Polls Suggest Americans Are Waking Up

Recent elections—the contest for Ted Kennedy’s seat in Massachusetts especially—suggest that something big is brewing in America. The Obama government-is-the-answer-to-everything agenda is evaporating. Pundits of every stripe are predicting a tidal wave in the November elections.

Two polls taken within the last month are especially revealing.

One is a Rasmussen poll indicating that only 11% of American adults think the federal government in Washington should increase its deficit spending (something which the President and Congress are actively trying to do with each passing day). A whopping 70% of Americans prefer to cut the deficit by cutting spending, and 59% say that increasing the deficit would hurt the economy rather than help it. Eighty-three percent say, according to Rasmussen, that “the size of the federal budget deficit is due more to the unwillingness of politicians to cut government spending than to the reluctance of taxpayers to pay more in taxes.” John Maynard Keynes must be rolling over.

Meanwhile, a  CBS News/New York Times poll just found that 70 percent of Americans are dissatisfied or angry with the way elected officials in Washington handle the business of the people. A remarkable 80 percent said that members of Congress are more interested in pandering to special interest groups than in serving the needs of people who elected them. A mere 13 percent believe that Congress represents the interests of the people at large.

Furthermore, the CBS/Times poll concluded that “Fifty-nine percent of Americans think the government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals, a percentage that has been consistent for many years. Fifty-six percent would choose a smaller government providing fewer services over a bigger government providing more services, up from 48 percent last spring and the highest percentage in more than a decade.”

These latest surveys come on the heels of a Gallup poll late last summer, which asked Americans this question: “How much of the time do you think you can trust government in Washington to do what is right—just about always or most of the time vs. only some of the time or never at all?” Only 19% responded “just about always or most of the time”—which I suspect may roughly correspond to the number of people at any given moment who are bought and paid for by the government, lying, stoned, drunk, deaf, out of their minds, or comatose. Eighty-one percent answered correctly—“only some of the time or never.”

The Keynesian idea that deficit spending stimulates never did make sense to me.  If government spends more than it taxes, it has to borrow the difference or print it. If it borrows it, then there’s exactly that much less capital available for private sector spending. If it prints the money, it just steals from everybody in the form of higher prices; if the economy gets a lift at all, it’s short-term and only because inflating the money supply sends false signals that eventually produce a corrective bust. If government spending stimulates, then how do the Keynesians explain the fact that after World War II when the U.S. government slashed its spending, the economy boomed?

After trillions in increased spending under Bush and Obama, we have a sick economy, struggling private businesses and a collapse of trust in government. Some politicians in Washington think all this is unconnected but I think the public is finally putting the pieces of the puzzle together nicely.