Paul Waldman explains how basic misunderstandings about government benefit the right.
For as long as researchers have been asking about it, Americans have expressed a jumble of contradictory feelings about government. They say they want government to be smaller, yet if you ask them about programs one by one, they support spending more on almost everything government actually does. There are some exceptions, like foreign aid. This, though, is likely built on the strange yet widespread notion that foreign aid takes up a huge portion of the federal budget; surveys find that if you ask Americans how much of the budget is taken up by foreign aid, the median estimate will be around 20 percent — or 20 times the actual figure. Similarly huge amounts are believed to be spent on “welfare,” while the actual spending for that program (now known as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, or TANF) is likewise less than 1 percent of the federal budget. In addition, most people think that the majority of welfare recipients are black, which is also false.
Their Own Facts.
