From the White House transcript: Obama DID include Chained CPI in negotiations.

[JDPriestly]

50. Low income people will be at the mercy of Congresses bribed by the very rich.

They could care less about low income people, especially if those low income people are of a different color, religion, area of the country than they are.

This is simply wrong. The chained CPI will result in huge cuts to Social Security, and if they use it for other programs, to those programs too. It will mean that the benefits paid to the poor from social programs will be cut back proportionately, to the same degree as the extent to which the poor themselves cut back to make ends meet. As a poor family tries to make do with less, to buy cheaper food, cheaper clothing, go barefoot for example or turn off the heat even when a child is sick, the government will reduce the benefits of that poor family because the CPI that applies to the government benefits that are helping them survive will be cut.

So as a poor family spends less, it receives less. Can you imagine how that family will try to survive after say ten to twenty years during which the new CPI is implemented?

It's really a bizarre, cruel idea.

It will be particularly difficult for married couples on Social Security when they get in their 80s or early 90s and one of them becomes seriously ill and has to have expensive medication or even go to a nursing home. The other, healthy spouse will have to survive on his or her reduced Social Security benefit. It could be reduced by as much as a thousand dollars a year. There is no way that the government can make that up to a person who is very poor.

Remember, people now retiring, and those of us who retired very recently paid extra into Social Security for the Trust Fund. The Bush administration overborrowed from the fund to give tax cuts to the very rich, and now the rich don't want to repay the Trust Fund. That is the story in a nutshell.