Who’s to blame for our fiscal problems of the past decade? Paul Krugman says elites deserve a lot more of the blame than the general public, but Dan Drezner disagrees: the public, he says, was in favor of tax cuts and in favor of the Iraq war, so they deserve a big chunk of the blame too.
Actually, though, I think Dan’s evidence demonstrates exactly the opposite of what he thinks. He’s right that polling evidence suggests the public was in favor of both these policies. But the public had been in favor of these things for well over a decade. About 60+% of the public had believed its taxes were too high going back to the beginning of polling on this question in 1957. And support for invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam Hussein had been in the 50-60% range ever since the Gulf War.
But guess what? Despite this broad support, nobody was crying out for either huge tax cuts or invading Iraq until George Bush and the rest of the GOP started talking them up. Without that, the public would have continued to vaguely think that taxes were too high and Saddam Hussein was a bad guy before switching the TV to Monday Night Football and forgetting about it.
It’s true that public support was probably necessary in order to pass the Bush tax cuts and invade Iraq. But the polling evidence is pretty clear that it was far from sufficient. Nothing about public opinion changed in 2001. The only thing that changed was the occupant of the Oval Office. The public isn’t blameless in all this, but the polling evidence makes it pretty clear that it was a minor player.
