The latest Washington Post/ABC News poll on domestic policies, in particular Social Security, will probably be viewed as bad news for the White House. Bush needs people to believe that the system in “in crisis” right now and that his plan to gut the program is necessary to save it. That’s clearly not where the public is.
First, the bad news for those of us who recognize Bush’s approach as a scam. People have generally accepted the conventional wisdom and are skeptical about Social Security’s long-term viability. When asked if they believe there will be enough money in the system to pay their benefits, only 32% said there would be enough, while 63% said there wouldn’t. (Those percentages have remained largely the same over the last 20 years of polling on this question, though Americans are apparently more optimistic about Social Security’s future than they were in the mid-1990s.)
Then, the good news. Only 25% of respondents agree with Bush that the program is “in crisis,” which is down considerably from the 34% who thought so in 1998.
Americans, in this poll, said they generally support investing some Social Security money in the stock market (53% support, 44% oppose), but those numbers change considerably once people hear about the details. When told privatization would cost as much as $2 trillion, 47% oppose the change, 46% support. When told that beneficiaries would get less money if they retire after their stock portfolio goes down, 62% said they wouldn’t invest their own money in Bush’s private accounts.
So, taken together, most Americans don’t want to invest in private accounts, prefer real Social Security as it is, question Bush’s empty rhetoric about a “crisis,” and don’t believe it’s worth spending $2 trillion on the change. They like the idea in the abstract, but don’t like the risk or the cost.
I’d say this is a good starting point for the national debate.
One of the things that worries me, though, is the different results one gets from nuances in poll phraseology.
In the most straightforward of the Post/ABC question, a narrow majority (53%) said they support the idea of investing some Social Security money in the stock market. A similar question from last week’s NBC/Wall Street Journal poll produced significantly different results: 50% said it’s “a bad idea” to let workers invest Social Security taxes in the stock market, while 38% said it’s a good idea. The most recent New York Times poll produced still different results: 45% said a proposal to permit people to invest their Social Security withholding money in private accounts was a bad idea; 49% said it was a good idea. A Fox News poll from last week asked people if they should “have a choice” about investing Social Security money in private accounts and 60% said they should.
What does all of this tell us? There’s plenty of confusion out there and, as usual, the sales pitch will matter as much, if not more, than the substance.