President Obama gave his speech today about the spending sequestration kicking in. We are going to skip the politics on the matter because frankly we have developed something called Cronic Ridiculously Absurd Political Fatigue Syndrome. You can call it the CRAPFS if you want. This week we ran a 24-hour poll on what the public thought of the coming spending sequestration and the results were surprising even if we could have guessed the outcome ahead of time.

Some in Washington want the sequestration, some do not. It is going to be very hard to know what the real outcome of spending sequestration is when you consider that it is really only a cut in the growth of spending in the cases we have seen.

The 24/7 Wall St. poll is one we would caution is not wide enough to qualify as a formal poll. That being said, sometimes we can find a consensus on far smaller numbers than this. We received 197 responses and five choices were offered in random order. Those who took our poll were screened by using a cookie and then also by only one vote at an IP address. The voting responses also came in equally spread out over the course of that 24-hour period with no abnormal flurries.

The end result is that of the 197 votes, sequestration is a good thing. Here are the results:

• Some 40% voted “I really want to see sequestration in order to cut government spending” and some 19% voted “The benefits of sequestration will mildly help deficit and budget issues.” That comes to 59% who think that sequestration will either be good or mildly beneficial.
• The other side of the spectrum showed that 17% said “I am really against sequestration because it will cause too much pain” and 16% voted for “Sequestration will have only a mild negative impact on the economy.” The implication here is that only 33% belive that it will have a negative impact.
• Lastly, 8% of the responses voted for “The outcome of sequestration does not matter either way.”

The long and short of the matter is that only one-third of respondents think spending cuts will hurt and 59% believed that spending cuts will help. Here is the snapshot of our poll:

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