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Comment by jahnu | Hacker News Reader

> People are not against government spending because they are misguided

Really? I would bet that most people don't hold their views on government spending based on anything more than a gut feeling and what the political party they support and associated media tell them.

I believe this because time and time again we see surveys that show random groups of people have a very VERY poor idea of what the actual state the economy is in, what the history of the economy is, who increased the national debt, who decreased it and when, what inflation is actually at, how to plan for current and future interest rates and house prices, who can control energy prices, etc. And most importantly (to me anyway) how wealth and income is actually distributed. These are mostly indisputable facts that we can all look up but somehow don't.

So yeah I think we as a group are mostly misguided most of the time.

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There could be a lot of misguided people, but those are not the one engaging in this discussion right here, right now.

If the GP is misguided, points out how and why according to the content of his post, not some general platitude about potentially misguided people that aren't relevant here.

The discussion from the top used the term "people" in a very general way, at least to me, so I think my reply was relevant and I was asking you for more on your point of view. I now have a better understanding of what you mean because you clarified just now. However, you seem to have understood my point too so may I suggest in the interest of us all having a better time on here, that you to respond a bit more charitably when someone doesn't exactly get the point you are making. Thanks.

I did read your comment in a charitable way, which was why I replied as opposed to just ignore it. It's just generally a bit hard to get the wordings right in those kind of charged topic, so I opted for terseness. It might have come off as ruder than I intended, but that wasn't the plan.

The second half certainly wasn't directed to you, just more of a follow up as to why I wrote my original comment.

Thanks! I appreciate the response!

Another thing that people generally get wrong is what government spending goes on, with wide swathes of people believing that vastly more money goes to welfare than actually is the case.

> vastly more money goes to welfare than actually is the case

Federally, some kind of "welfare" comprises 60% of the budget[0]. Sure, you could argue that Social Security and Medicare are benefits paid for by what you put in during your working years, but that's just a facade over the fact that it is a transfer of wealth from those who are working to those who have retired from work.

I'm not sure what your definition of "vastly" is, but certainly there is a substantial amount of transfers from those who earn more to those who earn less. All of this is separate from a discussion on whether that is good for society, but the facts should be laid out.

[0]: https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function

In the US "welfare" normally refers to social assistance programs not social insurance. That is no one refers to social security retirement benefits as "welfare" even though technically it is a form of it.

The common trope is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_queen

My favorite statistic is that a decent number of people think that 25 percent of the US budget, over 1 trillion dollars, goes to foreign aid.

https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/what-every-american-shoul...

What's the entitlement slice of the pie up to these days in the US?

~73% of the federal budget is mandatory spending.

Of that, ~52% is Social Security, unemployment, and labor programs (or ~40% of the total). ~28% Medicare and other health programs (or ~23% of the total).

Military is ~11% of the total.

Interest payments are a bit over 4% of the total.

International affairs is <1% of the total budget.

https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-bud...

Not just that, but when polled on specific policy positions, people often agree. But when polled on the policy by name, they disagree. [or the inverse]

ACA is a great example. Most of the core tenets are widely supported across the population. But, ask conservatives about the ACA by name and they often claim it's an awful law.

Ask liberals about the ACA and they’ll say it’s an awful law too, because they want single payer. The ACA is the classic please nobody compromise.

Contrariwise on abortion it doesn’t matter whether you call it abortion, choice, life, murder, or whatever else, the divide in opinions remains.

Yeah, it's a consistent finding that opposition to social programs is largely driven by propaganda. Name the programs, it's "rah, wasteful, cut it!" Talk about what it does, costs, actual e.g. overhead and fraud rates, without naming it, and people are like "that's great! We should use that instead of the wasteful, useless, fraud-filled [name of program you just described]!"

Shit, last I checked IIRC most people don't even understand how marginal tax rates work, which is something that directly affects most of them, is relevant every single year, and that is pretty easy to understand.

It's a miracle our democracy works even as well as it does. But, these results shouldn't be surprising, when you think about it—the average Christian, for example, hardly knows a thing about the belief system they claim holds the key to eternal life(!!!), which you'd think they might take super seriously and study with fervor, but most apparently do not. Why would we expect people to understand government any better than that?

I doubt if they are misguided as much as simply don't have the time to understand the myriad financial/political issues in front of them. Even if they did, all most could do about it is type in all caps on some social media platform. That's when the rest of us ghost them.

It takes a cycle of about eighty years for one generation to really get burned. Then they learn all about economics, debt etc.

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