Tag: federal deficit

A recent Fox News poll¹ finds that 75% of respondents consider “almost all or a great deal” of federal spending is wasteful:

In real world fiscal terms, half of federal spending pays for Social Security, Medicare, and interest on the debt:

Other poll results have found strong support for Social Security (see here and here) and Medicare (here). People like spending on those programs and do not want it cut and often favor spending even more. Of course, responding to a poll (it’s hard to get people to answer pollsters’ calls) does not require passing a logic or consistency test.

On a related topic, the Fox News poll also finds most of its respondents overwhelming think US taxes are too high. Despite the 2025 tax cuts enacted in OBBBA, that sentiment grew by 10 percent points between 2025 and 2026:

America’s taxes are very low by international standards. Here’s a TPC graph of the US’s tax levels compared with other countries:

What makes this perception even more off is the reality that America’s lower tax burden is also distributed much more progressively than that in most countries. The US heavily relies on a progressive income tax and has no broad-based national consumption tax unlike every other OCED country. That means average income people (i.e., those presumably responding to these polls) are paying even lower taxes than comparable cohorts in other countries. Put another way, affluent people in America are carrying more of the (albeit lighter) fiscal load. But the poll respondents still think they’re getting a bad deal.

I think these are the real-world political effects of the anti-tax political rhetoric that the American people have been relentlessly bombarded with over the last 45 years. These misperceptions cannot be easily corrected, given the polarized political and media environment. A fine mess you’ve gotten us into, Grover Norquist specifically and the Republican Party more generally.

Notes

1. Fox News is mainly an advocacy operation, not a news organization, as revealed by the discovery in the Dominion lawsuit and detailed in the book, Network of Lies. However, the Fox News poll is generally considered a well-regarded poll that is not considered to be tinged by the organization’s clear political and partisan bias. ↩︎