You may remember that there were a series of comical interviews conducted with Republican leaders just after the midterm elections in which, after months of talking about how eager they were to cut government, they couldn't come up with a single program they actually wanted to cut. Republicans in the House have now finally come up with some cuts, which amount to $32 billion, or a whopping 2 percent of the deficit.
But it turns out it isn't just the elected Republicans who have trouble finding programs they want to slash. The University of Maryland's Program for Public Consultation has released the results of an interesting study, in which people were given the amounts spent on lots of different programs and asked which ones they would increase, decrease, or keep the same, in hopes of reducing the deficit. They were also asked about different kinds of taxes they could raise or lower. There are a lot of interesting results (you can perform the exercise yourself here), but this one stood out:
That's right: Independents cut the most from the budget, followed by Democrats, with Republicans and Tea Partiers bringing up the rear. A big part of the reason is that the things Republicans would like to cut (foreign aid! welfare!) are pretty small parts of the budget, while the things Democrats would like to cut, most important, defense, are much larger. In addition, and this is what you'd expect, Democrats were much better at finding tax increases to help cut the deficit.
Perhaps it's time we retired the term "fiscal conservative," unless we're going to use it to mean someone who talks about balancing budgets but is unable or unwilling to actually do so. At some point in the distant past, there may have been conservatives who were fiscally responsible in deed as well as word, but we haven't seen them around in the last 30 years or so.
