By Benjamin I. Page and Lawrence R. Jacobs
Memo to Pete Peterson: Americans don't want cuts Social Security - and here's the proof.
Deficit-hawk and investment banker Pete Peterson has devoted a substantial part of his $2.8 billion fortune to pushing for cuts in entitlements like Social Security, in the name of deficit reduction. His Foundation lavishly funded the AmericaSpeaks "town hall" forums held on Saturday, the results of which will be presented to the national Deficit Commission this week -- purporting to tell what the American public thinks about various deficit-reduction options.
The AmericaSpeaks forums suffered from serious defects as measures of public opinion. Yet the results, perhaps to Peterson's surprise, correctly indicated that Americans are strongly committed to Social Security. Large majorities oppose cutting Social Security benefits, even for the sake of deficit reduction.
The AmericaSpeaks town halls failed to convene a representative sample of Americans: they opened their doors to self-selected political activists with extreme views, possibly hoping to draw Tea Party backers. Their intense emphasis on reducing budget deficits "primed" participants to focus on deficits rather than on the needs of retirees when evaluating Social Security policy. The information provided to participants was one-sided, speculative, and in some cases quite misleading: it overstated the "crisis" in Social Security funding, understated the current burden of payroll taxes on ordinary workers, and failed to convey the extent to which millions of retirees count on stable, dependable Social Security benefits. The policy options that were discussed tilted rightwards.
These town halls -- like deliberative forums in general -- should not be taken as accurate measures of "true" or "deliberative" public opinion. Carefully designed and carefully interpreted opinion surveys, based on representative samples from the whole country and carried out in natural settings rather than the artificial and manipulable "fish bowl" of town hall meetings, can do a much better job of revealing what the American public thinks.
Remarkably, however, AmericaSpeaks got lucky (or perhaps, from Peterson's point of view, unlucky.) Despite all the biases, on several issues town hall participants came up with opinions not very different from those that have been expressed by majorities of Americans in dozens of well-designed national surveys. Participants opposed cuts in Social Security benefits, insisting that benefits must be preserved when balancing the budget. They wanted to strengthen the economy, favoring the current stimulus bill (stalled in the Senate) by a margin of 51% to 38%. In order to reduce budget deficits, most favored cutting defense spending and enacting progressive tax measures: raising the payroll tax "cap" so that incomes over $106,800 are subject to the tax (85% in favor); raising high-end corporate and personal income taxes; and imposing new taxes on carbon and on securities transactions. Only on the Social Security retirement age did the results conspicuously stray from actual public opinion.
We have carefully reviewed the best available survey-based evidence concerning public opinion on budget deficits and Social Security. It is this evidence, which provides a fuller, more representative, and more accurate picture of Americans' thinking, that the Deficit Commission and others should pay attention to.
For decades, for example, highly respected studies by the General Social Survey and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs have found large majorities of Americans wanting to expand rather than cut back spending on Social Security. In the most recent CCGA survey, for example, 69% said the program should be "expanded," and only 10% said "cut back."
Support for Social Security is found in virtually all segments of the American population. The opinion that "too little" is being spent on Social Security is shared by majorities of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents; by majorities of men as well as women; by whites as well as African Americans or Latinos; by people with a lot of formal education as well as people with little. Most important, support is very strong among young (age 18-29) Americans, fully 63% of whom told the most recent GSS that we are spending "too little" on Social Security. The supposed generation gap on Social Security is mostly a myth. There is no intergenerational war between "greedy geezers" and the young.
Even when survey questions prime respondents to focus on budget deficits, large majorities of Americans oppose the idea of cutting Social Security benefits for the sake of deficit reduction. Early this year a survey by National Review/ McLaughlin (certainly not prone to a left-wing bias) found that only 11% of Americans approved "cutting future benefits of Social Security" to reduce government spending: fully 86% opposed. Similar results have been found within the last year or so by Democracy Corps/ Greenberg Quinlan; Bloomberg; Quinnipiac; EBRI/ Greenwald, and others.
When survey questions are asked in a reasonably unbiased fashion, majorities of Americans also express opposition to virtually any sort of specific cut or postponement of benefits. This includes reducing COLAs (only a bare majority would even "consider" this possibility, according to Bloomberg), or increasing the retirement age. Earlier this year, Democracy Corps/ Greenberg Quinlan found a solid 63% of Americans opposed to "allowing the Social Security retirement age for receiving full benefits to rise slowly to age 70 by the year 2020″; only 35% favored this, even when it was posed as a proposal "to help close the federal budget deficit." To be sure, EBRI/ Greenwald found a bare, 51% to 47% majority in favor of "raising the age at which people can begin receiving full Social Security retirement benefits by one year," but the question did not specify from what level the age would be raised: perhaps just from age 65, which the 1983 law is already doing.
Thus the sole non-progressive policy option that the AmericaSpeaks forums seemed to support - raising the Social Security retirement age to 69, apparently favored by a bare majority (52%) of forum participants - may not actually be favored by a majority of Americans. On this and other questions, careful scrutiny of AmericaSpeaks' methods is called for, including the unrepresentativeness of their participants and the biases in information presented and options discussed.
Finally, abundant evidence from surveys over the years by Bloomberg, NASI, the present authors, Pew, Quinnipiace, and CBS/NYT have all found that majorities of Americans favor raising or eliminating the payroll tax "cap" on high incomes. Most recently, Bloomberg found 78% of Americans saying that removing the cap entirely should be "considered." Last summer, NASI found that fully 83% of Americans supported "lift[ing]" the cap "so that workers earning more than [the cap] would pay Social Security tax on their entire salary just like everyone else." This one policy change, by itself, would erase most of the projected future deficit in the Social Security trust fund.
We believe that public opinion should be taken seriously by policy makers. Indeed, elected officials ignore the public's wishes at their peril. In assessing public opinion on deficits and Social Security, we urge that the Deficit Commission and others to take the AmericaSpeaks forums with a large grain of salt, even if they happened to come close to the truth on several points. To get a full and accurate picture of what Americans want, it is important to consult a wide range of survey-based evidence and expertise.
*This post was based on the Roosevelt Institute Working Paper, "Understanding Public Opinion on Deficits and Social Security." Full text available here.
Benjamin I. Page is Gordon Scott Fulcher Professor of Decision Making at Northwestern University and coauthor (with Robert Y. Shapiro) of "The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans' Policy Preferences."
Lawrence R. Jacobs is the Walter F. and Joan Mondale Chair for Political Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance in the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota. He has written numerous books and articles on public opinion and other aspects of American politics.
This post originally appeared one New Deal 2.0
Mark Olmsted: "You Lie": Myths the Right Tells About the Left
So polls are all well and good, but until the American citizens grwo some brains and cajones -- in that order -- we'll getr rolled again.
The essential partnership in politics is the one between the elected and their wealthy financiers. The most important consideration of our elected representatives is being re-elected, at least until such time as they have the guarantee of an overpaid sinecure once they are out of office.
While in office Democrats must be seen to care about the public welfare, whether they do or not. Republicans are free to cater to business, which gives them a leg up in finding employment post public “service.”
In politics, appearances are everything and actually doing something may cause damage to a politician’s future in business and is to be avoided as much and as long as possible.
They are not going to effectively regulate the financial industry. They are not going to un-cap taxes on the super-rich. They are not going to look after Social Security. Doing so is counter to their personal interests.
Go ahead. Name ten politicians to whom this does not apply.
Funding deficit reduction through Social Security benefit cuts is just a way to shift the tax burden down to the lower income levels. The Payroll tax is not paid on annual income over $106,800. Cutting Social Security benefits would not decrease the Payroll taxes it would just make the Social Security surplus available to offset shortfalls in Income tax receipts. This way the deficit reduction burden fall less heavily on those with earnings above $106,800 per year.
So why is the deficit reduction solution being framed as a surreptitious tax increase on those earning less than $106,800 per year? And why are the Democrats keeping so quiet about it?
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ss has already been "modified" by the change in the cola formula. ask anyone who has received benefits for more than ten years if the payments they receive today pay for as much as their first payments did.
the system, as it is designed, is bound to fail. demographics will accelerate the timetable. its time for an overhaul that creates a much more viable system.
Since the Reagan admin Republicans have implemented a strategy intended to bankrupt (or nearly so) the government.
Starting with Jude Wanniski's "two Santa Claus" theory and Art Laffer's eponymous Curve, moving to David Stockman's "starve the beast" theory, supply side (voodoo, according to GHWBush) economics was born.
When Republicans are in power they do everything possible to drive up the debt and deficit while saying absolutely nothing about it. They start a war or two to distract the public while making oodles of contract money for their friends in the MIC. They scream bloody murder when anyone challenges them about the wars or the deficit, calling their adversaries "traitors" and "unpatriotic."
When Democrats come to power, the debt/deficit becomes their most dramatic and loudly bemoaned target, and of course it was all the fault of Democrats. Every effort is made to continue the war or wars, both for the juicy profits and to continue distracting the public.
The idea is to eventually bring the government to its knees financially, and then the Republicans will stride in, heroes to a man, and "save" the nation, presuming, of course that it is necessary to change some laws, do away with some "entitlements," wherein they include SS (not an entitlement) and Medicare; also perhaps some constitutional changes are in order, leaving a two class system, Republicans on top, everyone else virtual serfs.
Reagan started the war on the American Worker. We need jobs, jobs in the private sector that pay family wages.
Fan'd and Fav'd
I try to get this basic picture as response to as many financial articles as I can, and I see that others do, too.
I do not normally see politicians speaking to this issue. Maybe the Dems don't want to seem whiny, and surely the Rethugs don't want it told nor believed.
I agree across the board with what you say.
Fanned and faved.
I'm trying to fit some semblance of it into twitter, but 140 is a hard number.
I don't post regularly elsewhere, but when I do, I try to get this in.
I return the fan, thanks.
Peterson is funding the Fiscal Times, a news website that offers reporting on a range of current economic issues, including the federal budget, the growing deficit, entitlements, health care, personal savings, taxation, and the global economy. Fiscal Times contributors and editors include several veteran economics reporters for the New York Times and the Washington Post.
...because if the baby-boomers spend the trillions they need from social-security at the same time the Wall Street paper-billionaires spend their stolen money then you have hyper inflation.
Anyone who studied and knows how an imperial monetary system works knows what I mean.
But this guy fails to tell you that Congress and presidents in both parties 'spent' that money from social-security collections on wars and bail outs for Wall Street.
Taxes are nothing but an austerity tool in a monetary system to buffer consumer spending.
So when a young person is working, a 'tax', called social-security, is levied against him so that he is 'buffered' from spending all of his pay check.
So the government calculates that 10% of the general public will be entering retirement thus 'spending'/consuming without working; that 10% is what is taken out of your check and it's matched by your employer to counter inflation.
That's why it's NOT a Ponzi scam folks...no matter what these deficit-hawks tell you.
As long as we expect populations to grow, social-security will always be solvent.
What Peterson wants you to believe is that there is boogey-man out there called the 'deficit' that stole all of your social-security money. - no no no that's not true.
Simply 'claw-back' the bail out money through Glass-Steagall and put people back to work rebuilding America.
Before raising 'age'; raise income requirements
The Ponzi scheme here is that corporations and many posters actually believe that profits can remain high while limiting the money supply. However, once the money supply is limited, money can only be transferred from one person to another. Without deficits and no jobs, someone is getting poorer while someone is getting richer. With a deficit and no jobs, the poor are made to suffer. With a deficit and jobs, prosperity for all. Econ 101. When prosperity is too high, then inflation starts being a concern. We are a long way from worrying about inflation.