Cloudy Thinking on Tax Cuts

[Resistance Is Futile]

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/16/business/16SCEN.html

Cloudy Thinking on Tax Cuts
By ALAN B. KRUEGER

CONSERVATIVE and liberal political commentators alike have wondered why most Americans have enthusiastically supported two of the largest tax cuts in history even though most benefits will flow to upper-income families. Adding to the conundrum, in public opinion surveys Americans routinely express support for spending more on government programs like education, opposition to government budget deficits, and disappointment that the gap in income between rich and poor has widened — all of which are in conflict with regressive tax cuts.

In the most extensive analysis yet available, Larry Bartels, a political scientist at Princeton University, gives a simple but persuasive explanation: 'unenlightened self-interest.' Middle- and lower-income Americans supported tax cuts they suspected went largely to the rich because they thought they, too, would benefit, if only by a small amount, and because they failed to connect the tax cuts to rising inequality, their future tax burden, or the availability of government services.

Professor Bartels analyzed a small battery of questions added to the National Election Survey, a poll of 1,500 people interviewed in the six weeks before the November 2002 election, and again in the month after the election. The survey turned up some remarkable results, which he reports in 'Homer Gets a Tax Cut: Inequality and Public Policy in the American Mind.' ...

[Traje]

1. Unfortunate...

That just shows that the majority of middle class voters (through no fault of their own) are naive herd-animals.

[newyawker99]

3. Hi Traje!!

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

[bluestateguy]

2. "I want tax cuts!!! WAAAAAAAHH!!!!

Such people are called tax whiners.

[Larkspur]

4. Yet polls before Bush enacted tax cuts showed that most Americans opposed

them.

When the debate is framed as "tax cut (for the wealthy) or saving Social Security, Medicare, public education..." the majority of Americans favored saving the social programs over the tax cut.

So just who are these pollsters polling? I know that it isn't me and my friends.