Adding overwhelmingly unpopular ideas like price indexing to the reform is only going to undermine the popularity of personal accounts, give the Democrats a real basis of opposition, and probably kill the whole reform effort. Those who support price indexing simply don't understand the personal accounts.Well, good for Ferrera. But this reminded me of something I've meant to bring up: not only is price-indexing a bad idea that would leave millions of seniors toiling in poverty, but it's absolutely nonsensical in theory. First, the more familiar "bad idea" argument. As we know, under the current system Social Security benefits for new retirees more or less keep pace with wage growth over time. As general standards of living rise, the seniors of each succeeding generation get richer. "Price-indexing," on the other hand, would more or less freeze initial benefits at current 2005 levels, growing only with inflation. The problem is that, as wages rise faster than prices, workers of the future will get richer and richer in real terms, only to then suffer an increasingly large income drop-off at retirement when they receive benefits suitable for living standards in 2005. (In practice, it's even worse than that: since medical costs inevitably rise faster than prices, and seniors spend a lot on medical care, retirees will actually get poorer in real terms over time.) Or, to put it another way, their Social Security checks would replace a smaller and smaller percentage of their pre-retirement income over time. So they'll be increasingly less and less able to pay for the things that all the other Americans have and own to enjoy a decent life. (Refer to Figure 1.1 above for more details.)