“Mark McKinnon”:http://www.thedailybeast.com/author/mark-mckinnon/ had the lead story on the Daily Beast yesterday, entitled “The Real Budget Warriors”:http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-11-10/deficit-reduction-commission-recommendations-and-the-republicans-who-champion-them/.
His first conclusion: “Seniors aren’t stupid”
His second conclusion: “Voters in the real world understand budgeting better than some of the brainiacs inside the Beltway. It’s pretty simple: You can’t keep spending more than you earn. And hardworking Americans are ready for ‘the conversation we must have,’ as suggested by Rep. Cantor, the likely new House majority leader, in his plan, ‘Delivering on Our Commitment.'”
[Left unclear is whether seniors are hard working Americans, but I’ll set that aside for the minute.]
His evidence:
* Marco Rubio mentioned raising the retirment age in a state where a lot of seniors live
* Marco Rubio was elected (actually he “dominated” with 49% of the vote, in McKinnon’s words)
* A larger proportion of the electorate was made up of seniors than in 2006
* Seniors favored Republicans by “21 percentage points”:http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1110/44802.html
Ergo, seniors are ready to see cuts to Medicare and Social Security.
Not quite willing to buy the logic that Marco Rubio’s dominating 49% of the vote in Florida overturns the received wisdom that seniors ought to be averse to cuts to benefits aimed at seniors, I went looking for some data. The best I could find was this “Gallup report”:http://www.gallup.com/poll/141611/Americans-Look-Wealthy-Help-Save-Social-Security.aspx. It turns out that in 2005, 35% of the population supported raising the age at which social security benefits begin. After the financial crisis and all the “learning” by those non-brainiacs outside the beltway, the percentage of the population willing to support raising the age at which social security benefits begin: 35%.
However, there is one point that McKinnon might inadvertently have stumbled upon. Although I could not find any cross-tabs in the Gallup report – which looked at a number of other ways to extend the life of social security – the report does note that:
bq. There is general consensus on the Social Security proposals by age — those that would primarily affect high-income Americans are the most popular among both young and old. The only notable difference by age concerns the idea of increasing the age at which people are eligible to receive full retirement benefits, which is endorsed by 50% of senior citizens but only 31% of all those under age 65
So McKinnon may be on to something: those over 65 may not be as adverse as those under 65 to raising the age at which people _in the future_ will receive social security benefits, a measure that by definition “will not hurt”:http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/unserious-people-2/ anyone over the age of 65. While I’d be really careful about extrapolating from that fact that seniors will also support cuts to _their own benefits_, I probably have to agreed with McKinnon on one point: seniors may not be that stupid after all.