A majority of Americans don’t like President Bush’s proposal to overhaul Social Security, saying it’s risky business to invest some of its funds in the stock market, according to a Newsweek poll.
Some 56 percent of Americans surveyed gave thumbs down to privatizing portions of the retirement system, while 36 per cent say it’s a necessary risk to improve the rate of return on Social Security funds.
In the president’s State of the Union address, he said Social Security would be bankrupt by 2040.
Of the 36 percent who sided with the president, 48 percent are 18-to-34- year-olds.
Among workers younger than 44, believed to have more to gain by the changes, only 28 percent said they liked the idea of privatization.
The poll, in which 1,009 adults were questioned, has an error margin of four percentage points.
Forty percent of those polled say the best way to run Social Security is to tax one generation to pay for the retirement of another, which is the way the system currently works.
Bush spent two days after his speech in rallies across the country to get Congress to back his idea for letting younger workers put up to one-third of Social Security tax contributions into accounts invested in stocks and bonds.
“We will make the system a better deal for younger workers by allowing them to save some of their payroll taxes in voluntary personal retirement accounts – a nest egg they can call their own, which government can never take away,” the president said yesterday in his weekly radio speech.