Poll: 43 percent agree with views of "Occupy Wall Street"

Forty-three percent of Americans agree with the views of the "Occupy Wall Street" movement, according to a new CBS News/New York Times poll that found a widespread belief that money and wealth should be distributed more evenly in America.

Twenty-seven percent of Americans said they disagree with the movement, which began more than a month ago in lower Manhattan and has since spread across the country and around the world. Thirty percent said they were unsure.

Young and left-leaning Americans were more likely to agree with the movement than were their older and more conservative counterparts. Half of Americans ages 18-29 say they agree with the movement; just one in three Americans age 65 or older say the same. And two thirds of liberals say they agree with "Occupy Wall Street" compared with just one in four conservatives.

Americans with at least some college education are more likely to agree with the movement than those with less education. Nearly half of those with at least some college education say they agree with "Occupy Wall Street"; among those who did not attend college, that figure drops to 37 percent.

Ah, the polling game. Ask junk questions and get junk results.

Of course it would be desirable for wealth to be more evenly distributed in the U.S. But the way to do this is to bring up the bottom, not to tear down the top.

I'd start with turning Social Security into a fully funded system with personal investment accounts and real wealth accumulation. Give it a couple of decades, and every family that has a reasonably steady work history would have at least a modest next egg. That would be tremendous progress.

Fix urban public education (I'd voucher the schools) so that millions of poor kids had a shot at a decent education. That would do wonders.

Get public payrolls and pensions under control to stabilize state and local government finances, then cut taxes and over regulation in the cities to encourage small business formation.

Control the borders. We import poor people by the millions every year, and then liberals howl that the income needle is stuck at the bottom rungs of the ladder. Duh.

The biggest drivers of intergenerational poverty are illegitimacy and the collapse of marriage among the lower class. That's a cultural problem which resists easy policy intervention, but the right kind of welfare reform is a start. Again, conservatives own this issue.

So yes, let's have a debate on how to reduce income inequality in the U.S. That's a goal most of us agree on. The question is method. The leftist solution is to massively penalize success, crush business formation and economic growth, increase welfare dependency, and level down. The constructive solutions are on the right. That's a debate I'm ready to have any time.

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