And the CPI is "cooked" to hide the inflation that the COLA is supposed to offset.
And yet if you compare the SS payment today to the SS payment of, say, 1990, and then compare the income of today with the income of 1990, do you find a disparity? If not, how can you say the CPI isn’t a rational measurement, whether you think it’s cooked or not?
I know that some people argue the real cost of living for old people is different because they buy different things, or because they use MORE of things because they are older and therefore their costs go up, or have other complaints about the CPI as applied to seniors.
But those are all things that, if we wanted to, we would need to fix by legislation. Right now, SS is adjusted by the standard CPI, and doesn’t care if old people have a different “basket” of goods they buy.