When Reality and Perception Part Ways In their efforts to resolve the pending fiscal crisis, Republican and Democratic negotiators are struggling to thread a very fine needle: finding budget cuts big enough to help stabilize the country's long-term debt but palatable enough to sell to both sides and the public at large. Part of the challenge is that the biggest, fastest-growing expenses tend to be the ones Americans object most to cutting. Last year, a Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard School of Public Health poll asked respondents whether they would support major, minor or no reductions to a number of programs. Over all, Americans were most willing to cut foreign aid, spending for the war in Afghanistan and salaries and benefits for federal workers. But Congress could eliminate spending on foreign aid and Afghanistan entirely and still be left with large deficits. As of the 2011 fiscal year, the government was spending about $22 billion a year on foreign aid and $120 billion on the conflict in Afghanistan. But for the past four years, it has run deficits of more than $1 trillion a year. As for federal salaries, they have been frozen for the past two years. And if all federal civilian workers took a 10 percent pay cut, that would amount to roughly $19 billion a year in savings. Americans were far less willing to cut Medicaid, Social Security and Medicare. But those programs pose far and away the biggest challenge to the long-term fiscal health of the country, as Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, and a number of other economic experts have long warned. Rising health care spending is often singled out as the one most pressing factor. Moreover, Congress has already wrung billions in savings from discretionary spending programs. According to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal-leaning research and advocacy group, the Budget Control Act passed last year contained about $1.5 trillion in spending cuts over 10 years, about two-fifths from defense and three-fifths from other discretionary spending. That will shrink nondefense discretionary spending - meaning public education, agriculture, infrastructure, aid to the poor and numerous other programs - as a share of economic output to its lowest level since 1962 at least.