Depressing: Public wants more spending on individual programs, not less

The political problem, of course, is that Americans like the idea of reducing spending much more than they like actual cuts in specific government programs. In survey after survey they support spending more, not less, on most of the major programs that make up most of the federal budget. Will political leaders’ warnings of unsustainable, economically debilitating government debt be enough to convince the public to embrace austerity? A YouGov survey conducted just before the president’s State of the Union speech sheds some light on that question by gauging the impact of anti-deficit rhetoric on the public’s taste for spending on a variety of government programs.

One version of the survey simply asked respondents “whether you would like to see more or less government spending” in a variety of areas. (To instill a modicum of constraint, they were reminded that “if you say ‘much more,’ it might require a tax increase to pay for it.”) As in many other surveys of this sort, respondents displayed considerable appetite for government spending. For education, law enforcement, health, and pensions, proponents of spending increases outnumbered proponents of spending cuts by margins of 2-to-1 or more. The only area in which a majority of Americans supported spending cuts was culture and the arts. Unfortunately, that is such a small sliver of federal spending that eliminating it entirely would have only a barely perceptible effect on future budget deficits.