In a message dated 7/31/02 3:02:53 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
<< fabio guillermo rojas wrote:
>
> > In other words, all of the main items in the budget are popular and
> > indeed if anything the public wants them to be larger. (Presumably views
>
> Question: could public opinion be endogenous? Ie, maybe there might
> be some status quo bias? Would people before the New Deal or the Great
> Society have approved of specific programs before they existed?
>
> Isn't it "folk wisdom" that many gov't programs start with promises
> they'll stay small (income tax, social security, medicaid) but once
> they exist, they become popular?
This is highly plausible to me. I would certainly expect initial
support to be lower, leading to initially smaller programs. Once the
programs exist, people come to want larger programs, and politicians
respond accordingly.
--
Prof. Bryan Caplan >>
That seems plausible to me as well. People who fear the increase in
government spending live to see that the republic does not come to a sudden
end and become amenable to more of it. Other people come to take the program
for granted (the status quo effect) and accept without question the
underlying rationale for the program, which very nearly always implies an
expansion (ie if we need to "feed the hungry" with ADC and there are still
people who are hungry, we must implicity increase spending on ADC until such
time as there are no hungry). Other people make a rational (incentive-based)
choice to accept the program's benefits and over time increasingly more of
them come to depend on it and believe they cannot survive without it, thus
supporting more of it.
This sort of analysis can apply to non-spending programs as well. Take for
example the "wetlands regulations," a set of administrative regulations
promulgated in theory under the Inland Waterways Act. In no way did the Act
authorize any federal agency to arrest and imprison someone for cleaning up a
junkyard as has happened under the wetlands regulations. Had Congress tried
in 1968 to pass a law granting such authority it would have been shot down
and members of Congress tossed out in the next election. Yet now the
wetlands regulations have become the status quo, and you had the rather odd
spectacle of an allegedly-conservative Republican presidential candidate
promising "no new loss of wetlands."
You can take the income tax as another example; the conservatives of the
1920s never made any effort to repeal the income tax (despite a small
conservative myth to the contrary), but merely to ameliorate and tame the
worst excesses imposed during the Great War. Or look at Social Security; a
few conservatives have talked about repealing it, but never have they made,
to my knowledge, a serious effort to do so. (and once again we were treated
to the spectacle of a Bush promising that he wouldn't "let Congress mess
around with your Social Security.")
David Levenstam
