Americans Want to Raise Taxes for Social Security

Again via Wonkblog (who maybe should get like a "Frequently Linked" card from me) comes the results from a survey conducted by a marketing firm hired by the National Academy of Social Insurance. And the results are in, when surveyed respondents support raising the payroll tax and lifting the payroll tax cap far more than cutting benefits.

Of note about this study, the surveyors explained policies before asking for their preferences, which is to say the answers aren't quite as arbitrary as some other polls and surveys would be. To me, this ties back again to President Obama's second inaugural address, the popularity of social safety net programs, and now some survey numbers suggest people are willing to pay more to keep it.

One final add-on that connects to my first post today: respondents were also asked if they thought Social Security was in crisis with 54% responding that they thought it was.  When the surveyors explained that raising Social Security taxes by 1.4% would guarantee the program for 75 years, the number of respondents thinking the program was in crisis dropped to 26%. Pundits are ginning up panic, again, when there is no real need for it.

Entitlements & Government Spending

Nate Silver does a great job at FiveThirtyEight breaking down where our government is spending money on the federal, state, and local level. After a thorough analysis he concludes what is fairly obvious: growth in government spending is coming from "entitlement programs" like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and (to a far lesser degree) welfare.  This analysis leads me to two takeaways:

1) We don't have a spending problem, we have an entitlements problem. When you see plans to slash non-defense discretionary spending remember that's not the problem and that's not grown substantially since 1972. Non-defense discretionary spending has been relatively static for forty years, so those offering plans to slash the budget are wanting to take away government services like education funding, infrastructure investment, and R & D. More to the point, if they take it away it won't do anything to deal with the actual problem we have. It's a solution matching ideology, not necessity.

2) Just because we have an entitlements problem doesn't mean we should eliminate our entitlement programs. There are a number of things driving the entitlement problem. From exploding health care costs to demographic shifts. Some of these problems, like health care costs, can be worked. Some, like the demographics problem, need endured.

Preserving the Status Quo on the Safety Net

John Harwood has an excellent piece in The New York Times making the same argument that I've been making, albeit a lot better, basically that's Obama's second inaugural wasn't a call for a massive expansion of the social safety net, but a call to maintain the safety net as constructed.

I was struck by how so many on the left described the speech as Clintonian. I was also, to some degree, vindicated by the notion that far from the Socialist Obama in Brit Hume's nightmares, the president is seeking to maintain the social safety net we've had for over half a century. Once more with feeling, this isn't a radical idea. Rather, it's a bid to say, "If we want Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid (and by polling we certainly want two of out three), then we have to be prepared to pay for them."  This stand in contrast to a GOP that never tried to find ways to pay for them and instead decided to attempt to dismantle them.