In his recent blog entry on chained CPI (Chained CPI: Unfair and inaccurate, April 26th), AARP President Robert Romasco highlights his groups opposition to the change, charging that it would be “Unfair and Inaaccurate.” In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
A coalition of strange bedfellows, including Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform and Moveon.org, have announced their opposition to this policy, even as many responsible policymakers from both sides of the aisle and at the highest levels of government continue to support it – notably, the president and the Speaker of the House.
It is no surprise that groups from the left and right have mobilized to defend the status quo in order to avoid the tough choices that must accompany any responsible deficit reduction plan. Yet, the resistance to a reform as simple and obvious as using the most accurate measure of inflation for price-indexed provisions in the budget is both astounding and disappointing.
Economists from the left, right, and center are in broad agreement that chained CPI more accurately reflects cost-of-living increases by accounting for the small-sample and substitution biases in the current inflation measure. This view is shared by experts at the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office as well as the experts at Bureau of Labor Statistics who are responsible for measuring inflation. Adopting the chained CPI doesn’t represent a policy change, but rather would best reflect the current intent of the law to index various provisions to inflation.
And while some argue that seniors face faster cost-growth than other populations, there is little evidence of a significant difference when one accounts for the fact that seniors are more likely to own their own homes mortgage free, have different shopping habits than younger populations, are able to take advantage of senior discounts, and receive constantly improving health treatments. Indeed, according to the Congressional Budget Office, “it is unclear, however, whether the cost of living actually grows at a faster rate for the elderly than for younger people.”
Moreover, offering seniors a preferential inflation measure raises more fairness concerns than it answers. If seniors receive a higher inflation measure, should non-seniors on the Social Security program receive a lower measure? Geographic inflation disparities are far larger than alleged age disparities (inflation has averaged 2.7 percent in New York and 1.8 percent in Detroit over the last decade); why protect seniors and not New Yorkers? What about other government programs and tax provisions? Should each be indexed to costs within its population? Or only those backed by powerful interest groups?
Indeed, it would be highly unfair to politicize inflation indexing or to exempt any government program or tax provision from the most accurate available measure of inflation.
More unfair would be ignoring our fiscal and retirement challenges and leaving the job to a future politicians. According to the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the President’s chained CPI proposal would result in benefit levels 1 to 2 percentage points lower than under current law – and it accompanies the switch with benefit enhancements for the old that actually reduce poverty among that group. By comparison, there is a 25 percent cut scheduled to occur under current law when the trust funds dry up in 2033. The greatest unfairness would be allowing this across-the-board benefit cut to hit every beneficiary regardless of age or income – when this cut could be easily avoided through a balanced package of revenue and benefit adjustments.
Mr. Romasco is right, we need a national conversation on improving retirement security, including how to make Social Security sustainably solvent in order to avoid abrupt benefit cuts and ensure the system is better protecting those who rely on it. Ideally, we’d have this conversation now. However, the overheated reaction to a technical correction in cost of living adjustments suggests that the political system may not be ready to tackle comprehensive Social Security reform. Continuing to index benefits improperly while we wait for this reform to materialize would be a costly mistake that will only make future Social Security changes more painful.
