Washington D.C. Desperately Needs To Stop Listening To America

Tea Party Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and conservative allies have been recently promoting #MakeDCListen on twitter, and the main narrative is that the elected officials and professionals in Washington D.C. should listen to the rest of America.

This is a an absolutely terrible idea. Washington should ignore what Americans think when it comes to economic policy and budget policy.

America has no idea what it's talking about.

This week we published the results of a poll we conducted with our partner, SurveyMonkey.

We asked respondents to estimate certain values -inflation, job creation, the size of the deficit, the percent of the country on food stamps. Very, very few came close.

Americans significantly overestimated the percent of people on food stamps. Most were off by multiple orders of magnitude when asked to estimate the current deficit. The average response estimated the federal minimum wage was about 8% higher than it actually was. Two in five thought the inflation rate was more than three times larger than it actually is, and almost 1 in 4 thought it was in the double digits. People had no idea we added 2.2 million jobs we in the past 12 months. Some even thought we lost jobs.

Walter Hickey / BI, Data via Surveymonkey AudienceEven on the most elemental questions - for instance, is the deficit getting bigger or smaller - America got it wrong. Almost 70% thought the deficit was getting bigger, even though it's at a 5-year low.

And, as both left-of-center pollster Public Policy Polling and late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel observed, many Americans have no idea that the Affordable Care Act (which they support) and Obamacare (which they oppose) are the exact same thing.

Under normal circumstances, that would be totally fine.

See, America has stuff to do. Most don't concern themselves with top-line economic figures because it doesn't matter in their life.

So what's absolutely insane is that Sen. Ted Cruz and his allies are trying to make D.C. listen to the people who clearly don't know what they're talking about, the American people.

When you get sick, you call a doctor. They know stuff, and will use their expert opinion to advise you on what to do to get better. You don't call your friend who dropped out of pre-med who knows nothing about internal medicine. You don't listen to him when he says that drinking screwdrivers is like mixing anti-biotics into your orange juice, because that is dumb.

When you have an economic crisis, you listen to the economic community. They'll debate, and there will be many different perspectives and decisions to make, but in the end you are listenting to people who can tell a deficit from a hole in the ground. You do not listen to the American people, because they know far less about that than one would expect.

That's why the #MakeDCListen campaign is so fundamentally absurd. Washington D.C. has more economists per capita than anywhere else in the entire country. Why the hell would we want to make professionals who are qualified at their jobs listen to people who think that the U.S. annual deficit is only several thousand dollars, and rising?

It's why we have a republic, not a democracy. The whole point of the American system is that most Americans don't have to know this stuff, and instead elect people who they trust to steer the ship.

But populist movements, like the Tea Party, ruin that. As much as he thinks he might be, Ted Cruz is not Cincinnatus.

The worst possible thing we can do is listen to the American people in this crisis. Please, D.C., do not listen.