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Tuesday, September 18, 2007
What Do Americans Think About Inequality? Addendum
Studying public opinion on economic inequality can make you both hopeful and cynical. On the one hand, we sincerely don't like extreme and rising inequality, for uniquely American reasons. But on the other, we support legislation -the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts being most notable- that make society even more unequal. And we don't support a lot of legislation that would level the playing field. This inconsistency can bring you down a road you don't want to follow- where you doubt the capacity of the public to act in its own interest.
But let's leave that to the fringe right-wing of folks like Prof. Bryan Caplan, who proposed distributing the franchise on probably the same basis as he determines eligibility for high-level economics courses.
The public can and does act in its own best interests, if it's given the chance.
Why should anybody be so cheery? Well, there's an interesting paper by Profs. Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson on the tax cuts and public opinion that makes the case that these inconsistencies are less evidence of cognitive failure than of manipulation and a broken system. They found that the tax cuts were supported on their own, but not when they had to be weighed against alternative uses of the same money.
When asked about these competing uses, voters consistently saw tax cuts as a lower priority than plausible alternative uses of the forecasted surpluses...Versus Social Security, tax cuts lost by a 74 to 21 percent margin. Versus Medicare, the margin is 65 to 25 percent. Even when Social Security is take out of consideration, 69 percent of respondents preferred using extra monies on "education, the environment, health care, crime-fighting, and military defense," rather than a tax cut, which garnered just 22 percent support.
Agenda management proved crucial in moving the legislation, and so did efforts to minimize the potential cost of the tax cuts and mislead the public about its distribution. Tax cut proponents used deceitful frames, policy designs, cost estimates, and other gimmicks.
The administration and its allies came into office determined to overstate the surplus and understate the size of the tax cuts, hiding the true budgetary effects of the tax cuts would minimize the danger of the fiscal tradeoffs becoming salient. budget estimates of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that overstated the surplus under any plausible scenario were a great help....[the architects of the tax cut] added in numerous unrealistic assumptions of their own. Most notably, supporters of the tax cut refrained from discounting revenues that were almost certain to dissipate. The key example is the the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT)...
In the end, how did they get away with all this (emph. mine)?
Yet even in today's political system not all matters lend themselves to the dynamic we have unearthed in this case. not all issues make voters eyes glaze over in the way that details of tax policy do. On matters such as abortion or the environment, extreme policy initiatives run up against opposition that is knowledge-rich, well organized, and poised to react.
With respect to economic and class issues, however, the situation is different. As the passage of the 2001 tax cut starkly displays, it is here that the political resources that voters need to ensure responsiveness have eroded the most. The decline of unions and locally rooted Democratic Party organizations, coupled with widespread disillusionment about the political process, has left lower- and middle-income citizens dependent on the media and a race-horse-obsessed discourse shorn of much content. It is now possible for policy makers to venture far from the average voter on important matters. But there is nothing random about the kinds of adventures that are possible, the types of voters most likely to benefit, or the citizens most likely to pay the price.
The rationality of the public should not concern us, but the state of civil society probably should.
Posted by Matt Lewis
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