RALEIGH – Generally speaking, the more the public knows about public spending and taxes, the more they express fiscal conservatism – which is good news if you are in the conservative think tank business.
Of course, you should simply take my word for this. But if for some reason you doubt the relationship I assert, please allow me to provide an example.
Over the past couple of years, the journal EducationNext and Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) have co-sponsored a national poll on education issues. In the most recent edition of EducationNext, the authors provide a useful summary of the key findings, along with an experiment from the 2008 survey.
The pollsters asked respondents if they believed that “government funding for public schools in [their] district should increase, decrease, or stay the same.” As education is a high spending priority for virtually everyone, it should be no surprise that a majority of respondents favored an increase.
However, the pollsters divided their respondents into two groups. One group got the question cold, without any additional information, and 61 percent favored increased education funding. But the other group was told the per-pupil expenditure in their district and then asked the same question. Support for increased funding dropped by 10 percentage points. The researchers found similar results for other questions, involving such matters as teacher pay and the expected educational benefits of higher funding.
Even these findings understate the phenomenon. Most Americans are so poorly informed about public education that even an added phrase or two in the polling question is unlikely to fill in the gap sufficiently.
For example, in the 2008 survey respondents were asked how much they thought their public school district spent per pupil. The median response was $2,000, if you can believe it, which is only about a fifth of the real nationwide average (per-pupil expenditure in North Carolina’s public schools was slightly lower, at about $9,000 in FY 2006-07, the last year for which operating and capital costs are available). Respondents also significantly underestimated the average teacher salary – they pegged it at about $33,000, on average, when the real national average was about $47,000.
Although these pollsters didn’t drill down deeper, my guess is that if you further informed respondents that a third or more of governmental expenditures on public education do not make it to teachers in the classroom, they would be less likely still to support higher spending levels until they could be assured it would reach the classroom.
Another way to spot this effect is to look on the tax side. Generally speaking again, voters have more information about the taxes they pay than about specific government spending levels and program details. And voters tend to express more fiscally conservative positions on whether taxes should be raised than they do on whether popular programs such as education should be more generously funded.
Consider the findings of the May poll by the Civitas Institute. Asked whether they agreed with Gov. Beverly Perdue’s decision to cut the salaries of teachers and state employees to balance the budget, 65 percent said they disagreed with it. But the same group of respondents expressed opposition to a sales-tax increase in response to the budget deficit, with 51 percent opposing it after a general description and 55 percent opposing it after being told the package in question (not what the House subsequently approved) would cost taxpayers $850 million.
The more information, the better.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation