thanks to reuters for that headline, but talk about poor [sic] taste . . .
anyway, looks like all those folks on social security are taking advantage of the rest of us honest taxpayers and getting way more money than they need! now that we've taken care of the welfare queens (thanks to slick willie), we can take on the social security sponges. reuters manages to frame the article entirely in terms of cost to the government and completely dodge the fact that the cost-savings would come from paying recipients less money.
so, we're going to get a tax cut at a cost of $20 billion that benefits the richest people in the country, and an adjustment to social security payments -- er, "costs" -- that will more than pay for it, looks like.
maybe we now we know where all those enron accountants are working.
j
REUTERS Greenspan says US CPI poor measure of living cost Reuters, 02.27.03, 11:20 AM ET
WASHINGTON, Feb 27 (Reuters) - Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said on Thursday that if more up-to-date price measures were used to index benefits, it could significantly cut the cost of Social Security for the government.
Greenspan told the Senate's special committee on aging that when Social Security was first established, Congress ordered the escalation of benefits according to the cost of living.
"And at the time, the only measure we had of the cost of living was the consumer price index ... but it has always been an issue of whether that really truly measured the cost of living. And one of the reasons basically is it has a fixed-weight system which biases it upward," Greenspan said, adding that since 1935, when the safety net was established, methods of statistical measurement have improved.
"Indeed, the very latest version is the ... so-called chain-weighted price index, which is a far superior measure of the cost of living," the Fed chief said. He said the use of such updated measures can make a "big difference" to the cost of safety net programs.
"If we had used the chain-weighted CPI, we would have probably had a budget deficit of about $40 billion less in 2002 -- a little more than half because of the tax-bracket shift, a little less than half on the issue of benefits," he added.
Copyright 2003, Reuters News Service