Dear Friend,

The 109th Congress has just been sworn in, and I wanted to take this opportunity to let you know about the expected Congressional agenda for the coming months.

Congress hit the ground running this week – addressing last week’s tsunami in Southeast Asia. On Tuesday, the House approved legislation extending our condolences to the families of the tsunami victims and affirming our commitment to providing additional U.S. government support for relief and reconstruction efforts in the countries affected by this massive natural disaster.

Congress will kick into full gear once the President is sworn in for his second term on January 20. The President is expected to make his 2005 State of the Union address to Congress shortly after that to outline his policy agenda for the year.

President Bush has already announced a number of his main agenda items. At the top of that list is Social Security “reform.” The President has indicated that he will move swiftly to push a Social Security bill through Congress.

As most Americans have known for some time, the Social Security program faces a long-term challenge as the Baby Boom generation retires over the coming decades and the number of people receiving benefits from Social Security doubles from 39 million to 80 million. The Social Security Administration’s actuaries estimate that several decades from now, Social Security will have depleted its trust fund and will only have enough revenues from the Social Security payroll tax to pay 73 percent of the benefits it will owe to Social Security beneficiaries.

President Bush has labeled this longstanding, long-term problem a “crisis” and proposed a radical plan to “fix” it.

The President has proposed allowing future workers to divert a portion of their Social Security taxes into individual investment accounts which they would control and could invest in a number of different ways; when they retired, they would buy an annuity with that money and receive a lifetime income from that investment along with a lower guaranteed Social Security benefit. While many Americans like the idea of having more control over their retirement income, such a change in the Social Security program would result in substantially lower Social Security benefits for future beneficiaries – and produce an additional shortfall of $2 trillion in Social Security funding.

Establishing individual investment accounts as part of Social Security would do little by itself to reduce the long-term funding gap facing the program. It would simply make that funding gap somewhat larger. While supporters of these accounts have been reluctant so far to admit it, their plan ends the Social Security funding gap primarily by reducing Social Security benefits dramatically in the coming decades. Even with the level of returns predicted by the Administration, these individual retirement accounts wouldn’t provide most future retirees with enough income to offset the reduction in benefits necessary to balance Social Security’s books over the next 75 years.

The future funding gap facing Social Security is serious but it’s not a crisis. That funding gap could be eliminated relatively painlessly by much less drastic measures. The only crisis we face is the possibility that the President and his Republican allies in Congress will be successful in destroying the one guaranteed source of income that future retirees can depend upon.

I strongly oppose the “privatization” of Social Security, and I will be actively working throughout this debate to ensure that Social Security continues to provide a guaranteed, adequate level of retirement income for our country’s senior citizens.

The next major milestone on the Congressional schedule is February 7, when the President is expected to submit his proposed federal budget to Congress for Fiscal Year 2006. President Bush has promised to produce a budget that cuts the deficit in half by 2009. In this budget, the President is expected to propose making deep cuts in important domestic programs and making his recent tax cuts permanent.

I can’t understate the importance of the coming debate over the President’s budget. The outcome will dramatically affect every other decision the federal government will be called upon to make in the coming years. Making these tax cuts permanent will reduce federal revenues by $1 trillion over the next ten years, and its impact is even more staggering in the long run. The revenue loss to the federal government of making the tax cuts permanent is, for example, three times larger than the projected shortfall in Social Security over the next 75 years. If Congress decides to make the tax cuts permanent, it is in effect also making a decision to cut future Social Security benefits substantially.

Congress is required by law to complete action on the fiscal year 2006 budget by April 15. It will be an interesting process to watch, to say the least. Last year, despite Republican control of both the House and Senate, Congress never managed to adopt a budget!

In addition, Congress is expected to receive a request from President Bush soon for additional funding for the ongoing war in Iraq. Recent reports suggest that this Iraq war supplemental appropriations bill could reach $100 billion or more. While I strongly opposed the invasion of Iraq two years ago, we as a nation can’t avoid dealing with the current consequences of that decision. Consequently, the issue for Congress in the coming months is not whether to appropriate money to pay for our troops’ operations in Iraq – we most certainly will – but whether we will pay for those operations by borrowing the money and leaving our children to pick up the tab.

Clearly, Congress will have some important choices to make this year. These challenges are daunting, but they are by no means insurmountable.

I will work in each of these debates to make sure that Congress adopts policies that benefit my constituents. That means that I will be working to maintain the guaranteed retirement income that Social Security currently provides; to ensure that the federal government continues to carry out its essential operations and invest in our nation’s future; to make our homeland more secure; to care for the needy; and to maximize our nation’s long-term economic growth and job creation by adopting a fiscally responsible federal budget.

It continues to be a pleasure to serve you, and I look forward to hearing from you. Please feel free to e-mail me at Rep.Doyle@mail.house.gov to share your thoughts with me or to request assistance in dealing with the federal government – or, if you prefer, you can use my web site, www.house.gov/doyle.

Until next time, I am

Sincerely,

Mike Doyle
Member of Congress