The proposal, often referred to as Section 219, would go far beyond agreements with Washington's closest allies

Social Security is racing towards insolvency because the program pays out more in benefits to retirees than it collects in taxes from working Americans.

Handing out even more generous benefits will make that situation worse. Yet that is exactly what the trustees who run Social Security are planning to do: Retirees will get a 3.6 percent cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) next year. That increase is 0.8 percentage points higher than last year's, and it is 0.9 percentage points higher than what Social Security was expecting to pay.

The Social Security trustees are doing what the law requires during a time of high inflation. That's why Congress ought to intervene here.

It should cancel the COLA.

No, this isn't a demand that lawmakers stick it to America's retirees. It's an appeal for some fiscal common sense. There are three good reasons to cancel this year's COLA.

First: Handing out higher benefits to wealthy retirees simply doesn't make sense when Social Security is trending towards insolvency.

As the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget notes, the announced COLA would be a $900 increase in benefits for the average retired household—but some retirees could receive as much as $3,600 more.

Paying generous benefits to wealthy households is the main reason Social Security is facing insolvency in the first place. A program originally intended to keep seniors from falling into poverty has become a huge wealth-transfer scheme that overwhelmingly benefits those who don't need the handouts. The COLA doubles down on this flaw.

Second: What about the workers who are paying for those lavish benefits? Wages have risen by 3 percent, on average, over the past year. Those pay increases have already been outpaced by inflation, which is up 3.7 percent in the past 12 months.

You'll often hear retirees talk about how they are living on a "fixed income," but the math simply doesn't bear this out. Social Security beneficiaries will get a COLA that is larger than the average pay increase for the workers who are funding the COLA. Retirees are protected from the impact of inflation while younger Americans must deal with inflation and finance that protection for the elderly. That's crazy.

Third: Cutting the COLA could kick-start a conversation about how to solve Social Security's looming insolvency. The Social Security trustees estimate that an across-the-board cut of about 22 percent will be necessary in 2032. Eliminating COLAs won't meaningfully change that arithmetic, but it would change the conversation—which has for too long been dominated by politicians promising seniors that nothing needs to change. That's wrong—and the sooner that becomes apparent, the better off the political system will be.

If eliminating the COLA is too radical a change, Congress should instead change how the trustees calculate the annual increase.

Currently, the COLA is based on one particular measure of inflation: the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers, otherwise known as CPI-W. This is a relatively narrow index that reflects the spending habits of only about one-third of all Americans, as Romina Boccia points out in her newletter, The Debt Dispatch. 

Instead, Boccia suggests using the Chained Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers, or C-CPI-U, which covers about 93 percent of all Americans and is generally regarded as a better measure of the rising cost of living. Other parts of the federal government already use C-CPI-U to update such things as tax brackets.

If Congress simply changed how Social Security's COLA was calculated, it could close 12 percent of the program's long-term shortfall. And while some retirees would see smaller COLAs as a result, the result would more closely match those increases to inflation.

Social Security's COLA reflects many of the fundamental flaws with America's old-age entitlement program. Like Social Security as a whole, it is too generous to the rich, too costly to the taxpayers, and too unfair to younger, poorer workers.

The post 3 Reasons To Cancel This Year's 3.6% Social Security Boost appeared first on Reason Magazine.

US President Donald Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on 18 October that he did not want to “drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table.” He also wrote: “Signing that document at this time will do that, and I can sign it later, or any time that I want!”

Trump was referring to sanctions and tariffs under the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, which he waived in an executive order on 16 October, days before the measures were due to take effect. The waiver suspends additional economic penalties intended to pressure Moscow over its war against Ukraine, while leaving earlier US sanctions in place. The decision came weeks before the 3 November midterms, in which Republicans are defending slim majorities in both chambers, and analysts said the penalties could have pushed up oil prices for Americans already paying more, largely because of the US-Israeli war with Iran, Reuters reported.

Trump says Zelenskyy could have made a better deal two years ago

A week before the waiver, Trump had announced a deal for Russia to increase diesel supplies to global markets. The Treasury also issued a license, valid until 7 April 2027, permitting certain transactions in Russian-origin diesel.

In the Truth Social post, Trump accused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of targeting Russian diesel refineries, saying the strikes were “seriously hurting the world diesel markets, including those in the United States.” Kyiv had paused its refinery strikes for three days at Washington’s request after Trump declared an energy ceasefire on 11 October, which Russia never confirmed, then resumed them. Since then, Russia has struck Ukraine’s energy sector 76 times, Zelenskyy said on 18 October.

Trump wrote that Zelenskyy “doesn’t want to end this war, and probably never did,” and that he “could have made a better deal two years ago than he can now.”

“His country is in shambles, a large portion of his land is lost, his oceans and seas are gone, and his male population is low, wounded, and/or dead,” Trump added.

He also said Russia was “doing very little, if anything, to help” Iran and that he wanted to keep it that way.

A day earlier, Trump said he had not made a final decision

On 17 October, Trump told reporters at Mar-a-Lago that he had not announced his final decision. “A lot of you don’t know what my decision is yet, but we’ll figure it out, and you’ll figure it out,” he said, Reuters reported.

“I think the president wants to take the 60-day period of time to sort of analyze what imposing both sanctions and tariffs will mean to the global economy and even to the US economy,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters before departing for Uzbekistan the same day.

Zelenskyy calls the waiver a pity as Republicans split

Zelenskyy called it a “pity” that Trump had waived sanctions under a law named for the late Senator Lindsey Graham, who “really believed in Ukraine.” He said he hoped Trump would change his decisions, NBC News reported.

Discussing the diesel deal on NBC’s Meet the Press, Zelenskyy said US oil prices had risen because shipping through the Strait of Hormuz was blocked, not because of Ukraine.

On 17 October, Zelenskyy told journalists that “the decision to undo all of this, to block all of it, seems wrong to me” and that it “definitely helps only the Russians.” His remarks appeared in Ukrainian on his official Telegram channel.

“Sanctions relief will continue. I think the diesel deal and the move regarding the Lindsey Graham Act are not the end of it. Unfortunately,” Zelenskyy said.

On 19 October, Zelenskyy wrote that partners had again given no warning of Russia’s overnight ballistic attack and that blocking missiles for Ukraine’s air defense while Russia gets sanctions eased or postponed amounts to partners denying reality.

Republican Senator James Lankford defended Trump’s decision on NBC’s Meet the Press, saying the president was “choosing the American people first.”

Senator Darline Graham, Lindsey Graham’s sister, whom Trump has endorsed for a full term, said at a campaign stop on 17 October that she would “choose to keep the pressure on Russia.”

“I don’t trust Putin and I don’t trust Russia,” Darline Graham said.

She did not directly criticize Trump but said she would not have made that choice, Reuters reported.