ACCORDING to a new CNN poll, 63% of Americans want the imminent "super committee" to call for tax increases on high earners and 57% want large cuts in domestic spending. Sounds sensible! But don't get your hopes up. Only 47% favour big cuts in defence spending. Worse, a mere 35% support "major changes" in Social Security and Medicare. I guess there's a reason defence and old-age entitlements dominate the budget: voters like it that way. Commenting on the significance of the debt-ceiling standoff, Brink Lindsey of the Kauffmann Foundation writes:

We are in the early stages of resolving a huge and enduring incoherence in American political economy: for a generation now, the American public has wanted more government than it has been willing to pay for. For many years it has been painfully apparent to anyone who cares to face facts that entitlement spending, especially on health care, is on a growth path that will eventually require enormous tax increases to sustain. Yet thus far, any efforts to either restructure entitlements or raise the taxes needed to pay for them have run into a buzz saw of hostility from the electorate. But as Stein's Law tells us, things that can't go on forever won't. The current, unsustainable political equilibrium has endured as long as it has because of the government's ability to pile up debt. But that ability is being progressively exhausted, and so the looming choice between our relatively lavish welfare state and our relatively modest tax bill cannot be delayed much longer.

Mr Lindsey is obviously correct. We're up against it. Something has to give. But the CNN poll makes reasonably clear that Americans, despite the multitude of signs that we're up against it, still have our heads in cloud-cuckoo-land. There seems to be some kind of widespread delusion that a small tax increase on the rich, combined with cuts in not-very-important spending categories will somehow deliver us from fiscal ruin. There is little appetite for the cuts in military and entitlement spending necessary to bring America's books toward balance. And, as Mr Lindsey notes, citing the CBO, maintaining anything in the neighborhood of status quo growth rates in entitlement spending would require huge across-the-board tax increases. Yet 87% of Americans oppose tax increases on the middle- and lower-classes. If I were a big credit-rating agency, this is what I would cite in support of the proposition that American debt is increasingly risky. Politicians naturally fear straying too far from public opinion, and this makes the incoherent cast of American public opinion dangerous.

America is a scooter-bound glutton who, when its continuously increasing mass finally overwhelms the doughtiest scooter's capacities, shakes its fat fists like a mad baby and demands deliverance from the laws of physics. America needs an extreme makeover, a heavy dose of tough love. America needs to grow up and get real. But our politicians always only tell us how beautiful and brave we are here in the best country in the history of the world. So I figure the odds that the so-called super committee sets us on a sustainable fiscal path are about as good as the odds that this blog post wins a Pulitzer.