Mythical government waste

By Frank Moraes 

Conservatives have a special fondness for government waste. As I pointed out leading up to the Fiscal Cliff, John Boehner seemed to think there were wasteful government programs, he just needed Obama to tell him what they were. This goes along with polls that shows that the American people want to cut government spending. But when asked about specific programs, they always want to continue funding those -- in many cases they want to increase that funding.

There is one exception. Americans want to cut foreign aid. Of course, that wouldn't do much because foreign aid is generally a bit less than 1% of the federal budget. But Americans think it is much higher. An American Public Opinion poll from two years ago found that the median American thought that foreign aid was 25% of the budget. So there you have it! In the minds of most Americans, we could balance the budget and then some (Quite some!) if we just stopped handing money out to people who hate us.

This kind of thinking is pushed by the conservative movement without actively lying. It is the reason we have Republican politicians constantly talking about "waste" without mentioning what the waste is. It is just a given that the government wastes money. When they do, they present spending on projects that sound wasteful but almost never are.

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A survey on the role of emotions in politics

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Please do me a favour -- and, more importantly, a favour for academic research.

I was contacted recently by a team of researchers at Appalachian State University in North Carolina that is currently studying the role of emotions in politics. They're conducting a survey that they hope will help them with their research. I can't take the survey myself, as I'm not a U.S. resident, but they tell me it only takes a couple of minutes. Their work looks extremely interesting and I'm eager to help them out (not least because they're fans of The Reaction and reached out to me and readers of this blog for our feedback). I'll post on the results of their research when they're done.

Please take a few minutes to do it. Here's the link to the survey:

http://www.appstate.edu/~hartmantk/survey.html

Thanks.