So you want ideas for cuts?

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has found his talking point in response to President Biden’s refusal to negotiate over whether the government should default on its debts. “I want to look the president in the eye and [have him] tell me there’s not one dollar of wasteful spending in government,” the California Republican has said. “Who believes that? The American public doesn’t believe that.”

That isn’t really the question — like any large organization, the federal government surely has some waste it could cut — but eliminating wasteful spending wouldn’t get us very far. The deficit for fiscal year 2022 was $1.375 trillion, and we’re not overpaying that much for pencils and file folders. Balancing the budget as Republicans are asking would require truly spectacular evisceration of programs Americans rely on.

So here’s another question: If we wanted to do some budget-cutting — not under the extortionist threat of default, but because it might be worthwhile — what federal spending do liberals think we could do without?

I reached out to budget experts at a half-dozen liberal think tanks for answers. Some were definitely reluctant to get drawn into a debate that assumes the budget must be cut at all.

Some of these experts noted that we spend less on our government as a percentage of gross domestic product than most of our peer countries do, and also tax less than most of them do.

But if you want to make cuts, you might as well start where the money goes: The biggest items in the federal budget are Social Security, health care (including Medicare and Medicaid), and the military. As a general rule, Republicans would like to cut the first two, while Democrats would rather cut the third.

The military is the place to start cutting, said Lindsay Koshgarian of the Institute for Policy Studies. “More than half of the military budget goes to contractors in an average year, subsidizing multimillion-dollar CEO salaries and stock buybacks, as well as cases of egregious overcharging,” she told me. “Trimming weapons and military contracts is long overdue. And Congress routinely refuses to allow the Pentagon to retire weapons systems it no longer wants.”

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says tax expenditures are worth reforming so they cost less, especially the breaks that disproportionately help the wealthy, such as 529 college-savings accounts and 401(k) retirement accounts.

You might or might not like those ideas for cuts, but they’re serious, involving significant sums of money. In contrast, when conservatives offer examples of federal spending they think aren’t worthwhile, they’re usually incredibly small expenditures that they think sound silly, often involving animal research.

That’s likely because they understand a feature of public opinion that political scientists have known since the 1960s: On the subject of government, most Americans sound conservative in the abstract and liberal in the specific.

They say government should be small and the budget should be balanced, but when it comes to particular things government actually does, they support almost all of them and want to spend more money on them.