Since 1969, Gallup has asked Americans whether military spending is too much, too little, or about right. For over 50 years, published as if it’s useful data. It’s not. This question is stupid. Why? Because I don’t think most of us know what the military budget actually IS, and more importantly, as you’ll see, even if we do know the number, we have no good way to understand what it means. And this opaqueness isn’t unique to our military budget. It’s standard operating procedure of US political discourse.
Understanding what’s going on with our budgets doesn’t actually start with the numbers. It starts with a better understanding about the human brain. The human mind evolved to track small numbers: children, predators, days until winter. When’s it gonna snow? Where’s that saber-toothed tiger? And where the frick did my kids go? But our global societies are so immense and so complex now that running them in small numbers simply isn’t possible.
Our brains comprehend relatively small digits, but our budgets operate in the trillions. This is a big problem, literally, because we are simply not equipped neurologically to comprehend what a billion of anything means, much less a trillion. And that means we’re not talking about a knowledge gap, we’re talking about a cognitive ceiling.
Let me share a few examples. I’d like to say these are gonna help you understand how big numbers work, it’s probably just gonna help you see that we can’t understand them.
Did you know that one million seconds is about 12 days, but one billion seconds is 32 YEARS? Our brains with this relatively simple switch from million to billion. But now our budgets are in the trillions. Numbers of this size are truly brain paralyzing.
Let me try to explain a trillion this way. If you had started spending $1 million every single day, not since you were born, not since America was founded, but since the day Jesus of Nazareth was born, you still would not have spent a trillion dollars. From year zero to today is about 741,000 days. At a million per day, that gets you to roughly $741 billion. To reach a full trillion, you need to keep spending your million a day for, oh, only another 700 years.
Now, multiply that number by 1.5 and you’ve got the proposed military budget for the U.S. for 2027. This is what Gallup’s asking if you have an informed opinion about.
We need better ways to see this data, my friends.
If this opaqueness were the case in just one part of our budget, it might be manageable, but I don’t think that’s what we’re dealing with. I think this lack of transparency is a pervasive issue that likely cuts through most of our current governance budgets. Let’s take a look at just a few examples of the crazy fog surrounding these things.
Example number one: the military budget. The current U.S. administration just proposed a 42 % increase to what was already the largest defense budget in U.S. history. and was already more than double what China spends. Where does this extra $660 billion for “war” come from? What exactly is it for? Why do they need it? Don’t misunderstand me. The world’s genuinely unstable and national defense matters. My point isn’t that defense spending is wrong, it’s that citizens should be able to understand what they’re being asked to fund. The fog makes this impossible for us.
Example number two: the tax code. Did you know Americans spend 6.5 billion hours every year just preparing their taxes? If we convert that lost time into wages and then add what people pay accountants and software just to figure out what they owe, the total cost of this confusion, just to do the math, hits $414 billion annually. And… more than 61 % of Americans still don’t understand basic tax concepts even after doing all that math! Also, in that fog, tax code loopholes are quietly redistributing money upward to the very small number of people who can afford to hire full-time CPAs to find those holes.
Example number three: Social Security and Medicare. Now, together, these two are the largest portion of federal spending, consuming roughly half of our entire federal budget. And yet, almost 60 % of us say we spend too LITTLE on both healthcare and social security.
My conclusion: most of us don’t have a frickin’ CLUE what’s going on with these numbers, even if we think we do.
Let’s do one more quick test, no judgment, most people fail this, you ready? What percentage of the federal budget goes to foreign aid? The average American answer is 31%. The actual number is right around 1%. Not 20%, not even 10%, 1%! Americans think we spend 30 times more on foreign aid than we actually do. And here’s the real kicker: when those same Americans are asked how much we should spend on foreign aid, they say we should “cut it” to 10%… which is still 10 times the actual number!
People are forming really strong opinions — and voting on those opinions! — about a budget item it seems they have never once seen accurately represented.
Let me be explicitly clear. This isn’t some kind of partisan left-right problem. This is a CLARITY issue. Democracy requires informed participants… not perfectly informed or expert level informed, but grounded in basic facts about where the money goes.
I don’t think that baseline exists. And I think it doesn’t exist because the system has evolved to reward its absence. Confusion benefits the people who already know the numbers. Clarity threatens them.
Which brings us to the most striking part about the research on budget misperception… there’s almost none of it. The foreign aid misperception was studied recently because someone, you might remember, tried to remove all the foreign aid. The military spending misperception surfaced as a side finding in the Reagan Institute’s Annual Defense Survey. The Social Security and healthcare findings came from a poll that was done for tax day.
As far as I can tell, nobody has ever commissioned a comprehensive systematic study of what Americans actually understand about where their tax dollars go.
On the one hand, it shocks me that we have run this country for 250 years without ever seriously asking this question. On the other hand, it’s exactly what I would expect, because it’s another matter of incentives. We need to follow the money! The powerful benefit when things are opaque, which means powerful people have to actively work against their own incentives to make things transparent.
Here’s what we do know… When people get a better understanding of where their money goes, they change their minds instantly. In that poll from the Bipartisan Policy Center, opinions on government efficiency shifted 12 percentage points in a single sitting once they got better information. Shocker… when people actually know what’s happening, things get better! Clarity works. We’ve just never really tried it at scale. Let’s just call this what it is, a system doing what it’s designed to do. This is all systems can do.
Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in World War II, two-term Republican President, warned us about this with our defense spending in his 1961 farewell address. He called it the “military-industrial complex” — the merger of a massive defense industry with the federal government, creating what he called “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power.” That was 1961.
We didn’t listen to him, and the same basic architecture — industry captures government, government shapes information, information keeps the public in a fog — has replicated itself across defense, taxes, social security, probably more.
Please understand, this is not some kind of conspiracy. It’s kind of the opposite. A mature version of a system like this, it doesn’t need to lie. It just needs to keep the numbers abstract and keep the debate EMOTIONAL. “Well don’t you support our troops?” “Do you really want to wait six years before seeing your doctor?” “Do you hate American business?” “Socialism!” “Communism!” et cetera, et cetera! Keep the debate hot and emotional instead of letting the conversation become concrete: “Do you support this specific allocation of this specific sum compared to these specific alternatives?” We’re not getting that kind of data right now.
At a certain scale, complexity can stop being a technical problem and become a governance strategy itself. When a system is incomprehensible, it becomes unaccountable. Abstraction becomes insulation. And at that point, the fog isn’t a side effect, it’s the frickin’ product.
There’s a name for this in economics, information asymmetry. The people who write the budgets, negotiate the contracts, draft the tax code, they know the numbers. You don’t. That gap is a feature of a system that benefits from your confusion. When people don’t know the numbers, they vote on vibes. And when people vote on vibes, the people who control the emotional framing win. You’re probably seeing this happen all the time.
Here’s the part that closes the loop. When government is kept deliberately opaque, when budgets are incomprehensible and prices are hidden and tax codes require experts to decode, the inevitable result is people conclude that government is broken. Wasteful, incompetent, can’t do anything right. It’s a society-level self-fulfilling prophecy.
“Government can’t be trusted to run healthcare.” “Bureaucrats will just waste the money.” “The private sector always does it better.” These aren’t organic public opinions arriving independently from millions of frustrated citizens. You have almost certainly internalized that that’s not because it came from us. And it’s not even because it’s true.
These messages are the predictable output of a system designed to produce EXACTLY the level of frustration we are experiencing right now. Because confused, exhausted citizens are far more likely to support the continuing dismantling of public institutions than actually- informed citizens would be. The “incompetence narrative” is the cover story. The opaqueness is the mechanism. And the beneficiaries are the same people who wrote the budget in the first place. Follow the money.
So what do we do about this? Interestingly, I think we already know what this fix looks like. We’ve seen it in our personal finances. Do you remember an online software called Mint? Yes, yes, I know Intuit bought it and eventually killed it, but a lot of folks I know remember Mint fondly.
If you’re not familiar, Mint was a personal finance app that took your bank data, every transaction, every subscription you forgot about, every embarrassing Amazon purchase, and put it all in one simple dashboard you could actually read. Pie charts, trend lines, spending by category. You could see at a glance exactly where your money went.
Mint was built on data that already existed. Your banks and credit cards had all of it the whole time. Mint just made it clear. Mint showed you exactly where every dollar went. Categorized, visualized, searchable. You got to see that you spent $540 at Starbucks last month and feel appropriately judged (hypothetically).
You’ve hopefully heard me talk about The Commons in past episodes. Basically, The Commons is the parallel economy I believe we need to build. Its organizing principle is that certain things — healthcare, housing, education, childcare, the things we need to live — should not be subject to the profit motive. Embedded in that principle is something equally non-negotiable: the people funding The Commons have the right to see what they’re funding. All of it. In real time. In an understandable way.
Here’s what I’m proposing: everything in The Commons is digitized and represented exactly like your old Mint dashboard. Visualized clearly in charts, for every person, in plain language, showing precisely what their contributions are funding. You paid in, here’s what’s built. Here’s what’s being proposed for next year. Here’s the trade off on the table. Want to see comparisons? Easy! Toggle here and see healthcare versus defense, education versus corporate subsidies, housing versus contracts. All of it visible, comparable, tied to our actual dollars.
Think back to the beginning of this episode. When presented visually like this, we’d actually be able to comprehend and evaluate extremely large budgets with brain- breaking numbers because now they’re depicted as common sense comparisons and charts, not as abstract gigantic figures. It’s basic user experience expectation really. The same standard we demand from our frickin’ banking apps just applied, you know, to the new social contract that keeps us all alive.
I’m not saying creating Mint for The Commons would be EASY to build, I’m just saying it’s absolutely doable. As usual, this isn’t an issue of “Can we do it?” it’s an issue of “Are enough of us demanding it?” It will be the job of The Commons to make this information available and understandable. And then I trust that we are smart enough to make good collective choices. Participatory clarity means we can all see the floor that’s being built, knowing what it costs, what the trade-offs are, what our contribution actually bought. A hard to read transparency report buried on a .gov page nobody visits doesn’t qualify.
We cannot build a shared future on a foundation of deliberate confusion. And we cannot ask people to meaningfully participate in a system they’ve never really been allowed to see. Let’s start building The Commons so we can show our society a new path forward. We can, and must, do better. And we will.
Original post with all source links: https://joshallan.com/2026/05/12/voting-on-vibes/
