don't ask for nothing!
If you are nothing,
don't ask for something!
- Arcade Fire, Neighborhood
As regular readers of this blog will note, the SMB has always tried to be the voice of reason in the noisy debate about the American deficit.
We're very fond of this role. It's not terribly difficult, doesn't involve a great deal of strenous research, and allows us frequent use of the term "dangerous idiots" along with plenty of time to drink red wine.
So we found this survey interesting. Follow along as we quote Ryan Avent, quoting Matthew Yglesias, paraphrasing the survey in question:
In this economy, voters are wary of raising taxes, even if the revenue raised goes to something they deem important, like paying down the deficit. A majority (51 percent) say that even though the deficit is a big problem, we should not raise taxes to bring it down, while only 43 percent say that we might have to raise taxes to reduce the deficit. This rejection is even more acute among the least educated and lowest income voters, who are being disproportionately hurt by the recession and as such are even more strident in their rejection of a new tax to pay down the deficit.
And by an even wider 2:1 margin, voters reject cuts in Social Security, Medicare or defense spending to bring the deficit down (61 to 30 percent). With nearly three-quarters of the federal budget devoted to these items, exempting them from cuts leaves little room to make realistic progress on deficit reduction...
Nearly half of voters think the deficit can be reduced without real cost to entitlements, with 48 percent believing there is enough waste and inefficiency in government spending for the deficit to be reduced through spending cuts while keeping health care, Social Security, unemployment benefits and other services from being hurt.
SweetfancyfuckingMoses. Pull yourselves together, people. Even in a country with the level of taste necessary to embrace James Patterson, William Kristol, and the musical stylings of Wham!, this is embarrassing. You can raise taxes. You can cut entitlement programs. But you cannot tightly shut your eyes, click your heels together, and wish aloud for the Magical Government Waste Fairy to alight on the CBO Projections with the gift of $1.4 trillion dollars of government waste a year.
Grow. Up.
