WASHINGTON — Another year without an increase in Social Security retirement and disability benefits is creating a political backlash for President Barack Obama and Democrats.
The Social Security Administration said Friday that inflation has been too low since the last increase in 2009 to warrant a raise for 2011. The announcement marks only the second year without an increase since automatic adjustments for inflation were adopted in 1975. This year was the first.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi promised to schedule a vote after the Nov. 2 election on a bill to provide one-time $250 payments to Social Security recipients. Obama endorsed the payment, which would be similar to one included in his economic recovery package last year.
Obama had pushed for a second payment last fall, but the proposal failed in the Senate when a dozen Democrats joined Republicans on a procedural vote to block it. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Friday that in the post-election session, “I will be working hard to gain Senate passage for a proposal that ensures that America’s seniors are treated fairly.”
Michael Steel, a spokesman for House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio, said that if Democrats were serious about a bonus, they would have voted on it before lawmakers went home to campaign for re-election.
Annual cost-of-living adjustments, or COLAs, are automatically set each year by an inflation measure that was adopted by Congress in the 1970s. The announcement Friday was triggered by the Labor Department’s release of inflation numbers for September.
The report showed that consumer prices are still lower than they were two years ago, when the last COLA was awarded. By law, the next increase in benefits won’t come until consumer prices as a whole rise above what they were in the summer of 2008.
The trustees who oversee Social Security project that will happen next year. They predict the increase at the start of 2012 will be 1.2 percent.
