Appendix A: Review of Other Polls on Surplus Preferences

An exhaustive analysis of telephone surveys conducted by other organizations was undertaken to provide a comparison with the results of this budget exercise. COPA analyzed 60 poll questions from August 1997 to July 2000 that asserted the existence (or future existence) of a federal budget surplus and that asked respondents to choose their top priority for allocating surplus funds. It should be noted that none of these 60 questions mentioned the difference between the on-budget surplus and the Social Security surplus, or gave respondents the opportunity to consider each surplus separately.

The set of questions included those that offered specific response options as well as some open-ended ones, with the only requirement being that the answer set had to contain at least three responses or response options. For all questions, each surplus spending option -- Social Security, education, debt reduction, Medicare, defense, etc. -- was ranked according to the public’s order of preference, with the highest percentage item ranked as 1, the next highest percentage item ranked as 2, and so on, for all responses above 5 percent. Options that got identical percentages in a question got the same ranking. Finally, the rankings of each policy area were totaled and divided by the number of questions in which they appeared, yielding the average rank for each surplus spending option.

The aggregate rank order of priorities using this systematic comparison reveals results that are somewhat consistent with the on-budget surplus decisions made in the web exercise. As in the web survey, Social Security clearly is considered to be the top priority in telephone surveys. With an average rank of 1.44, it was seen as the most important surplus investment in 74% of the questions in which it was an option. Again, in COPA’s exercise, not only did 82% give some surplus money to Social Security, but they also gave it the most money on average.

However, there are important differences. In the telephone surveys, domestic issues took the next three spots. Education was a close second to Social Security, with an average rank of 1.59; it was ranked either first or second in a vast majority of questions. Medicare (1.84) and health care in general (2.00) ranked third and fourth. Paying down the national debt was less of a priority: while about 7 in 10 spent money for this in our exercise, its 2.46 ranking makes it only the fifth highest priority in the telephone surveys. The option of cutting taxes was mentioned in all 60 telephone questions, but it ranked only sixth with a score of 2.98; by contrast, a majority provided funds for tax cuts in the web survey.

Various other options appeared in a relatively small number of questions, and they all had lower average rankings than the more often cited items above. The leading option among these -- indeed, the only other spending alternative with a rank of three or higher -- was fighting poverty and homelessness (3.00). Interestingly, this preference was ranked third on average in three open-end questions, whereas none of the closed-end questions even offered it as an option. Three other issues appeared in several questions but were given lower priority than third in terms of average surplus spending preference. These were general domestic spending (3.33), a prescription drug benefit for Medicare recipients (3.50), and defense spending (3.88).

It should be noted, however, that it is difficult to make direct comparisons between these questions and the COPA/Knowledge Networks exercise. While all of the 60 telephone questions ask respondents to choose a top priority, the surplus exercise allows for a distributive framework. Thus, while domestic priorities take precedence over debt reduction and tax cuts are far down the list when respondents are forced to choose, majorities are willing to provide at least some money for them when given a distributional alternative. Moreover, respondents are probably more willing to let domestic priorities slide in the web surplus exercise because they had previously been given the ability to adjust the current year budget according to those priorities.