Posted by
Always To The Right on Thursday, March 10, 2011 1:25:41 AM
Fully 72 percent think reducing foreign aid would produce some sort of
“large” savings whereas 51 percent think reducing Medicare benefits
would produce savings that are small-ish. To jog your memory about
this, we could disband the U.S. military for a year — no funding for defense of any sort — and we would still be only about halfway
towards eliminating the annual deficit. Which makes me wonder: Is
there any meaningful distinction for most of the public between spending
they want to cut and spending that must be cut? Defense is
a big chunk of the budget relative to, say, earmarks, and tales of
Pentagon waste and the oft-touted stat about how we spend more on our
military than the next umpteen nations do on theirs surely resonate when
the public’s thinking about trimming budgetary fat. But where, oh
where, does the idea come from that foreign aid is some huge
fountain of red ink instead of Medicare? It’s chump change. The only
explanation I have for that distorted view is that foreign aid is
something the public’s willing to cut whereas Medicare, emphatically, is
not. Am I missing something here or are we really that deep in denial?