Bruce Bartlett Uncovers the Most Misleading Poll Question of All Times

Dean Baker.--SS

Bruce Bartlett Uncovers the Most Misleading Poll Question of All Times:

Bartlett found a poll ( I beleive an NYT poll) that asked the extent to which people agree or disagreed with the statement:

"it is the responsibility of government to reduce income differences."

Since we live in a country in which the government pursues a wide range of policies that increase income differences, most poll takers could not help but be confused by this sort of question. After all, we have a government that subsidizes Wall Street by providing too big to fail protection and massive subsidies when the doofuses bring their banks to the brink of ruin. It grants drug companies patent monopolies that raise the price of drugs by hundreds of billions of dollars above the free market price.

We have a trade policy that is designed to put our manufacturing workers in direct competition with the lowest paid workers in the developing world while protecting our most highly educated workers from the same competition. And, we have a central bank (the Fed), which deliberately acts to throw people out of work to ensure that inflation doesn't reduce profits in the financial sector.

Most people would probably be happy to have a government that did not increase income differences. Asking them about a government that reduces income differences no doubt would strike poll takers as a bizarre question.