Obama suggested making a slight change to the measure of inflation used to calculate Social Security cost-of-living adjustments from the Consumer Price Index fo

Obama suggested making a slight change to the measure of inflation used to calculate Social Security cost-of-living adjustments from the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI) to the chained CPI. This would have modestly improved Social Security's finances while resulted in retirees getting slightly smaller increases to their Social Security checks. Obama suggested this as an olive branch to the obstructionist Republican Congress that worked hard from the moment he got in office to prevent him from doing anything. It was a move borne out of desperation rather than the cynical hatred for the poor. I'm not going to defend Bill Clinton. He made a lot of mistakes, including, as you say, making drastic, misguided changes to welfare and being "tough on crime". Although, for what it's worth, he has recently apologized for some of those mistakes [1]. In any case, fast-forward 17 years to today. Democrats and the Republicans are very, very different parties. I stand by my original statement: the only people who believe the two parties are similar are those who aren't paying attention. -- [1]http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/15/politics/bill-clinton-1994-crime-bill/ http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/15/politics/bill-clinton-1994-cri...