Americans Do NOT Want To Cut Government Programs
Conservatives sometimes assert and often imply that Americans want to cut government spending on social assistance and other programs. This is a myth.
In fact, when it comes to the types of programs that get most of the attention in our national debate, almost nobody supports spending reductions and, in many cases, there is strong support for increases.
Take a look at the figure below, which presents General Social Survey data for 2010. Each bar presents the distribution of responses to questions of whether the U.S. spends too much (red), about the right amount (yellow) or too little (green) on several different types of programs and public resources.
As a whole, the types of programs in this graph represent a very large share of total spending at all levels of
