I received an email about this news, so I went searching for an article with the details.  I found that ABC News had the article Obama Budget to Drop Benefit Cost-of-Living Trims.  I place ABC News only a fraction of a step above Faux Noise, but I’ll give you a few quotes from the story so you get the gist.

President Barack Obama will propose an election-year budget that would drop reductions he had previously embraced in federal benefits, officials disclosed Thursday. He also will ask Congress to approve about $56 billion in new or expanded programs, stepping back from aggressive efforts to tackle long-term government deficits and debt.
.
.
.
Republicans promptly portrayed the White House move as abandoning any commitment to fiscal discipline.

“The one and only idea the president has to offer is even more job-destroying tax hikes, and that non-starter won’t do anything to save the entitlement programs that are critical to so many Americans,” said Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner.

I suppose you can’t blame ABC News for repeating what Speaker Boner had to say.  So I wish that the Obama administration would come out first about how these tax cuts are destroying jobs and need to be stopped.  The reason why the tax cuts are job destroying is that they take money away from government that would spend it on buying stuff that creates jobs, but instead the money is retained by the wealthy who can’t possibly spend all the money they already have.  So the wealthy put the money from the tax cuts into bogus Wall Street gambling schemes that don’t put anybody to work.

Now here is one that you can blame ABC News for.

The proposed cost-of-living trims, supported by many Republicans and now put aside by Obama, would use a different inflation index to adjust annual benefit payments. Many economists believe the alternative formula, called a “chained consumer price index,” better reflects consumer spending behavior.

What ABC News doesn’t tell you is that there may be more economists that believe the current inflation index underestimates the impact of inflation on the elderly.  If there needs to be an inflation index to determine cost of living adjustments, there should be a special one for how seniors spend their money.  (Well, there actually already is one.)  Using this index would give seniors even higher cost of living adjustments than they currently get.

See the Bureau of Labor Statistics web page Consumer Price Index for the elderly.

BLS also calculates an experimental CPI for the elderly, or CPI-E, by using households whose reference person or spouse is 62 years of age or older.

Could ABC News be so ignorant that they are unaware of this index and the economists who promote it?  For that matter, one has to wonder if President Obama is also ignorant of this index.  What about the Republicans in Congress?  Anyone who is unaware of the this BLS index ought not be making budget decisions for our government.

I found a more reliable source to misrepresent the story. The Los Angeles Times story is Obama backs away from a Republican budget priority.

The president’s now-abandoned proposal to replace the consumer price index with a new formula for cost-of-living increases called “chained CPI” would probably have resulted in savings in programs such as Social Security and Medicare. Obama had indicated his support for chained CPI in battles with Republicans over the debt ceiling and government funding, starting in 2011.

Why no mention of the CPI-E, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer price Index For the Elderly?  Not only is chained CPI not a better measure of elderly spending compared to what is used now, it is actually a worse measure than what we use now – see CPI-E above.

Does the media have any responsibility to educate its readers?  Or does it only have to report what a few sides of the argument are?  Is this what is called balanced reporting?

When the President is wrong and the Republicans are wrong and this newspaper knows it, is it really being a newspaper to keep this a secret?

Do you ever ask yourself, how come I know more about these matters than the professional reporters seem to know? What am I paying them for anyway? Well, of course, I am reading this on the web so I am not paying them anything for the shoddy reporting. And they are getting everything from me that their reporting is worth.

The Real News Network has the 4 part series starting with I Was Born a Rebel – Code Pink Co-Founder Medea Benjamin on Reality Asserts Itself (1/4).

You may know Code Punk only from some of their visible protests at various congressional hearings or appearances of politicians. If so, you may or may not have an entirely favorable opinion of Code Pink. However, when you hear the story of how Medea Benjamin came by her opinions, you may change your mind somewhat. When I found out the things she has experienced first-hand about U.S. and multi-national corporate power, and even her experiences in Cuba, I couldn’t imagine her taking any different stands from the ones I have seen on TV (and the ones shown in the interviews).

An Apology From Fidel – Medea Benjamin on Reality Asserts Itself (2/4).

Obama Sucked the Steam Out of the Anti-War Movement – Medea Benjamin on Reality Asserts Itself (3/4).

As of this writing, part 4 has not been published.

February 23, 2014

Part 4 has been published.
The Movement is in Silos – Medea Benjamin on Reality Asserts Itself (4/4)

Naked Capitalism (NC not meaning North Carolina) has the article NC Reader Smacks Down Consumer Reports on Medicaid Clawback Advice.

But the bigger point for showing this example is that if you have the time and energy, it really is worth it to let various pundits and officials know when it’s clear they are hawking some sort of official party line and how what they have written discredits them. You may not always get the gratification of having them respond, but most writers read reactions to their articles, and in the case of a subscription-dependent publication like Consumer Reports, subscriber reactions are particularly important. And it also sharpens your argumentation skills for dealing with friends, family, and colleagues. We’re all chipping away at a bad orthodoxy, and continued probing will help find the fault lines.

This is a good description of why I have taken to blogging now that I am retired.  Besides, as a computer geek, it is a way to have my say without having to deal with actual people on a face-to-face basis.

Also implied in this blog is that you shouldn’t just read it, you should also make your views known.

Seeking Alpha has the article Did The Fiscal Stimulus From 2009 Work? by Cullen Roche.

First, I don’t know why conservatives have such a big beef with the fiscal stimulus. After all, it was mostly tax cuts. I consider myself a centrist who tends to lean slightly towards the fiscal conservative side and I can’t figure out when so many conservatives started suddenly hating tax cuts so much?
.
.
.
During a de-leveraging a government deficit adds net financial assets that helps support balance sheets. Anyone who says the deficit didn’t help at all either doesn’t understand basic accounting or must reject the idea that this was a credit crisis

I am glad to see that someone who claims to be somewhat conservative hasn’t lost the ability to do basic accounting. For a stimulus that was too small by at least a factor of 2 or 3, was ended way too soon, and was too focused on tax cuts, it did do a pretty good job. Imagine if we had actually tried a well designed stimulus package.

When you consider the size of monetary stimulus tried by the Fed compared to the size of the fiscal stimulus, the fiscal stimulus effect per dollar was much larger. Still that doesn’t convince some people that we should use the policy that actually works instead of the least effective policy that is available.

Is this any way to run a business?