President Obama's Social Security Proposal Risks A Senior Poverty Crisis

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http://www.businessinsider.com/how-high-does-senior-poverty-have-to-go-2013-4

It's official: President Obama has proposed cutting Social Security by replacing the program's current inflation adjustment with the stingier "chained" Consumer Price Index.

As I've discussed before, this risks undoing all the progress made against senior poverty since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. 25% of seniors were poor according to official poverty line in 1968, compared to just 9.4% in 2006. Note, however, that the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which includes things like out of pocket health care expenses which hit seniors disproportionately, already shows a 16.1% rate by 2009.

And our senior poverty rate, measured by the international standard of 50% of median income, is already 25%, much higher than most developed countries, more than three times Sweden's rate and over four times as high as Canada.

Why is Obama doing this? We just rejected the candidate who wanted to cut Social Security and Medicare. Perhaps, as Krugman (link above) suggests, he chasing the fantasy of "being the adult in the room," but this is a losing proposition.


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