Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age by Bartels Larry M

Author:Bartels, Larry M. [Bartels, Larry M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
ISBN: 9780691146232
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 2705879
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2008-04-27T00:00:00+00:00

Separate analyses by income class indicate that the effect of respondents’ own perceived tax burdens was about equally powerful among upper-and middle-income people. However, people whose incomes put them in the bottom third of the income distribution seem to have attached no weight one way or the other to their own tax burdens. Their views about estate tax repeal seem to have been strongly related to their own income levels, and perhaps also to their views about the tax burdens of poor people—with support for repeal perversely higher among low-income respondents who thought the poor are asked to pay too much.10

It is possible that the apparent effects of perceived tax burdens in the first column of table 7.2 are really attributable to more general political dispositions that shape people’s views about tax burdens as well as their specific opinions about the estate tax. In order to test that possibility, the analysis reported in the second column of table 7.2 includes party identification and political ideology as explanatory factors in addition to perceived tax burdens.11 The results of this more elaborate analysis indicate, not surprisingly, that Re publicans and (especially) conservatives were a good deal more likely than Democrats and liberals to favor estate tax repeal. Meanwhile, the apparent effect of people’s perceptions of the tax burden of the rich disappears entirely, while the apparent effect of their perceptions of their own tax burdens is reduced by one-third and the apparent effect of family income is reduced by one-half.

The analysis reported in the third column of table 7.2 adds two more potential explanatory factors: government spending preferences and perceived government waste.12 The statistical results presented in table 6.3 implied that these factors influenced people’s support for the 2001 tax cut; but the results presented in table 7.2 suggest that they had no perceptible impact on support for estate tax repeal. Here, as in the analysis presented in the second column, support for estate tax repeal seems to have been most strongly affected by political ideology, party identification, and people’s perceptions of their own tax burdens.

In assessing the substantial effects of ideology and party identification, it is important to bear in mind that the distributions of ideology and partisanship in the American public are not sufficiently skewed for their impact in table 7.2 to imply much net support for estate tax repeal. Instead, as with the Bush tax cuts more generally, the most important single factor in accounting for the predominance of public support for estate tax repeal was respondents’ attitudes about their own tax burdens. People who said they are asked to pay too much in federal income taxes were substantially more likely to support repealing the estate tax—even though almost none of them would ever be subject to the tax. Even after allowing for the effects of family income, partisanship, ideology, government spending preferences, and perceptions of government waste, those who said they are asked to pay too much were significantly more likely to favor repeal. Since respondents were much

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.