On May 6, 2008, at 7:35 PM, Michael Pollak wrote:
> This is about people having math and economics anxiety,
> and that rendering them susceptible to Big Lie techniques.
Not exactly: "In this case, however, the results are starkly different: better-informed respondents were no more or less likely than less-informed respondents to favor repealing the estate tax. Thus, there seems to be no reason to imagine that more information would produce a noticeably different distribution of public opinion on this issue."
And: "At the same time, these results highlight the real limits of political education as a transforming force. In the case of the inheritance tax, even well-informed citizens who recognized and regretted the increasing gap in incomes between rich and poor in contemporary America were only about as likely to oppose repeal as they were to favor it. And less well-informed, less sophisticated people were correspondingly more likely to favor repeal, even if they recognized and regretted the fact that economic inequality has increased. Viewed from this perspective, the results in Table 7 suggest that, even if every person in America could be made to see that economic inequality has increased and made to feel that that is a bad thing, the overall distribution of public opinion about the inheritance tax would change very little."