Online commentary: A fan's guide to the federal deficit
What was Michael Jordan's jersey number? Now, about what portion of the federal budget goes toward Medicare, Social Security, national defense and foreign aid spending? No, the answer to both questions is not 23.
Whether we should be chastising ourselves or complimenting Nike, the fact is that our knowledge of the federal budget lags our grasp of relatively unimportant sports trivia.
According to Rasmussen, less than half of us know that Medicare, Social Security and the military account for the majority of federal spending. At the same time, the public drastically overestimates other government expenditures. For example, we think 27% of federal spending goes toward foreign aid, a portion we would cut to around 13% (www.worldpublicopinion.org); if our austerity were enacted, it would represent a tenfold increase in foreign aid spending.
Contrast this confusion with the American people's command of sports data. We have no problem following the numbers behind our national pastime, football, basketball, hockey - you name it. We know the approximate win-loss record of our favorite teams and about how many games ahead or back they are in the standings; we're constantly throwing around batting averages, double-doubles and fantasy football stats. Sports metaphors have become so pervasive in our language that we can't help but cringe twice every time our boss asks us to "take one for the team": once for what he's asking us to do and once for how he asked it.
Fortunately, we can put to good use this tendency of ours to understand everything in terms of sports. Given the fundamental role that metaphors and analogies play in learning, we can use sports contexts to improve our understanding of something as far from tailgating as our all-too-sobering budget situation. Let's give it a shot.
Imagine you're a basketball coach. Your focus is on playing tight defense; either you don't believe in high scoring games, or you don't think the time is right to push the tempo.
Your opponent is a team called the Government Spenders. They average 100 points a game, and similar to the Miami Heat, three players accounting for the majority of their scoring. The LeBron James of this team, Medicare/Medicaid, leads the way with 21 points a game. The other forward, Social Security, and the shooting guard, Military, each add 20 more points a game.
After this triumvirate of All-Stars, the scoring drops off. The role players are Income Security (14 pts), Interest on the Debt (6 pts), Veterans Benefits (3 pts), Transportation (3 pts), and Education (3 pts). The rest of the bench isn't worth much worry, because players like Foreign Aid, NASA, EPA and Earmarks average less than a basket a game.
One final line from the scouting report: Medicare/Medicaid and Interest on the Debt are expected to play larger roles in the offense down the stretch.
As coach, what would be your strategy to contain the Government Spenders' scoring?
Not much of a hoops fan? We can use baseball to put our largest category of discretionary spending into perspective. Pretend the U.S. military is a Major League team. That team would be the Yankees: we have a winning tradition, others either love us or hate us, and we're big spenders. We would outspend the Red Sox of military spending, China, seven times over, and if we redistributed the combined spending of all 30 MLB teams (just over $2.5 billion) in a way that paralleled the spending of the top 30 militaries, it would make the real-life Yankees' $200 million payroll look frugal. A league whose expenditures were as lopsided as the world's military spending would see the Yankees' payroll at $1.2 billion.
We can debate the suitability of these analogies the same way we can argue about how best to quantify the defensive contribution of basketball players or compare sluggers across different eras. Maybe you'd prefer to frame the budget in a golf or X-games setting.
The particular metaphor and sport aren't important. What matters is that, as we start having a conversation over the federal deficit, it is as informed as the ones we have over last night's game. By grounding this discussion in ideological differences, rather than ignorance of the numbers, maybe we can stop playing prevent defense while the deficit advances farther into the red zone.
Scott Akalis is a writer from Grand Rapids who hopes the Government, and the Tigers, can turn things around. He has worked with Fortune 100 companies as a management consultant and holds a PhD in social psychology from Harvard University.