Posted on 10/12/2010 7:47:11 AM PDT by ex-Texan
BOCA RATON, Fla. Seniors prepared to cut back on everything from food to charitable donations to whiskey as word spread Monday that they will have to wait until at least 2012 to see their Social Security checks increase.
The government is expected to announce this week that more than 58 million Social Security recipients will go through a second straight year without an increase in monthly benefits. This year was the first without an increase since automatic adjustments for inflation started in 1975.
"I think it's disgusting," said Paul McNeil, 69, a retired state worker from Warwick, R.I., who said his food and utility costs have gone up, but his income has not. He lamented decisions by lawmakers that he said do not favor seniors.
"They've got this idea that they've got to save money and basically they want to take it out of the people that will give them the least resistance," he said. * * *
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
I wouldn't necessarily say that seniors constitute the path of least resistance. As a voting block, they carry a lot of clout.
Couple this with the increase in health insurance premiums, and you have some October surprises that the democrats will never get over.
Same mentality that says spending only 5% more on education instead of the scheduled 10% increase is a cut, I guess.
The democrats at least won’t be running cartoons showing Bush throwing granny down the stairs this month.
Brace?? The same thing happened last year, geesh
Hey Paul...
Where did you get this idiotic notion that this admin wants to SAVE money??
It’s laughable.
* * * [S]eniors like McNeil said they'll be thinking about the issue when they go to vote, and experts said the news comes at a bad time for Democrats already facing potentially big losses in November. Seniors are the most loyal of voters, and their support is especially important during midterm elections, when turnout is generally lower."If you're the ruling party, this is not the sort of thing you want to have happening two weeks before an election," said Andrew Biggs, a former deputy commissioner at the Social Security Administration and now a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
I noticed that too.
Just shows you how people can delude themselves.
They feel better viewing themselves as “victimized” than as dependants demanding more at the government trough.
It’s interesting how quick the entitlement mentality takes over. Most workers have gone for a while without a raise now. If they werre still working, they’d be in the same boat.
But since they’re not, and they are an organized dependant group, they expect constant raises no matter what. And to do any less is to “victimize” them.
Greatest generation my @ss.
Couple it also with inflation due to “quantitative easing” and you have people with about 50% of the purchasing power they had a couple of years ago.
While I am not unsympathetic to those who rely on Social Security, it is not like the rest of us are swimming in raises and extra money. Our costs have gone up, and for many of us, our incomes have either remained flat or been reduced, over a period of several years now. Now we are facing huge income tax increases and health insurance premium increases in 2011, which will take us back further as far as any discretionary income.
I remember that during the election campaign of George H. W. Bush the government announced good news.... Inflation had come down to the lowest level in many years.
NBC's Irvin R. Levine did a special segment on the news that night complaining that seniors were going to get smaller Cost of Living Adjustments, due to Bush/Reagan.
Irving R. Levine
Rest In Pieces
No such chance that NBC will do a similar story like that tonight.
Didn't the Greatest Generation's parents mostly vote for Roosevelt? Again, and again, and again?
Yes they will, after all it's always Bush's fault.
i remember that! what a tool was Irving R. Levine!!
If my memory serves me right it was you young people who voted in the current administration. So thank you for being so stupid to create your problem. Us older folk have no control over our income the way you do.
Yes.
>> While I am not unsympathetic to those who rely on Social Security, it is not like the rest of us are swimming in raises and extra money.
Amen.
Unless you work for the government, of course. THEIR raises are still coming in steady.
THX FOR THE PING.
It now appears to me that the thug-slugs will be letting the SElection go forward and possibly plan on causing great chaos thereafter.
Hard to say . . . so many undercurrents, cross currents and flags on plays are in the air.
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