Friday, April 15, 2005

Still too young to care

After a wonderful farewell from Michigan, I'm back in Austin, and I want to share a nice line from ex-roommate Justin Tiehen on how polling literalism might have led the privatizers into error: "Seventy percent of people under 35 support private accounts. Two percent of them actually give a shit." A recent poll said that support for privatization has recently fallen to 51% among the under-35 set; I don't know if it asked whether they gave a shit. Justin's point, in any case, has some role in explaining why even a successful attempt to mislead young people about the virtues of their plan wouldn't seriously help the Bush Administration. Nobody at our age is really motivated to worry about retirement, and even if some option seems to improve our retirement security, we're not going to take to the streets for it.

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