Yahoo! News: Chained CPI: A direct attack on middle class and working class people
Barack Obama " prefers " it. Nancy Pelosi is willing to consider it. The AARP, organised labour, and progressive Democrats in and out of elected office are entirely opposed.
It is "Chained CPI", the new favourite bit of jargon being tossed around in very serious policy circles as a possible bargaining chip in a budget Grand Bargain. The consumer price index (CPI) is a measure of inflation that is used to calculate cost-of-living-increases for programmes like Social Security. The "chained CPI" is a different method of calculation that presumes that when the price of one product goes up, people will simply buy something cheaper. Using this formula to calculate Social Security, veterans' benefits, and other programmes (including, for instance, Pell grants that help lower-income students afford college) would amount to a cut in benefits .
Republicans and many Democrats - including, apparently, the President - want to do it. They want to establish the wildly popular New Deal social safety net as part of the problem and they want to cut it. And this little scheme sounds enough like not cutting benefits that the objective press is able to pretend that it is just a technocratic adjustment, really, instead of what it is. (It is also a stealth tax increase .)
Yet Obama's economic adviser Gene Sperling noted in a Reddit discussion last week that "protections" from the cuts would be necessary for "low-income Americans, certain veterans, and older Social Security beneficiaries". If we need to protect people from it, how is it good policy?
Chained CPI is a particularly nasty kind of politics. What it actually does is change the adjustments for cost of living according to "behaviour". As Thom Hartmann writes:
In other words, screw what you want to eat, what you like. You're buying the cheap stuff.
Cuts and tax hikes
Yet this is the perfect opportunity to push back on this kind of talk, because Social Security is different - we pay for it all of our lives, through the regressive payroll tax, and most Americans know this even if some of us have been tricked into believing that Social Security contributes to the overall deficit . People do feel "entitled" to their Social Security - there is no equivalent stigma for living on Social Security to the ones that come along with, say, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families or SNAP (food stamps).
And so we should start here, then, and say yes, grandma should have steak (or organic kale, or whatever the heck grandma likes best). That she should not suffer weaselly cuts to her monthly income based on the idea that she can just adjust to chicken, or cat food, or whatever costs the least at the neighbourhood grocery. That grandma does not have to continually refine her expectations downward for the rest of her life if she does not want to.
Some politicians agree; Rep Alan Grayson and Rep Mark Takano put out a letter , now signed by many members of Congress, saying they would vote against any and every cut to Social Security or Medicare. Senator Bernie Sanders called it an " economic, moral disaster " and Senator Sherrod Brown, who had proposed legislation last year that would have increased, not cut, cost of living adjustments for seniors, called chained CPI "a direct attack on middle class and working class voters". Instead of cuts and tax hikes on working people, people with disabilities, the elderly and veterans, they argue, it is time for higher taxes on the wealthy.
Perhaps we could start with raising the cap on payroll taxes?
And then maybe we can go on and argue for better Social Security benefits , for expanded, not just extended, unemployment, for a welfare state that actually works for most people, for the right of every person to want a delicious meal, to feel they deserve it.