A Democratic organization called Deciding to Win just put out a report on the popularity of dozens of policy positions. Their charts look like this.
There’s not much surprising here for anyone who has looked at polling data before. People love Social Security and Medicare, dislike immigration, and want tough on crime policies. They are skeptical of government creating new programs (free universal childcare, free public college), but like ideas that raise costs and burdens on employers in favor of workers (increase minimum wage, protect the right to strike).
One thing the chart captures is just how much people support giveaways to old people over other forms of welfare. Below is a figure that simply extracts policies that are aimed either at helping the old or helping families with young children.
When studying public opinion, it’s shocking how much Americans love Social Security and Medicare. They’re not overwhelmingly in favor of all government programs that give people money or services. Rather, it is these two in particular that seem special.
This is not a paywall. The rest of this article is available to free subscribers to the newsletter. Just leave your email below to continue reading.
I like the general thrust of this article but i think it misses an important element: everyone gets old and most people have parents and grandparents. so if you do old people austerity, who ends up taking care of them? Yea the young people. And taking care of old people is a huge time and financial drain. Many people want to shunt mom and dad into a home, have the government pay, and not have to deal with that.
and lots of people don’t have kids and even if they do don’t want to rely on them. So being for old age entitlements is more rational for the young than it might look like at first glance.
I would focus on Medicare more than Social Security. Social Security has only just barely higher than a 1:1 payout ratio to average liifetime taxes paid ratio. So seniors can reasonably claim that they "paid for" their Social Security benefits. Medicare, on the other hand, is out of control with a greater than 3:1 ratio.
It is totally unfair that cash-strapped young and healthy adults have to pay exorbitant private insurance and provider rates while Boomers in six bedroom McMansions get Medicare. Medicare should be dissolved entirely. Seniors should be moved onto the private insurance market like everyone else. If they are genuinely poor (based on assets, not solely based on income) then give them a subsidy. But if they have a $2 million house, stock portfolio, or large pension then they should have to pay full freight. They can liquidate their large house (which is good for the economy by freeing up large homes for the families with several children who really need them) and downsize to a townhouse and pay for their health care with the proceeds of the sale.