Spending cuts conceptually and in reality

Building off last week's 2302 discussion of budgeting and the problems with trimming the budget, here is a year old Gallup poll showing that - with the exception of foreign aid - a majority of Americans oppose cutting specific budgetary items, even while saying that there is too much spending overall. This is a common finding, one that is repeatedly yearly and points to the difference in how the same issue can be seen in two different ways depending on whether it is an abstract consideration, or a specific, tangible  one that can hit us in the pocketbook. We really don't like cuts in those areas that benefit us.

Here are the results:



Clearly Education, Social Security and Medicare are programs that everyone believes benefits themselves - at least at some point in their lives. Not so foreign aid, which probably explains why a sizable majority supports cuts. They see no tangible benefit to it. Some do clearly so its probably worth wondering whether those who support it live somewhere the economy is tied into trade.

The other point to be made about attitudes towards foreign aid - and it could be applied to other areas as well - is that people tend to greatly over-estimate how much money is spent on it:

Asked to estimate how much of the federal budget goes to foreign aid the median estimate is 25 percent. Asked how much they thought would be an "appropriate" percentage the median response is 10 percent.

In fact just 1 percent of the federal budget goes to foreign aid. Even if one only includes the discretionary part of the federal budget, foreign aid represents only 2.6 percent.

This is quite the ironic result.