The Senior Citizens League believes Congress must address the loss of buying power by adopting the Consumer Price Index for Elderly Consumers Act. If signed into law, H.R. 1251 would base the COLA on the more fair and adequate CPI-E. Currently, COLAs are based on the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners, and they fail to keep pace with the inflation experienced by older Americans since goods like gasoline and electronics are weighted more heavily than health care and housing costs..The receipt for the original purchase with the questioned charge, or if you used a credit card, a copy of the credit card statement..This week, the Social Security and Medicare Trustees released their annual reports on the financial standing of the two programs. In addition, the Supreme Court announced its decision on the immigration orders President Obama released back in 2014.."Caught Up In A Medicare Drug Fraud," Tracy Weber and Charles Ornstein, ProPublica, December 31, 2013..TSCL believes that benefits should be increased, not cut. To do this while providing enough funding to keep the program solvent for another 50 years, 78 percent of TSCL's survey participants favor raising the taxable cap on earnings so that Social Security taxes would be collected on all earnings. Currently only earnings up to 8,500 are taxed for Social Security. "This means the nation's highest earning people, like the CEOs of some of the nation's biggest companies, are pocketing a huge tax break on all earnings over the cap," says Cates..On Wednesday, the House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee met with officials from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Government Accountability Office to discuss the removal of Social Security numbers from Medicare cards. According to Subcommittee Chairman Wally Herger, more than one million seniors have been victims of identity theft in the past year, largely because the Medicare cards they are encouraged to carry everyday contain sensitive information..I pour some water in the flowers, but some spills on the floor..TSCL's annual Senior Surveys indicate that roughly 56% of retiree households pay tax on a portion of their Social Security benefits. About the same number support reducing the taxation of Social Security benefits by lifting the threshold for taxation of Social Security benefits from ,000 to ,000 for single filers and from ,000 to 0,000 for joint filers..In contrast, the Social Security benefits of American workers, are not guaranteed by law. In the Supreme Court decision, Fleming vs. Nestor, the court found that Congress can make adjustments when conditions of the Social Security systems demand and that American workers who have paid their employment taxes have no legal recourse to any of the money deposited in the Social Security Trust Fund.
