If the cost of living is down(this is BS and you should know this)then why are the SS benefits being ripped off more for medicare? The cost of living isn’t supposed to be tied to energy, in fact energy is supposedly left out of the cost of living but they are using it as an excuse not to give the COLOA. You are obviously an idiot when it comes to SS. You can’t blame Seniors for it, they didn’t put it into law, but the damn well had to pay for it year after year. Now you think they should just say, “Oh, well if its for Eagles benefit, sure we will just piss the money away!” Sorry Eagle, those of us who have payed our lifes blood to others while working our butts off for 45 plus years don’t see it that way. Phase out SS, yes, I am all for it, but if you try to stick me for 45 years of payments with no return on my investment, you haven’t seen nothing yet, a**hat.
http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/COLA/latestCOLA.html
Latest Cost-of-Living Adjustment
Automatic Increases
COLA history
How COLA is used
Federal SSI benefit rate
Wage-indexed amounts
What is a COLA?
Legislation enacted in 1973 provides for automatic cost-of-living adjustments, or COLAs. With COLAs, Social Security and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits keep pace with inflation.
Latest COLA
The latest COLA is 5.8 percent for Social Security benefits and SSI payments. Social Security benefits will increase by 5.8 percent beginning with the December 2008 benefits, which are payable in January 2009. Federal SSI payment levels will also increase by 5.8 percent effective for payments made for January 2009. Because the normal SSI payment date is the first of the month and January 1 is a holiday, the SSI payments for January are always made at the end of the previous December.
How is a COLA calculated?
The Social Security Act specifies a formula for determining each COLA. In general, a COLA is equal to the percentage increase in the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W) from the third quarter of one year to the third quarter of the next. If there is no increase, there is no COLA.
Computation of 5.8-percent COLA
For the December 2008 COLA, we measure the increase in the average CPI-W from the third calendar quarter of 2007 to the third quarter of 2008. These averages are 203.596 and 215.495 for the third calendar quarters of 2007 and 2008, respectively, and are derived from monthly CPI-Ws developed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Month CPI-W for—
2007 2008
July 203.700 216.304
August 203.199 215.247
September 203.889 214.935
Total 610.788 646.486
Average (rounded
to the nearest 0.001) 203.596 215.495
The percentage increase in the CPI-W from the third quarter of 2007 through the third quarter of 2008 is 5.8 percent. The calculation of this percentage increase is as follows (rounded to the nearest one-tenth of one percent):
(215.495 - 203.596) / 203.596 x 100 = 5.8 percent.
Possible limitation on the COLA
Legislation enacted in 1983 may limit the COLA if the combined assets of the Social Security trust funds are below 20 percent of annual expenditures. (This limitation only applies to Social Security; SSI would be unaffected.) Such limitation has not occurred in the past, nor does it affect the current COLA determination. The combined trust fund assets at the beginning of 2008 are estimated to be 359.0 percent of 2008 expenditures.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm
For a complete list of Intervention Analysis Seasonal Adjustment
series and explanations, please refer to the article “Intervention
Analysis Seasonal Adjustment”, located on our website at
http://www.bls.gov/cpi/cpisapage.htm
http://www.shadowstats.com/article/consumer_price_index
Consumer Price Index
October 1st, 2004
“GOVERNMENT ECONOMIC REPORTS: THINGS YOU’VE SUSPECTED BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK!”
A Series Authored by Walter J. “John” Williams
“The Consumer Price Index” (Part Four in a Series of Five)
October 1, 2006 Update
(September 22, 2004 Original)
_____
Foreword
This installment has been updated from the original 2004 version to incorporate additional research on earlier changes to the CPI. The source for most of the information in this installment is the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which generally has been very open about its methodologies and changes to same. The BLS Web site: www.bls.gov contains descriptions of the CPI and its related methodologies. Other sources include my own analyses of the CPI data and methodological changes over the last 30 years as well as interviews with individuals involved in inflation reporting.
______
Payments to Social Security Recipients Should be Double Current Levels
Inflation, as reported by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) is understated by roughly 7% per year. This is due to recent redefinitions of the series as well as to flawed methodologies, particularly adjustments to price measures for quality changes. The concentration of this installment on the quality of government economic reports will be first on CPI series redefinition and the damages done to those dependent on accurate cost-of-living estimates, and on pending further redefinition and economic damage.
The CPI was designed to help businesses, individuals and the government adjust their financial planning and considerations for the impact of inflation. The CPI worked reasonably well for those purposes into the early-1980s. In recent decades, however, the reporting system increasingly succumbed to pressures from miscreant politicians, who were and are intent upon stealing income from social security recipients, without ever taking the issue of reduced entitlement payments before the public or Congress for approval.
In particular, changes made in CPI methodology during the Clinton Administration understated inflation significantly, and, through a cumulative effect with earlier changes that began in the late-Carter and early Reagan Administrations have reduced current social security payments by roughly half from where they would have been otherwise. That means Social Security checks today would be about double had the various changes not been made. In like manner, anyone involved in commerce, who relies on receiving payments adjusted for the CPI, has been similarly damaged. On the other side, if you are making payments based on the CPI (i.e., the federal government), you are making out like a bandit.
In the original version of this background article, I noted that Social Security payments should 43% higher, but that was back in September 2004 and only adjusted for CPI changes that took place after 1993. The current estimate adjusts for methodology gimmicks introduced since 1980.
Elements of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) had their roots in the mid-1880s, when the Bureau of Labor, later known as the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), was asked by Congress to measure the impact of new tariffs on prices. It was another three decades, however, before price indices would be combined into something resembling today’s CPI, a measure used then for setting wage increases for World War I shipbuilders. Although published regularly since 1921, the CPI did not come into broad acceptance and use until after World War II, when it was included in auto union contracts as a cost-of-living adjustment for wages.
The CPI found its way not only into other union agreements, but also into most commercial contracts that required consideration of cost/price changes or inflation. The CPI also was used to adjust Social Security payments annually for changes in the cost of living, and therein lay the eventual downfall to the credibility of CPI reporting.
(Please read the rest of this 2004 paper here... http://www.shadowstats.com/article/consumer_price_index )
(JH’s comment: The numbers have been rigged for at least a decade to prepare for the collapse in SS and other Federal obligations linked to CPI-W, BLS inflation numbers, and COLA adjusted pension obligations. The BLS has been politicized and is now a partisan organization controlled by government employees who have only allegiance to the continued existence of the Federal government, the people of this country be damned. It’s about time people started listen to good men like those at Shadowstats.com and stand up and strike down those who have brought this upon the citizens of this country. Let’s see what happens when the bread stops flowing for the first time since implementation the circuses of the American post-War economics.)