Burnt Orange Report

Greed, for lack of a better word, is good

By Jim Dallas

The Associated Press does a poll:

Most people say they are not willing to give up some of their promised Social Security benefits to save the poor from having their payments cut.

About 70 percent of people surveyed do believe President Bush's warning that Social Security is running out of money. But most also say they do not like the way the president is handling the issue, according to an AP-Ipsos poll...

The poll, conducted for the Associated Press by Ipsos-Public Affairs, found that 56 percent of respondents are not willing to give up some guaranteed benefits, while 40 percent said they would. Majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents were opposed to losing any benefits.

"If I were guaranteed that the poor would get what they're supposed to, that would be fine, but I'm not sure they would," said Margaret Normandin, 80, a Democrat from Laconia, N.H.

...

Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster, said persuading the middle class to give up benefits is a hard sell.

"The middle class feels like it's barely holding on," she said. "And Social Security is perceived to be the original middle-class support program."

...

When asked whom they trust more to handle Social Security, 48 percent of respondents said Democrats and 36 percent said Republicans. The president still faces strong opposition to his approach to Social Security, with 60 percent of those surveyed saying they disapprove.

The AP-Ipsos poll of 1,000 adults was taken May 2-4. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Last week, when the President gave his speech, we heard a lot of crowing about how he had finally changed the dynamic and forced the Democrats to choose between faux-progressivity and defending benefits for Republicans, or whatever.

In retrospect, can anyone think that such a claim is anything but ridiculous? It's a false choice, akin to asking middle America whether we'd prefer a kick in the nuts or a lead pipe to the kneecap. It's a false choice because it presumes that any solution must be revenue neutral - even when the entire "surplus" scheme engineered in 1983 came with the implicit promise of higher taxes on the wealthy.

Finally, the claim was and is ridiculous because, even as Americans have worked themselves into a panic over Social Security's solvency at some distant date, trust in President Bush in the immediate present has hit its own crisis point. Telling the American people that he wants to cut their benefits is not exactly the best way to sweeten that pot.

What Democrats must do is attack, because when you scratch the surface, the Republican plan continues to be the destruction of Social Security for the benefit of the rich and powerful. You can spin, but you can't hide.

To the extent that the people's own enlightened (or unenlightened) self-interest encourages people to grasp these key facts, and indeed support universality (in that weird sort of paradoxical Rawlsian way) the more, the better.