Has our political system been so degraded by misinformation and disinformation that it can no longer function? In a well-known paper with a discouraging title, It Feels Like We're Thinking," the political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels reported on a 1996 survey that asked voters whether the budget deficit had increased or decreased under President Clinton. In fact, the deficit was down sharply, but a plurality of voters - and a majority of Republicans - believed that it had gone up. I wondered on my blog what a similar survey would show today, with the deficit falling even faster than it did in the 1990s. Hal Varian, the chief economist of Google, offered to run a Google Consumer Survey ... on the question. So we asked whether the deficit has gone up or down since January 2010. And the results were even worse than in 1996: A majority of those who replied said the deficit has gone up, with more than 40 percent saying that it has gone up a lot. Only 12 percent answered correctly that it has gone down a lot. Am I saying that voters are stupid? Not at all. The problem is that much of what they hear is misleading if not outright false. The outright falsehoods, you won't be surprised to learn, tend to be politically motivated. It's a discouraging picture. We have an ill-informed or misinformed electorate, politicians who gleefully add to the misinformation and watchdogs who are afraid to bark.