Perry D.'s  Instablog

Americans want Congress to bring down a federal budget deficit that many believe is “dangerously out of control,” only under two conditions: minimize the pain and make the rich pay. 

The public wants Congress to keep its hands off entitlements such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, a Bloomberg National Poll shows. They oppose cuts in most other major domestic programs and defense. They want to maintain subsidies for farmers and tax breaks like the mortgage-interest deduction. And they’re against an increase in the gasoline tax.

...While they say they strongly support balancing the budget over the next 20 years, when offered a list of more than a dozen possible spending cuts or tax increases, majorities opposed every one of them except imposing a bigger burden on the rich.

Take out the growing 66% spending share of defense, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and interest payments that are mandatory (unless we default), and you're left with only 34% of the budget (and shrinking).




For those hoping Republicans or the Tea Party will push badly needed reform, the poll's message is "Get Real." There's little appetite among so-called "fiscal conservatives" for tough action to rein in spending and make the economy more competitive (or to even keep it as uncompetitive as it is now). Nearly 50% support higher taxes on the "wealthy." The survey suggests potential support for higher sales taxes (this is from Tea Party supporters), as though raising taxes and cannibalizing high-income employers will make the U.S. any more competitive, bolster the economy or throw off more tax revenue.
 

Eighty-two percent of respondents opposed benefit cuts to the Medicare health-insurance system for the elderly, with about half of Republicans wanting to see both the current Medicare and Social Security systems preserved. Just 35 percent of all respondents back a system in which government vouchers would help people pay for their own health insurance.“

Nobody wants to fail to take care of children who need medicine or the elderly,” said Tea Party supporter Randy Thorman, 45, a high school social studies teacher in Pryor, Oklahoma. “We don’t want to throw people out without some type of help.”

Three scenarios (not necessarily exclusive) appear more likely each passing day as the U.S. approaches its point of no return:

1. the U.S. will face a serious financial meltdown well within the next five years that dwarfs anything we've yet seen
2. the U.S. is doomed to a new Manifest Destiny of sclerotic, Western-European-style economic mediocrity, at best 
3. A authoritarian Pinochet-style president backed by a new incarnation of the Chicago Boys and an equally committed (and politically suicidal) party in Congress restores a true, robust, market economy in the U.S. -- in other words, a President willing to make the case to the public and move ahead against the will of electorate even if he or she can't make the case, expend all political capital in their first term and ruin their re-election chances by administering rapid, Polish-style, post-communism shock therapy to the psychotic patient.

#3 is the optimistic scenario.