Earlier this month, President Barack Obama proposed to tweak the formula for calculating the cost-of-living adjustment, or COLA, for Social Security recipients.
Price indexing involves changing the fundamental Social Security benefit formula for calculating the future benefits workers would receive at retirement (not the post-retirement Social Security COLA).
What is needed is a combination of steps: some immediate limitation on COLAS, some intermediate move to prevent inflation from pushing up benefits faster than the rise in wages and payroll taxes, some long-range measures to raise the retirement age and keep the formula for calculating benefits from straining the resources of society.