the issue most conservatives have is not spending on essential government responsibilities - BUT rather the reality that the spending path we are on is unsustainable.
But, Steve, there is a lot of ignorance out there. Here, for example, is part of a post from one of the more vocal self-styled conservatives on SI:
Being a conservative, I believe firmly that the one task of the Federal Government is to provide for the defense and offense of the nation....The defense budget is about 1 to 2% of the budget-------before decimating the defense budget let's look at the rest of the trillions in debt that has been created under Mr. Obama.
I will leave her anonymous, but she is shrilly ignorant of the fact that defense is around 20% of the budget even if you only count what is in the official, "straightforward" DoD budget, and more like 35% or so if you look at the line items in other parts of the budget that are really for defense. And of course there was the piece below on how much the US spends on foreign aid. A lot of the hysteria you hear about the budget is grounded in complete ignorance. Which isn't to say that there isn't a problem, there clearly is, but....
American Public Vastly Overestimates Amount of U.S. Foreign Aid
November 29, 2010
worldpublicopinion.org
Questionnaire with Findings, Methodology (PDF)
As debates about how to deal with the budget deficit have heated up in recent weeks, a new WorldPublicOpinion.org/Knowledge Networks poll finds that Americans continue to vastly overestimate the amount of the federal budget that is devoted to foreign aid.
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 set of questions has been asked repeatedly since the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) first asked them in 1995, and it was subsequently asked by other organizations as well. Over the years the most common median estimate was that foreign aid represented 20 percent of the budget, most recently in a 2004 poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. |
