Unequal Democracy by Bartels Larry M

Author:Bartels, Larry M.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press

PUBLIC SUPPORT FOR THE TAX CUTS

The policy priorities reflected in the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts—reductions in the top marginal tax rates, more favorable treatment of business and investment income, and a phase-out of the estate tax—were all long-standing priorities of conservative Republicans. To varying degrees, each provided much more substantial benefits to wealthy taxpayers than to people of modest means. Anyone looking at the evidence presented in table 5.6 on public attitudes about the tax burden borne by rich people would have good grounds for imagining that tax cuts aimed so disproportionately at the very wealthy would have generated substantial public opposition. In fact, however, the public was generally quite supportive of the Bush tax cuts. The same National Election Study (NES) surveys that showed majority support for the proposition that rich people pay less than they should in federal income taxes also demonstrated a remarkable degree of public support for the “big tax cut” passed in 2001—a policy designed in large part to ensure that rich people would pay much less in federal income taxes in the coming decade.

Respondents in the 2002 NES survey were asked two different versions of the “big tax cut” question: half the respondents were asked whether they favored or opposed the tax cut “Congress passed,” while the other half were asked about the tax cut “President Bush signed.”22 The distributions of opinion for both versions of the question are shown in figure 6.1. A comparison of the results suggests that associating the tax cut explicitly with President Bush had a slightly polarizing effect, increasing strong support by almost six percentage points but also increasing opposition by a few percentage points. However, the more surprising fact is that, regardless of how the question was posed, supporters of the tax cut outnumbered opponents by more than two to one, with most of those supporters saying they favored the tax cut “strongly.” These results parallel the results of an earlier NES survey, conducted during the 2000 presidential campaign, in which almost two-thirds of the respondents agreed “that most of the expected federal budget surplus should be used to cut taxes.”23

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