Declining Support for More Spending
The Pew Research Center has come out with the report of its latest survey on trends in political values. There is much interesting stuff here. For example:
The public continues to broadly support stricter environmental laws and regulation, but its willingness to pay higher prices, and suffer slower economic growth for the sake of environmental protection has declined substantially from two years ago. In the new poll, 51% agree that protecting the environment should be given priority even if it causes slower economic growth and some job losses, down from 66% in 2007. At the same time, the share saying that people should be willing to pay higher prices in order to protect the environment has dropped from 60% in 2007 to 49% currently. This represents a 17-year low point on this measure. Surprisingly, declines since 2007 in support for economic sacrifices to protect the environment have been particularly large among young people and political independents.
These results suggest one reason cap-and-trade is having trouble in Congress. Imagine what might happen if the public actually had to pay more for Obama’s green agenda.
The results are also consistent with the hypothesis that support for government spending should begin to decline almost immediately after Obama took office.
Obama the Planner
New Republic editor John Judis has a couple of insights about the Obama administration’s economic and social goals. He points out that, for more than a century, Progressive and free-market forces have gone through cycles of “reform and reaction.”
The Progressives — who my friend John Baden calls the “American counterrevolutionaries” — have repeatedly sought to increase the size and scope of government: railroad regulation, public land agencies, and the income tax in the 1900s; Social Security, low-interest home loans, and government ownership of power plants in the 1930s; Medicare, the war on poverty, and environmental laws in the 1960s.
In between, friends of free markets tried to roll back those reforms, but were never completely successful. Thus, each successive reform era has further increased government power and reduced free markets.
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