The Associated Press periodically conducts a poll in conjunction with the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research gauging the public’s views on federal spending. Given the ongoing fight in Washington between House Republicans and the White House over the next budget, these are significant numbers to keep an eye on. The latest edition of the poll was released last night and the results are a mixed bag. The good news for fiscal conservatives is that for the first time in quite a while, a solid majority (60%) of Americans agree that the federal government spends too much money and they need to reign in their trips to pluck the magical money tree. The bad news is that an even larger majority are completely unrealistic about how that can be done and they don’t want spending reduced for their favorite programs.

In the federal budget standoff, the majority of U.S. adults are asking lawmakers to pull off the impossible: Cut the overall size of government, but also devote more money to the most popular and expensive programs.

Six in 10 U.S. adults say the government spends too much money. But majorities also favor more funding for infrastructure, health care and Social Security — the kind of commitments that would make efforts to shrink the government unworkable and politically risky ahead of the 2024 elections.

These findings from a new poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research show just how messy the financial tug-of-war between President Joe Biden and House Republicans could be.

A quick glance at this graph will show you precisely how out of whack people are when it comes to spending priorities.

As you can see, only 16% of respondents believe that the federal government should be spending more money. A barely larger slice (22%) think that spending levels should remain the same. Everyone else agrees that Washington is blowing through too much money.

But at the same time, an even larger majority believes that we’re not spending enough on education, health care, and social security. Slightly smaller majorities believe we need to spend more on Medicare and border security. The one area where two-thirds of respondents felt we either needed to cut spending or leave it as is was the area we could probably least afford it: defense spending.

The AP interviewed some of the respondents to hear their thoughts on how this conundrum might be resolved. One elderly Biden voter from New York immediately parroted the administration’s talking points. He said, “The rich don’t pay enough of the taxes — that’s the problem. They know how to get out of paying their proper share.”

That shows how damagingly effective the progressive left’s talking points have been. People are repeating this line despite the well-documented fact that the top ten percent of earners in the United States pay 74% of all taxes and the top 25 percent pay nearly 90% of the government’s tax revenue. So they’re not nearly as good at “getting out of paying their proper share” as people have been led to believe.

The underlying reality is that the federal government is spending its way into an inevitable collapse unless something drastic is done. The federal debt is now well over $30 trillion. It’s a number so staggeringly large that most of us can’t even wrap our heads around it, so too many tend to just brush it aside. We’re already paying a significant portion of the budget each year on the interest payments required to service that debt and that number is projected to increase sharply over the next decade. At some point, we will be unable to meet our obligations and our national credit rating will be gutted. Then the dollar will become almost useless and we will be plunged into an actual depression. The era of American global leadership will be over.

Sadly, if this poll is anywhere near accurate, there is no way out of this trap. The government has raised generations of addicts who are hooked on “free stuff” from the government and they won’t vote in fiscal hawks who are willing to turn the ship around.