Poll: Only 9% want to raise taxes to reduce deficit, 77% want spending cuts. Also, 71% are against raising the debt ceiling

from theblogprof by The blogprof


Poll: Only 9% want to raise taxes to reduce deficit, 77% want spending cuts. Also, 71% are against raising the debt ceiling: "How about them apples?:

I kow it's in the mud, but just who are the 2% that want neither? Their solution is... what??? Of course, the fact that the vast supermajority of American wants cuts not taxes, the headline of eth CBS News piece is this: Poll: Americans Split on What to Cut from Government. The table that the article instead focuses on:

What it indicates of course is that either 1) Americans know what needs to be done but are scared to do it, or more likely 2) the poll didn't ask the right questions. Nowhere in the above list is the repeal of ObamaCare mentioned. Or scaling back of federal employees. How about eliminating the Department of Education and a few others altogether? Pension reform for federal employees? Rescinding the authorization for public employees to unionize in the first place? Welfare reform? Medicaid reform? No more refundable tax credits? How about the 47% that pay no federal income taxes pay some federal income taxes? Plenty of questions could have been had. CBS wasn't up to the task.

In addition to the above was a poll from Reuters: Poll: 71% of Americans oppose raising the debt ceiling. You Congresscritter in Washington listening? And don't give me default crap. Via Insty:

FELIX SALMON: The US won’t default, even if the debt ceiling stays.

In any given month, the government’s income dwarfs its debt-service obligations, which means that the government could simply pay all interest on Treasury bonds out of its cashflow. Greg hasn’t run the numbers on principal maturities, but I’m pretty sure that they too could be covered out of cash receipts—and when that happened, of course, the total debt outstanding would go down, and we wouldn’t be bumping up against the ceiling any more.

The point here is that the government has enormous expenditures every month, and debt service constitutes an important yet small part of them. If the debt ceiling weren’t raised, it stands to reason that just about any other form of government spending would get cut before Tim Geithner dreamed of defaulting on risk-free bonds.

So they could just . . . cut spending in response?

I'm not holding my breath. At least not yet.

UPDATE: More from memeorandum, JammieWearingFool, iOwnTheWorld.com, Hot Air, Outside the Beltway, Weasel Zippers, Gateway Pundit and Pajamas Media

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