This past week I’ve been fin­ish­ing up read­ing Noam Chom­sky’s latest book, Failed States. I have had to slog through most of the book because it gen­er­ally tends to be an over­whelm­ingly depress­ing read. Such is the nature of read­ing between the lines of US for­eign policy.

The part of the book that really inter­ested me (and kept me read­ing) was the the last chap­ter on “Democracy Pro­mo­tion at Home.” This is def­i­nitely the best sec­tion of the book. I have often in the past resigned myself to being a hope­less rad­i­cal left­ist; a person whose social and polit­i­cal ideals will prob­a­bly never even come to fruition in the United States (or per­haps even into pop­u­lar dis­course). There was how­ever one survey of US pop­u­lar opin­ion cited by Chom­sky that gave me hope. The survey was con­ducted by the Pro­gram on Inter­na­tional Policy Atti­tudes (PIPA) and titled The Fed­eral Budget: the Public’s Pri­or­i­ties.

In the study, con­ducted in March 2005, people were asked an array of ques­tions about how they would change the pro­posed budget allo­ca­tion. There are sev­eral amaz­ing con­clu­sions can be drawn from the survey:

1. There is a very broad agree­ment that the mil­i­tary budget should be cut (on aver­age by 31%)
2. There is a con­sen­sus that much more money should be allo­cated to social programs
3. The actual budget is essen­tially the oppo­site of pop­u­lar opinion.

The full report in PDF format is avail­able on the web­site. Here are some illus­tra­tive charts culled from the report.

Over­all win­ners and losers in the budget changes:

Changes in social spend­ing:

Changes in envi­ron­men­tal spend­ing:

That last one astounded me. Here are the sur­veys find­ing results on that point:

By far the largest increase in per­cent­age terms was for con­serv­ing and devel­op­ing renew­able energy. This amount was increased $24 bil­lion, from $2.2 bil­lion to $26.2 billion—an extra­or­di­nary increase of 1090%. This was also the area increased by the largest majority—70%.

Per­haps there is hope after all.