Is It the Government's Job to Close the Income Gap?
President Obama focused much of his State of the Union address this week on initiatives he says will financially help lower- and middle-income Americans, but voters still place more importance on government policies that encourage a free market over ones that reduce the income gap.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 66% of Likely U.S. Voters consider policies that reduce the income gap between rich and poor to be at least somewhat important. Twenty-eight percent (28%) don’t consider such policies to be important. This includes 38% who regard those policies as Very Important and eight percent (8%) who say they are Not At All Important. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
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The survey of 800 Likely Voters was conducted on January 19-20, 2015 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3.5 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.