Despite record 8.7% COLA for 2023, “Still more work to do to help seniors”
The Social Security Administration announced a historic 8.7 percent COLA increase for benefits in 2023. The extra money each month will help recipients cope with inflation to a degree when it arrives with January’s payments.
However, there are concerns that more needs to be done especially in the case of seniors to make the COLA more responsive to the expenses they face that aren’t used in the current calculation.
The current COLA uses inflation figures from the CPI-W, a broad basket of consumer goods and services. There are calls to use the CPI-E which targets goods and services that “would more accurately measure spending patterns of seniors.”
The Senior Citizens League reported recently that since the early 2000s, those on Social Security have lost forty percent of their purchasing power.