Shamelessly pilfered from Below the Beltway:

• Civic Literacy Report – Additional Finding (americancivilliteracy.org)

The ISI civic Literacy survey was not designed to test the civic knowledge of elected officials, but it did discover evidence of an interesting pattern that may merit further exploration.

[...]

Among the 2,508 respondents, 164 say they have been elected to a government office at least once. This sub-sample of officeholders yields a startling result: elected officials score lower than the general public. Those who have held elective office earn an average score of 44% on the civic literacy test, which is five percentage points lower than the average score of 49% for those who have never been elected. It would be most interesting to explore whether this statistically significant result is maintained across larger samples of elected officials.

The survey itself is here:

• Civics Quiz

(I scored a 30/33 — missing questions on the Gettysburg Address, the Anti-Federalists, and FDR vs. the Supreme Court.)

One of the most relevant questions is also somewhat deficient:

Which of the following fiscal policy combinations would a government most likely follow to stimulate economic activity when the economy is in a severe recession?

A. increasing both taxes and spending
B. increasing taxes and decreasing spending
C. decreasing taxes and increasing spending
D. decreasing both taxes and spending

The answer they’re looking for is “C” — which amounts to “give consumers lots of spending money so that they’ll buy shit“.  Sound familiar?  It’s philosophically equivalent to the constant interest rate cuts and “stimulus cheques” we’ve been receiving over the past year or so (and, for that matter, to the bank bailout).  We’re also coming to understand that it doesn’t work… or at least that it’s not the right way to solve this problem: panicked dumping of credit on a weak market makes people more worried, not less, and the basic problem these days seems to be confidence, not liquidity.

(In any case, the question makes some pretty broad assumptions about the nature of “a government”, which I suppose are appropriate for an American civics quiz: a Robert Mugabe or Hugo Chavez government would probably respond with hyperinflation and price controls.)

Your final creepy thought for the day:

Officeholders and non-officeholders find it equally difficult to identify the three branches of government. Only 49% of each group can name the legislative, executive, and judicial.