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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.)

(Want a free daily e-mail update? If it's in the news, it's in our polls). Rasmussen Reports updates are also available on Twitter or Facebook.

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.

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