The conservatives are always dreaming up new attacks on the most disadvantaged people in our societies. in the US, the front line of the war on the poor is the on-going attacks on the Social Security system. As I’ve noted in the past this entire debate is based upon the around the’s claim that the system can go broke. I dealt with that issue in these blogs – Social security insolvency 101 and The time has come to tell the American people the truth – among others, and I won’t repeat the points. They are clear – the US Social Security Trust Funds are just elaborate accounting smokescreens that ultimately mean nothing if one comprehends the financial capacity of the US government. They represent a case of a government creating a farcical structure to administer some program and then elevating the structure to a false level of importance that actually leads them to introduce policies which undermine the initial purpose of the program – and all without any basis. The determinants of future standards of living will be the availability of sufficient real goods and services of an acceptable quality. If they are available the US government will be able to purchase them with the stroke of a computer key. But because the conservatives have everyone thinking the funds will go broke, they can then force ridiculous time-wasting concepts into the public debate. One such attack is the proposal to use Chained-CPI measures as the Cost-of-Living-Adjustment (COLA) index in social security pensions.