STORY THIS WEEK: NO MONEY, MO PROBLEMS - PUBLIC OPINION ON THE BUDGET 

President Obama unveiled his budget proposal last week, which aims to cut $1.1 trillion within ten years, while continuing to invest in energy, education, and transportation. Republicans decried the budget, proposing their own budget proposals that would make devastating cuts to healthcare, affordable housing, and eliminate dozens of programs. According to a recent Democracy Corps poll, the majority of the public (50%) supports the Republicans plan to cut $32 billion from domestic programs (the poll was conducted prior to House Republican doubling this figure), but upon hearing where the cuts would come from, support dros to 43%. A CBS News poll also found that Americans disapprove of Republicans' efforts to defund the healthcare law (55% disapprove - 35% approve). So, does that mean that the public favors Obama's budget? Not necessarily. 

The American public is quite contradictory when it comes to views on the budget. On one hand, an AP-CNBC poll found that by a 2 to 1 margin, Americans prefer cutting federal services to raising taxes (59% cutting services - 30% increasing taxes) to balance the budget.  And a CBS poll finds that 37% of Americans do not feel that "will be necessary" to raise taxes on people like themselves to balance the budget. What exactly are the services they want to cut? Well, very few.

A Gallup poll found that out of 10 proposed cuts (table below), the only area of the budget a majority of Americans support cutting is foreign aid (59% favor - 37% oppose), while a majority oppose cuts to arts and sciences, anti-poverty programs, and budget behemoths Medicare, Social Security, and defense (among others). A Harris poll confirms this finding; their poll provided 20 different areas of spending, and found that a majority only support cutting six, none of which comprise a sizable part of the budget (foreign aid, regulatory agencies, and space programs, among the six).  By comparison, Harris asked the same question of Americans in 1980, and a majority supported cuts to 14 of the 20 (see table below).

One potential way to explain Americans' support for cutting smaller programs is a fundamental misunderstanding about how much of the budget these programs comprise. A World Public Opinion poll found that Americans believe that foreign aid is 27% of the overall US budget and think an appropriate level for foreign aid is 13% of the federal budget. In fact, the foreign aid budget in President Obama's 2012 budget is less than 1%.

Conversely, many Americans also underestimate the size of the larger budget items, defense in particular. A Zogby poll found that three-fifths of Americans underestimate the size of the defense budget. According to Gallup, only 58% of Americans realize that the US spends more on national defense than any other country (it spends 7x more than China, the nation with the second largest defense spending). A Pew survey found that only 39% of Americans knew that the US spends more on defense than on education, Medicare, or interest from the national debt.

The public does not put their trust in one single person or organization to resolve issues with the deficit and budget. According to CBS, 42% of Americans trust President Obama to lower the deficit, the same number as trust Republicans in Congress, while one in ten voters do not trust either side.