NY Times Identifies New Disease: Federal Budget Schizophrenia
It's been almost exactly a year since I posted about this poll that showed definitively that tea party supporters not only wanted to keep the federal spending they like, but in many cases wanted it to increase. They did this at the same time they were insisting the federal budget should be balanced primarily through spending cuts.
This excellent story from yesterday's The New York Times by Binyamin Appelbaum and Robert Gebeloff may use anecdotes to say the same thing, but it does so in an extremely well-written and highly convincing way.
The bottom line is the same as what the poll showed: The number of people who get federal assistance is much, much greater than is commonly admitted and those that get the assistance think they're "entitled" (Yes, I'm using that word very intentionally) to it. But these same recipients of federal benefits seldom, if ever, admit it (and never use the words entitled or entitlement) and often refuse to acknowledge that they take advantage of the spending.
In some cases they even deny that it is federal spending.
And if you ask them directly they want federal spending cut because, they say, the deficit and debt are killing them.
Like the poll, the story doesn't do much to explain how these widely divergent views -- I need, want and will take federal benefits but I hate federal spending -- can exist in the same person.
But regardless of the actual reason, the fiscal disorder the Times has identified -- let's call it federal budget schizophrenia -- goes a long way to explaining why federal budget politics is so difficult for the typical member of Congress. On the one hand your constituents want you to cut spending and not increase their taxes. On the other hand they absolutely don't want you to cut anything that's important to them. And in spite of what they say, much of what the federal government does is very important to them personally.
This is further evidence of what I've been saying for a while: Americans don't want less government, they want at least the same government as long as it costs less. With the exception of foreign aid, most Americans want the federal government to continue to do everything it's currently doing, they just want to pay less for it.
Red state entitlements
I also thought it was striking to see (in the graphics that were part of the article) how much "dependence" on federal benefits correlates with support for McCain in the 2008 election. The extreme example cited was Owsley County, KY, which has the highest per capita benefits (presumably because of black-lung benefits), and where Obama only got 23% of the vote.
Is it ignorance, hypocrisy or cognitive dissonance?
it's Lee Atwater's world, we're just living in it
Yes. It is ignorance, hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance. More specifically, it's the impact of the Southern Strategy.
The Republican Party’s four decades of antigovernment talking points have seeped into our public consciousness. In a large, complex, modern society, there will always be some private or public bureaucracy to be outraged about, if the goal is outrage.
We recently saw an orchestrated Republican flipout about a four-year-old, industry-favored, bipartisan bill about light bulbs. If they hadn't stumbled upon that reason to be furious, there would be a flipout about airline regulations, or tax forms, or shipping wine across state borders, or importation procedures, or the Third Amendment, or the absence of airline regulations, or whatever else could be mined for deceptive, inflammatory demagoguery.
The point of the resentment is the resentment. As Pat Buchanan wrote in his 1971 memo to Richard Nixon, working to heighten whites’ resentment about “the elitism and quasi-anti-Americanism of the National Democratic Party” would “cut the Democratic Party and country in half; my view is that we would have far the larger half.”
In 1971, that was a tactical gambit. Today, it’s the alpha and the omega of Republican rhetoric, policy proposals, and legislative effort. That’s why the Republican Party’s critique of Pres. Obama’s record on the economy consists entirely of lies, and that’s why GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney’s campaign is premised on telling inflammatory lies about America and the president.
There didn’t appear to be all too much antigovernment resentment during the Bush Jr. presidency, as the GOP pushed for Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, the executive’s asserted power to wiretap and to detain & torture US citizens without charges or a warrant, surpluses turned into deficits, the right in Raich v Gonzales to imprison folks for activity legal under state law, and the invasion for bogus reasons & failed occupation of an arbitrarily selected Middle Eastern country. (That's in some measure because the government was perceived to be targeting out groups, and to some degree because, in a worldview where everything about Republican identity comes down to tribalism, it's OK for a Republican president to do whatever he wants).
The cause of the receptivity to the talking points is the right wing’s efforts to gear up the resentment machine, which then trickles into the public consciousness. It’s not the result of anything that the government has done.
It's not cognitive dissonance
It's even simpler than that. Most of the people who accept government benefits while demanding that the government cut spending believe that they earned and deserve their benefits, but that is a significant number of people out there who didn't earn and don't deserve the same benefits. They don't want to cut everyone's benefits by 25% - they want to identify the 25% who are undeserving and cut their benefits to zero.
Small Quibble
Foreign aid is NOT the exception. If you look at how much people want spent on Foreign Aid compared to the 0.7% or less of the budget it takes up, they want more of that, too.