Stupid is as stupid does

The handful of you who read this blog probably also read Paul Krugman, so you’ve seen today’s column on the federal budget. As an introductory note, he writes:

How can voters be so ill informed? In their defense, bear in mind that they have jobs, children to raise, parents to take care of. They don’t have the time or the incentive to study the federal budget, let alone state budgets (which are by and large incomprehensible). So they rely on what they hear from seemingly authoritative figures.

And what they’ve been hearing ever since Ronald Reagan is that their hard-earned dollars are going to waste, paying for vast armies of useless bureaucrats (payroll is only 5 percent of federal spending) and welfare queens driving Cadillacs. How can we expect voters to appreciate fiscal reality when politicians consistently misrepresent that reality?

Budgets are, in terms of numbers, pretty transparent things: you take in a certain amount of money, you spend another amount of money, and you try to keep the two balanced while meeting your needs and satisfying your desires. For households, it’s relatively simple because, when we do bother with budgets (which few people do), we know what the expenses are for. With government, we rarely have any idea what the money is actually being used for.

We do know, as it turns out, that we know just enough to know what we don’t want cut. And, as Krugman points out, what we don’t want is the money that comes to us. If we benefit from tax-and-spend, we support tax-and-spend. Please Congress, cut someone else. Anyone else.

America needs a basic and simple education on taxes and spending. Americans need to know that they are, among the “advanced” industrialized nations, one of the lowest taxed — and poorest served. They need to learn some very simple truths: education and transportation each accounts for approximately 2% of the federal budget (hell, we have to start by explaining the difference between “discretionary” and “mandatory” spending). The “national defense” sucks up more money than anything, and, frankly, we get little economic good from having billions of dollars poured into fighter jets and battleships (after these are built, they don’t create many jobs, not the way the money one fighter would, when spent on education). Social Security takes a bunch of money, but that comes from its own dedicated source.

This isn’t rocket science, not for the purposes of creating an informed electorate, but an informed electorate causes even more trouble for politicians as does an ignorant electorate; the latter, at least, is open to manipulation. As progressives, we need and welcome information. Yes, it makes the business of government more difficult, but we have seen the damage done by in uninformed or misinformed electorate. The former is, at worst, a necessary evil we should strive to encourage. Americans who see their worlds falling apart should not be blaming hungry children, public employees, or families dealing with long-term unemployment. As long as we feed our riches to the Pentagon and the uber-wealthy while starving the middle class out of existence, we’ll continue on this downward trend.

We don’t need a nation of economic genuises. We just need an electorate that knows what the hell they really should be angry about.