What do voters really want?

Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, is best remembered for his famous question, "What does a woman want?" He admitted he never learned the answer in 30 years of psychiatric studies. A question of identical form and particular urgency looms in November: "What do voters want?" Politicians on both sides of the aisle think they know the answer. But they do not. And for that matter, neither do the voters!

Exhibit One: The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, as explained by George Will. It is supposed to recommend measures "that meaningfully improve the long-run fiscal outlook." It has a plan to do that. But 164 House Republicans flinched. Explains Will,

They fear, not without reason, that voters are ideologically conservative but operationally liberal -- that voters' cognitive dissonance makes them ardently in favor of shrinking the deficit and as ardently opposed to any measures commensurate with the problem.

There is no shortage of voters who say they want the federal budget cut and the size of government reduced. What they (okay, we) really mean is, "I want the federal programs and agencies that benefit me to stay intact and the ones that benefit someone else to be slashed like it's Halloween night in a horror movie."

Almost 30 years ago, Senate Majority leader Howard Baker (R.-Tenn.) asked the other 99 senators asking them to identify cuts of 5-10 percent in federal spending in their home states. Most senators agreed that the budget should be cut. Not one agreed that a cut could be made in their own states.

The reason is, I think, that we voters ideologically approve cutting the budget but operationally don't want it done on our own backs. My parents are in their 80s. Do I really want Medicare to be cut? Baby boomers, of whom I am one, are just starting to retire in large numbers. Guess what's going to happen to Social Security spending? Do we really want those payouts slashed just as we're starting to draw them?

Including government employees, more than 88 million Americans are personally dependent to some degree on government payouts. That's 29 percent of us. Do you really think it is politically possible for even a veto-proof Republican Congress to slash those programs, jobs or benefits enough to make a meaningful dent in the trillion-dollar-plus deficit?

Mark Steyn once wrote that if national financial collapse was a 20-chapter book, Greece was in chapter 19 and America still in chapter two or three. I think we're further along than that, but I agree with his his point that there is still time to reverse course. Time, though, is not the issue. The question is whether we have the will - the will, each one of us, to accept the consequences personally.

Will you accept a 10 percent reduction in your federally-sponsored benefits (schools, highways, direct payments, name it)? Will I? And if we will, will the representatives and senators we send to Washington next month have the will to push it through?

I am not persuaded the answer is yes, though I hope I'm wrong.