Americans shocked to learn that there isn’t actually a Social Security crisis

A survey shows that deficit fear-mongering works, but it's overcome by simple counter-arguments  

By Alex Pareene

The Washington Post’s WonkBlog has a scoop: People don’t want to cut Social Security!

The post concerns a recent survey that is actually pretty useful, in that it supports what should already be common sense: People have been led to believe that Social Security faces a crisis in funding. When you tell people some proposals for fixing it, they a) overwhelmingly choose to fund it more generously and b) decide that the program actually does not face any sort of crisis at all. A marketing firm hired by the National Academy of Social Insurance surveyed a random sampling of Americans and discovered that what people want is to raise taxes on rich (and regular!) people in order to fund more Social Security benefits, which is a good idea because the program is currently pretty stingy by international standards and Americans don’t actually have pensions anymore.