Ordinary Joes have mixed feelings on wealth By ADAM GELLER – 2 hours ago
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A substantial majority of Americans say the rich don't pay their fair share of taxes, opinion polls show. A growing number say the U.S. is becoming a nation of haves and have-nots.
The public's concerns reflect a shifting dynamic in recent years, as an increasing share of the wealth has gone to people at the top of the income scale. The top tenth of U.S. households now earn an average of 11.2 times what those in the bottom tenth make, according to the Census Bureau. That's up from a ratio of 8.7 three decades ago. The wealthiest fifth of U.S. households now take in 50 percent of all income, up from 44 percent in 1977. The differences are even more pronounced in analyses of incomes for the top 1 percent of households.
"The income gap between the rich and the rest of the U.S. population has become so wide, and is growing so fast, that it might eventually threaten the stability of democratic capitalism itself," then-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said in 2005.
But Americans are divided on whether government should be heavily taxing the rich in order to benefit those with less.
"It's a complicated area to try to understand American attitudes," said Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of the Gallup Poll. "It's kind of like, in some instances, conflicting medical research ... There's no one answer."
A majority of Americans — 51 percent in a poll by Gallup this past April — said they support "heavy taxes" on the rich to redistribute wealth. That is significantly higher than when the same question was asked in 1939, at the tail end of the Great Depression, when 35 percent agreed.
But people's support for higher taxes on the wealthy are tempered by their own aspirations.
"Most Americans hope to some day be wealthy and as a result, the idea of kind of redistributing income is not as popular as (government policies resulting in) making a bigger pie so everybody does better off," said Dennis Jacobe, chief economist for Gallup.
The tension between those ideas runs through American politics in ways that don't always seem logical. Even many wealthy people support higher taxes on the rich. In a country that believes in itself as a place where anybody who works hard enough can make it, though, there's a certain wariness of taxes that might discourage hard work.
McCain's criticism of Obama's tax plan is "trying to go for this idea that, in the U.S., is much more popular than in other countries ... that you get ahead through your own efforts," said Bryan Caplan, author of "The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies," and an economics professor at George Mason University. "I think he's trying to tap into what is a distinctly American view."
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