Senate Unanimously Votes Against Cuts to Social Security: Media Don’t Notice

Senate Unanimously Votes Against Cuts to Social Security: Media Don’t Notice

click link

snip


This pattern of coverage was clearly on display last weekend. Both the New York Times and Washington Post decided to ignore the Senate's passage by voice vote of the Sanders Amendment. This was an amendment to the budget put forward by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders that puts the Senate on record as opposing the switch to the chained CPI as the basis for the annual Social Security cost of living adjustment (COLA).

Switching the basis for the COLA to the chained CPI is one of the most beloved policies of the Washington elite. The idea is that it would reduce scheduled benefits for retirees by 0.3 percentage points annually. This amounts to a cut of 3 percent after ten years, 6 percent after 20 years, and 9 percent after 30 years.
If a typical retiree lives to collect benefits for twenty years the average cut in benefits over their retirement ends up being around 3 percent. This is a much bigger hit to the typical retiree, who relies on Social Security for more than two-thirds of their income, than the tax increases put into law this year were to the typical rich person.

But the magic of the chained CPI is that everyone gets to run around saying that they are not really cutting benefits, they are just "adjusting" the cost of living formula. And the media do their best to assist the politicians pushing these cuts. They almost always uses euphemisms like "changing" or "restructuring" Social Security, trying to conceal the simple reality that politicians are pushing cuts to the program.