1.   Benefit increases for current retirees would be slowed.

2.   It is not surprising that the Congress last week quickly and overwhelmingly passed a healthy pay and benefits increase for our people in the Armed Forces.

3.   Moynihan said the index now overstates inflation, making the annual benefit increases greater than necessary.

4.   Moynihan proposes lowering annual Social Security cost-of-living benefit increases because, he said, the Consumer Price Index on which they are based overstates inflation.

5.   News like that intensifies worker fears for their jobs across the industrial spectrum, discouraging them from pushing for big wage and benefit increases.

6.   One of the favored ways of doing that is to clamp down hard on wage and benefit increases.

7.   Still another is eliminating or cutting in half the current automatic cost-of-living benefit increases.

8.   The Legislature then canceled most of the benefit increase it had passed the previous year.

9.   Bush budget director Mitch Daniels defended the different treatment, saying that workers will see even more money in health benefit increases.

10.   He said in an interview that he is incorporating the benefit increase in the overall Pentagon measure before the panel.