20% Would Pay Higher Taxes to Reduce Deficit
Despite concern about the country’s historic-level budget deficit, Americans are not willing to pay more in taxes to reduce it.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of American Adults shows that just 20% of Adults would be willing to pay higher taxes to help reduce the federal budget deficit. Seventy-one percent (71%) would not be willing to do so. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
Those findings are nearly identical to those found last April.
At the same time, however, 83% of Americans say the size of the federal budget deficit is due more to the unwillingness of politicians to cut government spending than to the reluctance of taxpayers to pay more in taxes. Seventy percent (70%) of Likely U.S. Voters think voters are more willing to make the hard choices needed to reduce federal spending than elected politicians are.
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The survey of 1,000 Adults was conducted on March 13-14, 2011 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.
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