A symptom of the illness

Social Security benefits are tied to the consumer price index. When inflation pushes the consumer price index up, Social Security benefits are automatically increased the next year to adjust for the cost-of-living increase. This year, with the economic problems, the consumer price index has actually gone down, so in effect all of us who are seniors are already getting an increase in our Social Security benefits, even thought the dollar amount of our Social Security benefits will not go up January 1 (but they won’t go down either).

Nonetheless, President Obama has proposed giving all of us another $250 Social Security bonus next year, at a cost of between $13 and $14 billion more added to the skyrocketing Federal deficit, now at about $1.4 trilllion, or about three times larger than the already frightening debt that President Bush’s administration left us with last year.

Nice as the extra money would be, it makes no economic sense. We seniors do not lose buying power by not getting a Social Security raise next year, since the cost-of-living has actually declined slightly. It is, frankly, nothing more than a political sop to try to keep all of us seniors happy while Congress tries to ram through a health care package of dubious value and enormous cost.

So one again this administration is printing money like mad (which is in effect what happens when the government goes into debt) with no plans whatever to control costs or figure out how to pay back what we already own. I wasn’t happy with the Bush administration’s profligate spending, but President Obama’s administration, and especially this Democratically-controlled Congress, have in less than a year made Bush’s fiscal transgressions seem small-time.

I had hoped that the old Republican charge that Democrats were the party of fiscal irresponsibility and of “tax and spend” politics was no longer true. Apparently that charge is still valid.

This fiscal irresponsibility is now becoming a serious problem. It may, in fact, be the nation’s most serious national security issue at the moment, far greater even than the terrorist threats. As I have pointed out before, fiscal mismanagement and assumption of crushing debt preceded, and instigated, the downfall of a number of recent empires, including the British, French and Dutch empires.