GOP Winning on Social Security?

Polls appear to show President Bush’s Social Security reform proposal sinking like a stone, so I was a little surprised to see the normally left-leaning John Zogby warning that, even if the President’s proposal for individual accounts fails, the issue may nevertheless spark a long-term realignment in favor of the Republican Party.
Zogby bases this conclusion not on the concept’s popularity among young people, but on its appeal to the “investor class.” He notes that in his pollling, those who described themselves as members of the investor class favored President Bush by a margin of 61% to 39%, while those who described themselves as non-investors favored Kerry by 57% to 42%. The kicker: no fewer than 46% described themselves as investors.
This rapidly-growing category, Zogby writes, “is a far greater determinant of how they will vote and how they see their world than income, religion, race, marital status, or size of individual portfolio,” and Democrats ignore the appeal of President Bush’s “ownership society” at their peril.
For my part, I can’t understand why individual accounts aren’t more popular. I would think that anyone would rather save his own money than give it to the government, in hopes of getting it back someday.

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