So 52% of Americans think they would be better off without Social Security, Medicare, the FDA, the FBI, the EPA, the FAA, the FCC, the Army, the Navy, NASA, the National Parks, rural electrification, the Interstate Highway System,and the Clean Air Act?
Fifty-two percent of Americans are nuts.
What bugs people, it seems, is taxes: 55 percent of respondents believe they get less value from the government than what they pay in taxes, compared to 37 percent who feel they get the right amount. Only 7 percent believe they get more value than they pay for in taxes.
When you consider that a lot more than 7 percent of Americans are getting more from the government in straight cash -- through social security, salaries, food stamps, pensions, and so on -- than they pay in taxes, this number is equally loony.
But of course Americans don't really want the government to be smaller. They want it to do more in a whole list of areas. As Ed O'Keefe summarizes,
although most believe the government is invasive, they want to see it more involved in protecting the environment, increasing access to health care, cutting poverty, setting educational standards, fighting terrorism and regulating gun ownership.All while spending less money! To repeat, 52% of Americans are nuts. Or maybe more.
You describe a serious problem, and I'm not sure that anything can be done about it. The US today reminds me of seventeenth-century Spain: the state is overcommitted in debt and pension payments and military entanglements, and the inhabitants' will to sacrifice financially, either by paying taxes or by giving up some of what they have been promised, is virtually non-existent.
ReplyDeleteThe problem has been around for my whole life, at least. I worry that it will only get worse over the next few decades. One of my worries has to do with public employee pensions. Governments at every level in the US have balanced the demands of their employees for higher salaries with resistance to higher taxes by kicking the problem into the future, that is, by offering public employees generous pensions instead of raises. Public employees are now retiring in very large numbers, and the money to pay their pensions just isn't there. Rising health care costs are another looming burden. It is easy to imagine a future in which our governments can't do anything new because all of their tax revenue is committed to paying for promises made decades ago.
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