The stupid and the mistrustful make deficit reduction very hard

We all know by now that large majorities of Americans think that 1.) the deficit is way too large; 2.) feckless politicians need to cut "waste," namely foreign aid; 3.) the military, Social Security and Medicare are sacrosanct; 4.) politicians in Washington can't be trusted.

Yet, we know that we spend a tiny portion of the federal budget on foreign aid and the military, Social Security, and Medicare account for 50% of federal spending. There isn't a whole lot of "waste" to cut that would result in any meaningful reduction of the federal deficit.

With that in mind, exacerbated by point #4, #1. is going to be very difficult to address.

Basically, the federal government spends money on programs that are popular, which makes reductions in spending politically difficult. In practice, populist mistrust of government seems to me to make it more difficult to grapple with the issue. If people were generally inclined to trust government officials, then people saying “reducing the rate of long-term growth in Medicare spending is necessary to prevent the country from going bankrupt” then the public might support reducing the rate of long-term growth in Medicare spending. But insofar as people are convinced that all the money is going to (presumably non-white) moochers while feckless politicians try to steal from deserving seniors, veterans, and soldiers then operationally it’s going to be very hard to persuade people to take specific steps that save non-trivial sums of money.

So, it's particularly interesting that in countries where the government is relatively popular, reducing government spending has been far more attainable.

The received wisdom in the United States is that deep spending cuts are politically impossible. But a number of economically advanced countries, including Sweden, Finland, Canada and, most recently, Ireland, have cut their government budgets when needed.

Most relevant, perhaps, is Canada, which cut federal government spending by about 20 percent from 1992 to 1997. The Liberal Party, headed by Jean Chrétien as prime minister and Paul Martin as finance minister, led most of this shift. Prompted by the financial debacle in Mexico, Canadian leaders had the courage and the foresight to make those spending cuts before a fiscal crisis was upon them. In his book “In the Long Run We’re All Dead: The Canadian Turn to Fiscal Restraint,” Timothy Lewis describes Canada’s move from fiscal irresponsibility to a balanced budget — a history that helps explain why the country has managed the current global recession relatively well.

To be sure, the spending cuts meant fewer government services, most of all for health care, and big cuts in agricultural subsidies. But Canada remained a highly humane society, and American liberals continue to cite it as a beacon of progressive values.

Counterintuitively, the relatively strong Canadian trust in government may have paved the way for government spending cuts, a pattern that also appears in Scandinavia. Citizens were told by their government leadership that such cuts were necessary and, to some extent, they trusted the messenger.

And, to be sure, distrust of government has been a fact of life in the U.S. since the Vietnam War and Watergate, but the levels of distrust reflect the economy.

Note that massive rise in trust during the 1990s, which corresponded with an economic boom. Conservatives always convince themselves that any positive turn in their political fortunes must result from Americans awakening from their misguided and flukish embrace of Democrats and embracing their small-government roots. The truth is that Americans may oppose spending in the abstract but they favor it in almost every particular. Indeed, one of the Republicans' most powerful attacks on Obama was the charge that he'd cut Medicare, which explains why Kristol has been urging his party to undo Obama's Medicare cuts.

The path seems pretty clear, doesn't it?