Feenstra Introduces Legislation to Protect Solvency of Social Security for Iowa Seniors

HULL, IOWA – Today, U.S. Rep. Randy Feenstra (R-Hull) introduced the Save Our Seniors Act, which would help protect the long-term solvency of Social Security by requiring the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to include the honest projection of its financial health in its annual ten-year economic outlook.

“After a lifetime of hard work, our seniors deserve to retire with dignity and receive the Social Security benefits that they earned. However, thanks to reckless government spending and congressional inaction, the Congressional Budget Office forecasts that the Social Security Trust Fund will run out of sufficient funds by 2033 to pay Social Security benefits in full. It’s wrong and absolutely unacceptable,” said Rep. Feenstra. “That’s why I introduced the Save Our Seniors Act to help protect the long-term solvency of Social Security by requiring the Congressional Budget Office to include an honest and accurate projection of Social Security’s financial health in its annual ten-year economic outlook. This fix will ensure that our seniors receive their Social Security checks on time and in full while demanding real solutions from Congress to keep the Social Security Trust Fund solvent for generations to come. Serving on the House Ways and Means Committee’s Social Security Subcommittee, I will continue to work to ensure that our seniors and workers receive the benefits that they deserve and have earned while strengthening our nation’s fiscal foundation.”

“Representative Feenstra’s Save Our Seniors Act is a commonsense proposal to require more transparency from the Congressional Budget Office. CBO’s baseline does not actually reflect current law, providing a misleading picture of what would happen when the Social Security Trust Fund is depleted within the next decade. It is crucial for Congress and the American people to understand the truth, so we can instead achieve better results for seniors and taxpayers,” said Matthew Dickerson, Director of Budget Policy at the Economic Policy Innovation Center (EPIC).

More specifically, the Save Our Seniors Act would ensure that a simple and easy-to-understand graph depicting the actual outlook for the OASDI Trust Fund is included in the CBO’s ten-year economic outlook. Similar graphs exist in other Social Security related reports, like the Trustees Reports, but not in a document as widely viewed as the CBO’s outlook, which is used by members of Congress and economists to get a detailed look at the health of our nation’s economy and the federal budget.

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