I spoke about this yesterday and I have brought this to this chamber before on several occasions. In fact, the Senate adopted a very similar amendment by unanimous consent last year, and it passed on a recorded vote two years earlier.

My amendment would repeal an unfair tax that Congress enacted in 1993. The Congressional Budget Office has said that over 15 million seniors are affected by the taxation of Social Security benefits.

When Congress created the Social Security program to provide income security for seniors, part of the structure of the program and one of the reasons for its popularity was that benefits were not taxed.

In 1983, Congress decided that half the benefits of some seniors should be subject to taxation and, in 1993, raised that amount to 85% of Social Security benefits.

This tax affected supposedly "wealthy" seniors with an income above $34,000 for a single and $44,000 for a couple.

The goal of this seems to have been to impose a type of means testing on Social Security benefits. In other words, tilting the benefit structure in favor of lower-income seniors. Making it more like a welfare program. This is the kind of change Senator Moynihan often warned Congress about, but the Ways and Means Committee and the President ignored his warnings.

If that was the goal, the legislation was fundamentally flawed. The $34,000 and $44,000 amounts were not indexed for inflation, and I can assure you that seniors earning these amounts do not consider themselves wealthy, particularly with the increased costs of prescription drugs, rent or mortgage payments, gasoline, heating oil, and even food prices that seniors are experiencing today.

My amendment is fairly simple – it drops the tax back to its pre-1993 level starting in 2008.

This means that the 85% tax tier would be eliminated and the maximum amount of Social Security benefits that could be taxed would be 50%.

The revenue from the 1993 tax was applied to the M-edicare trust fund, and my amendment would make the trust fund whole by offsetting the cost of the tax roll-back – about $89 billion over 5 years – with an adjustment to function 920.

Inspector Generals and the C.B.O.’s budget options report have identified over $300 billion in potential savings on government programs over the next 5 years, and I believe the committees of jurisdiction can review wasteful government spending in order to offset this extremely important tax cut for America’s seniors.

This was an unfair tax on our seniors when it was enacted, and it is time we repeal it.

I urge my colleagues to support this amendment as many of you have in past.