Wednesday, 30 December 2009
Mark Kirk Hates Senior Citizens and the Disabled
Mark Kirk and his RINO buddies are having a gay ole' time partying it up on our tax tab. How is Mark Kirk's congressional voting and actions, or lack thereof, affecting people like myself who depend on Social Security because we are disabled and unable to work? The short answer is We are not faring well under Kirk, its called poverty.
Senior citizens and Disabled folk will not be getting a Cost of Living Increase this year and yet Mark Kirk and most of our CONgress critters voted themselves hefty raises for 2009. Steve Gold has a nice little write up about our Social Security disability checks versus the reality of the Poverty Theshold. CONgress claims that the Cost of Living actually went down, but do consider that this is tied to an index (of CONgress' choosing) that doesn't take into account factors that disabled and retired citizens have to face. The official threshold is adjusted for inflation using the consumer price index.
Social Security checks have gone up automatically every year since 1975, when the first automatic cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) took effect. Prior to that, a separate act of Congress was required to grant any adjustment to compensate for inflation. But this January 2010, there won’t be any COLA, for the first time in the 35 years.
The reason is simple: The official measure of the cost of living has gone down, not up.
And the major reason for that is that oil prices plunged from the peaks of the previous year.
Our COLA (Cost of Living Adjustment) is tied to the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W), which is tabulated by the career professionals at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. And from the third quarter of 2007 to the third quarter of 2008 (the period determined by law) the CPI-W went up 5.8 percent.
But now things are different. The CPI-W peaked a year ago, just before the 5.8 percent increase was calculated, and took a nose dive in the months that followed. Quarterly figures won’t be available until October, but based on monthly figures, the CPI-W now stands 1.9 percent below where it was 12 months before.
I don't know about you, but my food costs have gone up by at least 10% and I'm still buying the same things. My cable, gas and electric all went up by an average 5 to 10 percent and yet the CPI-W went down. How come?
One word explains this discrepancy: OIL
That’s not the only factor of course. Plunging home prices and a recession that has brought about historically low mortgage rates have also had their effects on the CPI. But the major factor has been wild swings in the price of crude oil and everything made from it.
Few motorists have forgotten that the price of regular gasoline at the pump exceeded $4 a gallon not long ago. Regular gasoline peaked at a national average of over $4.11 in early July 2008 – during that crucial third quarter used for calculating the COLA. But then the world price of crude oil collapsed, diving from a peak of $137 per barrel in July 2008 to a low of less than $35 in January, according to weekly averages from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Senior citizens and Disabled often have special diets, home medical services, handicap augmented transportation and other extra expenses not usually found in a normal family household. These are also not part of the CPI which is used to determine if we get a Cost Of Living Adjustment.
A consumer price index (CPI) is a measure estimating the average price of consumer goods and services purchased by households.
Two basic types of data are needed to construct the CPI: price data and weighting data. The price data are collected for a sample of goods and services from a sample of sales outlets in a sample of locations for a sample of times. The weighting data are estimates of the shares of the different types of expenditure as fractions of the total expenditure covered by the index. These weights are usually based upon expenditure data obtained for sampled decades from a sample of households. Although some of the sampling is done using a sampling frame and probabilistic sampling methods, much is done in a commonsense way (purposive sampling) that does not permit estimation of confidence intervals. Therefore, the sampling variance is normally ignored, since a single estimate is required in most of the purposes for which the index is used. Stocks and OIL greatly affect this.
So, the CPI is an estimate of our Cost of Living derived from weighted (numbers added or subtracted arbitrarily) values that can be adversely impacted by the stock markets and the Energy Industry Indexes! We disabled and senior citizens are getting no increase in our checks in 2009 because CONgress, Bankers, Stock Market manipulators and BIG OIL messed up the economy and almost precipitated a crash of the stock markets which went way down anyway. Nice.
Whatever the causes, Social Security recipients are going to feel squeezed this January, simply because they have become accustomed to annual increases. And about one in every four really will be squeezed, because their Medicare premiums will increase. The AARP estimates the number at 11 million. Thanks Mark Kirk for doing nothing while we sink further into poverty.
The U.S. House & Senate have voted themselves, respectively, $4,700 and $5,300 raises ...
- Mark Kirk voted to not give you a S.S. Cost of living raise in 2010 and 2011.
- Your Medicaid premiums will go up $285.60 for the 2-years and You will not get the 3% COLA: $660/yr. Your total 2-yr loss and cost is -$1,600 or -$3,200 for husband and wife.
- Over 2-yrs they each get $10,000
- Mark Kirk voted to spend all the Social Security surplus.
- Do you feel SCREWED?
- Will they have your cost of drugs - doctor fees - local taxes - food, etc., increase?
- NO WAY. They have a raise and better benefits. Why care about you? You never did anything about it in the past. You obviously are too stupid or don't care.
- Do you really think that Nancy, Harry, Chris, Charlie , Barnie, etal, care about you?
- SEND THE MESSAGE -- You're FIRED.. IN 2010 YOU WILL HAVE A CHANCE TO GET RID OF THE SITTING CONGRESS: Up to 1/3 OF THE SENATE, AND 100% OF THE HOUSE.
MAKE SURE YOU'RE STILL MAD IN NOVEMBER 2010 AND REMIND THEIR REPLACEMENTS NOT TO SCREW UP.
It is ok to forward this to your sphere of influence if you are finally tired of the abuse.
Maybe it's time for the........
proposed 28th Amendment:
"Congress shall make no law that applies to the citizens of the United States that does not apply equally to the Senators or Representatives, and Congress shall make no law that applies to the Senators or Representatives that does not apply equally to the citizens of the United States."
proposed 29th Amendment:
"Members of Congress shall be limited to two consecutive terms in office. They may serve a final third term of office after having not served for one term."
Let's get this passed around, folks - these people in Washington have brought this upon themselves!!! It's time for retribution. Let's take
back America.
Vote Mark Kirk Out of Congress!
Technorati Tags: mark kirk rino cola cost of living adjustment congressional pay raises poverty disabled retired senior citizen inflation cpi consumer price index congressional term limits
Of all the charity programs out there this one is very transparent using almost 100% of the donations for the purchase and distribution of toys to the children. If I was asked which of the charities I think most worthy of your support this one would certainly be No. 1.
These are people that truly want all the greatness of America and they have a heart for helping those in need.
Seems you can't make up your mind Mark. It appears you are a fair weather friend Mark, voting for who ever tosses the most green your way. Or maybe your one of those politicians Americans have come to know so well, who will say anything to get re-elected. You 
I'm sick of people like you Mark Kirk. You have betrayed your country for the almighty dollar and you are no longer welcome to represent American's.
Mind you, up until this point I've never watched a 'reality' show. Oh, Maybe I've dabbled at the edges, catching a youtube excerpt here and there for the laugh value or if it has some 'historic' significance like 
Is he truly being 'uncooperative', or is he invoking his right to remain silent. 
Those same customers might be most surprised to find that retail giant Walmart had the biggest markup.
So how did Kirk lie? Kirk has taken a rightward turn in the primary campaign: vowing to reverse an earlier vote in favor of controversial cap-and-trade carbon emission regulation. Oh really? Just how do you plan to take back your YES vote now that the bill is already passed? Answer: YOU CAN'T, your lying Kirk and trying to confuse voters into believing you can reverse your un-american vote when in fact its too late.
It might hurt people's feelings, the teachers would say
Let us compare this with one of their South American Neighbors, Venezuela. Since 2005, Chávez has been an outspoken proponent of what he calls a 
As you can see the need to properly vet and insure candidates that are true conservatives is important, for many reasons! Without a 'litmus test' we can be sure that our current enemy, the army of the community organizer, will try to disperse themselves within our ranks and create dissent and possibly get elected with lies and promises of 'change'.
And Mr. Obama, as always keep the change... it is after all my two cents.
