News Alert: Americans Hate Taxes!

A new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll found that most Americans think "most taxes" are wasted. A surprising 74% of respondents felt that the government wasted most of their tax dollars and another 23 percent said they believed some of their tax dollars were wasted. There were, of course, differences between Republicans and Democrats: with nearly half of the former saying they were angry with the taxes they pay while only 29 percent of Dems feel that way (and 44 percent of Independents). It is interesting to contemplate these numbers in relation to the election of Obama. It appears that people want the government to solve their problems, but without the money necessary to do so. It also appears most people have not taken macroeconomics, which teaches us that government spending tends to have a multiplier effect (a dollar spent by the government adds more than a dollar to the economy). Of course, with all the talk of the deficit, it is not surprising that people think government is wasting money. But the larger issue of the notion that government is largely wasteful shows the power of conservative discourse from Reagan forward to lead people to believe that government is bad and markets implicitly good. While many see the partial lie in the later, their short lived faith in government after 911 (and arguably when voting for Obama) has been supplanted by the dominant conventional wisdom for the past 30 years. The most surprising aspect of this finding is the fact that people generally demand government intervention in bad times and expect a more laissez-faire approach when times are good -- but seem unwilling to count on the government even now to solve our persistent economic troubles.