http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-poll-budget-20110424,0,850743.story
Times/USC Dornsife poll: Californians support tax hikes to help close budget gap
By Evan Halper, Los Angeles Times
April 23, 2011, 4:15 p.m.
Reporting from Sacramento— California voters agree with Gov. Jerry Brown that tax increases should help close the state budget deficit, and they want to vote on his plan for raising the revenue, according to a new Times/USC Dornsife poll.
The Democratic governor has been traveling the state to tout his proposal for a balance of spending reductions and tax increases since it stalled in the Legislature last month amid a bitter battle with Republicans. He had wanted an election in June on a renewal of several tax increases that will have expired by July 1, but he now hopes for a vote in the fall.
Sixty percent of those surveyed, including majorities of both Democrats and Republicans, said they back such an election. The alternative being pushed by most GOP lawmakers — forgoing an election and balancing the budget by cutting more from state services — was supported by just 33%.
Polling always fascinates me, even as I take a dim view of the psuedo-science that supposedly attests to its validity. The most significant of many objections I have to polling is the question of whether the interaction with respondents measures a preexisting opinion or creates a response on the spot to something the subject has never before seriously considered. This objection goes far beyond the obvious truism that the phrasing of poll questions can determine the result --
Do you favor surrender to the terrorists or do you favor strong action to reduce the threat of terrorism? No, even assuming integrity and honest curiousity by the pollster, you can never know how much if any thought the respondent has given to the issues being surveyed. The closer you get to election day, the more likely it is that your subject will actually have an opinion regarding her vote. But when you conduct a poll like this one, you have no way of knowing whether the poll is creating the response.
In answer to this complaint, you will see many polls that seek to measure initial reactions, and then proceed to "inform" the respondent of the facts surrounding the query before asking the question again. Often this leads to a significant change in the percentages. I take the pollsters as being sincere when they go through this drill, even as it seems to me to call their whole project into serious question.
Thus today's polling story in the Times reports:
Support for the cuts-only approach dropped to 25% when voters were informed that it would probably require reductions in school funding, according to the survey conducted for The Times and the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
And:
Nearly half thought the budget had grown in that period, with more than 1 in 4 saying it was "much bigger." In fact, general fund spending went from $103 billion in the 2007-08 budget year to $92.2 billion in the current year.
The artcle quotes several experts in support of its main thrust that Governor Brown is winning the public over to the idea of raising taxes. In contrast to a similar poll taken by the same organization just five months ago when a strong plurality favored spending cuts without tax increases, these results show that a strong majority supports increased taxation to avoid further cuts to education and even social welfare spending.
I believe that these poll results fit with the pattern of other national surveys indicating a rejection of Teabag nonsense. I seriously doubt that very many folks even yet understand the nuances of budget math, economic growth or the costs of entitlements. But what everybody has heard about -- inspite of desultory coverage in the Main Stream Media -- is that the 2011 GOP has launched an unprecendented political attack on the social compact. And these polls, along with the recall petition campaigns in Wisconsin and the ongoing campaigns of resistance in several other Teabag state capitals, demonstrate a visceral rejection of this attack.
For the last several decades, California has led the nation politically and socially. Reaganism and Howard Jarvis' philosophy took root here first, before it spread to the rest of the country. In the new century, we are now the bluest state -- and Governor Moonbeam is buidling the political consensus to reject the anti-tax bullshit that has bankrupted our governments and devastated our social fabric.
Teabag shit is just too weird and it is trashing the GOP brand.