WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Americans are fed up with the nanny state telling them how much salmonella they can get with their arsenic burger.

That’s what a shocking new Rasmussen Reports poll says. By a two-to-one margin, Americans say reducing the federal deficit is more important than inspecting the food supply. Read about Rasmussen’s poll.

Why is the result shocking? Because 57% of the people are more fearful of the imaginary dangers of our public debt than they are of the very real dangers of food poisoning.

Republicans say government has no role in preventing food poisoning, or financial panics.

The Centers for Disease Control estimates that about 48 million Americans come down with some sort of food-borne illness each year, with 128,000 requiring hospitalization and 3,000 requiring an undertaker. Any estimates of how many people get sick or die each year from our federal deficit? See the CDC’s estimates here.

The question posed by my friend Scott Rasmussen is a dumb one anyway: “What is more important -- increasing safety inspections for food sold in the United States or reducing the federal budget deficit?” Can’t we have both? That’s like saying, which is more important: your lungs, or your heart?

The question is designed to elicit an emotional gut reaction, not a sensible thoughtful answer. And the whole problem with food safety is that the gut wants to eat things that the brain would veto, if only it knew.

SEC struggles to nail fraudsters

To really know if we should cut funding for food safety, we’d want to know the magnitude of the problem, how much is spent on inspections, and the benefits of additional inspections. We’d want to know the history, to know what life was like before federal food-and-drug safety laws. We’d want to know how much unsafe food costs us (one estimate: $152 billion a year).

We’d want some facts.

It just so happens that we know the facts. In 2007, after a spate of high-profile food poisoning cases, a nonpartisan group of scientists re-examined our food-and-drug safety efforts. They concluded that the Food and Drug Administration needed more resources and more authority to stop preventable illnesses. The FDA, responsible for the safety of 80% of our food, was inspecting most food facilities only once a decade.

So, last year, Congress passed a food safety modernization act, with the Senate approving it by a voice vote (which means that not even one senator wanted to fight over it). Read all about the law here.

Much of the food industry supported the additional inspections. “Ultimately, it is the food industry that is responsible for the safety of its products,” said Pamela Bailey, president of the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which represents all the big brands that fill up our grocery carts. “But we have long recognized that strong government oversight is a critical and necessary part of our nation’s food safety net.”

But Republicans in the House, relying on their gut instincts, don’t agree. They passed a bill last week (without any Democratic support) to slash funding for additional food inspections, cutting about $300 million from the FDA and USDA inspections for next year, prompting conservative pundit Norm Ornstein to remark that “these kinds of cuts are seriously stupid and counterproductive.” Read “Mindless Cuts Can Have Dangerous Results,” on the AEI website.

Rep. Jack Kingston, a Georgia Republican who’s the chairman of the agriculture appropriations subcommittee, argued that the industry can police itself, because killing people isn’t good for business.

“We have a lot of concerns about the necessity of putting 18,000 food police on the streets and the kitchens of America,” Kingston said, repeating the lie that the food safety act would regulate how private citizens prepare their food at home. Just for the record, it doesn’t.

E. coli squared

There’s one industry that produces something even more dangerous than E. coli, and Republicans want to take the federal cops off that beat too.

I’m talking, of course, about the financial services industry. Remember how the banks and shadow banks bought and sold so much toxic paper that it crashed the whole global economy? I hope you do, because the Republicans in Congress don’t seem remember that American families lost $16 trillion in wealth, 9 million Americans lost their jobs, millions lost their homes, and economy lost a decade.

Last year, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act to put more inspectors on the job to stop financial-borne illnesses. The law is surely not perfect, but it does give the bank regulators, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau new powers and more money to prevent the sale of the kind of unsafe products that led to our worst financial crisis ever.

How soon we forget. Just a few weeks ago, J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon was lecturing Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke about how terrible all these new regulations were going to be. Why they’d practically run the banks out of business! But even as Dimon was dressing down Bernanke, his lawyers were quietly agreeing to pay $211 million to victims of J.P. Morgan’s shady dealings in worthless securities, in exchange for the government agreeing not to call J.P. Morgan a bunch of crooks. Read story about bank credit and regulation.

You wonder why Dimon even bothered to speak with Bernanke, because he has powerful friends elsewhere in Washington who will do his dirty work for him. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, for instance.

McConnell and the rest of the Republican leadership don’t have the votes to overturn Dodd-Frank. Instead, they will simply deny any money to enforce the law.

“Anything we can do to slow down, deter or impede their ability to engage in this kind of oppressive overregulation which is freezing up our economy would be good for the country,” McConnell said on Wednesday.

In their budget, House Republicans cut the funding for the CFTC, kept the SEC budget flat and have vowed to cripple the CFPB. McConnell enthusiastically endorsed those plans, and seemed to favor eliminating the cops on the banking beat altogether.

“The less we fund those agencies, the better America will be,” McConnell said. Just think how the economy will soar if we have another financial panic!

Economist and columnist Paul Krugman has noticed that we are suffering from a kind of intellectual regression, in which we forget the lessons that we’ve already learned at a terrible cost. Krugman refers to the insistence of our policy makers on repeating exactly the same mistakes their counterparts made during the Great Depression. We learned from those mistakes, for a while, but then we forgot. Read Krugman’s “Mr. Keynes and the Moderns.”

We’re in danger of doing the same thing in other essential areas of government. It’s not just FDR’s lessons that we are forgetting, but Teddy Roosevelt’s lessons as well.

Lesson One: Industry, even the most well-intentioned, does not police itself.