Poll: Americans Favor Taxing The Rich
(Bloomberg News) Americans want Congress to bring down a federal budget deficit that many believe is "dangerously out of control," only under two conditions: minimize the pain and make the rich pay.
The public wants Congress to keep its hands off entitlements such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, a Bloomberg National Poll shows. They oppose cuts in most other major domestic programs and defense.
They want to maintain subsidies for farmers and tax breaks like the mortgage-interest deduction. And they're against an increase in the gasoline tax.
That aversion to sacrifice is at odds with a spate of recent studies, including one by President Barack Obama's debt panel, that say reductions in Medicare, Social Security, military and other spending are necessary to curb a deficit that totaled $1.29 trillion in the fiscal year ended September 30, or 9% of the gross domestic product.
"The idea that we can solve our structural-deficit problems merely by asking more of the well-off is totally unrealistic," said David Walker, who was U.S. comptroller general from 1998 to 2008 and now leads a group advocating against deficits. "The math simply doesn't work."
According to the December 4-7 poll, taken days after Obama's commission sounded an alarm over the nation's "unsustainable fiscal path," the public still believes it's more important to "minimize sacrifice" than to take "bold and fast" action to pare the $13.7 trillion national debt.
If anything, the poll shows that public concern over the deficit has ebbed: Forty-eight percent of Americans say the budget shortfall is "dangerously out of control," down from 53% who said that in an October survey.
"The reality is deficit cutting hurts, and the American public is in no mood for further hurt than the slow economy and high unemployment is delivering," says J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co., a Des Moines, Iowa-based firm that conducted the nationwide survey.
The one place Americans are willing to see sacrifice is in the wallets of the wealthy and Wall Street. While they say they strongly support balancing the budget over the next 20 years, when offered a list of more than a dozen possible spending cuts or tax increases, majorities opposed every one of them except imposing a bigger burden on the rich.
"We give billions of dollars to these corporations, and in my eyes they pretty much just put it in their pocket," says Donald Froemming, a 57-year-old independent voter and unemployed diesel gas mechanic from Moose Lake, Minn.