{"id":10988,"date":"2013-03-11T15:54:12","date_gmt":"2013-03-11T19:54:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=10988"},"modified":"2013-03-11T16:01:25","modified_gmt":"2013-03-11T20:01:25","slug":"the-most-important-thing-citizens-should-know","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=10988","title":{"rendered":"the most important thing citizens should know"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If I had to pick one thing that a citizen of the USA should know, it would be the allocation of money in the federal budget. A simple pie chart is shown below. It&#8217;s a static image from the <a href=\"http:\/\/nationalpriorities.org\/en\/\">National Priorities Project<\/a>&#8216;s website, which is rich with interactive graphs and even provides a &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/nationalpriorities.org\/en\/interactive-data\/build-better-budget-game\/\">Build a Better Budget<\/a>&#8221; simulation. Along with the pie chart, another critical graph shows the basic historical trends over recent decades.<a href=\"http:\/\/nationalpriorities.org\/en\/budget-basics\/federal-budget-101\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" src=\"http:\/\/nationalpriorities.org\/media\/uploads\/federalbudget101_medium.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"460\" height=\"329\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The NPP is helping with public education, but the problem is serious. Right after the election, we <a href=\"http:\/\/www.civicyouth.org\/high-school-civic-education-linked-to-voting-participation-and-political-knowledge-no-effect-on-partisanship-or-candidate-selection\/\">asked<\/a> almost 4,500 young adults, &#8220;Does the government spend more on Social Security or foreign aid?&#8221; The right answer is Social Security (by a ratio of about 26:1, if we define &#8220;aid&#8221; as economic assistance, or about 20:1, if we include military assistance). A majority (51.3%) of the young adults chose the wrong answer&#8211;foreign aid&#8211;and just 29% got the question right.<\/p>\n<p>This is not a youth problem only. In 2011, <a href=\"http:\/\/politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com\/2011\/04\/01\/cnn-poll-americans-flunk-budget-iq-test\/\">CNN and the Opinion Research Corporation<\/a> asked adults how much of the budget the federal government allocates to various programs. The median estimate was 20% for Social Security (which is close to the correct proportion), but 10% for foreign aid (which is far too high).<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s hard to have a debate about what <em>should<\/em> happen if people don&#8217;t understand what <em>is<\/em> happening. We don&#8217;t teach this kind of material in schools, the mass media don&#8217;t explain it regularly or helpfully, and politicians have incentives to obfuscate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If I had to pick one thing that a citizen of the USA should know, it would be the allocation of money in the federal budget. A simple pie chart is shown below. It&#8217;s a static image from the National Priorities Project&#8216;s website, which is rich with interactive graphs and even provides a &#8220;Build a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-advocating-civic-education"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10988"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10988\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11012,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10988\/revisions\/11012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}