In 2001 and 2003, the Bush administration engineered two enormous tax
cuts primarily benefiting very wealthy taxpayers. Most Americans supported
these tax cuts. I argue that they did so not because they were indifferent
to economic inequality, but because they largely failed to connect
inequality and public policy. Three out of every four people polled said
that the difference in incomes between rich people and poor people has
increased in the past 20 years, and most of them added that that is a bad
thing—but most of those people still supported the regressive 2001
Bush tax cut and the even more regressive repeal of the estate tax.
Several manifestly relevant considerations had negligible or seemingly
perverse effects on these policy views, including assessments of the
wastefulness of government spending and desires for additional spending on
a variety of government programs. Support for the Bush tax cuts was
strongly shaped by people's attitudes about their own tax burdens,
but virtually unaffected by their attitudes about the tax burden of the
rich—even in the case of the estate tax, which only affects the
wealthiest one or two percent of taxpayers. Public opinion in this
instance was ill informed, insensitive to some of the most important
implications of the tax cuts, and largely disconnected from (or
misconnected to) a variety of relevant values and material interests.Larry M. Bartels is the Donald E. Stokes
Professor of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University
(bartels@princeton.edu). He directs the Center for the Study of Democratic
Politics in Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and
International Affairs. This article is a revised and abridged version of a
paper originally presented at the 2003 annual meeting of the American
Political Science Association and subsequently presented in seminars and
conferences at the University of Michigan, the Center on Budget and Policy
Priorities, the Brookings Institution, Harvard University, Demos, and
Princeton University, and at the 2004 meeting of the Russell Sage
Foundation's University Working Groups on the Social Dimensions of
Inequality. The author is grateful to numerous seminar and conference
participants, colleagues, students, and friends for their criticism and
support. He is also grateful to the Russell Sage Foundation for generous
financial support of his research through a grant to the Princeton Working
Group on Inequality, and for additional support of the primary data
collection on which the present report is based.