It’s Hard To Run A Democracy With An Ignorant Public

[DonViejo]

October 30th, 2013 12:00 am
Gene Lyons

“Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter.”

–Vice President Dick Cheney, 2002

Given the great hullabaloo in Washington over government spending, here are a couple of noteworthy facts. Under President Obama, the federal budget deficit has been more than cut in half, from a FY 2009 high of $1.55 trillion (largely inherited from George W. Bush) to an estimated $642 billion this year, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

However, a recent Bloomberg News poll shows that 10 percent of American voters are acquainted with this indisputable fact — 59 percent mistakenly believe that the deficit has risen under Obama. Another 26 percent think it’s remained approximately the same. It’s hard to run a democracy given such widespread public ignorance.

Militant ignorance, much of it. Fully 93 percent of Tea Party members subscribe to the false belief that government spending is skyrocketing out of control. No wonder they’re running around with their hair on fire.

But hold that thought, because there’s more: Measured as a percentage of the overall U.S. economy, the federal budget deficit has shrunk from 10.1 percent in 2009 to 4 percent today. Given increased revenue and decreased spending, the CBO projects the figure will decrease to 2.1 percent by 2015.

full article
http://www.nationalmemo.com/its-hard-to-run-a-democracy-with-an-ignorant-public/

[alc]

1. what is the public supposed to think? who should they believe?

They hear repeatedly "if you like your insurance/doctor, you can keep your insurance/doctor". Pretty simple and easy to understand.

That ends up not being true for everyone and a huge effort starts to defend those statements and even try to explain them as true with some convoluted description (as opposed the simple initial statement).

The explanations of why the initial statement was right are valid (and enough if you want to believe the best). But a simple statement rather than convoluted explanation is important to regaining credibility. And it should start with "we/I screwed up", not "you made some assumptions" or "you misunderstood".

Too many people have fell for too many "misstatements" over the last few administrations. Don't complain about their ignorance if you want to defend an alternate definition of the word "is" (I'm not directing that to DonViejo). Demand honesty from both sides on all issues & statements. Don't allow inferences from simple but important statements to be blamed on the public, especially when it's very likely that the speaker intended for those inferences to be made and believed.

[Zorro]

2. It's why Republicans have waged war on public education for the past 50 years

They don't want educated voters.

[JayhawkSD]

3. Not necessarily good news

For one thing, the president has very little to do with government spending. He requests spending, especially for things like wars, but it is Congress which does the actual spending. Congress, and only Congress, can authorize spending money by the United States. Yes, there is a large degree of blame attachable to Bush in that he promoted al lot of the spending by the Republican Congress, and a LOT of blame attaches to him for war spending.

Credit attaches to Obama in that he has reduced the amount we spend on wars, and that has been largely his doing. He has not actively promoted any cuts in defense or "national security" spending, and in fact has lobbyed for increased spending in both areas despite clear evidence that we spend far too much already.

Further, since the economy has not yet recovered from the recession, there is no real benefit from reducing the deficit. By Keynesian theory, we should still be running a deficit to continue jobs programs and stimulus programs to restore the domestic consumer economy. Oh, wait, I didn't mean "continue" there because we are not presently doing such things. We only had one little stab at that six years ago and gave up on it.

"Measured as a percentage of the overall U.S. economy," that is to say that pervasive "federal deficit as a percentage of GDP" has no actual meaning. When I was first becoming politically active, the federal deficit was measured as a percentage of government budget, a figure which is a meaningful measure of its impact. At some point that number became rather large and scary and economists, who did not want government borrowing to slow down because of its stimulating effect on the economy, began to measure it against the GDP instead of the government budget. There was something of an outcry for a brief time to the effect of "What does that even mean," but the enconomists buried us in baffling language and the new measurement prevailed.