Americans shocked to learn that there isn’t actually a Social Security crisis

Americans shocked to learn that there isn’t actually a Social Security crisis

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The Washington Post’s WonkBlog has a scoop: People don’t want to cut Social Security!

The post concerns a recent survey that is actually pretty useful, in that it supports what should already be common sense: People have been led to believe that Social Security faces a crisis in funding. When you tell people some proposals for fixing it, they a) overwhelmingly choose to fund it more generously and b) decide that the program actually does not face any sort of crisis at all. A marketing firm hired by the National Academy of Social Insurance surveyed a random sampling of Americans and discovered that what people want is to raise taxes on rich (and regular!) people in order to fund more Social Security benefits, which is a good idea because the program is currently pretty stingy by international standards and Americans don’t actually have pensions anymore.

For those unfamiliar with Social Security, it is a modest national social insurance program that helps prevent our nation’s old people from starving in the streets, as many of them used to. It is not terribly progressive in its redistribution and it is overwhelmingly funded by the middle classes rather than the rich, but both of those factors have helped shield the program from the existential threats that programs intended explicitly for the poor face each time Republicans or neoliberal Democrats get the hankering for some reform. Politicians from both parties still regularly run on a platform of “ending welfare” and “strengthening Social Security.”

Despite the staggering popularity and undeniable success of Social Security, a lot of political figures are obsessed with killing it. Some people want Social Security ended for honest ideological reasons, but most of the loudest voices in favor of “reforming” the program wish to do so because it would make them or their friends a lot of money by effectively forcing all Americans to gamble their retirements on the fluctuations of the giant Wall Street casino.