53% See Proposed GOP Budget Cuts As Pretty Insignificant

Congress is stalemated as Democrats fight $57 billion in spending cuts Republicans want to make in the federal budget for 2011, but most voters continue to believe that even the proposed GOP cuts won’t make a significant dent in the deficit.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 53% of Likely U.S. Voters think the spending cuts proposed by congressional Republicans will have little impact on overall levels of spending and deficits. Just 26% think the GOP cuts will significantly reduce federal spending and deficits. Twenty-one percent (21%) aren’t sure. (To see survey question wording, click here.) 

Even a plurality of Republicans (45%) say the proposed cuts are not likely to have much of an impact. Only 38% of Republican voters think they are significant. Most Democrats (63%) and unaffiliated voters (51%) say they won’t do much.

The majority of all voters wants to see spending cuts from this session of Congress. Fifty-eight percent (58%) would rather see a partial shutdown of the federal government until Republicans and Democrats agree on spending cuts than have spending continue at current levels. 

“In the 1995 shutdown, hardly anybody was directly impacted by the partial shutdown. In fact, polls showed that the UPS strike a few years later hit more people’s daily lives,” noted Scott Rasmussen. “But the 1995 debacle didn’t produce any lasting spending reforms either. Voters are looking for someone to display a little leadership and talk about potential solutions that are as big as the problem.”

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The survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted on February 24-25, 2011 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.