States like New York should stop spending. But shouldn’t cut any programs.
Pew’s new poll on state government spending offers some interesting new snapshots of the public attitude on spending and the deficit.
Here are some takeaways.
Most Americans don’t want the Federal government to spend any more money to help bail out cash-strapped states and local governments.
So there you go, Albany. We’re on our own.
But when asked about cutting specific government services offered by state and local agencies most Americans said No and Hell no.
73% of Americans — a whopping majority — don’t want any state cuts to K-12 education.
71% don’t want any state cuts to police, fire or other public safety departments, either.
Okay, so how about health care? There’s been so much conservative rhetoric about “socialist” government spending on health programs. Surely we’re willing to lay off a few doctors and nurses.
Nope. 65% say states and local governments should keep providing all their current health programs.
The closest thing to a majority of support for cuts — and this surprised me — was 43% backing for cutting road and transportation spending.
I thought Americans liked infrastructure investment…
But even there, half of Americans were opposed to cuts.
If the Feds aren’t going to help out and states can’t cut anything, that leaves taxes — right? Wrong.
58% of Americans said no to the idea of raising taxes.
So here’s our quandary in a nutshell– and the reason I think it’s a dodge to blame our current fiscal mess on politicians in Albany and Washington.
Americans want big government. They love big government. So long as it comes free, or at bargain-basement prices. But I think it’s clear that the bill is coming due.
Your thoughts?
bret- where do you think the debt comes from? the two are not mutually exclusive. the chart showed the size of military spending compared to other expendeture, which add up to the larger national debt as a whole.
billions, trillions gazillions, those numbers are so big the begin to mean nothing. “we” need to look at the smaller parts that make up the whole to begin to conceptualize how to manage the whole. after 14 trillion, would fifteen trillion be the point where one would say “now we’ve gotten out of hand”. please, i went numb at 3 trillion.
Do the police only respond to “trailer park” dog piles?
You see it’s comments like that, that make me think, you think, “who you are” (inside joke, sorry)
When there’s a fight at my trailer park the last thing i would do is complicate thing by calling the police, i stay clear and i let fires like that burn themselves out.
I think you deserve your pension, you paid into it, and it is your money invested by your union to make a profit to afford to pay you (as well as a comfortable slab to the union bosses). every time the unions bargain for higher pay, eventually it trickles down to costing me more for bread. so you didn’t really win anything in the long run, and many others get squeezed more. i think it’s a push, but unfortunately unions can push harder.
when this country relies on making money by people using their hands, instead of money making money we will be more stabile, self sufficient.
as far as the link and the info in it -like i said that was random, the first of many results from a google search. i think it displays that our military budget alone is larger than the total gross capital of many countries.
we could scale it back a bit. i would like a new bridge rather than another half dozen f-14’s.
i would like the engineers in charge of inspecting those bridges to do their job, instead of day trading on the company’s computer and rubber stamping residential house plans on the side.
i worked civil service, as a P.E. for a few years, i watched most everyone around me worked harder at “keeping” their job than doing their work. appearances rather than substance. i watched my teamster’s union rep forget that he once worked a shovel, and watched him screw blue collar and white collar alike- and earned ALOT of money doing so… all in the name of feeding his family. i left that nightmare and decided to open a restaurant, way more satisfying and a more direct way of “feeding the family” (and no, you will never get the name of that place, and yes i wash my hands more than you even look at soap)
what drove you to a career in the police? availability or the true desire to help your fellow man? the need to be shot at? the need to jump in on that dog pile?
I bet the lure of bennefits and pension played a big part, bigger than your desire for justice in the community.
i don’t think firemen think running into a burning building is what initially drove them to choose that career as much as the benefits, property tax breaks, etc..commendable yes- but then do tax payers need to, say, sponsor racing teams to the budget tune of thousands?
“we” need to determine, define, the difference between need and want.
that’s the first step in a good direction.
plain and simple “we” truley need less than we want.
…..ps happy fourth to everyone….and remember to celebrate the fact a bunch of white, rich, slave holding, land grabing, malcontents didn’t want to pay taxes anymore.
We as in the collective “us” Tonto. Maybe we’ll learn not to let politicians lead us with no plan. Not to cut the military to the bone, only to have rebuild it at extra cost. Maybe that we need to just fight our fights and get the heck out. Maybe that we need to protect the homeland first.
Say no, me personally? I wanted to help people. And I wanted a career, not a job. Yeah, well, it was that or a fireman. I never gave retirement a thought honestly. It was just part of the package.
I’m all for cutting across the board. Unfortunately the vast majority doesn’t feel that way.
So where does that leave us, other than in $14 trillion in debt I mean?
Hey just say no, do you really believe that about this country?
i believe this country was a great idea started by great men corrupted over the years by the self-righteous, the greedy and their self-entitled offspring. they took an imperfect but admirable system and chipped away at it and manipulated it to their own bennefits, not to the bennefits of a whole. as humans it is what we are doing to this earth.
first off you can’t win a war waged on a “feeling”. terrorism is an adjective, not a noun. just like the war on poverty– how’s that one coming along? any body check lately?
the war against terror is like a war against herpes.
viruses run their course, we never kill them, they go dormant till the next flare-up.
for the earth, wars and upheavals are like viruses.
the thing we are trying to defeat is a group of people’s beliefs. right, wrong, or orange, you can’t force a mind to change beliefs.
you will never rid the world of all terrorists, nevermind 50, 100, 300, (whatever the count is) in a single country.
while we are fighting to rid the world of an adjective, (the cause is doomed from the start) they are fighting for their very existance. they are extremely motivated.
…way more motivated in this conflict than we could ever be–they “need” to resist or perish. they don’t even really “need” to fight, they “need” to hide. we however only “want” them to perish. really- really- “want”, but not “need”.
if the oppressed of iraq, afghanistan, pakistan, iran, truley wanted things any different, they would make it so–without our help.
if 300 al quiada can hold off what we, the largest military power on the earth, can throw at them; then why couldn’t the thousands of iraqi people, oppressed and out numbered, against impossible odds, why couldn’t they revolt from within and throw off the government that they do not want?
i’d say simply there’s no motivation. just “want”.
the men hidden in the hills of afghanistan will fight to their last breath, yeah- when we find them. in the meantime…they melt into the background like the horizon.
the cruel truth is we need to leave EVERYWHERE, and let the power vaccums take their toll, then homeostasis will return.
tell me how this is any different than the bail out debate?
1- leave it alone and let it correct itself. trying to fix it makes it worse, at best it does nothing anyway
or
2- throw resources into the hole in hopes it will cushion the inevitable and unstoppable fall, digging a deeper self perpetuating hole….
if we secure our house, the “terrorists” will have to pick another country to target, or try to return here for another attack. if they come here- then we can be the most motivated. an occupying force will never defeat the indigenous.
if they go elsewhere, then quite frankly that would create a TRUE ally for us to work with.
that’s how it works on earth. left alone, and in it’s own time, anything we do to it balances. the world works best on a simple principle:
low and slow. just like cooking pork.
haha, I like that; the war on terror is like the war on herpes.
You know a guy who I always liked; Tip O’Neill said that congress was unfortunately being taken over by millionaires idiot sons or something like that.