Flat is fair: American public opinion on taxes and the myth of egalitarianism.

• Author: Gaines, Brian J.
• Position: Essay

Americans undoubtedly prize equality as a fundamental value, but what kind of equality is prioritized: equality of opportunities and treatment by the state or equality in outcomes? These distinct applications of equality prove antithetical. In practice, the term egalitarianism now connotes favoring "a greater degree of equality of income and wealth across persons than currently exists" (Arneson 2013). Egalitarianism is thus a marker of modern, progressive liberalism rather than liberalism in its original sense of valuing liberty and aiming to limit coercion by government as much as practicable (see, e.g., Hayek 1960, 103). Do most Americans embrace coercive redistribution in the interest of reducing inequality?

Decades ago F. A. Hayek was pessimistic, fearing that collectivism had displaced liberalism as the dominant doctrine of policy debate. Whether in the polemical mode of The Road to Serfdom (1944) or in the more analytical style of The Constitution of Liberty (1960), he observed that a state powerful enough to impose substantially equal outcomes would, by nature, not only prevent the benefits of competition but also demolish essential individual liberties.

Of course, Hayek did not merely lament the allures of socialism and its "fatal conceit" but also tirelessly argued against concentrating power in the state. Did his ideas take root? The huge growth in public-choice theory is but one sign that skepticism about statism has steadily grown. In a debate with Hayek in 1945, the renowned political scientist Charles Merriam was apoplectic that Hayek could see in what Merriam called the "creative forces of government" a threat to freedom (qtd. in Hayek 1994, 123). Thirty-six years later, in one of the most quoted lines from any presidential inaugural address, Ronald Reagan took Hayek's side: "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem" (Reagan 1981).

Few ordinary Americans hold utterly consistent views on deep questions of political philosophy or all policy debates. They embrace, to some degree, conflicting values. Mining survey data, for instance, James Kluegel and Eliot Smith (1986), identified not only a stable, widely held set of values that produce conservative attitudes toward policies aimed at reducing inequality but also a growing attraction to interventionist social liberalism, particularly among the young. From a highly innovative attempt to conduct a laboratory test of John Rawls's (1971) theories about how much inequality people see as tolerable, Norman Frolich and Joe Oppenheimer concluded that the desire to set a floor on poverty is almost universal. But they also found strong support for "letting people keep what they earn, without a ceiling, after providing for a floor" (1992, 170).

Fairness Rhetoric in Public Debate on Taxes

A thorough review of the landscape of empirical debates on the place of equality in the American mind is impossible in a short essay. My limited ambition here is to reconsider how Americans fare with competing demands for equality of treatment and equality of condition in regard to taxes. Survey firms routinely claim that Americans are anxious or angry about wealth inequality and eager for government remedies (see, inter alia, Kohut 2015; Newport 2015; Scheiber and Sussman 2015).

There is it seems, at least according to these surveys, consensus that Americans support higher taxes for the wealthy. Following the presidential election of 2012, a conservative columnist conceded, "Yes, a solid majority favors higher taxes for the rich. That's been true since the dawn of man" (Barnes 2012). President Barack Obama, meanwhile, when asked about the wealthiest paying more, noted, "By the way, more voters agreed with me on this issue than voted for me." Many of Obama's campaign speeches featured a short description of the "Buffett rule," which says that "if you make a million dollars a year, then you shouldn't pay a lower tax rate than your secretary" (White House 2012b). Obama nearly always asserted that Democrats had the public on their side in this debate: "And I intend to keep fighting for this kind of balance and fairness until the other side starts listening, because I believe this is what the American people want" (White House 2012a).

Four years later, Donald Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton might be seen as a repudiation of that alleged consensus, given that he emphasized tax reduction, whereas she again promised to raise taxes on the wealthy. But it is not yet clear how important tax policy was to Trump's surprising win, and, of course, Clinton won the popular vote by about two percentage points. She constitutionally has no legitimate claim on the presidency, but her popular-vote win indicates that her policy stances commanded more support.

Survey Says ...

Politicians routinely claim to be advocating positions preferred by majorities, but Obama and Clinton could in fact point to survey support. Consider a fairly representative study published by the Pew Research Center, "Tax System Seen as Unfair, in Need of Overhaul: Wealthy Not Paying Fair Share Top Complaint" (2011). The tide belies the survey's finding that the most popular choice for describing the current system was "moderately fair" (40 percent), ahead of "not too fair" (31 percent) and "not fair at all" (24 percent). The subtitle, meanwhile, describes a question that offers respondents three statements and asks which one "bothers" them most about the tax system. Fifty-seven percent had "the feeling that some wealthy people get away not paying their fair share," far ahead of those who chose "the complexity of the tax system" (28 percent) and those who chose "the large amount you pay in taxes" (11 percent) as the thing that bothers them most. The percentage selecting that first answer also rose slightly from 2003, when it was 53 percent.

One wonders why a "feeling" was in competition with two less-fuzzy claims and how other complaints might have fared. In a survey I distributed in 2004, I gave respondents a similar list, with the addition of "Government wastes so much of the money collected in taxes," and allowed them to select as many responses as they liked. Almost 80 percent agreed with the government-waste claim, making it the most popular complaint.

Is there stronger evidence of American egalitarianism in other survey items? Every year from 2012 to 2016 in surveys timed to coincide with the April income-tax-filing deadline, at least 60 percent of Gallup respondents have said that upper-income people pay too little federal taxes. When I likewise asked respondents to assess the taxes paid by the rich in a study administered by YouGov in February 2012 to a representative sample of about 3,500 Americans, 64 percent of respondents said the rich...