Cut the debt by cutting government: the first Reason-Rupe poll shows a country more radical than its politicians.

AS CONGRESS GRAPPLED over the federal government's $14.3 trillion debt ceiling this spring, the first-ever quarterly Reason-Rupe Poll found that 69 percent of Americans consider it "very important" to reduce the national debt. Another 17 percent deemed it "important," while I o percent said"moderately important."A full 84 percent of Americans want a reduction in government spending to be part of the solution to the debt crisis; 42 percent want an increase in taxes to be part of the solution.

This is the first in a series of Reason-Rupe public opinion surveys dedicated to exploring what Americans think about public policy. The project, which you can follow and parse in greater detail at reason.com/poll, has been made possible thanks to the generous support of the Arthur N. Rupe Foundation. This first report surveyed a random, national sample of 1,200 adults by telephone (859 on landlines, 341 on cell phones) from March 24 to April 9, 2011. The results have a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points. The poll was conducted for the Reason Foundation by NSON Opinion Strategy.

Taxes and Spending

Concern about the debt (see Figure 1) is consistent in all groups, regardless of race, party identification, age, income, education, gender, religious activity, or employment stares. Significant differences between political groups do emerge on the question of whether reducing the debt is "very important": Eighty-five percent of Tea Party supporters and 80 percent of non-Tea Party Republicans think so, compared to 60 percent of independents and 59 percent of Democrats.

Media coverage of the public's worries about deficit spending has focused mainly on the lack of consensus on how to deal with the national debt. Analysts and commentators often observe that survey respondents call for spending cuts in the abstract even while supporting current levels of spending on Medicare, Social Security, and other big-ticket items. Yet it is not surprising that when survey questions fail to explore tradeoffs, the answers reflect a lack of consistency or feasibility. Typically, pollsters do not follow up with the sort of inquiries that would clarify the apparent confusion. The Reason-Rupe poll, by engaging in those follow-ups, revealed a country very reluctant to raise taxes.

When presented with a series of tradeoffs between reducing spending and raising taxes (see Figure 2), the most popular policy prescription by far was spending cuts: Forty-five...