[lbo-talk] Re: further adventures in political surrealism

[Doug Henwood]

Just read the full paper. Aside from being depressing as hell - 
basically most people are very poorly informed, but it doesn't matter 
that much because they can't connect the dots anyway - it further 
undermines the Kansas thesis, since it shows strong popular support 
for repealing the inheritance tax (therefore there's no culture wars 
bait-and-switch going on). One reason for this strange position: if 
people think they pay too much in taxes, they're more likely to 
support repeal. People who support more government social spending 
are more likely to support repeal than those who don't.

Doug

Doug Henwood wrote:


>[this is an excerpt from Larry Bartels' paper "Homer Gets a Tax Cut" 
><http://www.princeton.edu/~bartels/homer.pdf>]
>
>The results of my analysis suggest that most Americans support tax 
>cuts not because they are indifferent to economic inequality, but 
>because they largely fail to connect inequality and public policy. 
>Three out of every four people say that the difference in incomes 
>between rich people and poor people has increased in the past 20 
>years, and most of them add that that is a bad thing-but most of 
>these people still support Bush's tax cuts and the repeal of the 
>estate tax. People who want to spend more money on a variety of 
>government programs are more likely to support tax cuts than those 
>who do not, other things being equal. And people's opinions about 
>tax cuts are strongly shaped by their attitudes about their own tax 
>burdens but virtually unaffected by their attitudes about the tax 
>burden of the rich-even in the case of the estate tax, which only 
>affects the wealthiest one or two percent of taxpayers. Some of 
>these peculiarities appear to be mitigated by political information, 
>but others seem perversely resilient.