Introduction

Making decisions about the federal budget is a complex and difficult process. When the President and members of Congress make annual decisions about government spending, they establish priorities, balance competing interests and make difficult trade-offs in a highly politicized milieu. They must take into account the particular economic environment of the times, such as deficits in the 1980s and much of the 1990s, surpluses in recent years. They often work with imperfect information and are forced to make plans based on assumptions that may never be realized. Public attitudes are one of many important considerations for policymakers, but given the complexity of the process, it is not surprising that decisions often do not reflect public preferences.

Election year 2000 could almost be called “the year of the budget makers.” Seldom in a presidential election have so many aspects of the campaign debate seemed to turn on budgetary questions. The existence of a budget surplus for the first time in decades -- and projections from government sources that sizeable surpluses will continue -- have made possible a host of proposals in far-flung areas, including health care and Social Security, two thorny subjects that in the past politicians have often treated warily. At the same time, the surplus has enhanced a climate among policymakers that favors increases in defense spending -- strongly affirmed by both the Republican and the Democratic presidential candidates.

While the public has been asked in polls how they would react to various elements of the budget and what it would like to do with the surplus, no clear picture of the public’s views has emerged. The very nature of the budget and surplus debate -- a complex and layered set of interdependent tradeoffs -- requires a more comprehensive approach if the desires and priorities of the American public are to be fully understood.

Much of the polling that has been done on public preferences on spending priorities has had limited utility. Many poll questions simply ask respondents if they would like to spend more money on a particular budget item. To express their support for the importance of the item, many respondents will answer affirmatively. This often produces data that show a majority of Americans would like to increase spending on many budget items and would also like to not raise taxes or run a deficit. The public is then easily dismissed as fatuous and irresponsible. However, this is largely an unfair charge. Most Americans do not know the actual layout of the budget, and virtually all Americans have some programs that they would like to reduce, along with many that they would like to increase. Therefore, they are not so much being unrealistic as they are responding to poll questions that fail to create a realistic tradeoff framework.

To remedy this situation, the Center on Policy Attitudes (COPA) collaborated with Knowledge Networks to develop an innovative poll that would ask respondents to establish budgetary priorities in a context that does require making tradeoffs -- similar to what members of Congress must do. The main focus of the effort was to see how Americans would deal with the discretionary budget -- that portion of the budget that is not dictated by existing laws (e.g. for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid), but is decided on each year in Congress.

In addition, the study sought to find how Americans prefer to handle the budget surplus. The very existence of a surplus tends to evoke a tension between short-term goals -- including spending on popular items like education and providing tax cuts -- and long-term goals, including reducing the national debt to stabilize the government’s fiscal position for the future and preparing to handle the severe problems projected for Social Security. When the public is faced with the serious trade-offs between short-term and long-term goals, what decisions does the majority make?

Because such a process requires considering a significant amount of information simultaneously, the standard telephone interview method was less than ideal. Using the Internet, though, it becomes possible to give respondents a substantial amount of information that they can peruse and make decisions about at their own pace.

Many Internet polls do not have truly representative samples because they are limited to the universe of people who are already online. To create a truly representative sample, a new company called Knowledge Networks has recruited a panel of more than 60,000 people across the United States, using a random digit dialing process. All panelists are then supplied with WebTV, which they use to retrieve and respond to surveys. Unlike other Internet polling methods, this process ensures that each household in the United States has an equal chance of being asked to participate, and also means that the pool of panelists contains households that do not already have Internet access. Participants for this survey were selected at random from the pool of panelists who are 18 years of age or older. A full discussion of the methods followed for this study can be found in Appendix C.

For the purposes of this study, the discretionary federal budget was broken into twelve major categories, including space and science research, the environment, job training, defense, humanitarian and economic aid to foreign countries, transportation, the State Department, the United Nations and UN peacekeeping, federal administration of justice and medical research. Several of these discretionary areas included small amounts of mandatory spending, such as loan programs, subsidies or benefit payments. The exercise did not include several budget areas for various reasons: they received very small appropriations (energy); they included too many disparate programs (community and regional development, commerce and housing); they were a mix of mandatory and discretionary (income security and agriculture); or they were not policy related (general government). In most cases, the areas omitted had more than one of these characteristics. Of course, also not included were “off-budget” mandatory spending items, such as entitlement programs like Medicare or Social Security.

A note on the source of the budget information and how it was presented is in order. All spending figures were taken from Office of Management and Budget’s publication, Budget of the United States Government: Fiscal Year 2001. Outlays are for 1999, the last year for which actual spending figures were known when the survey was carried out. To make it easier for respondents to think about the budget, the total discretionary budget was set at $1,000, which is a close approximation of the amount the average individual taxpayer pays each year for discretionary budget items. Actual spending figures were then translated to their corresponding portion of the $1,000.

Questions about the budget surplus were also translated into dollar terms that the average American could fathom. This was done by presenting the surplus in terms scaled to the average taxpayer, just as in the discretionary budgetary exercise.

The survey was conducted with a nationwide sample of 721 adults conducted via the Internet, using Knowledge Networks’ web panel (margin of error +/-3.7%). The survey was conducted July 14-26, 2000. A follow-up survey of 577 of the original respondents was taken July 28-August 6, 2000.

In addition to conducting the Internet survey with Knowledge Networks, COPA also conducted several focus groups around the country, specifically in Richmond, Virginia; Cleveland, Ohio; and Frederick, Maryland. In the focus groups, participants went through the same budget exercise, but were able to discuss their feelings and thoughts as they went along, providing added insight into how Americans feel about budgetary priorities.