Fay Lomax Cook

Three claims have dominated popular rhetoric about “saving” Social Security: The public is growing less confident about its future, less supportive of the program, and more in favor of privatization and incremental reform.

Extensive public opinion research by Fay Lomax Cook and Lawrence Jacobs at the University of Minnesota suggests these claims are “either false or substantially overstated” by policymakers who fail to back up their assertions with hard data.

In a paper presented at the annual conference of the National Academy of Social Insurance in January, they offered results of a review of hundreds of separate public opinion survey items through the year 2000. Though only half of the public expressed confidence about the future of Social Security, the data show people were more confident in 2000 than they have been in nearly a decade. In fact, con-fidence rose by 15 percentage points compared to similar surveys in 1998.

Also, rather than diminishing, public support for Social Security “is remarkably high and unchanging,” their study found. National Opinion Research Corporation surveys from 1984 to 2000, for example, showed 90% of the general public supported Social Security and that trend hardly varied. Similar findings were reported by the University of Michigan’s National Election Studies and the Gallup Poll.

This does not imply the public is not concerned about Social Security, but it is certainly not panicked about its imminent collapse. Only a third of the public believes the system will run out of money if no changes occur.

When asked a simple question about their support for privatization, a majority of those polled said they favor investing a portion of their Social Security taxes in stocks and bonds. But that support evaporated when respondents were asked a “balanced frame question” that also reminded them of the risks and costs of a privatized system, including increased taxes.

Cook and Jacobs suggest that policymakers consider several options the public appears more inclined to accept: Create a supplemental system outside of Social Security in which individuals could invest in stocks and bonds, and reduce the benefits of the affluent. Beyond these measures, the public appears evenly split in its support for gradually raising the early retirement age from 62 to 65 for partial receipt of benefits. And though people are opposed to payroll tax increases, they are more supportive of raising the income ceiling on which payroll taxes are based. Given a stark choice, they prefer tax increases to benefit cuts.

(A version of Cook and Jacobs’s paper, “Assessing assumptions about Americans’ attitudes toward Social Security: Popular claims meet hard data,” may be ordered from IPR’s publications department.)