Social Security Fairness Act--Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. TILLIS. Madam President, I come to the floor to talk about the vote that we are about to move to here shortly. It sounds like motherhood and apple pie--the Social Security Fairness Act. Who could be against Social Security fairness?

The fact of the matter is, the policy does address a challenge with Social Security for a single-digit percentage of people who have a pension--a government pension program--and they are not necessarily getting exactly what they should back. So it is something we need to fix, but this is not the way to fix it.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are 10 years away from most economists' consensus believing that the Social Security trust fund is going to reach insolvency--10 years--10 years away.

This bill will take $200 billion over that 10-year period out of the Social Security trust fund without any offsetting payment to it. So that is, to right a wrong for a small percentage of people that should get fairly treated, they are going to rake $200 billion--with a ``b''-- over 10 years to pay for this.

That pulls insolvency forward by 6 months. Now 6 months doesn't sound like a lot, if you are talking years and years and years into the future, but we are estimated to be reaching insolvency within the next 9 to 10 years. Suddenly, 6 months becomes a pretty significant amount of time. So we are bowing--we have people here who have voted against bills before because they say: I don't like the idea of something not going through regular order, getting dumped on us at the last minute, and voting on it.

Ladies and gentlemen, this bill has not even had a hearing in any committee in the House or the Senate. It got sent to us through a procedure called a discharge petition, which means that they have discharged their duty of doing regular order, sent it to us, and now we are about to take a vote today without having voted on it.

Now, I know there are a lot of people that say: Thom Tillis must be committing political suicide because how could you be against Social Security fairness?

People asked me the same question when I was against the PACT Act that my office helped author. The PACT Act was a veterans bill, a trillion-dollar bill that we had a commitment to take through regular order to get it right before we passed it. I talked to veterans groups who were concerned with my lack of support for a bill that I helped author, and I said: It is because I think you are going to regret it by us not thinking through the implications.

I said: It wouldn't surprise me if, 2 years from now, you are going to see and realize the very challenges that I told you about.

They said: You know what, we think it will work itself out.

Well, do you know what happened almost 2 years to the month? We are $3 billion in the hole for the current year veterans budget and $15 billion in the hole going forward because we didn't do our homework. We caved to the pressure of the moment instead of doing this on a sustainable basis.

Now, I don't know how many people are going to oppose the bill today. It is likely to move through. But to those of you who are looking past the regular order and fixing the things that I know are not fixed in this bill, own it when we have to come back and fix it. I will come back and fix it. I will help with Social Security reform. But know that you are making the job harder to fix a trust fund that is within 10 years of going insolvent.

It would be easy for me to talk to my friends at the Fraternal Order of Police and say: Yes, we are going to get this done.

And by God, I hope somebody over the next 8 to 10 years fixes Social Security in the future because in 10 years, there will be a mandatory 17--minimum 17 percent cut in the Social Security benefit across the board if we continue to fail to act here and if we continue to dig a deeper hole by the vote we are having today.

So to those of you who need this fixed, who need to be treated fairly, count me in. But understand that the folks who are rushing this vote today are hastening the day where they are probably going to break the promise for 97 percent more people on Social Security who do not benefit from this bill.

Look, I am in an election cycle. A lot of people may think that I am committing political suicide by doing this, but this Chamber needs courage and needs to say what needs to be said. We are about to pass an unfunded $200 billion spending package for a trust fund that is likely to go insolvent over the next 9 to 10 years, and we are going to pretend like somebody else has to fix it. Well, when you are a U.S. Senator and you have the election certificate, that falls on us.

I want to finish with this: There is nobody in this Chamber I hate to be in disagreement with more than the senior Senator from Maine. Senator Collins understands that we do need to fix this, and her sense of fairness and her expertise are unmatched in this Chamber. We do not disagree with what we ultimately need to do. This is a disagreement in how to get there and how to have something that addresses the downstream risk.

So it is with some trepidation that I come to the floor and criticize the good work of Senator Collins, but I do it because there is so much riding on us getting this right and having the courage to fix Social Security over the next few years, folks, or--record this speech--we will rue the day that we failed to do it.

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