Liberal PPIC Puts Pro-Tax Spin On Poll

JAN. 27, 2010

By WAYNE LUSVARDI

‘Hey, diddle diddle,
The poll cat played the fiddle,
The Gov jumped over the moon (beam),
The little (CalWatch) dog laughed to see such sport,
And the Gov dished out the budget with a spoon.”

A new Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) public opinion poll is out predictably, but misleadingly, claiming the public supports Brown’s budget plan and favors closing the state budget deficit with a mixture of spending cuts and taxes. Nothing could be further from the truth and the power of this PPIC poll is the power of suggestion to shape public opinion.

PPIC, a knee jerk pro-tax polling outfit, might as well have polled the public to find out which they agreed with: the governor’s state budget proposal consisting of a mix of spending cuts and tax increases or a nonsensical nursery rhyme? In other words, the PPIC poll is like the English nursery rhyme “The Cow Jumped Over the Moon” – it is complete nonsense that means little except for the political spin that PPIC puts on it.

Here’s what the key question on the PPIC poll asked and the results:

16. How would you prefer to deal with the state’s budget gap?

36 percent – Mostly through spending cuts
9 percent – Mostly through tax increases
42 percent – Mostly through a mix of tax cuts and increases
7 percent – OK to borrow from deficit
1 percent – Other

Opinion pollsters know that when asked a “cold” question without preparation that most people are ambivalent and don’t know what their opinion is and haven’t thought through the issue. This is why pollsters find that when they ask the same question again at a later time they get very different results.

Pollsters also know the sequence in which you provide multiple-choice answers are important in shaping the results. The above question sets up the respondent who is unknowledgeable or ambivalent by first asking if they agreed with spending cuts, or tax increases, or a mix of both.

Most people will answer “both” if they don’t know and believe the best answer is just to give a “50/50” answer. This is what juries often do in money damage lawsuits when they don’t know which side in a court case is telling the truth – they split the award of funds down the middle. So an answer such as both “a mix of cuts and taxes” is really a “don’t know” answer.

This is proven by another question asked in the PPIC poll as follows:

10. How much do you know about how your state and local government spend and raise money – a lot, very little, or nothing?

15 percent – a lot
39 percent – some
33 percent – little
11 percent – nothing
1 percent – don’t know

Forty five percent of those polled replied that they know little, nothing, or just “don’t know” about the state budget issue. And 84 percent answered that they knew “something” about the issue to “nothing” about it. What does that tell you? It infers that the answers aren’t very reliable because the respondents are ambivalent and not very well informed.

What is more important about the above question about how to fix the state budget deficit is the strength or magnitude of direction of the answers not the precise percentages. For example, a strong answer is 90 percent or 10 percent either favoring or not favoring an issue. Mid-range answers (30 percent to 60 percent) are not very strong indicators.

The strongest answers reported in the PPIC poll were that only 9 percent of the respondents favored tax increases and only 7 percent favored more borrowing. Thus:

What the news headlines should have reported:

“Poll Finds Public Doesn’t Want Taxes or More Borrowing,”

What the news headlines actually reported:

“PPIC Poll Finds Support for Brown’s Budget Plan”

Newspapers reported the PPIC poll findings as follows: “Most Californians are favorably disposed toward Gov. Jerry Brown’s plan to close the state budget deficit with a mixture of spending cuts and taxes.” “Most” means a majority. Only 42 percent of those polled favored both cuts and taxes, which is a plurality or a large minority. Once again both the PPIC spin and the newspaper reporting are misleading.

The power of asking such a question as “would you favor a mix of spending cuts and tax increases” is the power of suggestion. This creates a mind set in the public that the most popular answer is what the governor and PPIC want you to believe: both increased taxes and spending cuts are the solution to the state budget deficit. But it is the opposite of what the PPIC poll really found.

Who cares if the PPIC poll reports a 3.5 percent sampling error at a 95 percent confidence level based on surveying 2,004 adults? The PPIC spin on the poll is numerical nonsense. The public doesn’t want more taxes or more borrowing – that is the most important finding of the PPIC poll. Hey, diddle, diddle.