Why America Favores Tax Cuts

Why do average Americans seem to favor policies that reward the wealthy?

JUST OVER A half-century ago, at the end of World War II, Republicans in Congress made cutting taxes their top priority. It looked like a winning issue. The war had seen taxes on America's highest incomes soar to all-time record rates. For the first time ever, FDR had applied the income tax to the paychecks of ordinary salaried Americans. With the war over, the GOP calculated that the electorate would be eager for relief.

So Republicans in Congress quickly pushed through an across-the-board tax cut -- and another and another after President Truman responded by using his veto power. It wasn't until 1948 that the Republicans finally marshaled enough votes to override. Then the President made them pay.

In his re-election bid, Truman thundered repeatedly against GOP giveaways to the rich. Americans, on election day, handed him a stunning upset victory.

And though the Republicans finally won the White House four years later, by then their standard-bearer, Dwight Eisenhower, had taken 1948's lessons to heart. In his eight years as President, Eisenhower never even tried to cut taxes. The 1950s ended with a top marginal rate over 90 percent.

How distant those 1950s seem today. Our current President, George W. Bush, has made lower taxes the centerpiece of his entire domestic agenda, moving two enormous tax cuts through Congress.

The benefits of both have gone largely to the wealthy, and Bush's political opponents have made much of that fact. Yet the President does not seem to have paid a significant political price. Indeed, notes Princeton University political scientist Larry Bartels, most average citizens appear to favor the Bush tax cuts.

"missing", Bartels notes, is "any positive popular enthusiasm for economic inequality." Americans may believe that they can become rich, he adds, but "in the meantime they do not seem to cherish those who already are."

Why, then, do so many of us go along with tax cuts that shower their rewards on the wealthy? Bartels concludes that

it's because most Americans don't really understand the elements of the Bush program or its effects on the distribution of income and wealth.

What in the end is going on here? Most Americans, Bartels suggests, "support tax cuts not because they are indifferent to economic inequality, but because they largely fail to connect inequality and public policy."

Failing to make such a connection, people are largely guided by "unenlightened self-interest," Bartels says.

That is, Americans who feel that their own tax burdens have become too heavy are inclined to support tax cuts, no matter who benefits – and even if the cuts are likely to jeopardize spending on government programs that the same voters support.

other sources to AMERICAUNITED say that the tax burden that the tax payer resents is not only income tax, but also the burden of sales tax, user taxes,etc. he encounters during the day and he is unaware these taxes are being levied on him to cover the shortfall on tax cuts for the wealthy.

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(condensation of an article by Sam Pizzigati considering research by Larry Bartel)

The full Bartel document is available online at

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