These results probably have a lot to do with the fact that politicians lie about budgeting as a matter of course.
A new poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research demonstrates why making the federal budget according to public opinion does not work.
Sixty percent of Americans say the government spends too much money. They’re correct; it does. The problem is that when asked which things the government should spend less money on, they say basically none of them.
On the two biggest drivers of the national debt, Social Security and Medicare, 62 percent and 58 percent of Americans believe the government should spend more.
In addition to Social Security and Medicare, majorities believe that government spends too little on drug rehabilitation, assistance for childcare, border security, assistance to the poor, infrastructure, health care, and education.
The only category surveyed where a majority of Americans believe the government spends too much is on assistance to other countries, with 69 percent saying that it should be lower. Including all sources of foreign aid from the federal government, that spending category only accounts for 1 percent of the budget.
In some areas, partisanship is hardly a factor. For infrastructure, 61 percent of Republicans and 66 percent of Democrats want more spending. On Social Security, it’s 57 percent of Republicans and 68 percent of Democrats. Medicare has more of a split, but 45 percent of Republicans still want more spending, along with 69 percent of Democrats.
Of the 16 categories of spending listed, more Democrats want increased spending than Republicans do in twelve of them. The four exceptions are border security, the military, law enforcement, and (just barely) space exploration.
So here’s the bottom line: 60 percent of Americans say the government spends too much, but the only category where 60 percent or more people want less spending is foreign aid — which is 1 percent of the budget. The government can’t spend more in each category of spending while spending less overall. But that’s essentially what the people want, according to this poll.
Chasing public opinion in budgeting is fruitless because what the public wants is mathematically impossible.
Are these results because Americans are stupid? They’re not stupid in other respects, and they’re correct that the government spends too much overall (only 16 percent of people want the government to spend more in total). These results probably have more to do with the fact that politicians lie about budgeting as a matter of course and have created entirely false narratives about the causes of overspending.
We saw this during the state of the union address this year, when President Biden led a grotesque bipartisan display of fiscal insanity, getting Republicans and Democrats to promise not to touch entitlements. They have undoubtedly seen poll numbers similar to this poll and said, “No way we’re touching that.” But programs that are popular now won’t be very popular when they get automatic cuts because they lack funding, which Social Security and Medicare are scheduled to do in the next decade.
It ought to be the job of responsible elected officials to explain those facts to the people they represent and debate options to fix the situation. Instead, we’ve got bipartisan agreement to ignore the problem, which will only further entrench the belief in the public that there’s nothing wrong with entitlements and maybe we could even spend more — which means the debt will only continue to grow.