There is a rate increase coming, according to the blog leak.
Boehner offered a rate increase at those households making over $1 Million a year. I bet the compromise will be $500K for households.
The Speaker knows this screws small businesses, but the GOP lost the fall elections. Right now, we have no momentum, no public mandate, we don't have the Senate, we don't have the White House, and we don't have the rest of the Executive branch agencies (FBI, DoD, Justice, Labor Dept, etc).
There won't be any "cuts" to SS/Medicare. They are proposing to slow COLAs by tying the pittance of COLA increases to another index. They play these games now anyway! There was a long time where SS recipients didn't get a COLA for 2 years. The Govt said it was "because there isn't any inflation." I am not joking.
If this is the conclusion of the Re[s, no wonder we are called the The Stupid Party. It was a status quo election. The GOP retained control of the House. Obama won with 51% of the vote--certainly no mandate.
If the GOP surrenders unilaterally, they deserve to lose control of the House and be the permanent minority party. They are the ones who will be blamed for cutting benefits for SS. Obama will say that he was forced into the deal trying to protect tax cuts for the middle class and making sure that the wealthy pay their fair share.
There won't be any "cuts" to SS/Medicare. They are proposing to slow COLAs by tying the pittance of COLA increases to another index. They play these games now anyway! There was a long time where SS recipients didn't get a COLA for 2 years. The Govt said it was "because there isn't any inflation." I am not joking.
It is a big cut to SS and federal pensions (including the military) if they reduce COLAs. There is an established formula for determining COLAs. It had nothing to do with who was in the WH. History of Automatic Cost-Of-Living Adjustments
ya, we only have the one branch that controls spending. And that house has a mandate to to just that.
The rest is just white noise.
“....They are proposing to slow COLAs by tying the pittance of COLA increases to another index....”
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Yes, they want to change from using the CPI-W index (which uses changes in prices of a fixed “basket of goods” bought by a subset of our population). They would replace it with a “chained CPI” approach which would take into consideration that consumers change the “make up” of what they buy as prices change at relatively different rates. So maybe now the “fixed basket of goods” includes buying steak 3 times a month. As the price of steak goes up, the CPI statisticians would assume that the consumer would replace the steaks with hamburger and factor/cost that in the basket instead of steak.
As time goes on and prices rise further, they would assume that the consumer would replace the higher cost hamburger on their shopping trips with lower priced Spam. And then later on they could replace the Spam with 3 cans of cat food. So, the “measured” cost of living would not go up nearly as much as it does under the current CPI-W method.
So, for you retirees out there....enjoy your cat food! And enjoy walking to the store instead of driving.