Reducing deficit falls in importance to most voters: Poll

Remember the deficit?

Despite a new forecast that the government’s annual budget deficits will start rising again this year, few are paying much attention to the increasing red ink. Not President Obama, not Congress, not the majority of presidential candidates.

And, increasingly, not the public.

The latest Pew Research Center survey has found that the objective of reducing the budget deficit, which the public once ranked among the most urgent goals for Mr. Obama, has continued to decline in importance.

In the Pew survey, 56 percent of respondents said reducing the budget deficit should be a top priority for the president and Congress this year, down from 64 percent who felt that way last year.

In 2013 72 percent called the deficit a top priority. In the new Pew survey, released Friday, reducing the budget deficit ranked ninth in priority out of 18 policy areas tested.

Those findings jibe with other recent polls, such as a Bloomberg survey in November that found the public ranked the deficit as sixth in priority, behind the Islamic State, wages, terrorism, jobs and health care. Only 7 percent in the Bloomberg poll said the deficit was the most important issue facing the country.

The waning public focus on deficits comes as the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected that the tax-cut deal struck by Mr. Obama and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan in December will send the deficit soaring by 24 percent this year, to $544 billion. The CBO said the rest of the decade will only get worse, with annual deficits topping $1 trillion by 2022.

Pete Sepp, president of the National Taxpayers Union, said the fading concern over deficits is “incredible, considering that this is perhaps the last very short window of opportunity we have [in 2016] to make structural changes that can actually put a dent in future deficits.”

He said the trends in rising health care spending, retirement costs and other deficit projections are “dangerous warning signs that our fiscal situation could deteriorate much more quickly than anyone is imagining right now.”

Cutting deficits has not been a hot topic on the campaign trail. In the Democratic primary, one of the main questions is who would raise spending more, Vermont Sen. Bernard Sanders or former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. (The answer is Mr. Sanders, whose agenda is projected to add $18 trillion in new spending over a decade.)

On the Republican side, front-runner Donald Trump has a tax plan that includes middle-class tax cuts and simplifying the tax code. He said it wouldn’t add to the deficit, but independent analysts on either side of the political spectrum estimate that his plan would reduce Treasury revenue by about $10 trillion over a decade.

Deficits have fallen by nearly three-fourths since they peaked at $1.4 trillion early in Mr. Obama’s presidency. Even though the annual deficits of hundreds of billions of dollars are added to the total national debt, causing interest payments to climb, the relatively lower annual numbers don’t seem like a crisis, said James Pethokoukis, a columnist at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute.

“When you’re running trillion-dollar deficits, that’s an amazing, eye-popping number that really gets people’s attention,” he said. “When it’s not $1 trillion, the media’s not going to cover it as much, politicians aren’t going to talk about it as much it’s just not as clean and compelling a political narrative.”

And Republican candidates with tax-cut plans also are shying away from deficit math, Mr. Pethokoukis said.

“It’s tough to say you’re petrified about a debt crisis at the same time you’re offering a tax-cut plan that will reduce revenue by trillions of dollars,” he said. “So you have Republicans talking a lot more about economic growth, which is a more uplifting message. They’re not focused so much on the debt or really how to pay for the tax cuts.”

Mr. Obama is preparing his fiscal 2017 budget proposal, to be released Feb. 9. The White House has said the president’s spending plan will lay out “an effective path forward for investing in the middle class, growing our economy and doing so in a fiscally responsible way.”

White House press secretary Josh Earnest said last week that Mr. Obama wants to build on the “momentum” of deficit reduction during his presidency, but wouldn’t say whether the new budget will reduce the deficit as an overall share of the nation’s economic output.

Mr. Obama has never presented a balanced budget to Congress, taking office in the midst of the deep recession and getting the Democratic majorities in 2009 to approve an $800 billion-plus economic recovery plan that drove deficits to their highest point.

Later the president opposed the automatic spending cuts that helped reduce the deficits. His budget requests routinely have been rejected by Congress, and majority Republicans in the House and Senate are unlikely to approve his new budget.