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Pastimes : Clown-Free Zone... sorry, no clowns allowed -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: yard_man who wrote (224247)	2/27/2003 11:47:14 AM
From: patron_anejo_por_favor	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 436258

UFB! BubbleBoy now claims that CPI OVERESTIMATES actual cost of living increases....is this guy a martian?<NFG> biz.yahoo.com Reuters Greenspan says US CPI poor measure of living cost Thursday February 27, 11:20 am ET WASHINGTON, Feb 27 (Reuters) - Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said on Thursday that if more up-to-date price measures were used to index benefits, it could significantly cut the cost of Social Security for the government. Greenspan told the Senate's special committee on aging that when Social Security was first established, Congress ordered the escalation of benefits according to the cost of living. "And at the time, the only measure we had of the cost of living was the consumer price index ... but it has always been an issue of whether that really truly measured the cost of living. And one of the reasons basically is it has a fixed-weight system which biases it upward," Greenspan said, adding that since 1935, when the safety net was established, methods of statistical measurement have improved. "Indeed, the very latest version is the ... so-called chain-weighted price index, which is a far superior measure of the cost of living," the Fed chief said. He said the use of such updated measures can make a "big difference" to the cost of safety net programs. "If we had used the chain-weighted CPI, we would have probably had a budget deficit of about $40 billion less in 2002 -- a little more than half because of the tax-bracket shift, a little less than half on the issue of benefits," he added. First that bull$hit about no bank being "too big to fail" and now this...well, this will definitely come back to haunt him in 2 years when the CPI is at 8%!<NFG>