Poll: 85% say officials don’t get their retirement anxiety

A few weeks after the Republicancontrolled House of Representatives moved to kill rules allowing states to create portable retirement savings accounts, a new survey found that 75 percent of Americans support just such an option.

The response was a common refrain in a report that echoed the growing dread of living out one’s golden years in poverty. Politicians in Washington just don’t get how hard it is to prepare for retirement, according to 85 percent of those polled by Greenwald & Associates for the National Institute on Retirement Security.

That unity was related in large part to the elderly’s grim view of the future. “If current trends continue, the U.S. soon will face rates of poverty among senior citizens not seen since the Great Depression,” the report says. “Of the 18 million workers between the ages of 55 and 64 in 2012, more than four million will be poor or near poor at age 65.”

The survey, part of a larger research project looking at U.S. views on retirement security, randomly polled 800 people age 25 or older by phone since the 2016 election. The report concluded that “Americans are united in their anxiety about their economic security in retirement and in their dissatisfaction with national policy makers’ inaction to address the nation’s retirement crisis.”

Despite the political divide that has frozen the nation in place on other issues, support for such state-sponsored savings plans was close to bipartisan. Some 83 percent of Democrats were in favor of the option for those without work-sponsored plans, compared with 72 percent of Republicans.

Party lines were even less important when it came to how respondents viewed their own prospects. Almost 76 percent of those polled worry that economic conditions might hurt their chances for a secure retirement.

The survey also looked at attitudes about Social Security amid talk of benefit cuts. Any cuts to government spending that would lead to lower Social Security benefits for current retirees got a thumbs down from 76 percent of those surveyed. That’s up from 67 percent in 2013.