$250 Senior Payments Are Hokey COLA

Social Security: The White House wants to give a special $250 payment to all 57 million recipients of retirement, disability and veteran benefits. If it does, it will destroy the last shred of fiscal control left in the system.

To protect retirees from the ravages of inflation, Social Security recipients get a Cost of Living Adjustment to their basic payout each year based on consumer price changes in the preceding year.

Since COLAs were introduced in the early 1970s, inflation has been so inexorable, every year has seen an increase in benefits.

The string runs out next year, however.

Because of a fluke in the COLA calculation, beneficiaries this year accidentally got a whopping 5.8% hike - more than actual inflation. And because inflation this year has been fairly low, beneficiaries are slated to get nothing additional next year, and perhaps not in 2011 either.

Thanks to Washington, they'll get another raise anyway - right out of working Americans' pockets.

With unemployment at a 26-year high of 9.8% and many working Americans taking double-digit cuts in pay, it seems only fair that those who get Social Security should be held to what they deserve, and nothing more. But that's not how Washington works.

Sensing an opportunity to curry favor with the largest, and wealthiest, group of Americans in the country - the elderly - the White House wants to give them a $250 hike anyway - $14.3 billion in budget terms.

Even if it's a one-time payout, which is likely, it's vote buying on a massive scale - the kind of casual corruption practiced in Third World countries.

What's worse is that a precedent would be set - in effect, eliminating the COLA. Social Security and Medicare are already bankrupting us. This ends even the pretense of fiscal responsibility when it comes to entitlements.

Coincidentally, the very day this latest news of federal fiscal incontinence emerged, the Government Accountability Office released an update to its long-term budget outlook.

"While a lot of attention has been given to the recent fiscal deterioration," the GAO report said, "the federal government faces even larger fiscal challenges that will persist long after the return of financial stability and economic growth."

The long-term fiscal outlook, it added, "remains unsustainable."

What exactly does unsustainable mean? In the GAO's "alternative scenario" - the one based on "historical trends and policy preferences," and thus the most likely scenario - the U.S. has a spending shortfall of $62.1 trillion over the next 75 years.

That's just under 9% of our expected total GDP over that time. To close this "fiscal gap" will require a 47% hike in taxes or a 33% cut in spending. That's what "unsustainable" means.

Every day, in ways large and small, this government shows itself to be the most fiscally reckless and irresponsible in our nation's history - frighteningly on par with those that wrecked once-wealthy Argentina in the 1940s and Germany in the 1920s.

The $14 billion cumshaw the White House has in mind for the retired is just another signpost on our road to fiscal ruin.