American Attitudes toward Progressive Taxation

Steven M. Karceski, Colby College

The United States today is arguably more unequal in terms of wealth and income than it has been in the last 100 years. Recent policy proposals and high profile op-eds have brought the issue of progressive taxation front and center in the minds of the American public. This paper provides background for a proposed survey on attitudes toward American attitudes toward progressive taxation. Some scholars argue that the American public is not only anti-tax but also specifically opposed to progressive taxation. This camp highlights a principle-policy gap, where progressivity is supported in the abstract (consistent with the "ability to pay principle"), but the support dissipates when the public is asked about specific progressive tax policies. Others argue the opposite, highlighting support for certain specific progressive taxes (e.g., a wealth tax) and characterizing a very different kind of principle-policy gap, one operating in the other direction, where the public is characterized as ideologically (or philosophically) conservative, but programmatically liberal (or "conservative egalitarians") . I reconcile the findings from these two distinct camps by articulating the points of disagreement and where I believe the two camps are talking past one another. Ultimately I propose a survey designed to provide data that would shed additional light on Americans' views toward progressive taxation across a range of different tax policies and specifications. The data will be collected over the summer of 2026 at the latest, well in advance of the conference next fall. The findings will provide valuable information for scholars in the areas of distributive justice, public opinion, political sociology, and fiscal sociology/public finance. The results will provide insights into a topic that is growing in salience in the United States, and indicate where the public stands on the use of one of the primary means of addressing inequality: progressive taxation.

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 Presented in Session 180. Dollars, Debt, and Financial Risk