What Americans want

By R.A. | WASHINGTON

THE mysterious W.W., a colleague of mine at Democracy in America, is a great mind and a joy to read; I doubt I can match him for a turn of phrase. He puts the skill to good use in this post on American fiscal reform, but I fear that important complications have gotten lost beneath the vivid imagery. America's big problem, he suggests, is that it's simply too thick-headed to solve its fiscal mess. Polling shows that American voters vastly prefer easy and ineffective budget solutions to difficult and effective ones. They're against tax increases on middle- and low-income earners, against cuts to military spending and entitlements, but FOR large cuts to "domestic spending". My colleague writes:

[T]he CNN poll makes reasonably clear that Americans, despite the multitude of signs that we're up against it, still have our heads in cloud-cuckoo-land. There seems to be some kind of widespread delusion that a small tax increase on the rich, combined with cuts in not-very-important spending categories will somehow deliver us from fiscal ruin...

America is a scooter-bound glutton who, when its continuously increasing mass finally overwhelms the doughtiest scooter's capacities, shakes its fat fists like a mad baby and demands deliverance from the laws of physics. America needs an extreme makeover, a heavy dose of tough love. America needs to grow up and get real. But our politicians always only tell us how beautiful and brave we are here in the best country in the history of the world.

Let me first suggest that fiscal signs are more ambiguous than my colleague lets on. I trust the analyses showing that a long-term fiscal crisis looms, and I note that America's gross debt-to-gdp ratio is uncomfortably high. It's not obviously too high to sustain, however. It's far from obvious that swingeing cuts are necessary to right the fiscal ship—as opposed to, say, moderate increases in revenues combined with a meaningful slowing of the projected rate of growth of health spending. And markets, which should be heeded, could not be shouting any more forcefully that whatever cuts need to be made certainly don't need to be made now. I'm sure more than a few poll respondents are simply perplexed that anyone gives a damn about the "super committee" while unemployment is near 10% and a double-dip recession threatens.

But let's talk about the fat, ignorant American holding back progress on the country's fiscal issues, whatever their immediacy. Poll respondents are for things that sound easy and pleasant and against things that sound bad or unpleasant. Should we be surprised by this? I suspect that Americans are also against kicks in the head and for bacon genetically-enhanced to improve an eater's intelligence and virility. In their preference for the preferable and distaste for the distasteful, Americans are exactly like people most everywhere else. Perhaps the Germans relish painful cuts. They're the exception. Most people do not.

What is important to the process of fiscal consolidation is not what voters say they want. What's important is the interaction of the preference intensity of the electorate with the institutions of the government. Americans naturally want low taxes and generous benefits. That doesn't really matter. The issue, first, is how much they care about the benefits they receive and whether those benefits appear to represent a fair return on their tax burden. And the issue, further, is how well the elected government is able to translate preference intensity into policy.

I don't see Americans as fat, spoiled brats demanding to have their cake and eat it too, even metaphorically speaking. I see Americans as distressed by a dismal economy, frustrated at years of stagnant pay amid rising costs, and outraged by a system of government institutionally incapable of addressing basic concerns. Europe hasn't proceeded with dramatic austerity because austerity is popular in Europe. Oh no. Europe has proceeded with austerity because markets posed a real threat, because European parliamentary systems lack the anti-majoritarian bottlenecks that constrain America's government, and because European electorates accepted that policies they dislike were necessary to avoid potential outcomes they dislike even more.

Lampooning American voters as idiots living fat off the government teat obscures the reality of the present situation. Fiscal issues are not and should not be the principal worry in an America with high unemployment and rock-bottom sovereign-debt costs. And the difference in European and American policy outcomes isn't a matter of skull-wall width or body-mass index, but of objective economic situation and institutional design. If you're going to point fingers, point fingers there.