Estate Taxes - Are We Homers or Not?
Back in 2003, Larry Bartels, a political scientist at Princeton University, wrote an article in The American Prospect about economic inequality and support for the repeal of the estate tax titled, Unenlightened Self-Interest: The strange appeal of estate-tax repeal. Specifically, Bartels, using the National Election Studies, found that:
[A]lmost 70 percent favored repeal. But even among people with family incomes of less than $50,000 (about half the sample), 66 percent favored repeal. Among those who wanted to spend more money on a variety of federal government programs, 68 percent preferred repeal…Democrats’ efforts to frame the estate-tax debate in terms of reform rather than repeal have had very little impact on public opinion — and very little success in Washington.
However, Robert H. Frank, an economist at the Johnson School of Management at Cornell University, recently wrote an article in the NY Times titled, Reshaping the Debate. Frank asked the Survey Research Institute at Cornell University to conduct two telephone surveys to investigate public attitudes about the Bush administration’s proposal to eliminate the estate tax. Frank finds:
In the first survey, respondents were simply asked whether they favored the proposal. Almost 75 percent said they did. In the second, respondents were first told that lost revenue from eliminating the estate tax would necessitate some combination of raising other taxes, borrowing more money from abroad and further cutbacks in government services. This time, almost 80 percent of respondents favored keeping the estate tax.
Looks like the Democrats may have their frame for the repeal of the estate tax. Let’s see if any of the Democratic nominees decide to use this frame…
Comments
I want to read those articles. Estate ownership is important because estate ownership is a major portion of personal assets.
But, before those articles affect my train of thought, four things come to mind. First, part of the great income divide is that the lower income brackets do not have assets. African Americans especially have a major problem of too little assets. Even African-American high wage earners have not accumulated a healthy level of assets. Assets are critical for family security, education, and family income growth. We need caring national leadership to alleviate that problem.
Second, American owe more than we have saved. I guess we can let our imaginations run wild with the causes and consequences of that.
Third, these conditions seem to be an opportunity for national leaders and the public to form a partnership that can strive to rectify everybody’s deficit of personal wealth.
Fourth, who sets the agenda and is that agenda in the national interest or in the interest of a large portion of the public? The major contributors to Bush and Kerry in the last election were large financial institutions. Do we have a conflict here?
I guess that my concern is that leadership often establishes public opinion along with public opinion shaping national policy. So, my final question is to ask if the leadership manages public opinion in a way that separates national leadership from the public? Does that contribute to a further isolation of the government?
I have seen a few candidates that successfully circumvented a few powerful interests by identifying and appealing to the public’s real needs and interests. I wonder if one of the candidates could use that strategy to secure a political victory.
Bob Spencer
Posted by: Bob Spencer | December 10, 2007 06:29 AM