> Henry C.K. Liu wrote:
>
> >I just heard Carter say on the King show that twice as many people
> >believe in UFOs than there are who believe they will actually collect
> >social security someday. What do LBOers have to say about that?
>
> He's probably drawing on a poll that right-wing pollster Frank Luntz did
> for an anti-SS group. Luntz has been reprimanded by the pollsters'
> professional association for devious questions & reporting of results. What
> he didn't report from this poll was that people *wanted* SS; they just
> didn't believe they'd get it. Which, given the political environment, isn't
> that unreasonable an assumption.
Polls are very tricky things. I can't put my hands on it just now, but I did read an account which said that these questions WEREN'T asked together, but were in fact asked in separate questions in different parts of the poll. Thus, they were highly subject to framing effects.
Of course, Doug is quite correct about the political environment, but as EPI notes below, young people aren't ACTING as if they really didn't believe Social Security (and Medicare) wouldn't be there.
>From EPI's "Reading Between the Lines, October 5 - 11,1996" (Washington,
D.C.:
Economic Policy Institute, 1996 [http://epn.org/epi/ep0422-c.html]):
"As the Young Lose Faith in Medicare, Corporations Retreat on Health Coverage," by Spencer Rich and Judith Haveman, Washington Post, October 9, 1996, page A21.
This article discusses a recent poll showing that young people have little confidence that the Medicare program will survive until they retire. According to the poll, people in their twenties are more likely to believe that the television soap opera "General Hospital" will be around when they retire than Medicare. Earlier polls have shown little confidence among young people that Social Security will exist when they retire. It is worth noting that people in their twenties do not behave as though they believe these programs are going to disappear. If they believe they will have to pay for their own health care and have no Social Security income in retirement, then they should be saving at a high rate. Yet studies of saving behavior show very low rates of saving among young people.
It is also worth noting that there is no budgetary reason that would prevent Social Security and Medicare from surviving indefinitely. These programs will cease to exist only if people elect candidates who support their destruction. Their elimination would be a political decision, not an economic one.
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"