I think there is something else entirely going on here. The problem, in my view, is that pollsters are terrible at asking questions. The pollsters should ask something like this: "Should the government balance the budget through some combination of tax increases and spending cuts?" I'm confident the majority would say yes, and, more importantly, they would mean it. It's true that if you ask a question about cutting social security independently of the deficit question, people will say it should not be cut. But in the larger context of the deficit and the debt, people recognize that defense, social security and medicare/medicaid need to be cut, and they will support politicians who have the guts to say it (almost none that I'm aware of, and no major ones).

Dan,

Sorry to get all social science on you, but are you really referring to "bounded rationality" when you speak of "rational ignorance"? Perhaps, not being a huge fan of rational choice, I prefer the term "bounded rationality" to convey the idea that since there are so many things going on in an individual's world, no one had the capacity to make truly rational decisions--their decision making capacity is walled in. Or perhaps because I'm a midwesterner, I'm just too nice and think that suggesting that rationality is bounded simply sounds better than insinuating ignorance. I'm sure the dividing line is ever-so-thin, but academics predicate their careers on semantics. Any thoughts?

We've known for a very long time that people don't make rational decisions even though our political and legal system is dependent on them doing that. That isn't to say that authoritarian states ruled by an educated elite are better, they have clearly shown the exact same irrational behavior.

It isn't the entitlement to medical cover that needs to be cut, it is the appalling level of inefficiency in the American healthcare system, public and private. I read an article recently about how the Japanese spend half as much on healthcare, but have universal coverage, better health outcomes, and higher life expectancy.

The problem is that, for most Americans, understanding public policy is more of a "hobby" which interests some and not others. Few people really look at it as their duty to actually understand the economy or anything else. Most Americans want to live their lives and not worry about the larger world. So they base their opinions on a few snips of information or their own biases. From an individual standpoint, however, it isn't necessarily irrational to be ill-informed. There are costs to being informed and, for most people, these costs are greater than the benefits. Moreover, most Americans (at least those that would most likely be well-informed) live pretty good lives and, viscerally, don't really see a connection between macroeconomic issues and their own lives.