Social Security recipients can expect next year’s annual cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) to be the lowest since 2021, following cooler inflation readings in July and August.
On Wednesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the consumer price index climbed 2.5% year on year.
Combined with the 2.6% reading in July, and a similar reading expected for September, Social Security beneficiaries are on track to see a payment increase of about 2.5%, according to The Senior Citizens League, an advocacy group.
That equates to an increase of about $46.80 per month.
While the lower COLA forecast reflects an economy that is enjoying a slower pace of price growth, Social Security advocates say seniors and others on fixed incomes are uniquely affected by the inflationary environment.
This is exactly a problem of negligence. SS isn’t a fucking tree. It doesn’t just grow naturally. We have to put money into it and maintain that system, and not drain the coffers when we want to go bomb brown people in far away lands. When that system has been in place for decades and then someone doesn’t maintain it before me (I’m only 30 so I’ve only contributed about 12 years of my life to SS) but boomers worked for 40-50 years and kept trying to stop paying into it or taking from it, then they caused the problems. It’s not short sighted to call them out since they have had the most amount of time and have been the largest group of both voting and working blocks.
SS is going to fail or be dried up by the time I hit 60 since we keep running into issues with it. At best those of us under 45 will have to figure out a new solution and rework the system so that we can pay for the failure and misgivings of those before us. You can try and sit on a high horse about not wanting to blame the older generations, but they’re literally the ones with the voting power and money to make this all work smoothly and they didn’t do shit. If you’re younger like me then you too will be paying for their fuck up. You can’t live off the knowledge you gained from realizing too late that the older generations fucked us. We cant eat knowledge, we can’t live in learning from past mistakes, and we can’t drink the warm idea of knowing we sat around and problem solved as a team.
You’ve missed my point entirely.
Blame absolutely is fair, but people can’t vote on just the best options for SS alone, ignoring everything else. Also, as seen in recent presidential races (cough cough 2016), you can have a massive contigent of voter will just effectively erased by very thin margins or technicalities. On top of all that, voters can’t directly effect what the policy makers actually do in office.
My point is, it’s not useful to blame such a wide and diverse swath of people. Painting with such wide brush strokes only serves to create an us vs them situation that distracts from the actual policy makers, lobbyists, and news media complex with far more direct influence over all of this. Most of those people are boomers, but all boomers are not part of those groups.
The shortsightedness is thinking that new generations are the first people to go “Hey, maybe we need to pay into SS for enough money to be there. Maybe we shouldn’t waste money on proxy wars on false pretenses.” plenty of Boomers were shouting this from the rooftops as this shit was happening. Your objections and concerns are not new.
Basically, please stop talking about boomers as some singular homogenous entity. Please stop thinking that the situation we now find ourselves in is caused by some sort of lack of sense from older generations instead of politicians doing what is best for them at the expense of the general populace. Please stop blaming the average populace from before your time for the choices made by politicians.
Trump should be a burning hot example that politicians actions and the peoples’ will are often very disconnected.
We do have to find a way to fix this. Taking time to dunk on people just as downtrodden as us is wasted effort that could be put towards trying to fix things.