Matthew Yglesias writes that I was being "unfair" in pointing out that a majority of Republicans think that the government should provide health care for old people, but only about a quarter think it should provide health care for poor people.
That’s true, but also seems somewhat unfair. The gap is bigger for Republicans but it’s big for Democrats and Independents as well. This probably has something to do with ethnocentric attitudes and something to do with the fact that middle class people all aspire to be old some day and also to never be poor. But from a technocratic point of view, the public’s priorities are backwards here. Investing in the health of poor people is something that could very plausibly pay off down the road in terms of increased productivity and national growth. Investing in the health of a 80 year-old, by contrast, is bound to have pretty marginal benefits under any circumstance.
I think this understates the scale of the shift on the Republican side. Let's look at the chart again:
So the number of Democrats (73 percent) and independents (61 percent) who think government should provide health care for the poor is notably less than those who think government should provide health care for old people (88 percent and 77 percent respectively). But more than twice as many Republicans think the government should provide health care for old people rather than poor people.
Sure, as Yglesias notes, everyone gets old and everyone tries not to get poor. Almost everyone has elderly relatives but relatively fewer of us have poor relatives. But the plain fact is that Republicans have a lot more empathy for old people than for poor people. I don't think it's a coincidence that Republicans happen to be older on average. I think Yglesias is right that ethnocentrism has something to do with this as well; my point was just that this is the nature of activist government in America. We hate it in theory, especially when we think someone, somewhere, might be getting free health care. But we like the idea of getting it ourselves, someone "like" us, or someone we might someday imagine ourselves to be.
