Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate for President in our most recent election, was absolutely correct when she predicted a Grand Bargain had already been hammered out between the Democrats and the Plutocrats which would be revealed post-election, naturally. Obama & Co. will blame the Republicans who will argue in return that fiscal policy demands eating our elders if we’re to avoid eating our young.

Currently, Social Security incorporates a mechanism for Cost Of Living Adjustments so our seniors can starve more slowly. But certain bean counters (the same ones that brought you AIG, Enron, and Corn Ethanol) argue this strategy overestimates inflation, they say, because what REALLY happens when, say, the cost of hamburger goes up, seniors switch to eating pet food. This, they continue, should be the new standard for adjusting social security benefits for the elderly poor so they have some skin in the game. That’s the trouble, you see, with the poor: They have too much skin left. The sooner we can eliminate them, the more for the rest of us.

Serving Man: Eating the Poor

CLICK on Dining w/the $tars: The Golden Years to hear more.

“They’re actually getting more than they should,” says economics correspondent John Ydstie.

Cost of living adjustments, which were added to Social Security in 1975, are based on inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index, which measures the cost of a basket of goods. But many economists believe the CPI overstates the effect of inflation and prefer a different index, the chain CPI, which takes into account the substitutions that people make when prices rise.

“Let’s say the price of beef goes up a lot,” Ydstie says. “What people do is eat less beef and maybe more chicken, to keep their cost of living down. The current CPI doesn’t account for those substitutions very well, and the chained CPI does. So, it measures inflation more accurately.”

Free at Last