When I first saw this polling data, I thought we had some great news. After all, it shows that Americans – by a margin of more than 4-to-1 – want to reduce the burden of government spending.
This comports with data from previous polls, including the recent survey showing nearly three-fourths of Americans don’t think Obama’s spending helped the economy, the 2011 poll showing Americans overwhelmingly view big government as the greatest threat to the nation, the strong support for spending cuts in a survey earlier that year, and the 2010 poll revealing that Americans saw excessive spending as the real fiscal challenge facing the country, not deficits.
But then I noticed that Americans in this new survey are to the left of both the French and the Italians. That’s embarrassing. Sort of like losing a foot race to 500-lb elderly lady with one leg.
This isn’t the first time that Americans have lagged some of their European counterparts. Back in 2010, I reported on a survey showing people in the U.S. were to the left of both the Germans and the French.
How shameful. Now the old lady is blind as well, but still beating us.
But let’s conclude by looking at the glass as being half full. At least the American people are to the right of Obama. His most recent budget proposed to increase the federal budget by $2 trillion over the next 10 years.
Only 14 percent of the population is crazy enough to think that’s a good idea.
P.S. The United Kingdom is the only country where more people want to increase spending rather than cut spending. Not a good sign for that nation’s future. Seems I was quite prescient back in August.
P.P.S. As you can see from this post, if we simply freeze spending (i.e., keep the current level of spending), the budget is balanced in about six years.
[…] But I also was shocked to see another poll that found French and Italians were more supportive of spending cuts than Americans. […]
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On the “don’t despair yet” — or perhaps “don’t get your hopes too high” — may I point out that, at least as of the most recent figures I could find, namely 2007 which is admittedly before Obama, US spending as percent of GDP was significantly less than France and Italy. While our numbers have soared and France’s have come down some (I don’t know about Italy), I think they’re still above us. So maybe if France and Italy were spending what the US is, the people there would consider that just right.
Theoretically, to get a fair comparison you’d have to ask how much people think the ideal amount of government spending is. In practice, I don’t such a survey would be meaningful, because I suspect most people have no idea how much the government is actually spending, and fewer still could tell you where the money is going.
Honestly, I cannot see this data being accurate about the French. The ideal job young French people dream of today is a safe civil service job or similar. French parents count on all the govt handouts they get for having babies and for educating their children and for paying rent as leverage to get banks to give them loans to buy homes/vacation homes. They cannot bear the thought of cutting back on the right to early retirement and their long paid vacations. Teens destroy university buildings when someone starts talking about making them really pay for their university educations. This is not a country that wants or dreams of small govt. For most French people, the State is supposed to take care of them, period. Yes, there are fiscally conservative French people. The French are known for having lots of savings. But, no wonder! They are very assisted. Despite a high tax rate, the middle class and upper middle class don’t really complain because once you have a long-term work contract, you basically have a job for life, unless your boss can find a way to make the work tribunal believe you committed a gross error on the job. Even the chronically unemployed demand Xmas bonuses as part of their unemployment benefits, so, frankly, I don’t believe the figures you’ve got reflect life in everyday France at all. Of course, they do SAY that the govt spends too much, etc. But it’s all talk. They complain about the cost of Europe and over-regulation but the French political class has embraced the cushy jobs and lavish expense accounts afforded to them when they go work in Brussels and Strasbourg. They praise their new president for cutting his salary yet willfully ignore that he has reverted back to the no-oversight spending of the time before Sarkozy. (Sarkozy raised his salary but did away with the spend-as-you-will president’s budget and, instead, took care of many expenditures with what he was paid. Of course, the media in France never mentioned the second part, only the part about ”raising his salary”.)
I could go on forever.
Interesting take… I like the topic of this blog… The liberty movement is so concerned with America that we forget the we were created to be a city on a hill for the world to see..
The fact that more than half of the US population want to cut spending should be reason enough for cheer, independently of what other people think … and if other people think the same, more reason for cheer!
The 2010 survey does not seem directly comparable: it was more about “stimulus” than about spending per se; more Keynesian than socialist.
If we take the approach of cutting back government to the core functions outlined in the Constitution and either downloading to the states or creating interstate compact bodies to handle the rest…could we get to budget sanity? At least with interstate compacts we can acknowledge that something isn’t the job of the federal government and let the states work out among themselves a solution to it…