Nate Silver published an extremely interesting article yesterday about how the G.O.P.’s fervent no-tax policy is outside of the political mainstream.
He cites Gallup most recent poll (posted below), and the results are fairly surprising compared to those of the Tea Party poll that the Washington Post did:
Preferences for Spending Cuts vs. Tax Increases to Reduce the Deficit
As you may know, Congress can reduce the federal budget deficit by cutting spending, raising taxes, or a combination of the two. Ideally, how would you prefer to see Congress attempt to reduce the federal budget deficit?
Only with spending cuts | 20% |
Mostly with spending cuts | 30% |
Equally with spending cuts and tax increases | 32% |
Mostly with tax increases | 7% |
Only with tax increases | 4% |
Total: Only/Mostly with spending cuts | 50% |
Total: Only/Mostly with tax increases | 11% |
[Gallup, 7/13/2011]
While Republican in the House are vehemently defending a spending-cuts-only debt ceiling deal, Gallup’s poll shows that this is actually outside the mainstream of the American public. Only 26% of Republican voters surveyed took the position that a deal should be 100% spending cuts, along with 20% of those polled overall. In fact, where the most popular answer (at 32%) was that any deal should utilize spending cuts and tax increases equally.
Additionally, Republican congressmen (largely through their leaders, Eric Cantor and John Boehner), have been vastly overstating the amount of tax increases that President Obama’s debt ceiling idea would include. The Obama plan would include 83% spending cuts to 17% tax increases/the elimination of tax loopholes.
Nate Silver explained it best in his article:
We can also use the Gallup poll to tease out what mix of tax increases and spending cuts the public would like to see in a deal. Assume that the people who told Gallup that they wanted “mostly” cuts would prefer a 3-to-1 ratio of spending reductions to tax increases, and that those who said they wanted mostly tax increases would prefer a 3-to-1 ratio in the opposite direction. (The other choices that Gallup provided in the poll — an equal mix of tax increases and spending cuts or a deal that consisted entirely of one or the other — are straightforward to interpret.)
The average Republican voter, based on this data, wants a mix of 26 percent tax increases to 74 percent spending cuts. The average independent voter prefers a 34-to-66 mix, while the average Democratic voter wants a 46-to-54 mix.
Now consider the positions of the respective parties to the negotiation. One framework that President Obama has offered, which would reduce the debt by a reported $2 trillion, contains a mix of about 17 percent tax increases to 83 percent spending cuts.Check out the whole article here, or click the link below:
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/13/house-republicans-no-tax-stance-far-outside-political-mainstream/
