![\"education_trend\"](\"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/images\/education_trend.png\")
<\/p>\nEducation spending is pretty popular. In 2012, three quarters of American adults told the General Social Survey that our nation\u00a0spends too little on education. If you look at that question over time, you’ll find an interesting generational pattern. The three generations born (respectively) before 1926, before 1946, and before 1966\u00a0have each held successively more favorable views of education spending. I’d understand that as a story of economic growth and development. Young people\u00a0have needed increasing amounts of education to flourish in our increasingly complex society. That need became\u00a0increasingly evident to adults who came of age later in the 20th century. Generation-X, however, has held the same opinion as the Baby Boomers; and the limited data on Millennials suggests they are also in the same camp. The upshot: support for education spending is stable\u00a0at a high level,\u00a0buoyed\u00a0by\u00a0the majority opinion of everyone born since 1926, and not subject to much short-term change.<\/p>\n
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Welfare is different story. In 2012, almost half of adults (47.6%) told the GSS that we spend too much on\u00a0it; one third thought welfare spending was about right, and just 19.1%\u00a0said we should spend more. I have run a\u00a0graph showing the “liberal” opinion (we should spend more), but I find the opposite graph more illuminating: see below.<\/p>\n
Here we observe\u00a0the\u00a0oldest generation only toward the end of their lives, when they (alone) disagree with the conservative argument that we are spending too much on welfare. All the subsequent generations have moved pretty closely together. There have been spikes of concern about excessive\u00a0welfare spending in the 1970s and the early 1990s. In those upticks, one can see the political\u00a0opportunity\u00a0for\u00a0Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich. But there really hasn’t been a significant generational pattern to beliefs about welfare. The changes seem more correlated with short-term economic circumstances and\/or government policy. For instance, when Reagan began cutting social spending\u00a0and when Clinton declared the end of “welfare as we know it,” concern about over-spending fell. The implication: welfare spending is a constant political debate, and\u00a0who wins at a given moment depends on policy and circumstances.<\/p>\n
![\"welfare_trend\"](\"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/images\/welfare_trend.png\")
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Finally, Social Security. One might expect that people nearing or in retirement would be the strongest supporters of spending money on this program, whereas younger\u00a0people would be more reluctant. But the pattern of change over time for each generation is quite subtle, if one can detect it at all. Members of the “Greatest Generation,” for example, have held\u00a0the same view of Social Security expenditures\u00a0for the past 30 years. Likewise, Generation X has felt the same since they\u00a0were young, even though they\u00a0are now in middle age. The key pattern is a general increase in felt need to spend money on Social Security during the 1970s and 1980s, followed by a plateau. But if anything, the strongest supporters\u00a0since 1990 have been relatively young adults.<\/p>\n
![\"social_security_trend\"](\"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/images\/social_security_trend1.png\")
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The implication is that\u00a0Social Security remains very\u00a0popular (no surprise there), but also that it’s not an old-person’s issue. X-ers and Millennials are actually more supportive than members of the Greatest Generation today.<\/p>\n
The education and Social Security graphs look very similar. That is interesting because education is presumed\u00a0to benefit the young. whereas\u00a0Social Security focuses on the aged. Yet opinions about spending money\u00a0for these two purposes track closely. \u00a0It would appear that the driving force is one’s general view of the role of government, not a calculation of one’s\u00a0own needs and interests.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Education spending is pretty popular. In 2012, three quarters of American adults told the General Social Survey that our nation\u00a0spends too little on education. If you look at that question over time, you’ll find an interesting generational pattern. The three generations born (respectively) before 1926, before 1946, and before 1966\u00a0have each held successively more favorable […]<\/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":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15050","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15050","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=15050"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15050\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15056,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15050\/revisions\/15056"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}