"Homer [Simpson] 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.