Ok, late Thursday night or early Friday morning.
The most obvious reason for this combined D/R conspiracy is the COLA built into Social Security, which I’ll bet a lot of politicians deeply regretted - and because it would be politically impossible to rescind, they “fixed” the problem by skewing the inflation numbers down. As we all know, senior citizens spend a lot of their free time and money shopping (while taking a discounted bus, of course) for microwaves, iPods, plasma TV’s, etc. They don’t eat much and are trim and healthy, so those pesky food and medical figures don’t mean much to them. /s