In the last few weeks we’ve
heard reports in the media about budget proposals emerging from Congress. There’s
the House Republican plan and the Senate Democratic plan. You’d be forgiven for
thinking that’s it, because for some reason almost no one discusses the third
congressional budget, that of the House Progressive
Caucus. I only know because I regularly read Paul Krugman, who wrote
a column about it last week.
Business Insider, a
business-oriented website, commissioned a poll in February asking people to compare
three different approaches to averting the sequester. These were basically
versions of the three congressional budgets. The winner was the Progressive
Caucus’s budget:
Surveys have found that asking people about just titles of plans or telling people who proposed policy changes the results, so the point of this poll was to see what people thought of the plans when they were fully explained, but also stripped of partisan labels…Surprisingly, the plan that polled the strongest was the House Progressive Caucus plan. More than half of respondents supported it compared to sequestration and just a fifth of respondents were opposed… Shockingly, 47 percent of Republicans preferred the House Progressive plan to the sequester. This means that Republicans supported the House Progressive plan just as much as they supported their own party's plan.
A “truism” about America is that we’re a center-right
nation. That might have been true in
the past (although I doubt it), but I think it is definitely not accurate now.
Polls regularly show that Americans support socialist government programs—as
long as you don’t use the word “socialist.” (Notice the beginning of the Business Insider quote: telling people
who sponsored a plan biases their opinion.)
