The Spending People Want To Cut

A couple of polls are out, one from Gallup asking people which parts of government they want to cut and one from CNN asking specifically whether people prefer to cut a given program for deficit reduction or not. I prefer the latter, both because it asks more different categories and because I think it presents both sides of the debate better (and yes, that ends up with a higher average "let's cut it" percent, which is contra my interests in the matter). So, what do Americans want to cut? And what do they want to save?

The programs Americans do not want to cut significantly to reduce the deficit are infrastructure spending (39%/61%), unemployment insurance (38%/61%), Medicaid (29%/70%), education programs (25%/75%), Social Security (21%/78%), Medicare (18%/81%), and veterans' benefits (14%/85). What do Americans think it's okay to cut to shrink the deficit? Defense spending (50%/49%), "welfare programs in general" (56%/44%), pensions for government workers (61%/39%), and foreign aid (81%/18%).

A few observations: the things people do not want to cut include most of the left-wing stuff. It also includes the three welfare programs the government spends the vast majority of its non-military money on, so while Americans want to cut welfare in the abstract, they like the three big welfare programs we have very, very much. The public employee pensions thing is one where the public is just wrong, and I think it's the result of some populist demagoguery. And as to foreign aid, well, yeah, okay... try balancing our budget by cutting foreign aid. You can't; it's negligible. The polls that have done experiments on this are notorious: when asked what percent of our budget people think foreign aid should be, the average answer is an order of magnitude or two higher than what the figure actually is in real life. But people also think foreign aid constitutes 25% of our budget, whereas it's actually more like, uh, 0.25%.

But I also think one should take a poll like this in context, specifically the context of several polls showing that, while voters prefer "spending cuts" to "tax hikes" in the abstract, they prefer raised taxes to cuts in, say, Social Security, or Medicare. And they really, really prefer raising taxes on the rich to cutting those programs. So I'd say that if the public has a particularly intelligible, feasible preference for deficit-reduction strategy, it involves cutting defense spending and raising taxes on the rich. Sound like liberalism, much?