Do Americans overestimate what we spend on "foreign aid," or do they just have a different definition of "foreign aid"?

From 2018:

You’ve probably heard the statistic: “On average, Americans think 28 percent of the federal budget is spent on foreign aid, when it is about one percent.”

Reporters repeat versions of this “foreign aid” factoid all the time, sometimes with a certain anti-populist glee. As Ezra Klein notes, the foreign aid budget estimate is the “example budget wonks turn to when they want to underscore the public’s ignorance.” [Washington Post link.] ... A 2012 opinion piece in USA Today cited the foreign aid statistic to make the case that “not everyone should” vote.

In other words, the public’s foreign aid budget estimate underwrites an awful lot of doubt about the capacity of Americans to judge public policy.

The problem is, that statistic is quite misleading.... Americans commonly think of foreign aid as including military spending—and no surprise, given America’s enormous military budget, this inflates their estimates of the foreign aid budget....

When leaders use the language of humanitarianism to describe military endeavors, it is no wonder many Americans see defense department expenditures as a kind of foreign aid, and assume our foreign aid budget is enormous.

Also, people like to say foreign aid is only about 1% of the whole federal budget, but Wikipedia says it's about 8% of the federal deficit. That's significant. And we’ll be paying that back with interest in the future.

President Trump shares fake news about his approval rating

President Donald Trump said “Great news!” when tweeting this image from Fox News, which says “TRUMP’S SOARING APPROVAL” at the top, and then “55% OVERALL.”

Great news! #MAGA pic.twitter.com/haZ1HbVpNu

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2019

Sounds impressive! Except for one slight detail: according to the same poll that was the basis of the Fox News report, 55% is actually his disapproval rating. His approval rating is only 43%. And he calls other people fake news . . .

Mo Elleithee, director of the Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service (which conducted the poll), tweeted back:

I’m the Director of @GUPolitics & this graphic is incorrect.

The Battleground Poll shows 58% approval on the economy.

But it shows only 43% overall approval, & 52% disapproval.

The 55% number is the President’s unfavorable rating. (Only 40% favorable.)https://t.co/a00b6ljiJl https://t.co/nntXuHaUKj

— Mo Elleithee (@MoElleithee) April 11, 2019

Some other Twitter users have a theory:

My guess is that Fox posted the bogus graphic knowing Trump would tweet it. Now they can claim it was a mistake but most of their viewers will believe it's true.

— Ed Krassenstein (@EdKrassen) April 11, 2019

Epistemic closure

Public Policy Polling says that "Republicans are taking the results [of the election] pretty hard":

49% of GOP voters nationally say they think that ACORN stole the election for President Obama. We found that 52% of Republicans thought that ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama, so this is a modest decline, but perhaps smaller than might have been expected given that ACORN doesn't exist anymore.

Abortion, same-sex marriage, and gun control

Here are some interesting poll results on American adults' views on those three social issues:

• Abortion — There's no significant gender gap on whether it should be legal. Only 4% more women than men think it should always or usually be legal (55% and 51% respectively). There's essentially no difference based on age. There's a huge education gap: 61% of college graduates generally support legal abortion, whereas the figure is just 46% for those with only high school or less (and 57% for Americans who have been to college but haven't graduated).

• Same-sex marriage — Support for it is rising dramatically. Just two presidential elections ago, in 2004, twice as many Americans opposed it as supported it. Now, slightly more Americans are for it than are against it. In 2004, more than three times as many people "strongly" opposed it (36%) than "strongly" supported it (11%). Now, the number's the same — 22% feel "strongly" each way.

• Gun control — Opposition to strict gun control laws is skyrocketing among blacks and whites. Blacks have always been much more likely than whites to support gun control. But the percentage of blacks who say gun rights are more important than gun control (35%) is now as high as the percentage of whites who said so 20 years ago (37%). A majority of whites take that view now (57%).

(This is from a Pew Research Center poll where they called landlines and cell phones, and then weighted the results based on how much people actually use landlines vs. cell phones.)

Obama's focus on income inequality . . .

. . . looks like a good way to lose the election.

Cain leaves everyone else in the dust in the latest Zogby poll.

I don't put much stock in national polls as a predictor of who will win the primaries, since the real primaries and caucuses are done state by state, giving certain states a huge amount of power and making others irrelevant to the outcome.

But national polls can still show an overall trend in a candidate's popularity, and the latest Zogby poll is amazing: Herman Cain is the frontrunner by a 20% margin. I almost did a double take to make sure 20% didn't refer to the total support for Cain. No, that's how much more support he has than the second-place candidate, Mitt Romney.

Cain has 38%. Romney has 18%, which is as much as he's gotten in any Zogby poll.

Rick Perry? Just 12% — less than a third of Cain, and tied with Ron Paul. Each of the other 5 candidates has less than 5%.

Uncannily, the Cain/Perry divide was almost exactly flipped in Zogby's poll on September 12: Perry 37%, Cain 12%. (The second of Perry's 3 debates happened on the evening of September 12, and he hadn't yet given his worst debate performance yet.)

Jon Huntsman finally wins a straw poll.

TalkingPointsMemo reports:

The results are in from the straw poll conducted at the Take Back The American Dream conference this week . . . .

An overwhelming 49% of [337] straw poll voters at the progressive conference said Huntsman is the Republican “most qualified to be president” from a field of 11 that included the not-running Sarah Palin, the not-running Chris Christie and the still-kind-of-thinking-about-it Rudy Giuliani.

TPM notes that his victory among liberals is either "very good" or "very, very bad" for Huntsman.

Rick Perry is in "free fall."

So says TalkingPointsMemo, reporting on a new poll from Florida:

Perry dropped from being tied with Romney at 25 percent apiece in a pre-debate poll from the same firm ten days ago to having 9 percent support from the the Florida GOP. [Mitt] Romney moved up slightly and [Herman] Cain essentially took support from Perry on his way to second place.

Here are the poll results, from a sample of "likely voters":

Romney 28%, Cain 24, [Newt] Gingrich 10, Perry 9

Wow.

And Perry was going out of his way to court Florida:

On the morning of the [Florida straw poll] vote, Perry shook hundreds of hands, signed autographs, posed for pictures, and made small-talk with the delegates. He also met privately with party leaders, elected officials and key activists. He spent lavishly to woo the straw-vote electorate—including a large buffet breakfast spread on Saturday morning offered gratis to every delegate.

Herman Cain is polling just 2 points below Rick Perry.

A statistical tie, in this FoxNews poll. Cain has jumped from 6% in last FoxNews poll to 17%. FoxNews declares that he's now in "the top tier." Wow.

And Mitt Romney is leading, though all three of them are technically in a statistical tie: Romney 23%, Perry 19%, Cain 17%, with a 5% margin of error. (Full poll results.)

The poll might be misleading, since it was taken right after the glowing media coverage of Cain for winning the Florida straw poll. But if you're Rick Perry, you have to be worried that even one outlier poll is showing you neck and neck with Cain.

Incoherent views on taxes, spending, and the deficit

Bruce Bartlett (who was an economic policy advisor for Presidents Reagan and Bush Sr.) runs through 15 recent polls of the American public's views on taxing and spending.

Some of the most disheartening points:

[T]hree-fifths of voters believe that the budget can be fixed just by eliminating waste, fraud and abuse. . . .

[S]upport for cutting spending is largely confined to small programs such as foreign aid, and that people favor increasing spending for big programs such as Social Security. . . .

[O]nly 49 percent of people believe that reducing the deficit will require cuts in programs that benefit them; 41 percent do not. Also, only 37 percent of people believe that reducing the deficit will require higher taxes on them; 59 percent do not.

People overestimate how much we spend on foreign aid, and they underestimate how much we spend on Medicare and Social Security. We want to believe that if we happen to like a program, it doesn't cost too much. "Big government" is bad, so the biggest programs must be the ones we don't like.

What's happening to all four Republican presidential frontrunners?

They're all getting less and less popular.

Bruce Bartlett says on Facebook:

For the next year every Republican hopeful is going to be attacking the other hopefuls looking for the tiniest edge. Therefore, all of these guys are probably going to continue to fall in popularity vis a vis Obama.

Women want more independence in relationships than men do, and men are more likely to want to children?

These poll results are interesting but should be taken with a grain of salt, as the study was done for Match.com (which has an interest in convincing women that men will commit to them). This is about single Americans, age 21 and up (89% straight, 5% gay, 4% bisexual):

Data show men are quicker to fall in love and more likely than women to want children: 54% of men say they have experienced love at first sight, compared with 44% of women; among singles without children under 18, more men (24%) than women (15%) say they want children.

And, across every age group, women want more independence than men in their relationships: 77% of women say having their personal space is "very important," vs. 58% for men; 78% of women say the same about having their own interests and hobbies (vs. 64% for men). And 35% of women (vs. 23% of men) say regular nights out with the guys/girls are important.

The headline for that USA Today article reporting on the study says: "Men, women flip the script in gender expectation." But does it really flip gender expectations for men to be more likely than women to say they've fallen in "love at first sight"?

IN THE COMMENTS: Grobstein has two theories on why "the pop culture story where the man does not want to settle down" would turn out to be wrong:

I think a lot of our cultural relationship wisdom was formed under conditions quite different from now. In the post-war decades, there was a sharp shortage of men — of course men were less willing to commit.

The other possible bias is that the stories are about men who, because of their desirability, enjoy a strong bargaining position and may be less willing to commit.

Those are both good points. I especially find his second point — about how we tend to focus on certain men because they're more powerful and thus more conspicuous — to be both plausible and systematically overlooked.

But I added:

On the other hand, it could be that the standard story is fairly accurate, and the study results are skewed. Why? Because straight men and straight women (89% of the respondents) are saying what they think the opposite sex would like to hear.

Young voters and political party

Ann Althouse (my mom) quotes this report on a CBSNews/New York Times poll:

[O]nly half the 18-29 year olds are registered to vote and just 55 percent of them say they will definitely vote in 2010. Moreover, a mere 15 percent of young people say they are paying “a lot of attention” to the election. By comparison, 84 percent of voters over 64 say they will definitely vote, and 50 percent say they are paying a lot of attention to the election.

She makes a good point:

One is tempted to think that if only more young people would vote, the Democrats would have it made. But the young people who say they favor Democrats also aren't paying attention. They have to get interested before they'll be motivated to vote, and we don't know what they'd think after they paid attention. . . .

When you're young, usually you want to get along. You want to be liked. But do you care about politics? Do you really know who to vote for? Apparently not, or you'd vote.

See also "the taste of political and economic ideas." People often seem to be expressing coherent political ideas, when they're really displaying their taste or personality. Very often, the subtext of political discussions is: "I belong in our group, and I want to get along." If you're in a liberal milieu,* and you're talking with someone who states a lot of liberal opinions, you can't assume this person has engaged in any serious thinking about "the issues." It could be that they're skilled at adopting other people's words as their own, and they place a high priority on fitting in and getting along. When I was a teenager, I used to draw anarchy symbols on notebooks — why? Because friends of mine did this, and it was a way to signal: "I'm the type of person we approve of in our group." To conclude that I would have voted for anarchist politicians (if I had been old enough to vote) would have been a big mistake.

* Of course, the same thing applies if you cross out "liberal" and replace it with a different ideology. I'm using liberal by default because I've spent my life in liberal milieus. Or should that be milieux?

Americans don't want taxes raised or spending cut.

According to this poll by Harris.

I guess people must love deficits.

Details:

A 71 percent to 15 percent majority of adults do not think "it is necessary to increase taxes to reduce the budget deficit". Large majorities of Republicans, Democrats and Independents feel this way...

When it comes to cutting government spending, there is little support for cutting any substantial programs.

When asked what should be cut if something had to be cut, almost no one, including Republicans, said Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, or education. By far the most popular thing to be cut is the space program.

I found out about the poll from Matthew Yglesias, who links to it on Twitter and sums it up this way:

everything is unpopular

Or is it the opposite? This poll says that people don't want anything taken away. So ... everything's popular!

Americans don't want the government taking away their money. But we want to keep getting everything the government gives them. We want it all.

As the Harris report says,

Once a tax has been cut, there is usually a lot of resistance to increasing it again. And, once money is committed to a program or entitlements are established, cutting back on that spending is also very tough.

RELATED: Thing you're not supposed to point out #1.

Losing our religion

Everyone's talking about this Trinity College poll showing that fewer Americans say they're Christian.

The Washington Post reports it like this:

15 Percent of Americans Have No ReligionFewer Call Themselves Christians; Nondenominational Identification Increases

The percentage of Americans who call themselves Christians has dropped dramatically over the past two decades, and those who do are increasingly identifying themselves without traditional denomination labels....

But I don't think those are the most important results from this poll.

It's hard to get at people's true thoughts and feelings by asking them to put a label on themselves, because you dredge up all the connotations surrounding the labels in addition to the literal meaning. There are plenty of atheists, for instance, who don't want to go around proclaiming, "I'm an atheist," because that's just not polite. And this can cut both ways: I have a couple friends who deeply believe in Christianity and call themselves "Christians," but will refer to themselves as "not religious" or even opposed to "religion." For them, "religion" means human-made institutions that distort and distract from the founding principles of Christianity.

The answers to these questions are more revealing, because they're about real life rather than labels:

Were you married in a religious ceremony? (ever married respondents only)

When you die, do you expect to have a religious funeral or service?

The answers were 69% "yes" vs. 30% "no" for weddings, and 66% "yes" vs. 27% "no" for funerals (with a few percent not answering). So that's roughly a 70-30 split for both questions. (Here's a PDF of the complete results.)

I'm surprised at how secular we've turned out to be. I would have expected those numbers maybe in Europe; I would have thought the percentage of secular weddings or funerals here in America would be more like 10%. Even to me, the idea of having a wedding or funeral without the trappings of religion feels ruthlessly antisocial.

There seems to be a strong notion (though maybe not as strong as I thought) that even if you aren't particularly religious, you should still publicly go through the motions to be nice. If you're, say, getting married, well, "families" are going to "expect" it.

People sometimes talk about "family" as if it's this dictatorial entity controlling your life. But if you're over 18, unless you're bound by some specific debt or contractual condition to a family member, you're allowed to do what you want.

The other day I blogged about Twitter and said I was enjoying the "all-caps micro-wisdom" of Jenny Holzer. One of her posts that stood out:

IT'S JUST AN ACCIDENT THAT YOUR PARENTS ARE YOUR PARENTS