Americans want it all - just don't charge them

This has been a familiar theme throughout the financial crisis. People say that deficits are a big problem and that governments should slash and burn, if necessary, in order to bring down debt levels. But nobody wants to cut Social Security, or Medicare, or defense, and at the local level, pensions and health care are pretty much off the table as well. That doesn't leave much to cut. From NPR:

Traffic-weary commuters can only honk in support when the president calls for stepped-up investment in infrastructure, as he did in Michigan last week. "If we want new jobs and businesses here in America, we've got to have the best transportation system. And the best communication network in the world," he said. "It's like that movie Field of Dreams. If we build it, they will come. But we've got to build it." A survey for the Rockefeller Foundation found overwhelming support for infrastructure investment.

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[But] survey respondents rejected the idea of paying for roads with higher gasoline taxes by a better than 2-to-1 margin. Additional toll charges were almost as unpopular. In other words, if you build it, Americans will come, so long as they don't have to pay for it. "The overarching problem is people want everything to change, and they want nothing to change at the same time," [says pollster Jay] Campbell says. "It puts elected leaders in a really tough position."

Also on NPR was an Steve Inskeep interview with former Sen. Alan Simpson, who co-chaired President Obama's fiscal responsibility commission. He insists that there's plenty to trim within the sacrosanct Defense Department.

SIMPSON: We found stuff in the Defense Department that you can't believe. Here's one for ya. There's a DOD health system, its separate for Veterans Administration, its separate from Obamacare. It affects 2.2 million military retirees. Their premium is $460 a year and no co-pay and includes their dependents and the cost to the U.S. is $53 billion a year.

STEVE: So maybe people ought to pay in a little more that's what you're saying...

SIMPSON: And, I'll tell you what, you mention that, here come the reserve officers, here comes the VA, the veterans groups and they'll rain boulders on your head. That's how you pass or kill something in this country, you use emotion, fear, guilt or racism, and I've been in them all - I did immigration, nuclear, Social Security, aging - I learned where the long knives are. And as long as people are buffaloed by that, and fogged by that on the basis of protecting their hide from any peril, as H.L. Mencken once said, we're in deep trouble.