[lbo-talk] Bartels

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Mon Feb 20 10:58:46 PST 2006


I finally managed to read Bartel's paper on public attitudes toward estate taxes. Interesting piece, however, he does not seem to answer two rather important questions:

1. Where do perceptions of one's own tax burden come from? Those perceptions are the key explanatory variable in his paper, yet he does not explain what's causing those perceptions.

2. Why do respondents have very different attitudes toward a "big tax cut" - overwhelmingly negative (Table 6) and toward inheritance tax (slightly positive - Table 7 - the full sample column)? That seems to be inconsistent with his ignorant self-interest theory which predicts similar attitudes to all kinds of tax breaks, not just inheritance tax.

I initially thought, along the lines of the reference group approach in sociology, that it is the identification with the rich that determined the perception of one own's tax "burden" i.e. wannabe rich think they own taxes are too high because that is what they think rich people complain about, but Figure 2 in his paper seems to contradict that (showing that a much smaller minority believes that rich pay too much).

I think that another possible explanation of the relationships he found is the warm feelings Americans tend to have for small business, which seems to earn top confidence ratings in many polls - if the inheritance tax is perceived as an obstacle to small business (whether it is true or not), that explains why so many people oppose it, even though they are not in favor of overall big tax cut. If that is true, things ain't so bad for a single payer health care as initially thought - all that is needed is to drive the point that such a plan will benefit primarily small business by making them more competitive with big corporations.

Wojtek



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