Today the Social Security trustees released their annual report, and regardless of what you might hear otherwise from the chattering class, the underlying message is that there is no need to consider cuts in Social Security or Medicare benefits. In fact, we can and should increase benefits by taking a couple of basic, straightforward steps. [...]

This report by the Kaiser Family Foundation about elder poverty is shocking. I don’t think people realize just how many millions of people are barely subsisting in their old age, but it’s many more than the government likes to admit to. Just as with the Chained-CPI, we’re dealing with how they are accounted for rather than the actual numbers these people are forced to live on.

According to a Pew Charitable Trusts study released Thursday, baby boomers and Generation Xers are increasingly unlikely to be able to afford the costs of retirement, making critical the need for a strong Social Security program to bridge this income gap. Instead of weakening the social safety net by using the “chained CPI” to reduce [...]

African Americans in retirement or on disability would be hit particularly hard by a proposal to use the “chained CPI” to limit cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security benefits, according to a new study released by the Center for Global Policy Solutions. Changing the inflation adjustment from the commonly used Consumer Price Index to the chained [...]

So, they’ve crunched some real numbers and determined exactly how much money the average Social Security recipient can expect to lose if the Chained-CPI is implemented. I’m going to assume that if someone told you that the government was going to seize $15,000.00 from your 401k you’d think it was a cut:

The “rebranding” of the Republican party crashed headlong into reality again yesterday. The setting was Upper Senate Park on Capitol Hill.  The occasion was a FreedomWorks’ rally for the purpose of introducing what FreedomWorks is calling its “New Fair Deal.” I was assigned to cover the rally, and what I there illustrated why the odds [...]

In our post-mortem of the 2012 elections, the Campaign for America’s Future was one of the few organizations willing to say that “class war” was not only the common theme of many of the Democratic Party’s electoral successes but it is a strategy that the party should proudly embrace as it moves toward the 2014 [...]

All the smartest people in the executive suites just knew that the taste of Coca-Cola needed “reform.” Rival Pepsi was advertising to the “New Generation” and Coke’s executives came to believe their product wasn’t what the “cool” people wanted to drink. Everyone they talked to at the executive-level strategery seminars, and all the other executive-level [...]

The Congressional Progressive Caucus and AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka pressed their opposition to President Obama’s proposed chained-CPI change to Social Security benefits at a Thursday afternoon news conference, denouncing it as a cut in benefits for those who need the social safety net the most. Fifteen members of Congress, as well as around 45 supporters [...]

Some details are emerging about the so-called “softening” of the Chained-CPI for the most vulnerable. Here’s one analysis of what we know so far from Shawn Fremsted at CEPR: