American Dream
“Why do so many people support conservative policies that hurt them?” In These Times has a partial explanation:
For an important subset of these policies, the answer is simple: They don’t know the numbers.
Public opinion polls consistently show that people hugely overestimate the portion of public spending that goes to programs like welfare or foreign aid. For example, a Kaiser poll from the mid-’90s found that 40 percent of respondents ranked welfare as one of the two largest items in the federal budget, and 40 percent put foreign aid in this category. At the time, the two largest items in the federal budget were Social Security at 22 percent and military spending at 18 percent. The share of the budget going to Aid for Families with Dependent Children, the core welfare program, was less than 1 percent. Adding in food stamps, housing subsidies and other low-income programs could push this figure close to 4 percent. Less than 0.5 percent of the budget went for anything remotely resembling foreign aid.
The extent of this misinformation is important. If a person believes that 25 percent of the budget is already going to welfare, then she is likely to have a very different attitude toward further spending than if she knew the real numbers. She would believe that welfare spending is already imposing a substantial tax burden—one that must have a real effect on the living standards of many middle income families.
This overestimation of how many low-income people there are reminds me of something I came across in the 1990s while teaching about class inequality. In class surveys, my undergraduate students vastly overestimated the percentage of poor people.
At the same time, though — and this is what In These Times leaves out, though I imagine they’d agree — the students vastly overestimated the percentage of very rich people as well. As a consequence, many had an unrealistically high degree of confidence that they themselves would one day be wealthy. This inflated belief that they would “make it” added to student belief in the “American Dream,” converted in their minds from a stable job and decent house to early retirement with a multimillion dollar bank account.
Why support changing the rules if you think those rules will make you rich?
