Comments on: Survey results: Americans insist on government benefits but don't want to pay for them

By: jimh

jimh — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I think your trolling is showing:
“Roads, Police, Firemen. I have no need nor use for any other public services…”
Orly?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

to be fair, 22% want to cut national defense spending, which accounts for ~4% of GDP

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Just a thought: if you need to save on defense spending, you could remove some of those foreign bases (UK, Okinawa, etc). I’m sure if we want/need them, we’ll ask you to put them back & maybe even contribute to your costs.
Griff

By: Elite Hacker

Elite Hacker — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve never understood why people don’t get this. Sh*t is expensive & sh*t costs money. They want their Police and teachers to get paid what they deserve!!!…bt then where do they think the money comes from? Taxes!! They want their terrorists to be killed??!! Wait, that takes money too!!

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

You are correct it’s not saying the majority don’t want cuts. But the reality is that unless 60-70% of people are behind any given cut it will not happen.

Any one of those line items you pick with only 20% of people behind them end up in a bill and you as a senator votes for it…congratulations, you lost your seat. Why? Well 80% of people don’t want that and will hate you and may vote you out.

This is why the numbers as represented are entirely valid. Without the majority agreeing on a place to cut no law maker is going to propose said cut. It would be suicide.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Survey bias, perhaps? Suppose #2 read “National offense” instead.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

what’s needed is an interactive game called “balance the Budget” where you can adjust tax income and spending to balance the budget – then submit the results, which would be analysed and tabulated. The very act of fbeing forced to balance it would oblige people to get wise about how much get spent where and on what.
Of course the interesting thing about this ridiculous poll is that spending cuts are differentiated whereas tax income is just “Increase taxes? Y/N”. If the question was “increase income tax for earners over $200k? Y/N”, “Increase business tax on profits over $1B?Y/N”, tax on bankers bonusses, import duties, VAT on luxury goods – you would find that 5% unwinding pretty quickly. Sounds to me that the poll is designed to get the result it got.

Yours respectfully,

Ernst

By: charlesj

charlesj — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Part of the problem is that the questionnaire presents a set of options, all displayed with equal prominence even though some categories consume vastly more tax dollars than others. It’s well known that the wording of survey questions can influence the outcome, but maybe it’s time to think beyond words and language. Mabye the problem is not with the specific wording but with the medium iteslf. Words alone are not adequate to communicate the question in a quantitative way, yet it’s impossible to give a sensible answer without some quantitative awareness. How about presenting questions in a more graphical format that will prompt people to think more quantitatively about their responses. The technology needed to do this is widely accessible. It’s time to try it.

By: apoxia

apoxia — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

The interpretation of this data is a little off. The table does not show that “over two-thirds of Americans don’t want to reduce spending on anything, except foreign aid” – it shows that the only single service which has over two-thirds agreement on cuts is foreign aid. It also shows that 12% of the sample don’t want any of the services cut. It would be more accurate to say “88% of the sample wanted cuts in at least one area, with the most popular area to cut being foreign aid, with 71% support”.

By: Teller

Teller — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

“Americans insist on government benefits but don’t want to pay for them.”

Not sure what that means. I’ve paid taxes my entire working life, on everything I’ve earned and everything I’ve purchased. Who exactly are you talking about? Or am I way off base here?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

GTFO Iraq, concentrate on Afghanistan and then GTFO out there as well.

By: brianary

brianary — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

That’s the home owner tax, dad!

By: invictus

invictus — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

It’s somewhat encouraging to see 22% willing to cut defense spending, given that’s a ludicrously large portion of the discretionary budget.

By: wurp

wurp — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Beautiful comment! Thank you!

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

National Offense, I like that!!

By: lolbrandon

lolbrandon — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’m not an economist, but what if you took a few percent from everything? When I’m looking for ways to save, I don’t cut FOOD from the budget entirely, but I’ll do a little less of everything, including less dining out and less Trader Joe’s/more Wal-Mart groceries. Does cutting 2% from all of the above make any difference? Can education or the environment survive on 2% less?

By: nutbastard

nutbastard — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

*Cough*democrats*Cough*

Howabout this:

We cut military spending by 50%
We abolish the fractional reserve banking system
We legalize drugs, guns, and prostitution
We fire all chickenshit ticket-nanny traffic cops
We increase import duties and lower export costs
We make large public investments in developing a domestic energy supply
We release all nonviolent drug offenders from prison
We then abolish property and income tax
and fire all the bureaucratic fat that cannot convincingly and rationally justify their positions.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I want to give you an award. And hugs. So many hugs and awards. Hugs made of award statues. This is the best way of saying the simplest, most profoundly, unavoidably true facts of governing that somehow people (like nutbastard) somehow manage to miss.

By: Xenu

Xenu — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Newsflash: people want free stuff. More at 11!

By: Bryan Price

Bryan Price — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

There are actually three. The third is doing both. It really isn’t and shouldn’t be one or the other.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

That’s not a very good way to phrase the question. Raising the top tax bracket back up to 90%, as it was during America’s prosperous fifties and sixties, may be a far more popular step towards a solution.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

You’ve made a big arithmetical error. Consider just the two categories of ‘Science and Technology’ and ‘National Defense’, for both of which 22% of the population wants to cut spending.

To mean 78% of people want no cuts to either category, you must assume the two groups of 22% are the same. Not likely. With no overlap, 56% (100 – 22 – 22) people want no cuts to either. In reality, you can only say that between 56% and 78% want no cuts.

By: Jake Boone

Jake Boone — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’m not sure that you’re reading those results properly. They don’t say that “over two-thirds of Americans don’t want to reduce spending on anything, except foreign aid”. It could also mean that folks surveyed didn’t agree on precisely which categories should be reduced.

For the same reason you can have 100% election turnout yet have no single candidate gain a majority, you can have plenty of people expressing individual preferences without a single collective preference leaping to the fore.

By: PapayaSF

PapayaSF — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

The survey, the post, and many of the comments miss an obvious problem: the terms are so general they slant the survey. If you ask people if they want to "cut education," most will think of the wonderfulness of education and say "no." But if you ask them if NYC should cut the $65 million a year it spends on "Temporary Reassignment Centers" (a.k.a. "rubber rooms") for teachers accused of crimes up to and including molesting students, where they are paid full salaries for years to watch DVDs and play cards and sleep, I think you'd get 90% "yes" and 9% "Hell, yes!" Similarly, ask about "highways" and people think of maintaining freeways. But ask them what they think of the fact that 1,690 people at the Department of Transportation now make $170,000/year or more, plus benefits and pension and job security us peons can only dream about, and I'll bet you get a very different answer. (Oh, and before the recession started, only one person at DoT made over $170K.)

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Also, this chart doesn’t indicate how deeply the polled would cut these categories. The man who wishes to abolish the U.S. Dept. of Education (cutting the funding to zero) is lumped in with the man who wishes to trim 0.5% each from several different categories, including education.

By: coaxial

coaxial — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

And this is why California’s initiative system has crippled the state.

By: gastronaut

gastronaut — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I think death panels would be a great way to reduce federal deficits. Social Security, Medicare, and Veteran’s Benefits are all significant sources of spending and eliminating retired people would reduce them quite a bit. Eliminating retired people (if done after 1/1/11, when the estate tax holiday ends) would also trigger an increase in tax revenue as the estates of said people is taxed.
I suppose a similar approach could be taken with unemployed people, since they’re not generating any tax revenue either.
Sure- it’s a callous policy, but anything is better than raising taxes and becoming a socialist dystopia like, say, The Netherlands.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

How about we just cut the Government waste and fraud out of ALL these programs?

By: Junglemonkey

Junglemonkey — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I think I’m cluing in to why your name is “nutbastard” and not “economist.”

By: invictus

invictus — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Teller, I think you’re missing the point. Given that US government spending is in excess of tax revenues at this time, there are really only two choices: Cut spending or increase revenues. US voters, whether directly or indirectly, have approved of and accepted increased spending on government services. At the same time, they do *not* want their taxes to increase.

Your paying taxes for your entire working life doesn’t really say anything about the level of taxation. You could have made the exact same claim if you were paying $1 a year in taxes. The simple truth is: The current tax revenue is not sustainable at the current spending levels. There’s room for debate as to how the situation can be rectified, but you certainly *aren’t* paying enough taxes at the moment. No one in the US is.