No COLA is hard to take this year

Social Security recipients won’t be getting a cost of living increase — also known as a COLA — for the first time since the current system of automatic increases was established in 1975. By federal law, Social Security benefits can’t be reduced, but they won’t be going up in January.

The reason is a Nixon-era law that pegged annual Social Security increases to something called the “Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers,” according to the Web site http://www.factcheck.org.

Researchers for the Web site found that today’s lower energy costs pushed down the price index that determines the COLA — and could do the same thing next year.

Clearly, tying the amount of Social Security benefits to inflation is a smart idea.

Otherwise, the people receiving the checks would quickly see the buying power of those benefits dry up, rendering the program useless.

That’s what President Richard Nixon was obviously thinking when he first proposed this idea for automatic increases in Social Security. “This provision is one which I have long urged, and I am pleased that the Congress has at last fulfilled a request which I have been making since the first months of my administration,” Nixon is quoted on the Web site.

While the price of everything in our economy is tied to the price of energy, we have to wonder if this particular index is the best way to determine how much Social Security should go up each and every year.

Perhaps the better solution is an inflation index that tracks the kinds of things that Social Security recipients are more likely to buy. What if Social Security COLAs were tied to health care costs, for example?

The goal isn’t to find a way to rig the system so that seniors always get a big, fat cost of living increase every January on their Social Security benefits, it’s to maintain the buying power of those checks based on the kinds of things that the recipients actually buy.

Social Security has been around since 1935, and it has become an indispensible benefit for senior citizens.

Those in government — and those who want to keep their government jobs — should realize that this program has to work properly. That doesn’t appear to be the case in this particular case.

It’s time to find a new and more relevant way to determine the annual Social Security COLA.