Tag: Chained CPI

As you know, if you read this blog, or any of the true left wing sites, like FiredogLake and Corrente, that Pres. Obama has once again gone back on his word that cuts to Social Security were off the table as a bargaining chip for a “Grand Bargain.” He has proposed to use  the chained CPI to calculate cost of living increases in Social Security benefits. Now House Minority Leader Nancy is saying that she could live with tying Social Security to the chained CPI, plus she said Democrats would stick with the president to avoid going over the fiscal cliff.

David Dayen at FDL News summed up Pelosi’s meaning and later White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said at the press briefing:

Pelosi tried to emphasize the unformed idea that there would be “protections” for the most vulnerable. For example, the disabled on Supplemental Security Income might not be subject to chained CPI, and there could be a “bump-up” for people aged 80, to compensate for the cumulative effect of the benefit cut. Again, the vulnerable are a massive part of this population (pdf). This is almost the entire income source for almost half of seniors, and for 3/4 of widows or unmarried women. And 15.1% of seniors live in poverty. And if you hold all of them harmless, you erode the actual savings you can derive from this. The three-legged stool of retirement has withered away, especially since the dot-com bust and the Great Recession. This argues strongly for increasing Social Security benefits, not cutting them and not even mitigating cuts.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney called this a “technical fix” to better calculate inflation. Bullshit. If this were just a technical fix, you would adjust so that the fix wouldn’t hit beneficiaries in a regressive fashion, with the most pain at the bottom. This plan doesn’t, to any real degree. The goal isn’t to properly measure inflation, it’s to save money for the federal government. It always has been.

Well, it time to make noise and fight back. Atrios has sounded the alert and we should take to the phones:

White House

202-456-1111

Your senators

Your House member.

No cuts to Social Security.

Keep it up everyday, jam the lines until the President and Congress get the message:

Cliffsmas is coming and I bet you, like most of us, have not figured out just what it is that you are going to wind up giving the 1% this time around.  Fortunately, they want to make it easy for you, they have made a list of their wants and checked it several times now.

Many on Wall Street with the help of nice people like Paul Ryan and a group of Democrats that call themselves “The Third Way,” working with President Obama would like to give your Social Security to the 1% to use as gambling chips on Wall Street.

Then there are the CEO’s from Peter Peterson’s “Fix the Debt Commission,” who want 134 Billion dollars in tax cuts exempting foreign earnings for corporations (along with their usual trillions in federal war contracts, subsidies, bailouts and tax loopholes) for Cliffsmas.

In fact, these Fix the Debt Commission CEO’s are so eager to get this cutting of costs for people other than themselves who want to retire, that less than 60% of their companies offer pensions for their employees and of the ones that do, the CEO’s have underfunded their employee pension funds by more than $100 billion.

There are a bunch of other 1%ers that would prefer the Bowles-Simpson approach of gutting your Social Security payouts over a period of years as President Obama was pushing on the campaign trail and in negotiations with Congressional Republicans over a long period.  In these same negotiations Mr. Obama put cuts to health care for veterans and cuts to Medicare on the table.

The cuts to your benefits that Mr. Obama and the Austerians are promoting for Cliffsmas are far from chump change.  The chained-cpi cut is small at first, but over a period of years is a 9% cut in benefits  over a period of years.  Raising the age of eligibility for retirement age to 70 would cut benefits for the average retiree by 19 percent or about $35,419.