Inflation spikes, government cuts benefits

People ought to be marching in the streets over this, but the government has everyone bullied so badly that I wouldn't count on it.

The Labor Department has just reported that (whoosh...whoosh) inflation in September spiked at the fastest rate in months (thanks partly to skyrocketing fuel costs that pad Big Oil's profits) - but at the same time, 54,000,000 elderly or disabled Americans are getting the smallest Social Security increase in 4 years. And you know the inflation numbers are worse than the government says, because they always are. (My own observations bear this out.)

To put it in more vexing terms, the inflation rate so far this year (with just the first 9 months counted) is 44% higher than all of last year, while the increase in Social Security benefits is 30% lower than last year (and was lower than the inflation rate to begin with). Following all of this?

That's called a benefits cut. The number got bigger, but in real dollars, it's less.

And while all this is going on, the government also declared today that millions of today's workers are going to pay higher Social Security taxes next year - even though they'll end up getting less money when they retire or if they become disabled. Ain't exactly a testament to Bush's fiscal management skills, is it? Hell, nothing's a testament to Bush being good at anything, because the guy is a lifelong failure at everything he's ever tried, after all.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I just can't get the inflation figures to line up with the benefit increases - but the more important point is that almost everyone who gets Social Security or disability benefits already paid for them with their tax dollars. I think that any time their benefits don't keep pace with actual inflation, they're getting fleeced.

Ya know, I think there'd be more money to cover Social Security if the government would stop all its entitlement programs for Hummer owners and Halliburton. For at least 3 years, the Bush regime doled out huge tax breaks for oversized gas guzzlers like Hummers. Bush approved a tax break that gave business owners deductions of up to $100,000 if they buyed vehicles weighing over 6,000 pounds. This wasn't done for towing business owners who needed a new truck but for wealthy suburbanites who just wanted a Hummer and could pretend it was their business vehicle (even if they used it for personal errands). It was estimated that if 100,000 large vehicle owners received this handout, the government would lose $1,500,000,000 that could be used for your Social Security. Your tax dollars are in effect going to handouts for yuppie buyers of large SUV's that waste gas and drive up fuel costs even more.

Congress needs to rein in its own illegal pay raises. Congressional Democrats, to their credit, made good on a campaign promise to not increase congressional pay until the very modest minimum wage bill passed. But everything that happened after that was as unconstitutionally Republican as we've come to expect: In June, the House voted to increase its own pay, even though the Twenty-Seventh Amendment explicitly prohibits it from varying its pay in the middle of a term. (The Supreme Court won't let citizens challenge this, claiming the citizens aren't personally harmed by Congress's actions - even though it's the people's tax dollars involved. So now there's no enforcement mechanism for an important constitutional amendment. One good thing is that at least the Democratic congresscritters from Kentucky voted against the illegal pay raise - which none of the Kentucky Republicans had the sense to do.)

So, if you're retiring or have a disability, get ready for a year of not making ends meet. Thanks to Bush's mismanagement, looks like millions of Americans might have to forego Star-Kist for Kal Kan again.

(Source: http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/071017/economy.html;
http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=40&threadid=26478;
http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/06/27/congress.raise.ap/index.html)