RALEIGH – Being in the policy-information business, I consume as much information as I can find about public-policy knowledge and preferences. The goal is to understand how individuals – be they policymakers, political activists, or just sometime-voters – get their information, form their views, and translate their preferences into action.

Obviously, I have an institutional motive here. The John Locke Foundation operates a variety of research, communications, and outreach programs, each with a potential claim on current and future JLF revenues. The allocation decision is akin to those in portfolio management. It should be informed by the best available data.

Not surprisingly, some of the questions I find most intriguing involve public perceptions about the size, scope, and cost of government. While public-policy debate is often about particulars – whether a particular program should be enacted or expanded, what the consequences of a specific tax or regulatory change might be – it necessarily occurs within a context, a set of assumptions shared among the debate’s active participants and (usually) a different set of assumptions shared among the debate’s audience.

A new survey by the Harris polling unit, taken on behalf of the Washington-based Tax Foundation, provides some fascinating insights on the matter. It asked respondents a normative question: “What is the maximum percentage of a person’s income that should go to taxes – that is, all taxes, state, federal, and local?” The question yielded the following data:

• The average response was that total taxes should equal no more than 15 percent of a person’s income.

• Women favored a lower tax take (13 percent) than did men (17 percent).

• The young favored a higher tax take (18 percent) than did the old (13 percent among the 45-54 cohort, for example).

• Those of modest household incomes ($25,000-$35,000) favored a lower tax take (13 percent) while those of higher incomes ($75,000+) favored a higher tax take (18 percent).

• Those with graduate degrees favored a higher tax take (22 percent) while those lacking a high-school diploma favored a lower one (12 percent).

If you find some of these findings surprising or counterintuitive, be patient. You haven’t seen the punch line, yet. The average tax burden in the United States is actually 33 percent – way higher than any of the preference averages from the survey. Just imagine, for a moment, that fiscal conservatives in Washington, state capitals, and localities set a goal merely to reduce the total cost of government to the 22 percent target. That would require paring down governments to their core functions, increasing the efficiency of service delivery, and economizing on the use of debt. It would mean state governments would have to find more efficient means of educating students than the current, ineffective near-monopoly of district-run government schools. It would almost certainly require major structural changes in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid – transforming unsustainable and immoral transfer programs into some version of a forced-saving program, as some have recommended. It would mean an end to corporate welfare and farm subsidies. Fiscal pork would have to give way to fiscal tofu (sorry for the image).

If you did all that, and pulled the total cost of government down to 22 percent of income, most Americans would apparently still be dissatisfied. They’d still think government was too big. So would I. But I’d still take the deal in a heartbeat. It would mean that American government had been reduced in size and cost by about a third, on average.

I am certain that in reaction to the Harris/Tax Foundation survey, many defenders of the big-spending status quo would argue that the average American, who wants government to consume no more than 15 percent, is simply uninformed about the true cost of the government programs he desires. Okay, I might grant them that. But if even the highest-educated cohort of the American population believes that government ought to be 33 percent smaller than it is, who am I to disagree?

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.