Commentary By Ron Beasley
A few weeks ago I reported that conservatives all want to cut government spending but they don't want to cut spending on any programs. According to the latest Economist/YouGov poll the entire country wants a free lunch.
When it comes to decreasing the deficit, cutting spending is a more popular approach than raising taxes, by a margin of 62% to 5%. And here's what the public is willing to cut:
The only program that over a third wanted to cut was foreign aid which makes up less than one percent of the budget. Kevin Drum:
As you can see, there wasn't one single area that even a third of the
country wanted to cut back on. Except � hold on there! Down in the
middle of the table. There is one area that everyone's willing
to trim: foreign aid. Good 'ol foreign aid. A category that, as Roger
McShane dryly points out, "makes up less than 1% of America's total
spending."Beyond that, there were only four areas that even a quarter of the
population was willing to cut: mass transit, agriculture, housing, and
the environment. At a rough guess, these areas account for about 3% of
the federal budget. You could slash their budgets by a third and still
barely make a dent in federal spending.
Most of the budget consists of three things:
- Social Security
- National Defense
- Medicare
Only seven percent wanted to cut Social Security and Medicare and less than a quarter wanted to National Defense. The State of California is in trouble because people kept cutting taxes while demanding the same services. I guess we are all Californians now.
Update
Via Ezra Klein here is a better chart from Annie Lowrey. The blue bar represents the percentage of people who want to cut spending and the red bar the percent of the national budget.
Take a moment to savor the unconscious conflation of the low information voter's mind between foreign aid and foreign wars, a.k.a. empire maintenance.
ReplyDeleteEven the sheeple recognize that we cannot continue to piss away our treasury by fomenting hatred against ourselves. War is expensive.
The ego continues to self-censor but the id knows and will hopefully, eventually overwhelm the teevee controlled veneer.
Get back to work. Please.
Now remove SS and medicare/medicaid since those are financed separately. Sure, cutting them would mean a little more take home pay on the check, but if i'm not mistaken they're technically off-budget. I know SS is self-funding; i'm not sure about medicare/caid.
ReplyDeleteRedraw the graphs representing income from income and corporate tax (not the payroll tax programs)with matching expenditures.
All of a sudden that national defense number takes up a much, much bigger portion of the pie. I wonder why almost all these graphs present the facts so that national defense doesn't look like the 40%+ of Congressional spending that it really is.
It's also interesting to contemplate how much foreign aid is routed back to the US in the form arms purchases.
Lex
ReplyDeleteYou are absolutely right, the military industrial complex gets at least 40%. I suspect that the funding difference between SS/Medicare and defense would be too much for most of those polled to understand.