You can participate in this by taking this survey which allows you to specify where to cut and where to increase. Your Uncle Dave would slash defense spending more than half, eliminate farm subsidies, eliminate the high-speed rail and raise funding for education.

An innovative study has found that when a representative sample of the American public was presented the federal budget, they proposed changes far different from those the Obama administration or the Republican-led House have proposed.

The biggest difference in spending is that the public favored deep cuts in defense spending, while the administration and the House propose modest increases. However, the public also favored more spending on job training, education, and pollution control than did either the administration or the House. On average the public made a net reduction of $146 billion–far more than either the administration or the House called for.

In other words, the public takes a considerably more humane view of spending than either party, is considerably less beholden to the military-industrial complex, and doesn’t seem to care if the super-rich get a bit offended.

The study was the combined effort of a think tank, the Program for Public Consultation, and the polling firm Knowledge Networks. They presented an elaborate questionnaire to more than 2,000 respondents.

Given the goal of cutting the deficit, the average Americans did the job — cutting it way more deeply, in fact, than either the Democratic or Republican proposals call for.

Ironically, the political subgroup that did the worst job was the slice of respondents who identified themselves as Tea Party sympathizers. They were the least likely to raise taxes and also the least likely, when faced with actual programs, to make cuts.

The next worst were Republicans, then Democrats. Independents raised taxes more than Republicans and cut spending more than Democrats, ultimately reducing the deficit by a whopping $195 billion.