George W. Bush Quotes

It will take hard work, but doing nothing on Social Security, for example, simply makes sure the system will go broke. It's time to make some reforms.

I think that when it comes to Social Security, all of us want to make sure that our senior citizens can retire with dignity and respect. And everybody has to be open-minded in thinking how do we firm up a system that, in fact, is going to be in difficulty in the coming years.

How many campaigns of your life have you heard candidates of both parties promise a fix for the Social Security system? And everybody's got a plan. Every damned candidate has had a plan, and yet it remains unfunded, biggest part of the budget, no end in sight, no solution has ever worked.

I believe that social security should be a universal retirement guarantee and not means tested.

Well, we certainly need to raise the retirement age. I've told my 19-year-old and my 22-year-old that they're not going to be getting retirement benefits at age 62.

The fine print in the President's Social Security proposal is that all present and future workers under age 55 will have their promised retirement benefits cut.

I think we'll build a consensus for action on Social Security reform which will reduce that long-term unfunded obligation and put the system on a sustainable basis.

Well, the big elephant in the whole system is the baby boomer generation that marches through like a herd of elephants. And we begin to retire in 2008.

It's critical - that the people that are benefiting today from Medicare and Social Security that they not see benefit reductions. It's awfully hard to tell someone who might be 82, that they've gotta go back to work, because their benefits are gonna be chopped. That's not gonna happen.

However, the Administration's plan to privatize Social Security will undermine retirement security for all Americans by cutting guaranteed benefits by more than 40 percent, and risky private accounts won't make up for the loss of benefits for millions of Americans.

We have so many people retiring that we do not have enough people paying into the system to be able to provide the benefits for those collecting those benefits.

The debate over Social Security should not be about how much we can cut from the program in order to balance the federal budget. The debate over Social Security should not be about raising the retirement age or limiting benefits. The debate over Social Security should be about retirement security.

Europe's demography is developing towards a smaller working population in an ageing society.

People expect those in authority to take on big problems and to solve them. We had an opportunity to reform Social Security in a way that would have protected people's benefits and created a solvent system. Younger workers would be confident that the money they were putting into the system would be available to them when they retired. It was a missed opportunity. I regret that.

It used to be, people were afraid to talk about Social Security. Now, I think people should be afraid not to talk about Social Security and start coming up with some solutions.

Millions of Americans have paid into social security and deserve their full benefits. Pure and simple, Republicans are manufacturing a social security crisis that does not exist in order to dismantle social security.

Social Security is fine for those at or near retirement today. For those receiving their checks today, don't worry. It's going to be there for you. For those that are nearing their retirement years, don't worry, it's going to be there for you. But for your kids - for your boy and my boy, and for their children, for our kids and grandkids, it's a real big question as to whether or not the system's going to be there.

[Social Security ] is not in crisis at this stage. Leave Social Security alone. We have a lot of other places we can look that is in crisis. But Social Security is not.

I just think that we ought to protect the Social Security fund.

One of the strongest lessons I learned in doing six months of work on retirement topic was how absolutely crucial the Social Security system is for the great mass of Americans. The research of professionals and our own reporting convinced me that many millions of people are not capable of effectively managing the finances for their own retirement.

I think that the Democratic Party is a big tent, which means that there are positions I may not agree with.

I would like to think that we have made much more progress, that we've come much further, to have someone like a Donald Trump to emerge as the nominee of a major political party.

My primary objective, my desire would be to see the Democrat Party get shellacked in every election, to never see the Democrats ever win one again, as currently constituted.

And if I am elected, I promise the formation of a new party, a third party, a wild party.

I don't think it's so much Trump lobbing us for changes. It's us asking him for help in getting the changes done. I think Trump has the bully pulpit. He has a great deal of influence with the Republican Party on both the House and the Senate side. The bill right now to the conservative point of view doesn't have enough repeal. It looks like we're keeping a lot of Obamacare. So we actually think that there needs to be more repeal. That's the message I took to Trump.