In Fiscal Cliff Deal, Don’t Chain Grandma to Smaller Social Security Checks

The National Women’s Law Center calculates that the typical single elderly woman would see her monthly benefits reduced by $56 at age 80. It reports that this is “an amount equal to the cost of one week’s worth of food each month.” Perhaps they’ll start substituting cat food for provolone. But these cuts get even worse over time as the reduction adds up. By age 95, the NWLC reports that her benefits will be down by over nine percent, the equivalent of nearly two weeks of food. Even with a “bump up” in later years, the graph below from the NWLC shows how quickly benefits will erode with the chained CPI:
 
This hurts women more than men because they are more likely to live longer and to be poor while they do so. The NWLC reports that a woman is twice as likely as a man to get to age 95, scrounging for ways to pay for two weeks of food. Their poverty rate is similarly high: single female beneficiaries age 80 and over have a rate of 16.2 percent, compared to just 9.4 percent for their male counterparts.