Inductivist

I see that Warren Buffett paid $7 million last year in federal income taxes. He and I are two American citizens who have a duty to contribute to our country. I'm a middle-income college professor. The federal government paid me $2,000 last year (I paid in 2k and got a return of 4k). How am I getting screwed, exactly?

It's a good occasion to make a comment about income taxes. I spend much of my time fretting over the state and direction of the country, but I should focus on the bright side: I paid roughly negative $2000 to the federal government this year. And I didn't even have mortgage interest to deduct. How did I do it? By having four children and a wife who doesn't work outside the home. The government paid me! What a sweet deal. What a country. My thanks to all the childless rich people who make this possible. The status quo feels so good, maybe I'm going to have to vote for Obama in 2012.

What is the ideological center of contemporary conservatism?  In his book We Are Doomed, John Derbyshire described the phenomenon of the "metrocon"--urban conservatives who sympathesize with conservatives who live in the sticks--authentic conservatives--but who have lifestyles more similar to cosmopolitan liberals. To illustrate real conservatives, he writes about people from small-town America who believe that homosexuality should be illegal. Now that is a true conservative. Derbyshire doesn't know a single metrocon who thinks that homosexual behavior should be against the law. 

Is there something to this idea that anti-homosexuality shows us what is at the heart of rank-and-file conservatism? Many liberals would argue this; that hate is at its core.  Actually, the truth is that love is at the center of it; love of tradition, love of one's fathers. 

At the same time, the recent debate over raising the taxes of the rich led some liberals to contend that the Holy Grail of conservatism is protecting wealthy Americans. Conservatives are obsessed with economic freedom for the privileged. 

So which is it? I don't have access to a question about favoring laws against homosexuality, but the GSS does ask if homosexual sex is wrong. Respondents are also asked about taxes on the wealthy with answers ranging from "much too low" to "much too high." I correlated these measures with the degree to which one is politically conservative. The correlation between conservatism and wanting lower taxes for the rich is .16. The conservatism/anti-homosexual sex correlation, by constrast, is .39--much stronger. 

Another way of looking at it is percentages. Seventy-nine percent of those who describe themselves as conservative think homosexual sex is almost alway or always wrong. Only 49 percent of conservatives say that the taxes paid by the wealthy are "too high" or "much too high." Opposing homosexual sex captures conservatism better than concern about high taxes for the rich.  

Here's a new Gallup poll on attitudes toward extending tax cuts to all Americans (and unemployment benefits). Where's the evidence that ordinary Americans are itching to stick it to the rich?  Sixty-six percent of all Americans wants the tax cuts extended for all Americans; a majority (52 percent) of Democrats favor the extension.












The country is split (44% vs. 40%) when respondents are given explicitly the choice to raise taxes on the wealthy. Obama is wrong to claim that the people are on the Dems' side on this issue. Based on my analysis of GSS data, many of those who favor it are black and Hispanic.  

Predictors of wanting to tax the rich, N = 4,743.
Predictors	b	b	b
Black	.87	.59	.57
Hispanic	.65	.46	.38
Income	--	-1.08	-.99
Liberalism	--	--	.32

Compared to whites, non-Asian minorities (NAMs) are more likely to favor the government reducing income inequality by taxing the wealthy. Is this because they are poor and liberal, or because they are NAMs?

The table displays unstandardized OLS coefficients. The first model includes only two predictors: whether or not the respondent is black and whether or not the respondent is Hispanic.  Both groups are significantly more likely than whites and Asians (the reference group) to favor taxing the rich. In the second equation, income is added. Not surprisingly, higher-income people are less likely to favor being taxed to reduce inequality. This is the same finding reported in the last post. The coefficients indicate that the influence of income reduces the effect of race, but even with the adjustment, blacks and Hispanics are significantly more likely to favor income equalization. And you can see that even when the extent of one's liberalism is added to the model, the racial gap persists, just in a reduced form.

In other words, blacks and Hispanics want to tax the rich: 1) because they are poor; 2) because they are liberal; and 3) because they are minorities. Each of the variables has an independent effect, but of course, income and liberalism may just be mediating the relationship between race and taxes. It is not unreasonable to conclude that NAMs are poor and liberal because they are NAMs.

But even if we partial out the effects of income and politics to see what is left of race, income and liberalism reduce the racial effect by less than half (just compare coefficients across the models). The pattern of results is consistent with the view that NAMs want high taxes for the wealthy because they perceive them as privileged and white, and this feeling goes beyond simply being poor and liberal .     

TGGP was so right in the last post to ask, "Where's the data?"

GSS respondents were asked the following question: "Some people think that the income differences between the rich and the poor ought to be reduced, perhaps by raising the taxes of wealthy families or by giving income assistance to the poor. Others think that the government should not concern itself with reducing this income difference between the rich and the poor. Here is a card with a scale from 1 to 7. Think of a score of 1 as meaning that the government ought to reduce the income differences between rich and poor, and a score of 7 meaning that the government should not concern itself with reducing income differences. What score between 1 and 7 comes closest to the way you feel?" 

Unfortunately, the question is double-barrelled, asking about taxing the rich and helping the poor, but if anything, the wording should tilt responses toward government intervention.

I divided the sample of whites from surveys from the past decade into three equally sized groups: low-income, middle-income, and high income. The mean responses to the question look like this:

Mean score

Low-income 3.66
Middle-income 3.72
High-income 4.28

The low- and middle-income groups are significantly more in favor of equalizing, but the differences are fairly small (Cohen's d for the low/high comparison is .32).

Plus, the typical response for the poorest group is close to 4, which is the neutral answer. Even poor whites are pretty indifferent about reducing inequality. I don't see stick-it-to-the-rich sentiment here.    

These elite liberals are completely mystified about why ordinary Americans don't want to tax the rich aggressively. These supposedly creative people even lack the imagination to come up with a good answer. So as the son of a retired maintenance man, let me help them out. The problem is that they assume that we rubes are naturally good at hating, so how in the world could we not want to stick it to the people who clearly deserve our hostility? They make the mistake of believing that we think like them.

The reality is that ordinary American assume that they are just as good as rich people; they are just people like ourselves. They are not cardboard monsters like liberals want us to believe. They are just folks. And just like we don't want blacks or Hispanics or Jews or regular white guys to get hosed, we don't want anyone to get hosed. If I don't get angry that some rich guy pays the same for a lawnmower at Sears as I do, why am I going to get worked up if he doesn't pay taxes at a higher rate?  He's paying much more into the system than I am as it is. If the government is giving him sweet deals that I don't get, then that should be stopped. But why squeeze more out of him?

I see soaking the rich as a little like gang robbery. We take his money because we've got the numbers to get away with it. And then liberals make us feel righteous about our crime. "Social justice" sounds so noble, doesn't it? We don't want to bleed the guy because we're not criminals. If he stole the money, then he needs to rot in prison.  But we don't believe capitalism is organized theft. If he didn't break any laws to get it, then I'm the thief if I join the mob to strip him of his cash.