Via Plain Blog, this is from a poll conducted by Emily Swanson and Mark Blumenthal:
According to a new HuffPost/YouGov poll, 69 percent of Americans think that most of the federal budget deficit could be eliminated by cutting “waste and fraud.”
Um, what? More than two-thirds of Americans think the budget deficit is largely a result of waste and fraud? But wait! It’s all explained by a deeper dive into the poll results:
A more detailed look at which programs were named by Democrats and by Republicans suggests that for many, waste is indeed defined as “money spent on some government program I don’t like.”
So there you have it. By logical concatenation, two-thirds of the American public think the budget deficit could be tamed largely by cutting spending on programs they don’t like. That’s a little more defensible. Now all we have to do is figure out which programs a majority of us don’t like.1
1Hint: There aren’t any.
