One of the many difficulties with using polling data to measure “public opinion” (whatever that means) is that simply rephrasing the question can elicit very different answers. This is true of economic policy as well: people will respond very differently to the same policy, even if it’s phrased differently.
J.D. Vance has come under fire recently for saying that families with children should pay lower taxes than those without. twitterOne progressive account claimed that Vance was arguing that “childless adults should pay a higher tax rate than adults with children.” Of course, as others have said, already As noted, the basic idea Vance is describing is not a call for changing the tax code; it’s already part of it. The child tax credit is already in place, and using Vance’s assumptions, someone making $100,000 a year with three children would pay a lower tax rate than someone making the same amount but with no children.
For now, I’ll ignore the debate over whether the child tax credit is good policy. What interests me here is how the policy is framed. If you ask, “Should adults without children pay higher taxes?” I think many people would be against the policy. But if you ask, “Should adults who are raising children get a tax credit?” I think a significant number of people would be in favor. In fact, it’s teeth It’s pretty popular. If you ask 1,000 people the first question and then ask them the second question six months later, I think you’ll find a lot of people who answered “no” to the first question who answered “yes” to the second. But saying “people with children should get a tax credit” and saying “people without children should pay higher taxes” are saying the same thing. Both policies are the same. And in fact, many of the people on the left who are pontificating about Vance’s comments also strongly support the child tax credit and want to expand it. If you think the child tax credit should be expanded, that’s tantamount to saying that the existing tax rate gap between childless adults and adults with children isn’t large enough.
So why do people respond so differently to differently worded policies? I think the main reason is that people aren’t really responding to the content of the policy. What people are really responding to is what they perceive as the intention of the person proposing the policy. And Vance certainly contributed to attributing undesirable intentions to himself. In the video above, Vance uses tax credits as an example of how states should use the tax system to “reward what we think is good and punish what we think is bad.”
So while someone who says “We should expand tax credits to support parents and children” sounds like a good person who wants to help parents in need, Vance’s proposal sounds rooted in the belief that childless adults are “bad” and therefore “should be punished.” The policy proposals are the same, but the first sounds like it comes from good intentions and the second sounds like it comes from bad intentions, and many people are reacting not to the details of the policy but to what they think the motives of those who propose it are, good or bad. This is probably why I’ve said elsewhere, “Political NoncognitivismThe idea that “most people’s support for a policy is a way of expressing their attitudes, not an evaluation of proposals or factual claims about reality.”
Stepping away from politics for a moment, consider the case of Wendy’s, which made waves a few months ago when it was reported that the fast-food chain was considering implementing a “surge pricing” model, in which prices would be adjusted based on demand at certain times of the day, meaning menu items would be more expensive during the lunch rush and less expensive in the mid-afternoon.
This angered a lot of people, but perhaps a slight change in wording would have changed people’s opinions. The policy is commonly described as “if you go when it’s busy, you pay more,” which sounds bad to most people. But what if we simply rephrased it instead as “if you go when it’s less crowded, you get a discount?” Logically, the two policies are equivalent, but the first policy makes people feel taken advantage of, and the second policy makes people feel like they’re getting a bonus.
There’s reason to think the second framing will be well received, because we’ve already seen it in the form of happy hours: many bars and restaurants have happy hours where drinks and menu items are offered at deep discounts, and happy hours almost always occur after lunch and before dinner, when the bar is at its quietest. Happy hours have always been framed as “come early, get a discount” rather than “come late, pay more,” so no one is as upset about it as they were about Wendy’s potentially engaging in surge pricing, although these policies are logically equivalent.
What do you think, readers? Are there any policies that you support that you think you would be more supportive of if they were couched differently in public? Or are there any policies that you once supported (or opposed) but changed your mind after hearing them couched differently?
