Now that the ‘ruinous inflation’ seems to have abated somewhat (I am paying $2.99 a gallon for gas) all of us who are on what blacks call the ‘charity,’ but the rest of us call Social Security can look forward to the COLA announcement. And that announcement has nothing to do with a can of soda. It’s the Cost-of-Living Adjustment in the amount of our monthly payment which first shows up in the January check.
So, the COLA is announced, and everyone’s pissed off. Why? Because the monthly will only increase by 3.2%! That’s bullshit! That’s no goddamn good! How am I supposed to survive when prices for everything last year went through the roof?
It’s that goddamn Biden’s fault. He’s no fucking good. Wait ‘till he has to live on a goddamn social security check instead of all that money his kid stole from the Chinese.
From time to time, I stop off at the local McDonald’s for breakfast and to write part of my morning story. There’s a group of oldsters who meet there every morning and hold kind of a breakfast club. They pay 50 cents for a cup of coffee and refills are free.
What do they talk about? Who’s in the hospital, who’s come out of the hospital, who’s been misdiagnosed for some ailment and who needs to see a doctor but has been told they need to wait another three months.
One old lady angrily told the group that she had to call the Governor’s office at least twenty times to find out why her state tax refund was late. “I left a message every time and nobody ever called me back,” she complained.
She finally got her refund, all 56 dollars that she was owed. And you wonder why the telephone for the Governor’s office is never answered with a live voice?
And by the way, this group of seniors is so impoverished and so barely making ends meet that the big news at one of their meetings was that a member of the group had found a guy to cut her lawn who was only going to charge her 20 bucks every time he showed up.
They all live in their own homes which were paid for years ago. We live in Massachusetts, so everyone has a great, state-funded medical plan put in by Romney although he never mentioned this program during the 2012 campaign. And Massachusetts is also one of those states which doesn’t count social security payments as income, so the monthly payment doesn’t create any kind of liability on your tax return.
I’m willing to bet that there’s a group of seniors sitting around every morning in just about every fucking McDonald’s in the United States. And I can also bet you that the most important topic of conversation in every one of those breakfast clubs will be how pissed off they are at this crummy, little 3.2% COLA raise.
But I’m also willing to take the short odds, and I’ll lay two Jacksons on this one, that these same people would bitch like hell if the COLA adjustment had been twenty percent.
Because that’s what you do when you’re a senior – you bitch like hell about everything because you don’t really have anything better to do. When Newsweek did a survey of social security recipients last week and found that 62% of the respondents said they were ‘unhappy’ with the paltry bump in their monthly checks, frankly, I was surprised that the percentage of seniors who were pissed off at the increase was so low.
I happen to live in a town which has remarkably fresh water coming out of the tap because this is New England, where just about every town is situated next to a fast-running creek which flows straight down from the Berkshire Mountains and empties into the Connecticut River further downstream.
Get on the checkout line behind a senior at the local Stop&Shop, and you’ll notice that every one of those folks barely scraping by on their pathetic monthly checks is buying a couple of gallons on bottled water to take home.
God bless America – land of the free and home of the crummy 3.2% COLA increase.
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