When faced with fiscal tradeoffs, more Louisiana residents support paying higher taxes to fund key services than cutting state spending to fill an $800 million budget gap next year, according to first report from the 2016 Louisiana Survey by LSU’s Reilly Center for Media and Public Affairs.
Released today, the survey found that about 51% of Louisianans polled are willing to pay higher taxes for the state to spend more on elementary and secondary education. Similar patterns exist for higher education (50%), transportation infrastructure (46%), health care (36%), and coastal protection and restoration (32%).
“Residents’ willingness to pay higher taxes is strongly tied to what they believe those taxes will fund,” the survey says.
The survey, the first report from the 2016 Louisiana Survey, was released one day after the Louisiana Legislature passed several last-minute bills—including a temporary 1-cent sales tax increase—to cover all but an estimated $30 million of the nearly $900 million gap in the current year’s budget.
The Legislature passed a temporary 1-cent increase on the state’s sales tax that would kick in April 1 and removed a number of exemptions on the sales tax.
“The value of asking about preferences for specific government expenditures and following up with a question about taxes to fund those expenditures is that it forces respondents to think in terms of the same sort of tradeoffs that lawmakers face,” the report says.
The data was collected via landline telephone and cellphone interviews from a random sampling of 1,001 Louisiana residents between Feb. 1-26. The survey had a response rate of 3% and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
Only 4% of those surveyed favored cutting education funding. Meanwhile, more than nine times as many people favored paying more for transportation infrastructure such as bridges, highways and roads. That may be a good sign for a state with a reported $12 billion backlog in transportation maintenance projects.
Similarly, Louisianans who were polled favored by a large majority paying higher taxes for health care than cutting services.
Funding for government assistance programs is the only exception to the survey respondents’ attitudes. In that area, 43% of those survey favored spending less on government assistance program while 40% support the state’s current funding level.
—Alexandria Burris
