No Social Security raise: Dems propose $250 bonus

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

Another year without an increase in Social Security retirement and disability benefits is creating a political backlash that has President Barack Obama and Democrats pushing to give a $250 bonus to each of the program’s 58 million recipients.

The Social Security Administration said Friday 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.

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. Friday’s announcement 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.

The increase for 2009 was 5.8 percent, the largest in 27 years. It was triggered by a sharp but short-lived spike in gasoline prices to above $4 a gallon in the summer of 2008. When the price of gasoline later fell — to below $2 a gallon — so did the overall inflation rate. Seniors, however, kept their increase in benefits.

A little more than 58.7 million retirees, disabled Americans and surviving spouses and minor children of enrollees receive Social Security or Supplemental Security Income.