When it comes to deciding on either increased government spending or
returning surplus federal funds to taxpayers, most Americans say they’ll
take their money, according to a new
Portrait of America poll.
The
survey, released Sunday, showed that 70 percent of Americans favored a tax cut compared to just 19 percent who said they wanted surplus federal funds spent on new programs.
For his part, Vice President Al Gore, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, has opted for “targeted tax cuts” in the $250-300 billion range, according to campaign information. Gore’s priorities remain paying down the national debt and shoring up Medicare and Social Security — two of the federal budget’s biggest line items.
On the other hand, Texas Gov. George W. Bush — nominated as the GOP’s presidential candidate yesterday at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia — “believes that roughly one-quarter of the surplus should be returned to the people who earned it through broad tax cuts — otherwise, Washington will spend it,” said a tax issue statement on his
campaign website.
With government economic analysts predicting a $2 trillion surplus in ten years, Bush’s plan amounts to around $500 billion returned to taxpayers, or about double Gore’s offering.
Bush also said that federal taxes “are the highest they have ever been during peacetime,” a claim disputed by the Gore campaign.
“The public has a much different view of tax cuts,” Portrait of America analysts said Monday. “On the surface, these findings seem to challenge the conventional wisdom that people would rather use the surplus to shore up Social Security and other government programs rather than to cut taxes.”
Rasmussen Research conducted the survey of 1,000 adults on July 25. The margin of sampling error for the full sample is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95 percent level of confidence.
Other current Portrait of America polls deal with these questions: Do Americans favor tax cuts over funding for existing or new programs? Also, would most Americans opt out of programs like Social Security if they could?