The White House is
in damage control mode after President Obama's budget with its Social Security cuts has been greeted with near-universal scorn. (Joe Scarborough's
on their side, so they've got that going for them.)
While they're regrouping at the moment, they'll soon be beyond the "Republicans made us do it" narrative and move on to why these benefit cuts aren't so bad and how they will protect the most vulnerable with a "bump" in benefits. How this works is that after so many years of retirement or disability payments (in the Simpson-Bowles proposal this was cribbed from, it's 20 years) along with years of compounded chained CPI cuts, the oldest and the poorest will get a "bump" in benefits. That's how they'll mitigate for the cuts that they say aren't really cuts. [Update: The WH fact sheet outlines that the bump will occur after 10 years for retirees, 15 for disabled.]
The first problem with that is that it obviously contradicts their contention that this is not as a benefit cut, but instead a "technical adjustment" that more accurately reflects inflation. If it's not a cut, and if it is supposed to be more accurate, then why does it have to be adjusted for older and poorer people? If it truly was more accurate, then there wouldn't be a need to bump up benefits to make up the gap between their income and inflation. If it's more accurate, then benefits would never lag inflation, right?
The second problem is more onerous. White people and wealthy people live longer, so they'll be the "bump" beneficiaries. This proposal is inherently discriminatory against people of color and lower income people who are less likely to live long enough to get the bump. They'll just live long enough to see their benefits shrink more and more every year.
Ironically, it's also more discriminatory against single women, who are more likely to live that long, but have smaller payments because of lower earnings. Even with the bump, they'll never see a recovery of the benefits lost compared to the current formula. Here's a really good illustration of that from the National Women's Law Center
The bottom line, whatever they want to call it, "superlative CPI," or "technical adjustment," or more accurate, it's a benefit cut. If it wasn't a cut and if it was accurate, they wouldn't have to come up with ways to try to fix it.