I was very pleased to report the other day that the people of France overwhelmingly favor spending cuts, even when they were asked a biased question that presupposed that Keynesian-style spending increases would “stimulate” the economy.
Now I have some polling data about British voters, though I confess I’m not sure whether to be pleased or worried.
You’ll see below two slides that were presented earlier today at the Bucharest stop on the Free Market Road Show. They’re not from my presentation, but rather from the speech by Matthew Sinclair of the UK-based Taxpayers Alliance.
As you can see from this first slide, the good news is that only 12 percent of British people think government taxes and spends too little.
On the other hand, it’s a bit worrisome that nearly 1-in-5 Brits believe in UFOs.
What a bunch of idiots.
Then again, nearly 1-in-3 Americans believe that higher taxes would be used for deficit reduction instead of more spending, and that’s an even more preposterous conclusion.
So I shouldn’t make fun of our English cousins.
Here’s some more good-news/bad-news polling data.
The good news is that only 12 percent of Brits think that the government can pay promised benefits (and I bet that number would fall even lower if they saw this shocking data on the U.K.’s long-run fiscal outlook).
The bad news is that 13 percent of Brits think the moon landings were faked.
But since 17 percent of Americans actually admit to having positive feelings about the federal government, I’m reluctant to throw stones since my country is a glass house.
Let me close on a positive note. I’ve expressed considerable pessimism about the future of the United Kingdom, and I think the current leadership of the supposed Conservative Party is terrible.
But maybe there’s reason to hope. It wasn’t that long ago that I shared a very encouraging story from England about civil disobedience against a revenue-hungry government.
And now we know from Matthew’s data that the British people have appropriately jaundiced views of their government.
So perhaps if they ever find another Margaret Thatcher, there’s a 5-percent chance that they can pull themselves back from the fiscal abyss.
