Voter Ignorance Threatens Deficit Reduction. By Bruce Bartlett.
A Feb. 1, 2011, YouGov poll found only one program, culture and the arts, on which a majority of people are willing to spend less…
A Jan. 26, 2011, Gallup poll found 59 percent of people favoring cuts to foreign aid, but a majority opposed cutting any other programs…
A Jan. 25, 2011, CNN/Opinion Research poll found a strong 71 percent of people want to reduce the size of government. When questioned about specifics, foreign aid again topped the list, with 81 percent favoring cuts. But only two other programs got majority support…
A Jan. 12, 2011, Ipsos/Reuters poll … A strong majority oppose cutting Medicare, education, Social Security,…
All my gentle readers know, of course, that foreign aid is way less than 1% of government budgets, and a vanishingly small percentage of GDP…
Comments
8 responses to “It’s Unanimous: Cut Spending! (As long as you don’t cut spending!)”
I’ve become – albeit, in a tepid and reluctant way – a bit of a latter-day Bartlett and Stockman fan.
This is tea party thinking – and it goes beyond cognitive dissonance to utter incoherence.
http://jazzbumpa.blogspot.com/2010/09/what-hell-friday-broadcasting-stupidity.html
JzB
And, unfortunately – nay, tragically – has become orthodox Rethug thinking.
http://jazzbumpa.blogspot.com/2010/12/best-headline-of-year.html
JzB
I don’t know how much faith I’d put in Bartlett when he write stuff like this: http://www.forbes.com/2009/05/14/taxes-social-security-opinions-columnists-medicare.html
Foreign aid is still billions of dollars, and exponentially over the years it adds up. Egypt, Pakistan—tell me what good has it done us to hand over billions to these folks??? Mubarak’s British and Swiss banks accounts are now somewhere between $40–$70Billion, with a B. Israel’s Nuke’s have been the real deterrent there, not Mubarak. And Pakistan—a huge percentage, by huge I mean F*cking large percentage of the “foreign aid” eventually flushes out to the Taliban or Al Qaeda. You can belittle that all you want Mr. Roth. When I think of the jobs that can be created with just 1 billion (when we spend at least tens of billions overseas, and if you count IMF which is funded mostly by America, no doubt HUNDREDS of billions) you know what Mr. Roth??? I’LL TAKE IT.
I honestly mean this as no offense to you Mr. Roth, I like you and I mean it more as a compliment to your intelligence, but someone of your ethnic persuasion should be very familiar with the idea of nickel- and-diming people to death.
@Ted K
I’m of course not saying that foreign aid is trivial — only the the amount spent is trivial in discussions of balancing the federal budget. Especially when it’s the only proposed cut.
The really sad thing is, we could cut the entire discretionary budget, excluding defense, and we still wouldn’t eliminate the deficit.
@Chris T
The really amazing thing is if health costs were growing/had grown at the rate of CPI, we wouldn’t have a budget problem.
And I mean cost per procedure/hospital night/whatever — even with the aging population we’d be fine.