Washington - A majority of likely voters (52-40%) favor proposals to allow younger workers the choice to invest a portion of their Social Security taxes in personal accounts, according to a new poll conducted by Zogby International for the Cato Institute. Younger voters support the chance to invest by an enormous majority (66-23% among voters under 30).
The poll also found that Americans believe that opponents of President Bush's Social Security reform proposals have an obligation to put forward an alternative plan to solve the financial crisis that is about to engulf the current system. By an overwhelming 70-22% margin, voters said that Democrats should come up with proposals of their own. Even 55% of Democrats believe this.
Americans are highly skeptical that the current Social Security system will be able to cope in the near future. By a 62-30% margin, voters do not believe that Social Security will be able to pay all promised future benefits. Unsurprisingly, skepticism is particularly strong among younger voters with over 70% believing that Social Security will be unable to pay the benefits promised by the federal government.
As in past polling undertaken by Zogby International for the Cato Institute, the most important reason given by reform supporters for backing personal accounts is the strongly held belief that payroll tax contributions belong to the people paying them and that it is their money and they should be allowed to control it. This view was true for every ethnic and age group polled, except African-Americans, who chose inheritability as their biggest reason for supporting personal accounts.
This issue is not dead, despite what the Democrats and the MSM want you to believe. This issue is alive and well and has significant support, especially among young people!
Along the same theme, President Bush was asked today about his pushing Social Security Reform:
And then we go to Terry.
Q Mr. President, you talked on your reelection about having political capital. You have a Republican Congress. How, then, do you explain not being able to push through more of your agenda, especially when it comes to Social Security reform, which the public does not seem to be accepting and your own party is split on?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, first of all, I think the public does accept the fact that Social Security is a problem. You might remember a couple of months ago around this town people were saying, it's not a problem, what's he bringing it up for? Nobody sees it as a problem except for him. And then all of a sudden, people began to look at the facts and realize that in 2017, Social Security -- the pay-as-you-go system will be in the red, and in 2042, it's going to be bankrupt. And people then took a good, hard look at the numbers and realized that Social Security is a problem.
And that's the first step toward getting Congress to do something. See, once they hear from the people, we got a problem, the next -- the next question the people -- question the people are going to ask, what do you intend to do about it?
The President knows that if he sticks to his guns and steadfastly pushes for this reform, it will happen. It might not even happen under his watch, just as President Reagen's Welfare Reform didn't get passed until 1995, but it will happen.
President Bush also knows that when given the choice between a party that is pushing an agenda with new, innovative ideas and a party who does nothing but obstruct and criticize... The American people will choose the party of leadership every time!
(Full results, as released by Cato, can be found here)