One of our two parties argues that Americans don’t want government services and, indeed, a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 56 percent of Americans said they wanted smaller government and fewer services. Yet, as Cornell professor Suzanne Mettler reports, the vast majority of Americans have at some point relied on government programs — and valued them — even though they often fail to recognize that government is the source of the assistance.
According to Mettler: A 2008 poll of 1,400 Americans by the Cornell Survey Research Institute found that when people were asked whether they had “ever used a government social program,” 57 percent said they had not. Respondents were then asked whether they had availed themselves of any of 21 different federal policies, including Social Security, unemployment insurance, the home-mortgage-interest deduction and student loans. It turned out that 94 percent of those who had denied using programs had benefited from at least one; the average respondent had used four.
When children show the same contradictions regarding support from their families, we call them spoiled brats.