Free COLA!

The Washington Post’s George F. Will describes how the Arkansas Democrat Wilbur Mills sought the Democrats’ 1972 presidential election with an “admirably straightforward attempt to buy the votes of the elderly” by championing “an automatic COLA” (which stands for cost-of-living-adjustment) for social security. “His campaign fizzled but his achievement endures, and his place in liberalism’s pantheon is secure. His COLA, which began in 1975, is the entitlement that proves that the entitlement system, like the universe, will expand until, perhaps like the universe, it collapses in on itself.” But, Will says: “Barack Obama has now established Mills’s Social Security COLA as the capstone to the architecture of the entitlement culture that is modern liberalism’s crowning achievement. It’s an entitlement to which you are entitled even when you are not entitled to it.”