Fiscal Conservatives Don’t Want To Cut Spending

Conservatives do a lot of posturing about the deficit, which they only discovered the existence of on January 20, 2009. I remember the good ol’ days of the early Bush presidency when the problem was the surplus. Well, conservatives are apparently extremely upset with the deficit now, but taxes are still bad (in fact we should cut more!). They believe the solution to the deficit problem is to cut spending. So, one polling organization, the American National Election Study asked conservatives what they wanted to cut (via Salon). Unsurprisingly, almost nothing:

Very few conservatives said they favored reducing (or cutting out altogether) spending on any program. The least popular program proved to be childcare — with a grand total of 20 percent of conservatives saying they’d slash it. The most popular is highways; only 6 percent want to cut spending there. Even bugaboos like welfare and foreign aid fare well, attracting the ire of only 15 percent of conservatives. Amazingly, the survey found that, on average, 54 percent of them actually wanted to increase spending.

Everyone wants to cut “waste, fraud and abuse.” The problem is, no one can ever name what specific waste, fraud or abuse there is, unless it’s someone else’s program. Perhaps if they were serious about budget cutting they have to use the trick you use with kids (one cuts, the other picks), Democrats will agree to a program cut like Republicans claim to want as long as they get to pick it. Sounds fair to me.