Recent Gallup polling shows that taking from the rich to give to the poor is becoming more and more popular.
Over at Vox Matt Yglesias highlighted a very interesting trend in recent Gallup polling. Simply put Americans seem to want to tax the rich more and give that money to everyone else in society:
Americans are eager to see the government “spread the wealth around” through heavy taxes on rich people. This, according to Gallup, is a relatively new phenomenon, with a clear preference for soaking the rich really only emerging in the past four or five years…
…On a different polling measure, Gallup finds that at least since the mid-1980s a large majority of Americans have expressed a preference for a flatter distribution of income. But that’s something that could, at least hypothetically, be achieved in a whole variety of ways. Taxing the rich in order to redistribute income to the working class is a much more specific idea and, naturally, a more contentious one.
To be sure we aren’t talking about huge majorities coming out for the idea of “spreading the wealth around” that made Joe The Plumber so mad back in 2008. According to Gallup only 52% of Americans now support the idea that we should, “redistribute wealth by heavy taxes on the rich.”
But it’s not that hard to understand why the American publics attitudes over taxing the rich have changed. Simply put the rich has seen their income rebound quite quickly since the American economy started growing again back in 2009, while everyone else has seen little or no gains at all.
Of course this shift in public opinion probably won’t lead to any major changes in American public policy overnight. The Republican party still very much opposes tax increases and their current economic policies would if anything just exacerbate our trend of rising inequality.
This shift could however have a major impact in the long term. Since 1980 both Democrats and Republicans have felt the key to winning national elections is to appeal to the middle class by promising to spur economic growth. The parties might differ on how best to do that, but the they largely agree that economic policies should focus largely on making a bigger economic pie, not necessarily dividing the pie up in a more equal way. But since most Americans have seen stagnant real income growth since 1980, it’s possible the whole “bigger pie” model of economic policy could becoming increasingly unpopular.
Simply put the American public, especially young Americans as Yglesias notes, might just want to “spread the wealth around.” Just don’t tell Joe The Plumber.
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