Republican pollster Connor Maguire on Friday pushed back on the claim that Republicans want to make major changes to entitlement programs like Social Security.
“These entitlement programs, they need to change at some point. You have people continuing to pay into this that are going to get zero benefits from it,” Maguire, senior client strategist at WPA Intelligence, told Hill.TV’s Jamal Simmons on “What America’s Thinking.”
“I think that at some point we will be moving down the road that Social Security will become insolvent,” he continued. “We will not be able to provide the same amount of resources that retirees have today. And for us to maintain that, we need to make some changes.”
“I’m not talking about total, massive changes that are going to scare everyone,” he said. “Some groups like the AARP like to say that Republicans want to destroy everything.”
“Make some fiscal changes that make responsible choices that we can actually control this for a duration and not just a short time,” he said.
Data from the Treasury Department released earlier this month found that the federal deficit increased some 17 percent in 2018, to $779 billion.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) pointed to entitlement programs as to why the deficit had increased.
“The three big entitlement programs that are very popular, Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid, that’s 70 percent of what we spend every year,” McConnell said in an interview with Bloomberg News. “There’s been a bipartisan reluctance to tackle entitlement changes because of the popularity of those programs.”
A new American Barometer survey, conducted by Hill.TV and the HarrisX polling company, found that 73 percent of Americans were in favor of cutting spending as a way of tackling the budget deficit.
— Julia Manchester
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