Cost of Living Adjustment

Built into the Social Security system are automatic cost of living adjustments (COLA), which increase retirement benefits according to the inflation rate. But this year the cost of living has actually gone down 4%. Nevertheless, President Obama wants to give senior citizens a check for $250 to make up for their not getting a COLA. George Will sees such generosity as “the entitlement that proves that the entitlement system, like the universe, will expand until, perhaps like the universe, it collapses in on itself.”

Barack Obama has now established [Sen. Wilbur] Mills’s Social Security COLA as the capstone to the architecture of the entitlement culture that is modern liberalism’s crowning achievement: It is an entitlement to which you are entitled even when you are not entitled to it. Obama says that 57 million Americans — every Social Security beneficiary and some other recipients of federal entitlements — are entitled to $250 apiece to assuage the disappointment of having not been injured by inflation. Because the cost of living declined 4 percent last year, the 57 million are not entitled to the actual COLA, but they evidently are going to be declared entitled to monetary consolation for the misfortune of not experiencing misfortune.