Cutting government spending has been in the news recently. The Associated Press conducted a poll to find out what Americans thought needed to be cut. While they say they would like to make cuts, their targets are quite different from the Musk-Trump ones.
Many U.S. adults believe the federal government is overspending — but polling also shows that many Americans, including Republicans, think the country is spending too little on major government programs such as Social Security.
…About two-thirds of Americans say the U.S. government is spending “too little” on Social Security and education, according to a January AP-NORC poll. Another 6 in 10, roughly, say too little money is going to assistance to the poor. A similar share say spending is too low for Medicare, the national health care insurance program for seniors, and most also say Medicaid is under-funded by the federal government. About half say border security is not receiving enough funding.
For the longest time, many Americans vastly overestimate how much money goes for aid and think that it is too much.
Foreign aid is one area where there is broad consensus that the U.S. is overspending. The 2023 AP-NORC polling suggests that Americans tend to believe too much money is going to other countries.
…At the same time, polling has shown that U.S. adults tend to overestimate the share of the federal budget that is spent on foreign aid. Surveys from KFF have found that, on average, Americans say spending on foreign aid makes up 31% of the federal budget rather than the actual answer: closer to 1% or less.
31% of the federal budget? This is utterly delusional and shows that people are all too eager to believe that vast cuts can be made to the federal budget without affecting them at all, and so lap it up when politicians rail about foreign aid.
This is complicated by the fact that some foreign aid goes for the purchase of weaponry. Another complicating factor is, as I discussed in yesterday’s post about USAID, a lot of this ‘aid’ comes back to the US in terms of goods and services being required to be obtained from here. A lot of ‘aid’ is more like a subsidy from the US government to US businesses and the agriculture sector, routed through foreign countries.
I feel like recent events have made it abundantly clear it matters almost nothing what people think/say, and it only matters what wealthy people think/say…
I saw on TV last night, probably PBS News Hour, a fairly long story about how farmers in Kansas are being hurt by the USAID cuts. It turns out that a lot of what they grow, almost a third IIRC, winds up as foreign aid. USAID was formed around the middle of the last century precisely because we were growing too much food; and prices were dropping to where one couldn’t make a living as a farmer.
@1 lochaber:
Gillens and Page beat you to it (2014):
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B/S1537592714001595a.pdf/testing_theories_of_american_politics_elites_interest_groups_and_average_citizens.pdf
From the conclusion: “…our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts” and “policy making is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans”.
I tracked down the referenced survey for that 31% claim. It is from 2015, so I would be interested in if there are any recent surveys. Not that I suspect Americans are any smarter now. Just for comparison. Here’s the link:
https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/poll-finding/americans-views-on-the-u-s-role-in-global-health/
The Nebraska Cattlemen has FA and now they’re FO:
Link
Anyone who wants to talk about the government spending too much, without discussing the military budget, is not a Serious Person(tm).