A little while back I expressed a desire to see a poll of voters asking whether they knew about the plunging federal budget deficit. Just as a reminder, here’s what the CBO numbers for the recent past and projections for the near future look like:
Well, Hal Varian of Google got in touch with me, and said,”We can do that!” So he put together a Google Consumer Survey; it’s still ongoing — results here — but here’s what it looked like this morning:
I’m sure someone will quibble about the wording; and yes, the CBO numbers are as % of GDP rather than nominal values (but those would look the same). But I don’t think there’s any real question here: the public has no idea that the deficit has been falling like a stone. A solid majority of voters think it’s still going up, and hardly anyone knows that it’s going down.
There’s another takeaway here too: The deficit is down but the economy is still just treading water. So, with the deficit coming down as it is, why aren’t great things happening? Krugman addresses the counterproductive nature of implementing deficit reduction measures (“austerity”) in a depressed economy in a later post, A Tale of Two Flat Countries.