Ryan Streeter
The Tea Party has been called many things. “Reform-minded” is probably not one of them.
We know they’re obsessed with spending cuts, but no one credits them with understanding the depths of, say, entitlement reform.
As it turns out, though, they are more willing than their conservative, non-Tea Party peers to support the kinds of reforms needed to get entitlements under control.
We published the results of our poll yesterday on how conservatives view four entitlement reform provisions. We also asked respondents to tell us how much they sympathized with the Tea Party.
As it turns out, Tea Partiers are more reform-minded than their conservative peers.
As Yuval Levin said here at ConservativeHome, the key to health care reform is – as he put it – “two boring words”: defined contribution. Rather than committing ourselves to a defined benefit program, which always inflates costs, we should work with defined contributions, which introduce competition and slower cost growth.
More than anything, converting Medicare to a defined contribution – or voucher – program, will slow the program’s growth.
While Tea Partiers and other conservatives were nearly identical in their views on raising the retirement age or means-testing programs, 48% of Tea Partiers support converting Medicare into a defined contribution program compared to 36% of other conservatives.
Tea Partiers also support private Social Security accounts at a higher rate than other conservatives, but it’s on the issue of defined contributions where they really stand out.
Now, overall, the numbers on defined contribution are low enough to suggest that conservative thought leaders and elected officials need to do a better job of explaining why it's so important. But it is encouraging nonetheless that a group often maligned for not being thoughtful on policy polls as well as they do.
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