans by $190 million, and he has called for the total elimination of broadband telecommunications grants.

Are they thinking about our folks? They are clearly not. They have no interest in what is going to happen to the generation coming behind the one that already has theirs.

That is what we have got to do. We have got to make sure we can refocus the attention that is paid to our generation because no one is thinking about us.

There is a name for that.

Borrow and spend.

In the last several weeks I have tried to talk about the impact on women that the Bush administration's policies have had. For example, there are 20 million women in this country without health insurance and millions more who can barely afford to pay their premiums; but this budget does nothing to hold down health care costs. It slashes Medicaid by a total of $45 billion over the next 10 years. That is a devastating cut on women and children because women account for over 70 percent of adult Medicaid beneficiaries.

In terms of violence against women, the President's budget cuts the Violence Against Women Act programs by $19 million; child care, the budget freezes funding for the Maternal and Child Health block grant and eliminates the Universal Newborn Screening Program.

Now, I have a 19-month-old. You have young children. I have passed legislation in Florida that ensured that we expanded screening for genetic anomalies and problems in newborns, and this Bush budget reverses all of that progress.

If we do not make sure we screen newborns for hearing problems, then we will have learning disabilities that are directly related to hearing abnormalities and without any excuse. But we have got to make sure that we think about children and families when prioritizing and that is what we could do. And the proof is in the pudding that we do not.

I also wanted to talk a little bit about health care because one of the most important issues that we have in this country is the skyrocketing cost of health care.

We have 45 million Americans who do not have health insurance. That means when they are sick, they cannot go to the doctor and they have to let their health care problems spiral out of control until they have to go to the emergency room to get the problem solved. And young Americans, our generation, are the most likely group to be insured. We think we are invincible. We think we are not going to have to worry about having health insurance and going to the doctor, so we go without. But more often we also cannot afford it.

Thirty percent of young adults age 18 to 24 have no health insurance at all. Compare that with 18 percent of adults who are 35 to 44 and only 1 percent of seniors. So the health care crisis disproportionately affects our generation, and there is nothing in the Bush budget to improve that. Where is this President's leadership on expanding access to health care?

When I go down the street, when I go to the supermarket at home, when I go to street festivals, people stop me in the street. I have heard the gentleman talk about people stopping him in the street and talking about issues that are important to them. The thing that they stop me on the most often is education and health care.

They say, if my baby girl or my baby boy is sick, I have no health insurance and I cannot get them shots. If they have a cold, I cannot bring them to the doctor. I have to wait until the problem is bad enough to bring them to the emergency room, and no mother or father should have to suffer through something like that.

This President needs to exercise some leadership in this budget on how to solve this problem and he has not. It is an abdication of leadership.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for yielding to me, and it is an honor to be here once again with him. It has been my distinct pleasure to serve with my colleague in various capacities over the last 10 years, and particularly because we represent a State that would be so impacted by whatever the vague outlines of the President's suggestion, for lack of a better term. Because what has been truly unfortunate about the President's concept is that that is all it has become. It has just been a concept.

We are trying to help people understand that the President, although he has been stumping the country promoting his concept, his concept has never amounted to legislation. He has not asked any Member of Congress to file legislation. We have not seen a bill; therefore, we have no specific details. And coming from the State that we do, which is one of the States whose residents would be the most significantly impacted by the devastating results of his proposal on Social Security, we have spent quite a bit of time trying to educate our constituents about the dire ramifications.

Given our generation and the impact ultimately that the President's outline would have on them, we need to continue to spend time doing what we have been doing, which is trying to spread the word and make people aware that, despite what they may have heard in the previous hour, we are on a fact-disseminating mission. We need to get the word out and make people understand that there is a lot of fiction and a lot of trumped-up reality that has been disseminated.

We need to help people understand that while there is a problem with Social Security, we need to be responsible and take the time that is required, that is our responsibility to take, to get it right. It is not a crisis.

The year 2042 is what has been clearly acknowledged as the earliest that we have to be concerned about there being a cut in benefits. And while we absolutely do not think we should reach that point, in 2042, since this is the 30-something Working Group, I will be 75 years old. In 2052, which is the more likely scenario, given the dim economic picture they have painted and

given our economic history, it is unlikely that in 2042 there would even be a problem yet. I will be 85 years old.

The reason that is important, as my colleague knows when he talks to his friends and when I talk to my friends, people who are listening out there, people our age think Social Security will not be there for them. They really do. And with the facts, they will understand that it will be there for them well beyond their retirement years. We need to be responsible and take some time to make the changes necessary and not yank the rug out from under our generation or our children's generation. We need to make sure we can preserve the Social Security safety net.

So, Mr. Speaker, I am glad to join my colleague this afternoon because we have a lot of educating to do.

Mr. Speaker, what could happen is our colleagues on the other side of the aisle just spent an hour talking about how there is a crisis, and we need to address it. It could appear as though we are engaging in a debate of, yes there is, no there is not. Let me just show the folks at home who is saying and agreeing there is not a crisis.

The other day, the Comptroller General, David Walker, testified in front of the Committee on Ways and Means, which is the committee with main jurisdiction over this issue. He said, while the program faces no immediate financial crisis, he did say that time is working against us, and the longer we wait, the further you put off solving this problem, the more difficult it is going to be. He did acknowledge in full public view, the Comptroller General of the United States, that the program faces no immediate financial crisis.

Now, I would not think that the Comptroller General would deliberately contradict the President unless he wanted to make sure that he stuck to what is factual versus hyperbole. We have been truly committed to disseminating facts and not just blowing this problem out of proportion to get to our political goal. That is what the other side has been doing.

Mr. Speaker, it is important to continue along the vein that we have. These are not manufactured facts by the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) and the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Wasserman Schultz).

If we look at this chart that shows how the debt would increase under the President's budget proposal if this plan goes forward, this is the portion of the debt from 2004 through 2015 that each American would be responsible for. It starts at $4,395 in 2004 and goes up to $10,500. This is gross income per family of four, and this is CBO numbers. This reflects the CBO's estimate of the President's budget that he has recently proposed. We are already in pretty dire straits when it comes to the deficit. The deficit, when divided amongst every American and each family, this is what it translates to over time. This is what it means to a family of four in real burden.

So if Members think about the real burden that a family of four takes on in adding to the debt because the proposal that the President has put forward grossly increases the deficit. I want to take this chart down and go to the next chart, in order to privatize Social Security and make the transition to private accounts, that would cost $1.4 trillion in borrowing in the first 10 years of the plan.

That obviously will endanger the economy. It makes us further indebted to foreign nations and sends essentially the decision making about our economic future to China and Japan as opposed to remaining here in Washington, D.C., where we think most Americans would obviously prefer it to be. It raises taxes on our children and grandchildren over time because that number goes from $4,300 in debt per family of four to more than $10,000 per family of four.

Going past 10 years, it costs another $3.5 trillion. The Republican Social Security privatization plan adds further to our debt. Here is the $1.4 trillion in the next 10 years and an additional $3.5 trillion over the 10 years after that. That adds additional debt in the first 10 years, and this shows the current debt that we have.

We have got to make sure that we become once and for all fiscally responsible. We have a goal to remain committed to the preservation and solvency of Social Security because we have been, as Democrats, supportive of creating, sustaining and improving Social Security since 1935. The proof is in the pudding. The proof is in where the votes have been, and the votes have been in terms of sustaining Social Security's future, on the Democratic side of the aisle.

To add insult to injury, if we are going to spend time talking about private accounts and that really seems to be the way the President has shaped this debate, that is the issue around which the President has shaped this debate, what is unbelievable is that private accounts by anyone's admission do not even solve the problem. Private accounts do not shore up Social Security, they do not improve its solvency, they do not solve the 2042 problem. They just create private accounts and privatize Social Security and pull the rug out from under people's future retirement security. That is all they do.

Just so that we can stick to the facts and not hyperbole, I will highlight the gentleman from New York (Mr. Rangel), our ranking member on Ways and Means. The other day, he spoke to Mr. Walker and asked him about private accounts and his opinion. Mr. Walker, the Comptroller, said that as a carve-out, and this was in front of the House Committee on Ways and Means, personal accounts financed with payroll taxes could worsen the program's financial stability. He said if it was designed as a supplement to traditional benefits, as an add-on, that personal accounts would not cause a problem. And, essentially, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Levin) said, well, what the President proposed was a carve-out. That is clearly not acceptable under the Comptroller General's concept.

By the President's own experts' admission, Social Security is not in crisis, Social Security is solvent until at least 2042; and then what is unfortunate is the hyperbole, because our colleague from North Carolina, who was spending some time on the floor a little while ago talking about their view, his view, on Social Security referred to the solvency issue and said that out in 2042 that Social Security would be flat busted, I think was the term he used while I was listening to his debate. That is absolutely incorrect. Flat busted. My definition of flat busted means no money, gone, cannot provide any benefits at all. Then he, a few minutes later, said, well, it would provide 60 to 70 percent of benefits.

The reality is that the factual numbers from the Social Security Administration itself, from the trustees who manage the Social Security trust fund, they say that at the earliest in 2042, Social Security would pay 80 percent of benefits if we do nothing, which you and I and others continue and the leader and the whip and the chairman of the caucus continue to stress, we are not suggesting that we do nothing. We are suggesting that if we are going to focus on this problem, that we call it a problem and not a crisis, couch it the way it is, and let us come together in a bipartisan fashion and sit down and hash out solutions.

Our point is why spend time wringing our hands, gnashing our teeth, and stressing out our constituents who are really concerned about whether or not Social Security is going to be there for them talking about privatizing Social Security which is the vast majority of what we are spending our time talking about when it does not even solve the problem. That is the bottom line.

When I had my town hall meetings, Democrats have held more than 300 town hall meetings, like the gentleman said, more than 80 percent of our colleagues in the caucus have had town hall meetings, there have literally been more than 300 of those. At so many of those, senior citizens, our wonderful senior citizens who literally we all stand on their shoulders today, you and I especially, our generation has been able to achieve what we have been able to achieve by standing on their shoulders.

People ask, why do seniors care about this issue? The President has said, people 55 and over are not going to have to worry about it. They care because they care about their grandchildren. They also care because they have a healthy dose of skepticism. What they lived through in their lifetimes has taught them not to take everything at face value. And they understand that when you have such a gargantuan, mammoth change to a system as large as Social Security, there is no way that you can trust that people who are 55 and older will not have to worry.

They also understand that they need to be concerned about their children and their grandchildren. That same AP story that the gentleman quoted a little while ago focused on the President and what he has said about this issue. The President commented on people 55 and older. At the same time he was saying they would not need to be concerned about his plan, he also said grandmothers and grandfathers need to be worried about their grandchildren when it comes to Social Security. So at least the President acknowledges that people 55 and older have a legitimate reason to be concerned about this. We have got to make sure that we continue to disseminate the facts and not engage in the hyperbole that the Republicans have been.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, I want to get to some of the e-mails we received since the last hour. I want to highlight an e-mail we got from a young woman, someone who just passed 30-something, 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 haven't 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 people's 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 children's or grandchildren's 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.

His outline.

That is okay. I thank the gentleman. He is right, I was giving him too much credit. You do not get both. You get at least a 46 percent cut in your benefits in the Social Security benefits that you would have gotten if you move to a private account.

I want to give some information to our younger peers about what it would mean. Risky private accounts do not make up for the 46 percent cut in benefits that President Bush has proposed. A 20-year-old who enters the workforce this year would lose about $152,000 over their working lifetime in Social Security benefits under the Bush plan.

Social Security provides disability insurance, which we have not talked too much about yet. I had a man who suffers from MS come to one of my town hall meetings. He could barely speak because it has affected his voice.

He can no longer work. He collects Social Security. We need to remind people of people who are survivors, who are collecting survivors benefits, their families, people on disability.

Absolutely. A third of Social Security goes to people who are survivors of Social Security recipients. The Social Security recipient in their family has passed on. That person's dependents who remain alive collect that person's Social Security benefits.

There are young children and widows who are sustained through their life, who are able to remain in their house, who are able to send their children to school and leave the legacy that their deceased parent would have wanted for them, because Social Security is in place.

If you shift to private accounts, the President's outline does not help people on disability or survivors or their families because they cannot work, because they do not have a way to invest in private accounts, because they do not collect a salary. So we are going to essentially leave them out in the cold.

For a worker in her mid-20s with a spouse and two children, and there are millions of families like that across this country, Social Security provides the equivalent of a $350,000 disability insurance policy. Most people that I know cannot afford to go out and buy one of those on the private market. That is the type of thing that Social Security provides.

Suppose, God forbid, a young parent dies suddenly. Social Security provides for the children who are left behind. The survivors benefits will replace as much as 80 percent of the earnings for a 25-year-old average wage worker who dies leaving two young children and a spouse. For that parent, Social Security survivors benefits are the equivalent to a $403,000 life insurance policy.

That is what Social Security means to real people who suffer through these unexpected tragedies every single day.

We need to fix Social Security. We acknowledge that there are problems. We do not think that we should get to 2042 and have there only be 80 percent benefits paid. We believe in shoring up Social Security, but we believe in doing it responsibly, and we are not going to come to the table and negotiate on a risky privatization plan which does not solve the problem, which adds to our national debt, makes us more reliant on foreign nations and their economic decisions and leaves the future of our generation twisting in the wind, hoping that they will have benefits that would probably go away if this is the direction we are going in.

Mr. Speaker, I want to remain true to my gender, and I have done this every week since I have been participating in the 30-something group. I have an 18-month-old who I want to take to Mommy and Me in the morning, so I am going to go home in a minute and catch my flight so I can do that.

The reason that I am saying that is that I am one of three women younger than 40 in the Congress, out of 435 Members. There are a unique set of issues that women face when compared to men. The privatization outline that the President has suggested really puts women in a dire situation. For example, in 2003, the average monthly Social Security benefit for a woman was only $798, which is $241 less than the average man's monthly retirement. Women's earnings were 76 percent relative to men in 2003, which is down from 77 percent in 2002.

Women who reach retirement age live on average at least 3 years longer than men, so this is going to be their problem 3 years longer than men. Social Security is the only source of retirement income for one in three unmarried, retired women. Without Social Security, 52 percent of white women, 65 percent of African American women, and 61 percent of Hispanic women would live in poverty upon retirement. It provides more than half of the total income for widows and single women.

We have got to make sure that Social Security provides for all of us. We have got to make sure that we get the facts out as it relates to this problem. Not crisis, but problem. And we in the 30-something group, the members of our generation are going to continue to help educate, as we go around the country on the campus tours that we are planning, as we work with Rock the Vote and the myriad of organizations that the gentleman has detailed. The Older Women's League also is on that list in being in opposition to the President's outline.

It is our responsibility to ensure that when the baton is handed to our generation, that we commit to carrying it forth and run up those stairs like they do in the Olympics and light the torch so that we can make sure that we preserve the safety net that was created back in 1935.

It is always a pleasure to be here with the gentleman, and I look forward to continuing our fact-disseminating mission.

Absolutely. The Speaker is also wearing the tie. During this week, the Lifetime Network has promoted the issue of violence against women and highlighted the issue of violence against women on their Web site and on their network. We have all been wearing and have been asked to wear this tie and scarf to highlight domestic violence and the tragedy of domestic violence so that we can make sure that we can fight domestic violence in every corner of this country.

So I am pleased that the men and women of the Congress on both sides of the aisle have been committed to this and we are standing in solidarity with the women who have been victims of domestic violence.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Florida for yielding to me. It is a pleasure to be here with my 30- something colleagues once again.

I did have townhall meetings in south Florida last week. I had three townhall meetings, and more than 500 people attended those meetings. Other than two, two out of those 500 hundred, every single person left with the feeling that they were completely opposed to the President's privatization plan. They understood first and foremost that it is incredibly disturbing that the privatization proposal he has put forward does not even solve the problem.

We, I think, have tried to stress as Democrats that we are not saying there is no problem, that there is a problem that needs to be addressed. But, for example, and one of the examples I used in my meetings, was that the earliest that we have a problem where we are taking in less than we are paying out is in 2042, and many of the studies show that it really could last until 2052. Our generation, when I talk to my friends at home and ask them whether they think Social Security is going to be there, they do not think it will.

Let me just throw out an example. I am 38 years old. In 2042, I will be 75. I will be 85 in 2052. So that shows you that Social Security will be there for our generation. What we need to do is we need to make some changes to Social Security, shore it up, help preserve the safety net; but we need to take the time to do it right. We do not need to perform the radical surgery the President is proposing, and that was the overwhelming message I got from my constituents.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back to the gentleman from Florida.

Mr. Speaker, one of the things that came up in my town meetings, talking about the debt and privatization would add to in America, the gentleman from Florida and I served with a wise Republican member of the Florida Senate, Senator Jim King, whom when we were engaged in a debate with our House colleagues and it was the State Senate versus the State House and our position in the State Senate was we should not be adding to debt and we should not be continuing to borrow to pay for our needs, he likened that concept to using our MasterCard to pay off our Visa.

Mr. Speaker, that is really the policy that the President is advocating. He appears to think it is okay to add to the debt, make our deficit much more significant, to overrely on nations like China and Japan. I feel an overwhelming sentiment coming from my constituents, and just by applying a little logic, why would we want to leave our constituents' future retirement security in the hands of the economic whims or decisions of foreign governments. That is essentially what is being done when we talk about privatizing Social Security.

The other really big issue that the President has tried to stress and underscore and use to try to relieve the concern that senior citizens may have over his plan, he is saying do not worry, people over 55 and over, we are not going to touch your benefits, nothing is going to happen.

Well, as neutrally as I possibly could, and some people might chuckle about that, I presented that argument in my town meetings last week. And overwhelmingly, my constituents, the constituents of the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek), understood when we have a massive program like we have in Social Security in America, and we are talking about the kinds of numbers and the impact that privatization would have on that program, $1.4 trillion cost to privatize in the first 10 years, and another $3.5 trillion in 10 years after that, when we apply a radical surgical procedure to a program that size, they understand there is no way you are going to avoid impacting them. It is not possible. They are smarter than that.

The other reason for the answer to the question of why senior citizens care about this, assuming they believe the President, say they take the President at his word and believe it will not affect people 55 and older, the reason they care is they understand that our generation, their children and their grandchildren, we are not the generation of savers that they were. They were the generation of savers. We are the generation of racking up our credit card bills and trying to have as much as we possibly can. There is nothing wrong with that, but it needs to be recognized that is a policy where Americans continue to add to their debt and there are eventually consequences to that.

Exactly. And what the gentleman said about debt in general and making sure that we continue to have sound public policy when it comes to Social Security, these senior citizens understand that because we do not have the savings in generations following them, we have to make sure that we adopt an approach to fixing Social Security that recognizes that the emphasis should be on encouraging savings. There is a way to do that without moving to a radical proposal like privatizing the program.

Chairman Greenspan testified before the Committee on Financial Services and was pretty unequivocal in his testimony before our break about what he believes the direction we should take is.

His focus was absolutely on any policy change that moved away from encouraging a national savings was not a sound one. Almost every one of the comments that he made undermined the President's arguments. He testified in front of our committee that the overriding long-term retirement issue facing the Nation is increasing national savings. Before I yield back, I want to tell my colleagues a really telling story. The thing that I think is important to stress is that Social Security was created in 1935. It was created by Democrats, it was sustained by Democrats, it was improved by Democrats and that has generally been virtually without any Republican support for Social Security. It was not created with Republican votes. It has not been fixed by Republican leadership. The gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Frank), our ranking member on the Committee on Financial Services, asked Chairman Greenspan this question:

Mr. Chairman, in 1935 if you were a Member of Congress, would you have voted for Social Security?

The chairman's response was: I can't answer that question.

I think I will just leave it at that and allow that to underscore where the support for Social Security is. It certainly has not been on the administration's side of the issue.

I just want to expound on a couple of the things that the gentleman said. Given from the three of us, me being from the opposite gender from the two gentlemen I am here on the floor with, I think it is important to note the effect that privatization would have on women. We have talked about this before but just to give you an idea of what women face when it comes to the comparison to men. In 2003, the average monthly Social Security benefit for a woman was only $798. That is $241 less than the average man's monthly retirement. Women's earnings are still 77 percent relative to men in 2002 dollars. Women who reach retirement age live on average at least 3 years longer than men. So this is a female problem, to say the least. Social Security is the only source of retirement income for one in three unmarried retired women. That is a really significant number.

Without Social Security, 52 percent of white women, 65 percent of African American women and 61 percent of Hispanic women would live in poverty upon retirement. It provides more than half of the total income for female widows and single women. The other thing I wanted to expand upon that the gentleman from Florida talked about is the issue does arise, where is the Democrats' plan? Do my colleagues remember, I think it was a Wendy's commercial, the really famous Wendy's commercial, ``Where's the beef?'' That is what I would like to know, and my constituents want to know about the President's plan, where is the beef? It is very nice to talk about vague outlines of what you would like to see happen, pie in the sky concepts, but generally in my legislative experience, when a President or a governor in my experience makes a proposal, they usually send the legislative body a bill. They usually get a Member to sponsor it. And then we have an opportunity to dissect it and debate it and then the minority party offers their alternative. It is time. It really is time. It is the President that has laid out that this is a crisis. We call it a long-term challenge. We would be happy to sit down and discuss our approach to that long- term challenge but we are in an apples-to-oranges situation here.

I have some credit card debt.

Fifty.

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, I just wanted to expand on something since we are going to try to focus on young people in our caucus. A really good example of what impact this proposal would have on younger people, a 20-year-old who enters the workforce today, over the course of their career would experience a $152,000 loss in their Social Security benefits that they would have otherwise received. It provides disability insurance that young families need. There is no private insurance plan today that can match the disability benefits that Social Security provides. For a worker in her mid-20s with a spouse and two children, Social Security provides the equivalent of a $350,000 disability insurance policy. Most young people cannot afford or obtain that kind of coverage outside of Social Security.

And let us say, God forbid, a young parent dies suddenly. I heard the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Clyburn) today talk about a person who came to one of his townhall meetings whose spouse died when she was 35 years old and Social Security provides the survivor benefits that are left behind for those kids.

To such an extent, most people do not realize Social Security's survivor benefits will replace as much as 80 percent of the earnings for a 25-year-old average-wage worker who dies, leaving two young children and a spouse. That is the equivalent of a $403,000 life insurance policy. And the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Clyburn) talked very poignantly this morning about the gentleman that he has known for years, and had never heard this story, that his 35-year-old wife, when she

passed away, could at least rest in peace knowing that her life and her work had provided for her children's future benefit even in death.

And that is the type of rug that we are pulling out from under people if we go in this direction.

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, actually what I want to close with is I want to quote the President because the President has said that leadership means not passing problems on to future generations and future Presidents. And I take him at his word, and I am hopeful that we do not go forward with this proposal because this plan to privatize Social Security flies in the face of his stated belief that we need to exercise some leadership and make sure that Social Security is preserved into the future for our generation and for our children's generation. And I look forward to working with both gentlemen.

Mr. Speaker, the Students at University School of Nova Southeastern University mobilized one of the first school-based tsunami relief campaigns in South Florida upon returning to school in January. Like others throughout the world, these students were struck by the enormity of what has been described as the worst natural disaster in modern human history.

In a single unified effort, students at the K-12 college preparatory school collected $26,220.74 in their 1-day fundraising drive. They called the event ``jeans day'' and contributed $5 to trade their uniforms for jeans on the designated day--Friday, Jan. 7. In addition to the $5 donations, some students brought in money they'd saved, others prodded their parents to contribute, and one elementary school

student brought in her entire piggy bank. The Lower School, University School's elementary school, contributed $12,375.74.

The money collected will support UNICEF's South Asia Tsunami Relief Efforts.

University School is the only independent college preparatory school in South Florida that is part of a major university. The school offers programs of studies designed to prepare students for college and for effective citizenship beyond the college years. The academic environment is marked by high expectation, as students master skills, acquire new knowledge, improve their ability to think critically, and develop a sense of civic responsibility.

Mr. Chairman, the most troubling aspect of this bill is that related to asylum.

Today's laws for seeking asylum are the result of lessons learned after World War II. After the war, America reflected with shame on how this shining beacon of democracy and freedom turned its back on 1,000 Jews who fled for their lives on the ship called the St. Louis. We turned the St. Louis away, not even allowing it to dock in America. It is estimated that over half of those refugees eventually died.

Today, in Haiti, Cuba and other countries, thousands face death, religious persecution, torture and property confiscation. This bill virtually closes the door to those who might seek asylum in America.

Let us not forget the lessons of history. I urge my colleagues to keep the doors open to those seeking justifiable refuge.

Regarding driver's licenses, the 9/11 tragedy has been referred to here on this floor referencing the terrorists who obtained driver's licenses. Let me remind my colleagues that this bill would not affect that situation at all, as all of the terrorists were in this country legally and could have obtained driver's licenses regardless of this law.

We should heed what Florida Governor Jeb Bush said last year when he was talking about driver's licenses for illegal immigrants. He said, ``We shouldn't allow them to come into the country to begin with, but once they're here, what do you do? Do you basically say that they are lepers to society, that they do not exist?''

He concluded by saying, ``A policy that ignores them is a policy of denial.'' I agree and I urge my colleagues to vote against this bill.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague so much, and I have to say that it is a tremendous pleasure to join my 30-something colleagues, my colleague from Florida and the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan). I am glad to see the ranks of the 30-somethings are expanding, especially on our side of the gender balance. No offense to my colleague. It is especially exciting that I can rejoin the Meek- Wasserman Schultz tag team that we enjoyed in the Florida legislature.

I am so glad my colleagues have been spending some time this evening talking about the significant disparities between the President's proposal and the crisis, the so-called crisis, it seeks to address and the facts. So I would like to spend a few minutes separating fact from fiction and maybe boil this down to some simple terms. Because often in Washington we talk about trillions of dollars, which is really an unfathomable amount of money. It is so hard for anyone to think about what $1 trillion means, never mind several trillion. So I want to spend a little time about what this means to real people.

Clearly, the President's proposal makes Social Security weaker, not stronger. It does nothing, as the gentleman laid out, to resolve the funding challenges that currently face the system. The President's plan costs nearly

$2 trillion to implement in the first 10 years alone and several trillion more dollars each decade after that. And his privatization proposal bankrupts the entire system faster than it would, that is the term he used, which was an inappropriate term, but it literally bankrupts the system in only 15 to 20 years. And as my colleague stated, without doing anything, which no one here is advocating, we have another 50 years to go and we can still pay 80 percent of the benefits.

There is a funding gap. We all agree with that. And we have to address that funding gap. But it does not have to be closed by reducing or cutting benefits. That is a totally inappropriate solution.

The real crisis here is not in Social Security; the real crisis is the poor management of the Federal budget. That is the bottom line. We have someone here who has been mishandling the direction of the Federal budget, and it needs to be fixed.

When I see a problem in my household budget, what my husband and I do is, we make sure that we do not give that problem an overdose of medicine. When we address a problem with our budget, we address it in a way that is proportionate to the size of the problem. We give the problem not an overdose of medicine, but we give the problem an aspirin. And that is the difference here.

We saw earlier this week that the President's budget does not even cover the cost of any Social Security reform. This is despite the fact that extending the tax cuts permanently costs five times more than fixing Social Security for you, for me, for our children, and for their children. If we rolled back the President's tax breaks for just the wealthiest 1 percent, it would cover most of the funding gap right there, most of the funding gap just by the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans, rolling back their tax cut and not making it permanent.

Of course, the Bush administration today eliminated any discussion of limiting tax breaks for the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans or anyone else just to ensure Social Security's solvency.

The bottom line is that privatized accounts put Americans' hard- earned retirement savings at the whims of the stock market. I do not know too many people out there that have had a tremendous amount of confidence in the stock market these days so that they would trust their entire retirement future and the security of that to the whims of the stock market.

I thank my colleague, Mr. Speaker.

Another important point, and why the three of us are here tonight highlighting this, is because our generation needs to understand the President has laid out a rosy scenario under his proposal that simply does not exist. No group of Americans has more reason to fight the privatization of Social Security than young Americans and young workers and their families. The President's proposal cuts benefits, it pulls the rug out from underneath our retirement security, and it adds trillions to the debt.

Privatization will ultimately result in a crisis that means millions of young people will basically be forced to work into their 70s, when right now, under the current system, they could retire far earlier with a guaranteed benefit. And they would have to ultimately pay higher income taxes for the rest of their lives.

I want to talk just briefly about the simple terms that I described earlier. This is how the President's proposal hurts everyone. The costs of privatization clearly explode the national debt. Most Americans understand what happens when you run up your credit card bill and do not pay it off. It is impossible to get out from under that debt, never mind trying to get a bank loan based on the credit you have, because your credit is gone.

That is exactly what the President is doing here, essentially. He is using up America's credit, yours, mine, our children's, even our grandchildren's to fund a radical and untested program that puts the safety of America's workers and retirees at risk. That is really the bottom line. Because of the misplaced spending priorities, the national debt has grown so large that an average family of four pays thousands of dollars each year to pay down the government's debt, which is just like the interest that you pay on a credit card when you do not pay off that debt every month.

Imagine what that family is going to owe when trillions of dollars are added to their monthly statements in the form of new and higher taxes. And what do they get for all that spending? Benefit cuts, removal of their retirement security, all of which is subject to the whims of politicians and the stock market's fluctuations. And that is totally inappropriate public policy, and young Americans should be as deeply disturbed as we are.

Mr. Speaker, I want to bring up something that maybe has not been discussed and that is the disproportionate impact that the President's plan will have on women. Women are already starting far behind the eight ball as compared to men in their earnings. There are a number of factors that leave women even more vulnerable to this radical proposal than it leaves men.

In 2003, for example, the average monthly Social Security benefit for a woman was only $798. That is $241 less than the average man's monthly retirement. Women's earnings are 77 percent relative to men back in 2002. Women who reach retirement age live, on average, at least 3 years longer than men, and Social Security is the only source of retirement income for one in three unmarried women.

Without Social Security, 52 percent of white women, 65 percent of African American women, and 61 percent of Hispanic women would live in poverty upon retirement without the safety net that Social Security provides. It provides more than half of the total income for female widows and for single women.

So when the President talks about the different groups that his proposal would disproportionately benefit, he does not seem to care that we would leave women in this country completely out in the cold.

Mr. Speaker, I know we are using Congressional Budget Office numbers, and that needs to be understood. We are not just making this up to fit the picture that we want to show here.

But the question I have is, when I sat in the Chamber and listened to the President deliver the State of the Union address, my understanding of the President's proposal was that he would try to put forward a proposal that would ensure future retirees would have more money. The illusion that he has created is that by privatizing Social Security, putting the future of Social Security into the stock market, he led people to believe Wednesday night that they would retire with more money than they would have if we left the system as it is. But each of the graphs I have seen here tonight shows consistently there is less money for each scenario, whether you are the youngest future retiree or the oldest future retiree.

How are we wrong and he is right? How is it that he does not see that he is costing the government trillions of dollars, pulling the rug out from under our retirees and causing them to have less money, not more? What are we not getting here?

So is their theory, if they say it enough times, it will become true?

Madam Speaker, Libusa Breder, a Jewish prisoner, said, ``There was no God in Auschwitz. There were such horrible conditions that God decided not to go there.''

With the passage of time, it has become more difficult for my generation to grasp what happened 60 years ago. The contributions and courage of the Greatest Generation enabled my generation of Americans to grow up in peace and be the first generation in decades to live without facing conscription.

In Auschwitz, at least 1.5 million innocent people suffered unfathomable pain and ultimate death. They were from many different nations, over 90 percent of them Jews. South Florida, where I am from, is home to the second largest population of Holocaust survivors in North America, the majority of whom live in my home county of Broward.

The concept of ``never again'' was instilled in me for my entire life. Unfortunately, in recent times, we have had vicious criminal acts against humanity, and we must remember that we

must stay vigilant and not let the passage of time weaken our resolve. We are all proud of the Greatest Generation; but with today's resolution and the anniversary approaching, we focus on the Lost Generation.

It is our solemn responsibility to make sure that these lost souls did not die in vain. We must never forget what happened to them, and we must use the lessons of Auschwitz to stop modern-day atrocities such as the ethnic cleansing in Sudan. History can and will repeat itself unless we stand in the way and fight against evil.