BATON ROUGE - A new report says the majority of Louisiana residents support raising taxes to fund education and other state services.
According to the 2017 Louisiana Study, 62 percent of Louisiana residents support raiding taxes for spending on elementary and secondary education. The report also indicates that 59 percent of residents support increased taxes for higher education, 53 percent support more taxes for health care, and 57 percent support more taxes for transportation infrastructure.
Residents do not support raising taxes for prison and incarcerations, welfare, food stamps, and other public assistance programs.
The Louisiana Study is an annual project by the Reilly Center for Media and Public Affairs at LSU's Manship School of Mass Communication. The goal of the study is to identify opinions of Louisiana residents on important public policy areas.
The Reilly Center says 71 percent of residents want lawmakers to use a mix of spending cuts and tax increases to deal with Louisiana's budget shortfall. When pressed, these individuals emphasize spending cuts more than tax increases.
The study says there is stong, bipartisan support to raise the state's gasoline tax "up to an additional 15 cents per gallon" to help fund transportation infrastructure.
The survey data was collected from a random sample of adult residents via telephone interviews from Feb. 23, 2017, through March 23, 2017. Researchers contacted 414 respondents through landline telephones and 598 through cellphones for a total of 1,012 respondents. The report says the response rate was 10 percent.
"The response rate for this survey is within the typical range for reputable live-interviewer telephone survey firms," the report says.