During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama portrayed his tax plan as a way to help "spread the wealth around." That was an unfortunate choice of words, though not as silly as the "conservative" formulation that raising taxes "punishes success."
Most Arizona voters do not foresee an end to the economic recession by year's end or America becoming safer from foreign attacks at the same time.
A majority of Americans (52%) now worry more about drug violence coming over the border from Mexico than illegal immigrants, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.
Three-out-of-five Arizona voters (59%) say Governor Janet Napolitano made the right decision accepting President-elect Barack Obama’s offer to be secretary of Homeland Security. Napolitano’s nomination will be the subject of a U.S. Senate hearing later this week.
Two weeks of military action in the Gaza Strip has done nothing to move public opinion in America.
Seventy-five percent (75%) of U.S. voters say they plan to watch at least some of Barack Obama’s inauguration live next week, including 28% who plan to watch it all, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.
Obama spoke Thursday at George Mason University about his American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan -- a.k.a. the stimulus package. There's an interesting section that would warm the heart of John Maynard Keynes.
Former eBay chief Meg Whitman is preparing to run for governor in 2010. Considering that California is so broke that next month it may have to issue IOUs instead of checks, I cannot imagine why anyone would want the job.
Twenty-two percent (22%) of NFL football fans expect the New York Giants to win the Super Bowl for the second straight year. However, 17% think the Pittsburgh Steelers will emerge victorious on Super Sunday. Fans of those two teams are also the cockiest—64% of each team’s fans expect their favorites will win it all.
With no break in the bad economic news, Americans are reconciling themselves to the need for Big Brother to step in and lend them a hand.
Sixty-five percent (65%) of New York voters approve of Gov. David Paterson’s job performance, but 48% say the state does not need to raise taxes as he has proposed to balance its budget.
Despite the fact that President-elect Barack Obama promised billions of dollars in tax breaks as part of his economic plan, just 21% believe their taxes will go down during his presidency.
Sixty-three percent (63%) of U.S. voters say it is at least somewhat likely that major legislation to improve the country will be passed during Barack Obama’s first 100 days in the White House, a strong indicator of how much voters are counting on the new administration and Congress to fix the current economic mess.
What a difference a financial meltdown makes.
"Go back to the oven," the woman in her hijab in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., yelled to the Jewish Americans demonstrating their support for Israel. "You need a big oven, that's what you need."
If Caroline Kennedy is appointed to the U.S. Senate, she is favored to win re-election against her likeliest Republican opponent in 2010.
It seems as though some of the post-election optimism among Democrats and African-Americans has worn off. For the full month of December, the percentage of those voters who say the nation is heading in the right direction dropped from levels found in November.
Voter confidence in the War on Terror has remained relatively stable over the past three weeks. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 47% of voters believe the United States and its allies are winning the War on Terror, compared to 46% in mid-December.
Americans are solidly optimistic about the economy’s recovery, but most expect it to take up to five years to come back.
As the government contemplates spending very large sums of money, it is reassuring to know that somebody still worries about waste. Or it would be reassuring, if only that somebody were not Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, who promises that he and his fellow Republicans will "protect taxpayers against the rush to spend their money."
