Selling the Social Security Overhaul
BRIDGE CITY, Texas — Rep. Kevin Brady had come to the senior center in this rural community to talk about the need to make changes in Social Security. But first, he wanted to reassure his audience that the discussion wouldn't affect them.
And so the Republican congressman held up a photograph of his elderly mother.
"I am never going to do anything to change your Social Security or her Social Security," he told the 30 people who had come to hear him. "As a son who loves his mother, I'm going to preserve Social Security."
With members of Congress at home for a weeklong recess, many Republican lawmakers are making similar appeals in town meetings across their districts. Social Security needs changes to avoid financial ruin, they are saying, but seniors need not worry. Their benefits will be protected.
But as Brady and others are finding out, seniors are feeling uncertain nonetheless. And that could spell trouble for the push by President Bush and Republican leaders to restructure the massive retirement program, allowing workers under age 55 to divert some of their Social Security taxes away from the government and into private investment accounts.
"I wouldn't want to invest my retirement in the stock market. It's too risky," said Margaret Pellerin, 75, after attending the session in Bridge City, about 100 miles east of Houston in an area dotted with oil refineries.
Pellerin said she and her husband had lost $20,000 in the stock market years ago. "I don't think kids should take that chance either," she said.
In Smyrna, Ga., C.W. Driskell, 74, declared himself "not completely sold" on private accounts after a town hall meeting with his congressman, Republican Phil Gingrey.
"Bush is basing the amount of money they'll earn on what investors made in the '90s," Driskell said. "Those were the good years. I've made nothing in stocks in the last five years."
And in Elkins, W.Va., in a county that Bush won in 2000 and 2004, Republican Rep. Shelley Moore Capito said after a meeting with 75 constituents at a senior center that she did not sense any consensus on what, if any, changes should be made to Social Security.
"Whether they're ready for a change, I'm not sure we're there yet," said Capito, who has not decided whether to support Bush's call for private accounts.
