I sure do. It's the youth of America.

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.

Statistics like this are a pet peeve of mine. And to see a whole article filled with "x% of people think Y" is not that interesting.

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.

The juxtapositions in here are interesting:

- 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?

This is an interesting topic that is also a very current one in the Netherlands: https://business.gov.nl/finance-and-taxes/pensions/the-new-p...

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.

I've been told by the libertarians since the early 80s that social security was running out of money, and back then I fully believed that the program would be gone by the time I retired. Yet somehow Congress manages to tweak it as necessary to keep it solvent. I expect they will continue to do so.

I would love a survey asking people about the half-truths the smug libertarian types like to tell about social security.

I can go to ssa.gov and click the button that says "log into your account."

100% of the people polled are the type of people who interact with polls. The questions, framing, and context of the interaction is going to influence the results in ways that aren't corrected for. The day of the week, what's in the current news cycle, the context of the individual media bubbles of the poll takers, whether or not they've had breakfast, and a myriad other factors will influence the results in ways that aren't accounted for.

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.

As usual, I don't think the conclusion of the survey is fully supported by the way the questions were worded. I'm not sure I've ever felt differently about a survey, in fact.

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.

Your benefits amounts are tied to lifetime earnings, and you get less per month if you start early, so it is effectively a personal account, regardless of the details.

CATO is being pendantic.