Sleeper issue: Colas | Michael Tomasky

Looking for a sleeper issue this election? We may see one stir and wake up on Friday, when the Social Security Administration is expected to announce that senior citizens won't get Colas for the second straight year. I don't mean Pepsis. I mean cost of living increases.

This is not a political decision of any sort but a straightforward actuarial one. If the consumer price index for wage earners doesn't go up from September of the previous year to September of the current one, there's no Cola in the current fiscal year (which really tracks more closely to calendar year 2011 than 2010, since the fiscal year starts October 1). The September 2010 numbers will come in Friday, and it is universally expected that they will not justify an increase under law.

There wasn't one last year either. But last year wasn't an election year. This is. And an off-year election, in which seniors make up a higher-than-typical proportion of the vote.

You'd think most senior citizens would understand how this works, and it's the law and all that. Still, that seems unlikely to prevent Republicans from saying "Barack Obama is denying you your cost-of-living increase." In fairness, Democrats would probably do much the same thing if the situation were reversed, but Republicans are just more ferocious about this sort of thing in general, as we know, and some of them will undoubtedly find a way to imply that Obama doesn't want them to get their benefits because they aren't Muslim or something.

It is possible for Congress to vote for a lump-sum increase anyway - say, $250, which would in many cases be not too much less than the total annual benefit increase (typically in the area of $300 or $350 most years, as I recall) but would not, if voted as a lump-sum, count in the ongoing Social Security benefit increase calculation. North Dakota House Democrat Earl Pomeroy, fighting for his political life up there on the lone prairie and likely to lose, wants to do just that.

Well, a, Congress is adjourned until after the election. It would seem to me that Democrats could still campaign on the promise that they will do this, but that's not the same as doing it before an election.

So, two and half weeks before voting day, the largest bloc of voters in the country is going to be told that the government is not increasing their benefit. I wonder how Bush and Rove would've handled this...

US politicsObama administrationUS midterm elections 2010Michael Tomasky
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