Can Americans Make the Tough Choices?

The Center for American Progress, which bills itself as the liberal Heritage Foundation, has a really good pie chart of how the federal budget is split among the various areas it funds. I recommend taking a look, so you can see exactly where this massively oversized budget is going.

CAP also has a quick take- they call it an analysis, though it is far short of that- on where the money goes. In actuality, it discusses where Americans would cut the budget. Their findings, as correlated by the numerous sources the “analysis” cites, show Americans are mostly abstract about cutting the budget. According to CAP:

But, the American public’s disdain for “government spending” only holds up in the abstract. The public is much less willing to pull out the hatchet when asked about specific parts of the federal budget. That same Economist poll gave respondents a list of budget areas and asked them which ones should be cut. Only one area garnered majority support for reductions— foreign aid. And foreign aid makes up less than 2 percent of the federal budget even using the most expansive definition. Even eliminating it completely would have little discernible impact on the federal bottom line.

There was not even one other area aside from foreign aid where support for cuts cracked 30 percent, let alone 50, including everything from science and technology to aid to the poor. Support for cuts to two of the biggest budget items—Social Security and Medicare—didn’t even make it out of the single digits. And lest one think this one poll was an anomaly, recent polls from Quinnipiac and Democracy Corps confirm the overall message: people support the abstract idea of spending reductions, but don’t like actually cutting specific programs.

Americans need to make tough choices over the next several years to begin the long process of balancing the federal budget and eliminating our national public debt. CAP’s piece does a credible job of showing that, unfortunately, this may very well not happen. In particular, two segments of Americans deserve blame. First, young-and-middle-aged people don’t want higher taxes for entitlements they won’t receive. Secondly, old people don’t want to lose entitlement benefits for which they have been taxed; and middle-class America. Unfortunately, unless the sacrifices are made, our national debt will swallow this country whole. Hopefully, Americans will realize this and prepare themselves for the tough but necessary path to prosperity.

(For the record, I am one of the young people who doesn’t want to be taxed. I am all for cutting entitlements over time, slowly phasing people out of certain, among other ideas to balance the budget and lessen the debt. This is not fair to older people, but I think it’s the only viable option to kick-start the process. Otherwise, we’ll have to raise taxes, and that will devastate the economy. I have many other ideas, including ones I will address at a later time, but for the sake of this post I will stop with what I have above.)