Transcription
No, you're not seeing things. No, this isn't clickbait. No, this isn't a bad dream. VA benefits are being cut. Not only are they being cut, they're being slashed to the tune of four figures, especially if you're someone like me who's rated 100% VA disability. Four figures per month is the impact that this is going to have. And the worst part is this: it's a quiet cut. This is going to be slashed right under our very noses.
Today's video is going to expose this VA disability benefits cut, and even how it affects Social Security. But today's about VA disability. I'm going to show how this is causing hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars per month impact to you watching this, and more importantly, a call to action on how to stop this from happening. We have a lot of new things occurring in the VA with this new administration; lots of change occurring. This video could change everything and impact you hugely. I'm Jordan Anderson with VA Claims Academy. Let's get into it.
The Department of Government Efficiency, or Doge—Elon Musk and his team—have been really looking into the VA. They actually have one of their head associates at the VA looking into how the VA is working, and more importantly, maybe how the VA is not working. And there's a lot that's going to come from this, and a lot of changes that are in the works already. But one of the biggest changes that could ever happen are the VA disability pay rates and the incremental increases that veterans get every single year. I'm going to show you how there has been something that is hugely overlooked that is happening right now that is robbing you of hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars each and every month. Let's jump into these numbers so I can prove it to you, because I know this is a bold claim.
For this year of 2025, the pay cost of living allowance (COLA) increased amount—again, this is a nominal increase, not an actual increase; I'll get into that and the difference in a second—was 2.5%. Okay, so essentially, if you're a disabled veteran right now, you receive a 2.5% nominal increase, meaning in actual dollars to your monthly paychecks for this year of 2025, thanks again to that cost of living adjustment tied to inflation. Okay, so to give you an idea of what this is supposed to do for us veterans, the cost of living adjustment right means, hey, groceries are going up in price; price of eggs went up for a very, uh, uh, long time, right? Eggs got really expensive. The price of insurance goes up. The price of living here in the United States is going up, right? So this increase, nominally, in the amount that you're paid each and every month is supposed to offset that, to where you break even in purchasing power. That's what's supposed to happen. Here's what's actually happening.
It's very important that you know that the cost of living adjustment is calculated using the CPI, okay, the Consumer Price Index, which is calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Here's why that is hugely important, and where we start to really go wrong. Here is where everything changes, and we have zero idea how much this is going to impact us. I'm going to show you and calculate how much money you're actually losing every single month. This is actual purchasing power that you're losing every month right now. This is the Consumer Price Index as calculated in 1980. Let me give you a brief backstory. Back in the 1980s, I think it was about until 1983, the Consumer Price Index was actually calculated very differently than it is today. Okay, they have added things—they being the Bureau of Labor Statistics—such as hedonic adjustments, even substitution. For instance, if the price of beef goes up too high, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says, "You know what? Ah, beef. Families aren't going to buy beef since it's expensive; they're only going to buy chicken now." So they take out beef from the CPI and only put in chicken, which brings down the CPI. Okay, this, a lot of people think, is done in order to lower the burden of Social Security payouts, other things that are paid out based on that CPI statistic. Let me show you how different the CPI statistic is from the actual reality of prices of things that you actually have to buy to live.
Okay, believe it's Mark Twain who popularized the quote, "There's lies, damned lies, and there's statistics." Okay, this is what we're getting into. This here is from shadowstats.com, curated by John Williams, who all he does is extrapolate and use the same exact 1980s methodology that we had and use that CPI, uh, methodology for today in order to measure the difference between the CPI and the actual cost of living increase. Here on your screen now, you'll see that the blue line and the red line used to be sort of in lockstep here until around the mid-80s. They start decoupling, and now there's about a 7% gap between the red line, which is the reported CPI, which is very low, and the blue line, which is what the CPI used to be methodology-wise, which is a lot higher and much closer to the actual increase in your cost of living every single year. The difference between the actual cost of living and your reported CPI is about 7% per year. Okay, really it's about 8%, but let's say it's 7% per year to give you a picture of how significant that is. Over the last 20 years, the average return of the S&P 500 annually is about 8.5%. So you're talking about compounding interest; uh, they always tell you, okay, it's good to invest, go ahead, compounding interest, utilize that. Well, this 7% is also compounding, but it's compounding against you. Okay, this is a 7% loss of purchasing power that you're compounding every single year. So let's do some quick math to see how much that you've lost.
So let's pretend that you're 100% disabled and you have a spouse. Okay, this is going to get you, say, around $4,000 per month. Okay, now this is going to be an estimate here because, of course, the cost of living each year, uh, might again nominally boost this number up with the COLA allowance, but let's say you've been receiving VA disability for 10 years, and again, we know that we have a 7% per year on average difference between the CPI and the actual cost of living increases that you actually experience. Okay, so 7% over 10 years with this $4,000 per month means that after the end of a decade, you were robbed for $183,000. That was your loss of purchasing power over that 10 years—183k. Okay, that's well over $18,000 per year, right? About $1,500 per month. That's a house payment for a lot of people. If I told you that tomorrow veterans who are going to get pay cuts, and 100% disabled veterans right, are going to get minus $1,500 per month of a hit monthly, right, there would be outrage. This is a slow bleed, something that you actually have to think about; something that you have to calculate. It's something that you knew was going on, sort of subconscious, like, "Ah, 2.5%; I feel like prices went up a little bit more than two and a half percent since last year. Ah, I must be crazy," and you just see you kind of just shut up about it. This is what's happening. This is why sounding the alarm on this video, spreading this video, leaving your comments in the discussion about what you think about this is so huge right now, because there are changes happening with the VA, right? We see even changes with this administration economically, where they're questioning, you know, "Is the gold actually there?" Things like this. This is why this conversation is so huge because ultimately this is a currency issue, right, which is outside the scope of this video, but this is hitting vets hard, as well as Social Security recipients, which, by the way, you can get VA disability and Social Security at the same time. If you want me to make a video on that in the future, let me know. This is what is hitting us, hitting our older vets, hitting our retirees who don't know why they can't keep up with the cost of living, despite, "Ah, don't worry, your cost of living adjustments there; hey, you're good now, carry on."
If you are loud enough, if we can make this catch on, these cost of living adjustments can get bumped up significantly, to where instead of a 2.5% cost of living adjustment, hey, how about the 8% that it actually is in reality? Instead of this veteran losing $183,000 to this hidden tax over the last decade, how that gets put back in the veteran's pocket so they can provide for their family. I'll leave a link to shadowstats.com in the description below. But if you agree with this and if this is eye-opening to you, do me a huge favor: hit that like button and share this with someone who needs to hear it. You may not be losing $1,500 a month, but maybe you're making less than this per month in payments from a VA disability or Social Security, even. Okay, and that's hitting you for $700 per month. Is that much better? Do you see how significant this is to each and every one of us watching this right now? This is not just a, a small cut; this is a huge slash to your benefits that you're not receiving that should be in your pocket, that should be your purchasing power that's getting siphoned off somewhere to who knows who. The more we can get the Department of Government Efficiency, the more we can get this administration, the changes in leadership to focus on what is actually impacting veterans—the long wait times, the poor quality of care, the poor quality of CNP exams, maybe the inefficiencies how VA disability claims are rated, right, and the fact that vets aren't getting the purchasing power that they were actually promised—there's something going on there. They aren't even going to think about cutting VA benefits once they see what's actually being happening right here. If you expose this video, if you talk about this topic and you expose that, "Hey, actually veteran benefits are already being cut to the tune of a massive amount, right," then they aren't even going to think about cutting benefits further, and that is what is important, fellow vets. I hope you enjoyed this video. Definitely hit the like button for me; share this with someone who needs it. Jordan Anderson, I'll see you in the next one. Cheers.