Once again, just watching the same poll data over and over again: we want to solve what we believe are budget problems, but we don’t want to actually take any of the steps that are being presented as options:
Two in Three in U.S. Say Their State is in a Budget Crisis.
There are a number of issues with the entire concept of this article. For example, two in three people in the US think their state is in a budget crisis. Well, how many of them were actually right? Of those polled, how many lived in states with actual budget crises and how many were not?
This strikes me as a quantitative question with a right or wrong answer. That two in three Americans see it the same way is probably telling in its own right: it seems like the Republican message is getting through, if not the appetite for their remedies. But there is a real baseline here to compare and contrast with, so why is that not included in the report?
The other problem is that, as is the typical blind-spot for polls, multiple choice questions leave us with only one predefined set of answers. Gallup to their credit chose the more common methods of budget cutting, but the choices were all budget cuts. And the problem with that is: we didn’t need to cut the budgets when we were making money in this country. Nowhere in there is the option to “put people back to work and raise tax revenue,” though this is in reality the only measure that works.
I’m not arguing that budgets can’t be cut, that bloat doesn’t happen, that success doesn’t hide a multitude of sin. I’m saying success hides a multitude of sin.
