Questions - Deficit Reduction and Congress - August 3-4, 2011

National Survey of 1,000 Likely Voters
Conducted August 3-4, 2011

By Rasmussen Reports

1* Regardless of how you plan to vote, how likely is it that Barack Obama will be re-elected in 2012?

2* The president and Congress recently agreed to a plan that raised the debt ceiling and promises to cut federal spending by a trillion dollars over the next decade. How likely is it that federal government spending will actually be cut by a trillion dollars over the next decade?

3* When members of Congress talk about spending cuts in the future, do they mean spending next year will be lower than it was this year or do they mean that the growth in spending will be less than planned?

4* Suppose that the president calls for a balanced approach to deficit reduction and insists that half the reduction comes from increasing taxes on corporations and the wealthy. Would that help or hurt his chances for re-election?

5* A special congressional committee has been formed to recommend long-term fiscal reforms by the end of the year.  If the super committee can’t make a deal in time, automatic across the board spending cuts are supposed to go into effect, including cuts in Medicare and defense spending. If the committee can’t make a deal in time, how likely is it that they will allow the automatic, across the board spending cuts to actually happen?

NOTE: Margin of Sampling Error, +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence