This guest blog post is authored by Emily Ekins, who is the Director of Polling for the Reason Foundation… For our politicos, note that the jump below in the first graph goes to a new statewide survey with new polling numbers on Propositions 30, 32 and 38.
Emily Ekins, Reason Foundation
Poll Finds Californians Are More Ready for Wisconsin-Like Reforms Than You Might Think
No one is going to mistake Gov. Jerry Brown for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, but our new Reason-Rupe telephone poll of likely voters in California finds emerging signs that even California’s Democratic-leaning electorate has grown weary of the state’s tax increases and may be ready for some Wisconsin-like reforms.
Adjusted for inflation, California’s government spending increased 42 percent per capita from 2000 to 2010, but the Reason-Rupe poll finds that just 14 percent of likely voters believe California’s government spending over that decade improved the quality of life in the state. In fact, 52 percent tell Reason-Rupe that the increase in state spending actually decreased the quality of life and 28 percent feel it made no impact. As a result, 56 percent of Californians favor reducing state government spending to what was spent per capita in 2000 and 25 percent oppose going back to the year 2000’s spending levels.
And with pension liabilities crushing state and local governments, 77 percent of Californians believe government workers should contribute more to their own pension and health care plans and 74 percent believe taxpayers should get to vote to approve future increases to government employees’ pensions and benefits.
For more on these poll results, as well as our new results on Propositions 30, 32 and 38, please visit the Reason-Rupe poll website.