AP:
By law, Social Security benefits cannot go down. Nevertheless, monthly payments would drop for millions of people in the Medicare prescription drug program because the premiums, which often are deducted from Social Security payments, are scheduled to go up slightly.
"Seniors may perceive that they are being hurt because there is no COLA, but they are in fact not getting hurt," said Andrew G. Biggs, a resident scholar [sic] at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank. "Congress has to be able to tell people they are not getting everything they want."
The banksters got $22 trillion dollars NOW NOW NOW in the bailouts, so Congress didn't exactly say No to them, did they? Nor did AEI.
So, banksters aren't "people"?
What are they? Lizards? Weasels? Giant vampire squids? DING DING DING DING!
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Define "hurt" if you would please
"Seniors may perceive that they are being hurt because there is no COLA, but they are in fact not getting hurt,"
I suspect this fella Biggs flunked basic math.
When the price of food goes up, and the amount of money you have to buy that food goes down, there are those who will experience that as pain.
Some will starve.
Others will freeze to death in the next hard winter for lack of heating oil.
I would love to know
the whole story behind how the AEI and other ideology shops came to occupy such a large place in the national political and economic dialogue. How did these people - organized to conservative supply talking heads to the media - manage to get themselves treated as scholars (sic is right) called upon daily to offer wisdom?
Since I first saw them all on PBS' NewsHour, I tend to blame it.
The whole story
Deniseb,
There has been a lot of writing about the ascendency of the right. Its been a long effort that began in the late 1950s. You can read "Right Nation" by two Economist writers who's names I always forget and/or "Blinded by the Right" and "Republican Noise Machine" by David Brock.
I've been looking at the degeneration of the progosphere into the pibbersphere and see similar patterns. I'm not claiming moral equivalency (and it appears you have to make that shit explicit here these days, sigh), but the "public option" effort by the pibbersphere is an example of bad policy being pushed for no really good reason, much the same as the right's efforts. Well, I guess the right has greed. The pibbers just seem a little...