But honestly I'm pretty impressed that ~50% of people understand that social security payments today are funding current retirees, and not future retirees. The fact that only 25% think the opposite, and 25% don't know, is actually pretty impressive.
For example, if I was asked the second question, I honestly don't know which way I would have responded before being told the answer, because clearly the answer is in between the two options. Obviously it is not intended to "largely replace" your income, but also obviously it is not intended to only keep you above the poverty line, since it is based on your income during your life. So yes, it very concretely "replaces" your income, but only partially, not "largely". If it was only intended to keep you above the poverty line, it would be based on the poverty line.
Even the government phrases it as "replacing" income:
https://www.ssa.gov/pubs/EN-05-10024.pdf
> Social Security replaces a percentage of a worker’s pre-retirement income
Reading survey questions drives me insane.
- Most Americans don't know how social security is funded but
- An overwhelming majority of nonretired adults (79%) do not believe they will receive their full scheduled Social Security benefits when they retire.
- About three in four adults (77%) have heard that Social Security is projected to run short of money by 2033.
If you thought you had an individual account, and you also thought the program overall was going to run out of money and that you weren't going to get the "full benefit", does that mean you thought you weren't paying enough in?
There has also been a common talking point of Congress stealing from social security to fund other expenses, which could also explain how it would not be able to pay even with individual accounts.
Aka, how all retirement accounts are handled.
My personal retirement plans assume no social security. Anything I may get in old age is a nice bonus, but in my planning, it's not the beef.
Political candidates (Carter and Reagan) promised reductions in federal spending, but couldn't get past the obvious lack of any real discretionary control due to the size of the biggest ticket items such as the entitlements and military. The conservative message of "entitlements will make you immoral" was replaced by "entitlements are unsustainable," making it sound like serious economics but without any real basis.
If there's ever a significant population crunch of working age people, it would be in trouble. In 2018, the cost of the Social Security program exceeded total revenues for the first time.
At current rates, Social Security is projected to be insolvent by 2034.
The only ways to mitigate this is to spend less or make more. But no one wants to pay more and no one wants to give up anything.
Where they've essentially implemented the system as the 1 in 4 American think it works in the USA. Specifically:
> It will become clearer how your pension or your employee’s pension grows. Employees will have their own pension account, showing all the contributions they have paid. And the profit or loss made with this money.
It will be interesting to see if this works out as they've calculated/predicted.
Since Soc Sec is income insurance, I am opposed to the flat benefit concept. Higher incomes pay higher premiums so they should get higher payouts. We already have some benefit flattening now because Soc Sec benefits are partially taxable above $25K single/$32k married.
CATO is being pendantic.
The confounders and the structure of these polls are not statistically significant or valid ways of understanding anything except perhaps the poll taking institutions, and the polls they choose to perform and publish can provide insight into underlying agendas. The bubbles which they influence most are part of that context, so the social narrative of those bubbles represents a significant bias, regardless of the rules which may or may not be followed for any given poll.
The sampling of 2200 people, the use of the "it's math! ta-da! Statistics." is handwavy and manipulative at best. The error bars are so large as to make the results effectively meaningless. People should stop believing polls and pollsters unless or until they engage in scientifically legitimate methodology. Blinds, multiple question distributions, psychological profiling, corrections for environmental, cultural, and personal bias, multiple significant population sizes, effective sampling in choice of participants, and so on, and those sorts of polls require money and time that make doing legitimate polls prohibitively expensive and lengthy.
Most institutions engaging in polling don't want to bother with because they know they can handwave away concerns by claiming "Statistically valid random sample size!" and not have to address any of the other methodological or structural flaws.
This is no better (or worse) than a poll on bsky or twitter or hackernews, effectively. They just hide the fact that they're sampling from a segregated population and pretend it's representative.
And as far as the economic doom of social security hanging over our heads, it requires a balanced budget and fiscal responsibility, and the chuckleheads who've been running congress the last 60 years got what they wanted. Austerity or collapse or a whole menu of unpleasant shit sandwiches await for those of us who have to deal with the boomers' irresponsible and reckless orgy of self enrichment.
They'd had better pay me, because I paid someone else, so they owe me. Especially after I paid a few pittances in property taxes for their wonderful schools.
I think it’ll look a bit like the collapse of USSR when the state reneges on its obligations and the people have to scramble to find new ways to make ends meet.
Edit; I can’t tell if the parent comment is satire, it’s too early in the morning for me
I'll let you lower social security, but if you want someplace to stay you'll have to pay me a gazillion dollars or perform a $10 million environmental study before you can build it -- for a house I was able to build for $30,000 under the rules of my time.
I get my due either way.
for that matter zoning reforn is already a thing - so their property map not be worth that much.
of course when predicting the future always use plenty of salt
As a millennial I could already see the ladder being pulled away and was luckily enough to grab on to the bottom rung. Young people are so ready to burn down the system that they’re just waiting for the opportunity to do so and I don’t blame them. At this point it only seems to be a matter of time. I try to warn boomers that they should be more sympathetic because they’re going to have to ask the young people for a bailout and as bad as it is doing deliveries for minimum wage as a young person it’s infinitely worse doing that as a old person.