The Nation: Voters Did Not Choose Austerity

[amborin]

Voters Did Not Choose Austerity

George Zornick on November 9, 2012

On the top line, it’s pretty simple: Barack Obama ran on an unambigious platform of government investment, higher taxes on the wealthy and a protected safety net. Mitt Romney ran on an equally clear platform of vastly decreased federal spending, including on “entitlement” programs, and lower taxes for everyone (and, though he frequently denied it, mostly the wealthy).

Now, the political conversation turns immediately to the fiscal cliff, which requires big decisions on tax rates and government spending. Obama’s re-election should be a clear enough sign of how voters want this handled, but of course there are hitches: pundits and politicians can invent all sorts of other reasons why Obama was re-elected, and on several occasions during the campaign Obama voiced support for the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan, which would lower taxes on all income brackets and cut the safety net.

So it’s therefore important to make clear that voters quite consciously chose a different path. The polling data bears that out.

A survey of people who voted in the past election, for both candidates (sample size 1,000; plus or minus 3.1 percent) conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research for Democracy Corps and the Campaign for America’s Future found that many individual elements of the Simpson-Bowles plan are deeply unpopular with the electorate.





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http://www.thenation.com/blog/171174/voters-did-not-choose-austerity