Almost Every Slice of American Society Wants To Strengthen Social Security Except Washington Insider

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/election-2014/almost-every-slice-american-society-wants-strengthen-social-security-except-washington




As strengthening Social Security becomes a higher profile issue in a handful of toss-up U.S. Senate races, a new poll of likely 2014 voters in those states and nationwide finds overwhelming support to boost benefits by taxing all Americans equally.

“We tested in this research the idea of increasing Social Security benefits and paying for that by having wealthy Americans pay the same [income tax] rate for Social Security as everyone else,” said Celinda Lake, who conducted the mid-August poll. “We’ve polled this in the past and we have seen this is consistently and overwhelmingly popular with voters. Seventy-nine percent of the voters in this poll supported that idea; 59 percent strongly. Only 21 percent opposed the idea.”

“To folks inside of Washington, that may come as a surprise,” said Eric Kingson, the co-founder of Social Security Works, one of the poll’s sponsors, and a Syracuse Univsersity professor of social work. “To folks outside, it’s not a surprise. And again, it is consistent with what other polls have shown, a willingness to even pay more to expand protections.”

“It’s consistent with the very real fears of Americans, that they’re facing a retirement income crisis in their own lives,” Kingson continued. “When they look around, they don’t have the pension protections they once had from employers. They’ve lost equity in their homes. Two-thirds are moving toward retirement where they don’t have sufficient funds to maintain their standard of living. So outside of Washington people are well-aware of that, and they ultimately turn to Social Security.”

[xchrom]

1. kick. nt

[Mnemosyne]

2. K&R for more visibility. nt

[MannyGoldstein]

3. Strengthen? Or "strengthen"?

When Obama said "strengthen", he meant "cut". If anyone needs a link to show this, let me know.

[MisterP]

4. that's so 2011: now they say demilitarizing the US is a Paulbot thing and if we talk

too loudly about de-escalating the police Paul will win and he might even chain our CPIs!

it's both frighteningly Orwellian and suffocatingly boring how they operate--is "terriboring" a word?