On Sunday, I mentioned that support for private accounts tends to plunge precipitously when costs and trade-offs of these accounts are mentioned. The new Washington Post/ABC News poll provides more compelling evidence that this is the case and that, therefore, the level of "hard" support for Social Security privatization is quite low.

In the WP/ABC poll, there is a slight majority (53 percent) in favor of "a plan in which people who chose to could invest some of their Social Security contributions in the stock market". But when a followup is asked ("What if setting up a stock-market option for Social Security means the government has to borrow as much as two trillion dollars to set it up, with that money to be paid back over time through cost savings from the current system?"), that 53 percent is cut in half, so only 24 percent of the public winds up favoring private accounts if that kind of borrowing is necessary to set them up. That's bad news for Bush, since it appears that the administration plans to advocate just that sort of borrowing to set up these accounts.

Yet more bad news for the administration is the public's expressed interest in participating in such accounts if they were set up. Only 37 percent say they would personally put some of their Social Security money in such an account, given that they would "get higher Social Security benefits if the stock market went up, but lower Social Security benefits if the stock market went down." Significantly, people who don't expect to receive their full benefits from Social Security are no more likely to say they would participate in these accounts than are those who expect to receive full benefits. That undercuts one of the key selling points of the administration's plan.

So the public doesn't support private accounts, given the costs of setting up such accounts, and expresses little enthusiasm for participating in these accounts, even if they were available. If Bush is hoping for a groundswell of public opinion to push his privatization proposal over the top, he'd better think again.