Policy makers, pundits, and news audiences are bombarded every day with new polls on public opinion and by journalists' reports on the state of Americans' thinking. Elites sift their way through this onslaught by relying on a few guidelines to simplify their task.
Political observers depend on four assumptions to make sense of public thinking on Social Security. The first is that the public really does not know much, if anything, about Social Security; the clear implication is that the public's preferences should be followed as a practical political matter but should be discounted as an influence on policy discussions.
No single poll on entitlement has gotten more eye-opening attention than Third Millennium's UFO poll of eighteen to thirty-four year olds in September 1994. Journalists (and policy makers) followed Third Millennium's lead and pitched the poll as suggesting that young Americans considered UFOs more likely than the prospect of collecting Social Security.1
Third Millennium's UFO poll and its widespread use by journalists and policy makers illustrates the second assumption that elites have adopted: Americans' confidence in the future of Social Security is dramatically changing, escaping like air from a punctured hot balloon. The lurking conclusion is that support for Social Security will decline dramatically. Public support, it is intoned, will melt down now that confidence has collapsed.
The third assumption of political observers is that Americans are now turning toward radical change that would privatize Social Security as the best hope for restoring its future. Anne Willette, for example, opened her October 1, 1996 story for USAToday by heralding a poll that purported to demonstrate that almost 60% of Americans "want to invest some of their Social Security taxes themselves -- even though they might end up with less money at retirement." Americans, particularly younger workers, are watching out for their interests and demanding their "money's worth."
The final assumption is that there is substantial conflict between the generations over Social Security. Staving off the collapse of Social Security is being held up by the self-serving opposition of seniors who are disregarding the interests of younger Americans. In a November 1994 broadcast, ABC's Jim Angle flagged younger Americans' "deep doubts about generational fairness."
We evaluated these common assumptions about public opinion by reviewing hundreds of survey items that span the period from the 1970s to the fall 1997. We were especially interested in survey questions that were worded in an identical or similar manner over a long period of time. A major problem with studying public opinion surveys is that poll results are extremely sensitive to the wording of questions; survey responses may -- to some degree -- simply be an artifact of how poll questions are phrased. Examining similarly worded questions allows us to identify genuine patterns and trends in public opinion.
The evidence on public opinion, we will argue, is at odds with important aspects of the conventional presumptions regarding Americans' thinking about Social Security. The public is, in fact, better informed about Social Security than commonly presumed. Areas where the public is wrong often represent plausible conclusions based on the information available to it. The public may simply be echoing the choices it is presented. Although large proportions of citizens understand Social Security's operations, this knowledge is generally unequally distributed among the more affluent and educated.
In addition, Third Millennium's notorious UFO report is both fabricated and tells us nothing new about public opinion -- Americans have had low confidence in Social Security since the 1970s. The kicker is that even with the low confidence, the public's support has remained virtually unchanged -- a flatliner, according to available trend data. The third assumption that Americans welcome the opportunity to restructure Social Security to include individual investments in equities similarly lacks a clear grounding in the available evidence. Responses to balanced survey questions show no support for individualized privatization. Politicians who emphasize this kind of structural reform place themselves in the vulnerable position of pressing the reforms on a public that is comparatively well informed and opposed to individualized privatization.
The fourth assumption of intergenerational warfare is overstated. Although seniors are more sensitive to threats to Social Security, younger Americans are consistently just as supportive (if not more so) of the overall program. Forgotten in the rush to condemn seniors as "greedy geezers" are the differences that divide the elderly. Opinion surveys suggest that education, economic circumstances, and other factors both divide seniors and draw them together with other segments of the population including younger cohorts. A broad cross-section of Americans support Social Security not because it satisfies a simple calculation of its "money's worth" to any one individual but because it provides an insurance against the risk of low income in retirement and a protection from bearing the burden of financially drained parents.
