Numbers Before Politics   Dean Baker In These Times, April 26,
2005  See article on original website  Since last autumn’s
Republican victory, progressives have engaged in considerable
soul searching. The most basic question has been: Why do so many
people support conservative policies that hurt them? For an
important subset of these policies, the answer is simple: They
don’t know the numbers.  Public opinion polls consistently show
that people hugely overestimate the portion of public spending
that goes to programs like welfare or foreign aid. For example,
a Kaiser poll from the mid-’90s found that 40 percent of
respondents ranked welfare as one of the two largest items in
the federal budget, and 40 percent put foreign aid in this
category. At the time, the two largest items in the federal
budget were Social Security at 22 percent and military spending
at 18 percent. The share of the budget going to Aid for Families
with Dependent Children, the core welfare program, was less than
1 percent. Adding in food sta