A number of political websites are linking to this piece in The Economist and reproducing the chart below. I'm joining in because I think it's quite significant and says a lot about the big problems currently facing our country.
Folks were asked if they'd prefer to deal with the deficit by cutting spending or raising taxes. Cutting spending won big — 65% versus 5%. Okay…so what do you want to cut?
This roughly translates to "Nothing." The only thing a lot of people want to cut is Foreign Aid, which accounts for less than 1% of our spending. If you cut 50% of the budgets from the categories that got 25% or more in this vote, you might trim spending by another 4% or so. In other words, we want to cut spending but we don't want to cut spending.
Betcha within a week or so, someone puts up an interactive website where you get to see the deficit and then you click on, say, "Health Research" and then you say, "Cut it by 20%" and you see what that does to the deficit. Let me know if you come across such a site before I do. I doubt it will make a significant number of people understand the problem but it might make a slight dent.