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| AP |
Seventy-three years ago today, the first Social Security checks went out to beneficiaries. The anniversary comes at a difficult time for the program. It narrowly escaped a cut floated by the Obama administration in the fiscal cliff negotiations that would have reduced cost-of-living increases going forward. While it’s not in danger anytime soon, it does have a 75-year funding shortfall, one which has even advocates like Nobel laureate economist Peter Diamond calling for its finances to be shored up.
So the National Academy of Social Insurance hired the marketing firm Matthew Greenwald & Associates to conduct a survey of a random sample of Americans to see how they’d like to see that shortfall closed. The survey used a technique called “trade-off analysis” to see which elements of a potential deal made respondents more or less likely to support it. So if a package with spending cuts and tax increases gets a certain amount of support, and a package with just tax increases gets another amount, you can then analyze those results to figure out the response to spending cut proposals. The survey also explained policies before asking for respondents’ opinions, to avoid getting responses that were basically arbitrary.
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