Read My Lips: Why Americans Are Proud to Pay Taxes.

• Author: Gaines, Brian J.
• Position: Book review

* Read My Lips: Why Americans Are Proud to Pay Taxes

By Vanessa A. Williamson

Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2017.

Pp. xx, 281. $25.95 hardback.

Public opinion is often conspicuously absent from scholarly discussion of tax policy, crowded out by technical debates among professional economists. Vanessa Williamson, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, has authored this new book that is part of a welcome, overdue correction. The book's tide advertises one of her primary clams; she strives to counter a widespread view that Americans are "antitax." If the argument that many, even most, Americans see tax paying as a "badge of pride" (p. 182) rings false, Williamson does not deny that anger coexists with other, positive sentiments. The best short summary of her portrait is that American attitudes constitute a "paradox" (p. xvii): tax paying is often regarded as a sign of virtue, but the very commonly held views that others undercontribute and that governments waste the money collected via taxes generate concomitant resentment.

In developing her arguments, Williamson relies upon two primary, original sources: a survey conducted in November 2014 and a set of in-depth interviews with one hundred diverse individuals done slightly earlier. The latter figure most prominently in her analysis and, quite apart from copious quotations in every chapter, consume about 15 percent of the book via an appendix of blurbs profiling each interviewee. In turning over so much page space to ordinary Americans, free to converse and not merely respond to survey questions that might be loaded, confusing, or ambiguous, Williamson is clearly keen to get beyond broad, "on average," and "overall" claims. To her credit, she lacks the contempt for the public so often evident in scholars of public opinion and political behavior.

Just the same, the book is cast largely as a demonstration of how misinformation distorts Americans' policy preferences. Williamson's main themes as she explores the juxtaposition of positive and negative thoughts about tax paying are that Americans dislike spending that goes to those they perceive as "them" not "us" and that some widespread but mistaken beliefs about tax burdens distort fiscal-policy preferences. Although she offers a few quotations and citations to bolster the claim that "taxation remains a racialized issue" (p. 10), the gist of the former argument is that many Americans fret that (illegal) immigrants and the poor do...