Economix Blog: Americans for Greater Inequality

CATHERINE RAMPELL

Dollars to doughnuts.

As Rich Oppel and I wrote in an article today, the Republican presidential candidates have been steadily promoting flatter — and therefore more regressive — tax overhaul plans. Flatter taxes have of course always been the holy grail for many in the conservative base, but now such proposals seem to be gathering broader support, too.

In a recent article for Scientific American, Ilyana Kuziemko and Michael I. Norton write:

Support for redistribution, surprisingly enough, has plummeted during the recession. For years, the General Social Survey has asked individuals whether “government should reduce income differences between the rich and the poor.” Agreement with this statement dropped dramatically between 2008 and 2010, the two most recent years of data available. Other surveys have shown similar results.

The article notes that declines in support for redistributive government policies have been larger among minorities, and that “Americans who self-identify as having below average income show the same decrease in support for redistribution as wealthier Americans.”

These findings are a bit unexpected, given  the spreading Occupy Wall Street movement and frequent complaints about rising inequality.

Ms. Kuziemko, a professor at Princeton, and Mr. Norton, a professor at Harvard, argue that greater opposition to redistributive policies may actually be a predictable reaction to having slipped in the distribution oneself:

People exhibit a fundamental loathing for being near or in last place — what we call “last place aversion.” This fear can lead people near the bottom of the income distribution to oppose redistribution because it might allow people at the very bottom to catch up with them or even leapfrog past them.

This statement is based on a study of theirs based on survey data. The surveys found that people making just above the minimum wage are the most likely to oppose an increase in it.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=8533c2dc01d6cdf940f919f5034d8503