President Clinton’s Roundtable on Women and Retirement Security.

Transcript

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the White House. I want to thank the Vice President, the members of the administration, Congressman Cardin, all the panelists who are here, the satellite audience at the 12 other sites across our country. I’d like to say a special word of appreciation and welcome to Betty Freidan, who has written with such insight and appreciation for the challenges women face as they grow older.

We’re here to talk about the special impact of the challenge to Social Security on the women of the United States. I would like to put it in, if I might, a larger context. Six years ago, when the Vice President and I came here, we brought a new vision of government against a backdrop of a $290 billion deficit and the kind of problem we’re here to talk about today that we knew was looming in the future. We believed that we could give the American people a government that would live within its means, but at the same time invest in and empower our people.

It led to an array of new policies in education and the economy, the budget, the environment, in health care, in crime, welfare reform. Indeed, it led to the very effort to reinvent government, to use the Vice President’s phrase, and the great effort that he made in that regard. But over the last six years we have been more active, among other things, in family matters and health matters, and a whole range of domestic areas, while giving the American people the smallest federal establishment since President Kennedy was here.

And the results, I think, have been quite good for our people, in terms of prosperity, opportunity is abundant, communities are stronger, families are more secure. This year, all year long, I have told the American people and done my best to persuade the Congress that it is terribly important to build on this prosperity and its newfound confidence to meet the remaining challenges this country faces on the edge of a new century — particularly, and perhaps most important, the need to save Social Security and to prepare for the retirement of the baby boomers.

On December 8th and 9th we will hold the first ever White House Conference on Social Security, with a goal of paving the way toward a truly bipartisan national solution early next year. Social Security, as many of you know from your own experience, and as all our panelists will be able to discuss in one way or the other, is more than a monthly check or an ID number. It represents a sacred trust among the generations. It represents a trust not only between grandparents, parents and children, those in retirement and those that work, but also the able-bodied and those who are disabled. It is our obligation to one another and it reflects our deepest values as Americans. And it must maintain a rock-solid guarantee.

We have a great opportunity to save Social Security. As all of you know, just this month we closed the books on our first balanced budget and surplus in 29 years. It is the product of hardworking Americans who drive the most powerful economic engine our country has had in a generation; the product of hard choices by lawmakers who put our nation’s long-term economic interest very often above their own short-term political interest. It is an achievement that all Americans can be proud of(1).

But we have to ask ourselves to what end has this been done. Of course, balancing the budget is essential for our own prosperity in this time of intense global competition. But it also gives us a chance to do something meaningful for future generations by strengthening Social Security. And doing that will help to keep our economy sound and help to keep our budget balanced, as we honor our duty to our parents and our children.

As the Vice President said, soon there will be many more older Americans. I hope that he and I will be among them. Two of the 75 million baby boomers who will be retiring over the next 30 years. By the year 2013, what Social Security takes in will no longer be enough to fund what it pays out. And then we’ll have to dip into the trust fund as provided by law. But by 2032, as this chart on the left makes clear, the trust fund itself will be empty and the money Social Security takes in will soon be only enough to pay 72 percent of benefits.

Now, that’s the big reason I wanted to reserve the surplus until we decide what to do about Social Security. Every American must have retirement security in the sunset years. We plan for it, count on it, should be able to rely on it. That holds true for women, as well as men. But in the case of women, Social Security is especially important. On average, women live longer than men; women make up 60 percent of all elderly recipients of Social Security — 72 recipients over the age of 85, as you can see here.

For elderly women, Social Security makes up more than half their income. And for many it is literally all that stands between them and the ravages of poverty. You can see what the poverty rate is for elderly women — it’s 13.1 percent with Social Security; without it, it would be over 50 percent. Study after study shows us that women face greater economic challenges in retirement than men do, for three reasons.

First, women live longer. A woman 65 years of age has a life expectancy of 85 years. A man 65 years of age has a life expectancy of 81 years. Second, for comparable hours of work, women still have lower lifetime earnings than men, although we’re working on that. Third, women reach retirement with smaller pensions and other assets than men do.

Now, Social Security has a number of features to help women meet these challenges. And we have done a lot of work over the last six years to try to help make it easier for people to take out their own pensions and to make it more attractive for small businesses to help to provide pensions for their employees, which could have a disproportionate impact, positive impact for women in the years ahead. But the hard fact remains that too many retired women, after providing for their families, are having trouble providing for themselves.

Now, we have worked these last six years to expand pension coverage, to make the pensions more secure, to simplify the management of pension plans. We’ve worked for the economic empowerment of women, to end wage discrimination and strengthen enforcement of the Equal Pay Act. But we must do more until women earn $1 for every $1 men earn for the same work; and today we’re only three-quarters of the way there. We must work harder to give retired women the security they deserve that they could not get for themselves in the years they were working.

Today, I am announcing two concrete steps we must take. First, I propose that workers who take time off under the Family and Medical Leave Act should be able to count that time toward retirement plan vesting and eligibility requirements. Sometimes the few months spent at home with a child mean the difference between pension benefits and no pension benefits. That is precisely the wrong message to send to people who are trying to balance work and family.

Millions and millions of people have now taken advantage of the Family Leave Act when a family member was desperately ill or a baby was born. None of them should have lost time for retirement vesting and eligibility benefits.

Second, I am proposing that families be given the choice to receive less of their pension when both spouses are living, leaving more for the surviving spouse if the breadwinner dies. That should help keep elderly widows out of poverty in their twilight years. And the poverty rate for single women, for elderly widows is much higher — almost — about 40 percent higher than that 13 percent figure there.

These proposals build on the work of Congressman David Price of North Carolina and Senator Barbara Boxer and Senator Carol Moseley-Braun. They will make a difference for our mothers, our wives, our sisters and some day for our daughters. But let me emphasize again the most important thing we can do for future generations is to strengthen Social Security overall.

When I said in my State of the Union address I would reject any attempt to spend any surplus until we save Social Security, I knew the congressional majority wanted to drain brilliance from the surplus even before it appeared on the books, much less having the ink dry. And not just this year, but permanently. Now, I am not opposed to tax cuts, and my balanced budget we have tax cuts for education, for child care, for the environment, and for making it easier for people to get pensions. I’m just opposed to using the surplus to fund tax cuts until we have used all we need of it to save the Social Security system for the 21st century.

The threat of a veto put a stop to that effort in this last Congress. The next Congress will be the Congress I call upon actually to move to save Social Security for the 21st century. It should not be a partisan issue, and we should not have another partisan fight to save the surplus until we reform Social Security.

But recently, Republican leaders are still saying the surplus should go to fund tax cuts first, and the Senate Majority Leader has suggested that he may not even be willing to work with me to save Social Security. Well, I hope that’s just election season rhetoric. After all, they were willing to work with the insurance lobbyists to kill the patients’ bill of rights. And then they worked with the tobacco companies to kill our teen smoking bill to protect our children from the dangers of tobacco. And they were happy to work with the special interest who were determined to kill campaign finance reform. I think the Senate Majority Leader will be able to find time to work with me to save Social Security. And I certainly hope so.

I say this partly with a smile on my face, but in dead seriousness. This issue will not have the kind of money behind it that the tobacco interests can marshal or the health insurance companies can marshal against the patients’ bill of rights. And everybody here with an opinion is going to have to give up a little of it if we’re going to make the right kind of decision to get there. This is the sort of decision that requires us to open our minds, open our eyes, open our ears, open our hearts, think about what America will be like 30 years from now, not just what it’s like today, and imagine what it will be like when those of us who aren’t retired will be retired and our children will be raising our grandchildren — increasingly, when those of us who are retired will be looking after our great-grandchildren as the life expectancy goes up and up.

This requires imagination. And it will be hard enough under the best of circumstances. It would be foolish to take this projected structural surplus that has been built in for six hard years of effort and squander it, until we know what it will cost to have a system that all Americans, without regard to party, can be proud of.

Now, this is an issue that offers us that kind of choice between progress and partisanship; moving forward, turning back; putting people over politics. In 11 days we will elect a Congress that will determine the future of Social Security. We need one that is 100 percent committed to saving Social Security first; to putting the long-term security of the American people — our parents and our children — ahead of the short-term politics.

Now let me say I am eager to hear from our panelists. I think it’s important to note on this day with this subject that one of America’s first great advocates for Social Security was the Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins. As Secretary Herman would tell you, Frances Perkins’ name now graces the Department of Labor building, just down Pennsylvania Avenue. She was the first woman to hold that office, or any other Cabinet office. Years later, on the 25th anniversary of Social Security, Frances Perkins looked ahead and said this, “We will go forward into the future a stronger nation because of the fact that we have this basic rock of security under all our people.”

That foundation, that rock, was laid by Frances Perkins and Franklin Roosevelt. It is up to all of together, women and men, to make sure that rock will hold up all our people in the 21st century. Thank you very much. (2)