smaller-raises-for-seniors-smartmoney: Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance: "Of course, lower benefits are part of the point. Using the slower-rising index is being billed by many including President Barack Obama's fiscal responsibility commission and the Bipartisan Policy Center -- as a way to generate much-needed savings to help deal with the country's mounting debt crisis. In fact, the savings could amount to an estimated $112 billion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. 'This is a start in helping us fix Social Security,' says David John, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
But critics say the new proposal only makes a bad system worse. The current measurement of inflation is supposed to account for the spending habits of adults of all ages, including only a small proportion of retirees. That doesn't reflect the true inflation seniors face, says Moshe A. Milevsky, a finance professor at York University in Toronto. For example, many older people spend a large share of their budgets on items like health care, whose prices have risen about twice as fast as overall prices, according to a 2010 paper published by the Congressional Research Service.
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