Social Security Trustees Live In Alternate Universe

What's gas cost now? Over three bucks a gallon?

Wasn't it just $2.25 at election time last November? Hmm.

Our electric bill is about 20 percent higher than it was a year ago. Our phone service, thanks to the corporate toadies who laughingly "regulate" utilities here in Florida, has increased even more, as has our cable.

Property taxes and insurance costs are going through the roof.

Increased transportation costs have pushed grocery prices to record highs, especially fruits and vegetables. Melons and papaya are now seldom-affordable luxuries at our house.

And as the US dollar plummets against most other currencies (down a full 66 percent against the European Union's euro in the short time that currency's been out), most everything made abroad is more expensive than it was a year ago.

These days, that's about everything we buy.

Closer to home, the consumer health organization, Families USA, found that from April 2006 to April 2007, Part D drug plan prices for the top 15 drugs prescribed to seniors shot up once again, this time almost 10 percent.

And to thoroughly depress you, Medicare premiums face steep increases again next year.

Part B premiums, which have increased an average of 11 percent a year for the last five years, are forecast to increase by $15.90 in 2008 from the current $93.50 a month to $109.40 - the largest amount in the history of the program. According to TREA Senior Citizens League, this means that an elderly married couple could be faced with close to $400 in new premiums next year.

And that doesn't count the increasingly painful and capricious expense of the prescription drug program under the privatized Medicare Part D. (Greed now blinds the Pharma/Insurance cartel to the great pain and suffering they inflict. Congress could ease or even eliminate this pain but our "representatives" are far too busy kissing butts on "K" Street in exchange for campaign contributions.)

In fact, by next year basic Medicare payments will have compounded five times faster than the meager increases that we've received from Social Security increases these past six years.

Which begs the question: Isn't Social Security's annual cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) supposed to protect us from exactly this kind of injustice? Doesn't the law provide annual increases based on increased senior costs? (Actually, no. It doesn't. But that's another story.)

One in Three Needs Social Security to Live

A majority of the 48 million Americans who receive Social Security checks depend on it for at least 50 percent of their total income. One in three rely on it for all or almost all their income. Anyone can see that continued decreases will drop us back to the bad old days when seniors ate dog food and were dependent on the "kindness of strangers."

Surely, the Social Security COLA will leap next year to compensate for all the price increases we're now enduring.

Sorry, Charlie! It seems that the Social Security Trustees, those wonderful folks who have been shortchanging us all these years, live in an alternate universe. There - and what a heavenly place it must be - gas prices remain steady, insurance never goes up, and the yellow brick road is paved with gold.

For in spite of the soaring prices of just about everything in your world and mine, last week those wise Trustees announced that our Social Security Cost of Living Adjustment for 2008, the annual correction to help seniors keep up with inflation, will be just 1.4 percent. In fact, the Trustees explained, apparently quite pleased with themselves, inflation has been so minimal, so benign, that it could require an increase of only 1.2 percent, the lowest ever.

How's that for dumb, blind, and what-the-hell-is-the-matter-with-you?

Little wonder, according to TREA Senior Citizens league, we consider our need for a fair and realistic Social Security cost-of-living increase the "most important issue facing seniors."

While politicians in Washington complain how senior "entitlements" like Social Security COLAs are strangling the country - cutting deeply into corporate welfare and war costs - seniors are seriously hurting out here.

Next year's 1.4 percent COLA increase is an insult to 48-million Americans who have worked hard all their lives, who have paid into the system as they were asked, and who now face the boot end of an increasingly barren promise that they would live comfortably in their old age.

It's unfair. It's un-American. It's immoral and downright scandalous.

And as I wrote in my last column on this subject, nothing will change until we force public financing of electoral campaigns, compelling politicians' attentions from rich corporate patrons and their lobbyist lackeys back to those who elect them.

Meanwhile, let's compel Congress to put their entire $168,500 salaries under Social Security and only Social Security. Let's see how they like it.

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