Andrea Louise Campbell, "Taxation and Resentment: Race, Party, and Class in American Tax Attitudes" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Summary

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Episode Overview

Podcast: New Books Network – New Books in Public Policy
Host: Ursula Hackett
Guest: Professor Andrea Louise Campbell (MIT)
Book: Taxation and Resentment: Race, Party, and Class in American Tax Attitudes (Princeton University Press, 2025)
Release Date: September 10, 2025

This episode explores Professor Andrea Campbell’s groundbreaking book, which investigates the complex and often contradictory attitudes Americans hold toward taxation. Using both historical context and original survey data, Campbell examines how race, partisanship, class, and perceptions of fairness intersect to shape opinions about federal, state, and local taxes—including income, sales, estate, and payroll taxes. The discussion gives special attention to the unique perspectives of Black and Hispanic taxpayers, the role of racial resentment and ideology, and how deeply American individualism, political messaging, and experience with government inform tax politics today.

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Main Discussion Points & Insights

1. Evolution of the American Tax System

[03:50 – 05:16]

• Historical context: Before the 20th century, federal revenues mainly came from tariffs; local and state governments relied on property taxes.
• The modern apparatus (income, estate, payroll, sales taxes) took shape from 1913 onwards.
• Absence of VAT: U.S. individualism, smaller public sector, and a lack of robust welfare state meant there was "never sort of a need for a new source of revenue, especially not a robust one like a consumption tax." (Campbell, 05:35)
• Early progressive ambitions: The 1913 income tax was predicated on taxing ability to pay, specifically targeting the rising fortunes of industrialists.

2. The Decline of Progressivity

[08:04 – 11:46]

• Early income tax: "Only the top decile... paid it."
• Gradual erosion via two main channels:
  • Rate cuts: Especially stark in the Reagan era ("the top marginal rate had been 70% and Ronald Reagan reduced that to 28%")
  • Tax breaks: Proliferation of deductions, credits, exclusions.
• Campbell emphasizes that “the overall value of these tax breaks... disproportionately goes to the top 10%, the top 1%.”
• As a result, “our tax system, when you combine... every level of government is almost flat.”

3. Abstract Preference vs. Practical Attitudes

[11:46 – 14:11]

• Americans overwhelmingly endorse progressive taxation in theory.
• Yet, paradoxically, “the taxes they dislike the most and most want to see decreased are the progressive taxes... the ones that cost them less," while regressive taxes (like sales tax, which "cost[s] them more as a share of income") are less objectionable.
• “Americans’ tax attitudes are upside down in two respects: their individual tax attitudes don’t match up with their abstract preferences, nor do they match up with their self interest.” (Campbell, 12:32)

4. Concepts of Proportionality, Fairness, and Ideology

[14:11 – 18:47]

• Notions of fairness are “always in the eye of the beholder.” (Campbell, 15:30)
• Many Americans, especially Republicans, see proportional taxes as fair since “everyone pays the same.”
• There is strong resentment that "some pay nothing," particularly with the income tax’s exemption of low earners.
• Preference for sales tax derives from both its universality and its "flatness," but also from the cognitive simplicity: “complications of math” make it difficult for people to assess the true burden of taxes as a share of income.

5. The Appeal of Sales Taxes and Perceived Control

[19:48 – 22:10]

• Sales tax is praised because “the rich can’t manipulate that share... there’s no loopholes to not pay. Everyone bumps into it.” (Hackett, 20:26)
• Yet it’s also seen as “very controllable—don’t want to pay, don’t buy the item.”
• Campbell notes, “Many taxes feel uncontrollable... whereas people feel that with the sales tax they have choice.”

6. Visibility and the Social Security Payroll Tax

[22:10 – 25:33]

• The payroll tax is felt to be less unfair since "people ultimately expect to get back what they put in."
• The Social Security relationship is deeply ingrained: “That relationship with tax dollars being associated with a visible benefit is most apparent with the payroll tax.” (Campbell, 23:06)
• Most Americans pay more in payroll than income tax but accept payroll taxes owing to perceived future payoff.

7. Tax Expenditures (“Tax Breaks”) and Public Perceptions

[25:33 – 30:58]

• The U.S. forgoes nearly as much federal revenue through tax breaks as it collects via the income tax.
• Many “do not recognize tax expenditures as a government benefit... but they do recognize when others are getting them.”
• Campbell finds “their attitudes toward these breaks... roughly mirror their attitudes towards direct spending programs.”
• Racial resentment is a critical predictor: whites with high racial resentment want to see both progressive taxes and tax breaks for the poor cut.

8. The Role of Racial Resentment, Partisanship, and Political Messaging

[30:58 – 37:33]

• Racial resentment strongly predicts opposition to progressive taxes and support for cutting benefits for the poor.
• Partisanship does matter, but is situational: “Republicans... are only more likely than Democrats to say my federal income taxes are too high when there’s a Democratic president.”
• Independents: “Particularly anti tax... even more likely than Republicans... to say that [any tax] is unfair.” (Hackett, 35:01)

9. The Estate Tax Puzzle

[37:33 – 43:22]

• Despite its narrow reach, the estate tax is the “most hated by normal Americans.”
• Explanations:
  • Americans see wealth as earned, already taxed income—it feels unfair to tax it again.
  • Strong desire to leave wealth to children.
  • Political messaging about family farms and small businesses (coded white) being forced out by the estate tax.
  • Racial resentment: suspicion estate tax funds will support minorities—“those programs are perceived as disproportionately going to non-whites... especially unfair.”

10. Racialization of Tax and Financial Policy

[43:22 – 47:58]

• Campbell relates her findings to broader literature on credit, bankruptcy, and the role of race in American political development.
• Many mechanisms through which access to relief, benefits, and fair taxation are racialized.

11. Distinctive Attitudes Among Black and Hispanic Taxpayers

[47:58 – 54:33]

• Important finding: Black and Latino Americans are more likely to regard nearly every tax as unfair, and to support tax cuts even more than white Republicans.
• "It's not that I think there's self interest per se... it's that black Americans have often suffered from a coercive state... might be more suspicious of when the tax man comes around." (Campbell, 54:15)
• Systematic over-taxation is both intentional (property tax assessments, foreclosure practices) and unintentional (less access to untaxed employer benefits).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On American aversion to VAT and social protection:
  “In the US, we never get those extensive social protections in part because of our fraught racial history. So there was never sort of a need for a new source of revenue, especially not a robust one like a consumption tax.”
  — Campbell, 05:35

• On the erosion of progressivity:
  “Both the reduction of the rates and the introduction of all these breaks means that the effective rate of taxation has fallen at the high end... [the] system is almost flat.”
  — Campbell, 11:46

• On the paradox of tax attitudes:
  “Americans’ tax attitudes are upside down in two respects: their individual tax attitudes don’t match up with their abstract preferences, nor do they match up with their self interest.”
  — Campbell, 12:32

• On fairness and proportionality:
  “Fairness is always in the eye of the beholder... Many of my survey respondents, especially Republicans... feel that everyone should pay something.”
  — Campbell, 15:30

• On racial resentment and tax politics:
  “Racial resentment is a very strong predictor of all three of the phenomena that I look at: tax attitudes, spending attitudes, and tax break or indirect spending attitudes.”
  — Campbell, 30:58

• On independents as anti-tax:
  “Political independents, those who don't affiliate with either [party], are particularly anti tax. So that's quite interesting... they are the proverbial swing voters.”
  — Campbell, 31:16

• On estate tax animosity:
  “Even amongst those for whom all of those things are true... two thirds or something... say that we should repeal estate taxes. Tell us about this opposition. Where does it come from? Why do people hate a tax that basically nobody pays?”
  — Hackett, 38:49

• On Black taxpayer attitudes:
  “Black and Latino Americans are more likely than white Americans to say these taxes, every, basically every tax is unfair. And they're more likely to say these taxes should be decreased... in some instances, black Americans are more likely to say taxes should be decreased than white Republicans, which... is extraordinary.”
  — Campbell, 48:16

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Timestamp | Segment/Topic | |------------|-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 03:50 | History and development of American tax system | | 05:35 | Why the US never adopted a VAT and its implications | | 08:04 | Erosion of progressivity and the influence of wealthy taxpayers | | 11:46 | The “upside down” paradox: abstract vs. concrete tax preferences | | 14:11 | Fairness, proportionality, and partisan/ideological lenses | | 19:48 | Why Americans see sales tax as both fair and controllable | | 22:10 | Visibility of tax benefits, especially payroll/social security taxes | | 25:33 | The massive “tax expenditure” (tax break) system and public perceptions | | 30:58 | Racial resentment, partisanship, and the complexity of tax attitudes | | 31:16 | Independents’ anti-tax attitudes and the misperceptions shaping policy | | 37:33 | The puzzle of estate tax hatred | | 43:22 | Racial coding of financial relief, the politics of deservingness, and related literature | | 47:58 | Distinctive experiences and attitudes of Black and Hispanic taxpayers | | 54:54 | Future research directions and the legacy of senior citizen benefits |

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Conclusion and Future Directions

• Campbell urges new research on Black and Latino tax attitudes: "That’s just untilled territory that, that needs more work.” [54:54]
• Her next project will focus on how policy has made senior citizens “super-participators” in democracy, and how social protection for the elderly is now eroding.

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Listen if you want:

• A fresh, data-driven take on why Americans so passionately argue about taxes.
• To understand the deep roots—historical, racial, and political—of popular tax resentments (and confusions).
• Insight into why people defend taxes that hurt them, resent taxes that help them, and how experiences of race and government deeply structure these beliefs.

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Transcript

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[Marshall Poe]

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[Ursula Hackett]

Hello, I'm Ursula Hackett of the New Books Network New Books in Public Policy Podcast. Today, I'm delighted to welcome Professor Andrea Campbell of mit, the author of Taxation and Race, Party and Class in American Tax Attitudes, which was published by Princeton University Press in 2025. Welcome to the show, Andrea.

[Professor Andrea Campbell]

It's wonderful to be with you. Thank you so much.

[Ursula Hackett]

Well, I'm absolutely delighted that you're here to talk to me, partly because we are long standing colleagues, but also because this is just an extraordinary book and I enjoyed reading it very much. It's rich, informative account of American public opinion on taxes. It's beautifully written and it utilizes both historical and original modern data and statistical analysis in order to really drill down to the individual level on tax attitudes into different types of taxes, which I hope we'll get onto in our conversation. And also to examine how partisanship and racial attitudes and self interest either do or do not significantly really shape people's tax views. And I thought in particular the findings that you had about black and Hispanic taxpayers in particular were absolutely fascinating. I'm hoping we were going to have a chance to talk about them later today. So it's an incredible achievement. I congratulate you on this book. And I wondered if we could start by talking just in outline about the American tax system and how it came to be and develop as it did in a country that is famously devoted to a kind of rugged individualism and skeptical of government power.

[Professor Andrea Campbell]

Yes, well, thank you for that question. So many of the taxes that Americans pay today when are really developed in the early 20th century. Prior to that it was mostly tariffs. The federal government was very, very small in scope. State and local governments were really larger and they devoted or they got their revenues mostly from property taxes and so on. That all starts to change in the 20th century. And estate tax is added. The individual income tax, which is the focus of so much American tax politics, is initiated in 1913, although it's really World War II that that becomes a tax that most people pay. And then other taxes are added over time. During the Great Depression, the social welfare state develops in the United States and a payroll tax is introduced, a gas tax as well. Property taxes are given from state governments to local governments continue as the primary source of property of local government revenue. And then states institute their own income taxes oftentimes in the 1930s, and also state sales taxes, which are one of the main consumption taxes that we have in the United States. So we never get a VAT unlike most other countries in the world. Instead, we have this array of taxes at every level of government. Americans are taxed at federal, state, local government by this array of many, many different types of taxes.

[Ursula Hackett]

So I mean, it is interesting you mentioned the VAT because of course a lot of other countries, including my own country of Britain, have this value added tax where you're basically taxing the value that's added at each stage of the production process. And the US doesn't have vat. So could you delve into a bit more? Why is that? Why did the US never have a developer vat?

[Professor Andrea Campbell]

Yeah, it's an interesting question and part of the reason owes to what you mentioned before, that the US is a very individualistic country. Once a small public sector, low taxes, VATs were adopted in many peer nations in say, the 1960s and we did not. And if you look in fact at total taxes as share of gdp, the US was not that different than say, the rich democracies of Europe in terms of, you know, taxes in the 1960s. But then there's a divergence. U.S. taxes stay pretty flat. Tax revenues go up in these other countries. It helps fund more extensive social protections than what we have in the United States. In the US we never get those extensive social protections in part because of our fraught racial history. So there was never sort of a need for a new source of revenue, especially not a robust one like a consumption tax. And in the early days, going back to the early 20th century, there was some talk of having a consumption tax during the Great Depression, for example, but it, it never came to fruition. And instead at the, the dawn of federal taxation, especially the income tax in 1913, the idea was that industrialization has created these very large fortunes and that the tax system should be oriented toward an ability to pay principal, that those with more should fund the government because they were better able to do so, and that that would be fair and just given what market incomes were being generated by industrialization. So early on there was the establishment that we should have progressive taxation, especially at the federal level. Therefore the VAT sort of never fit in with that orientation. Now that said, a big part of the book is the rest of the history of American tax policy and especially the politics around taxation is owing to the choice of progress of taxation, especially at the federal level. Because with progress of taxation, of course, you're taxing the most organized, vocal, high resource parts of society, and they have spent the subsequent hundred years trying to get their effective tax rates reduced, which is a large reason why we have the politics that we have today in the US around taxes.

[Ursula Hackett]

That's fantastic. And I think I'd like to drill again into this question of progressivity because of course, as you say, it's this really crucial part of the argument that you're making in the book. And I mean, I think it's wonderful to reflect on that history of progressivity in past times. I wonder if you could just quickly take our listeners through how did that Progressivity erode what was happening in that intervening period. That takes us up to that, the modern period of tax.

[Professor Andrea Campbell]

Yeah, in the early days, the federal income tax was highly progressive because only the top decile, the top 10% of income earners paid it. And then it became a tax that most people paid during World War II because of the great revenue needs of the, of the war effort. But it remained progressive with brackets and higher tax rates imposed at higher income levels. And the rich and the, and the highly affluent sought to reduce progressivity in two main ways. One is seeking reduced tax rates. So trying to get those top marginal tax rates reduced. They were highly effective. Taxes tend to go up during wartime and then were immediately pulled back in the, in the post war periods. We had several rounds of that after World War I, after World War II, after Korea. So trying to get the tax rates reduced at the high end. The Reagan revolution was key in that because in the 1970s the top marginal rate had been 70% and Ronald Reagan reduced that to 28%. So that was one technique they used to reduce their effective rates of taxation. The other is that the rich and the affluent sought out tax breaks. And the federal income tax in the US is low, just riddled with all sorts of credits, deductions, preferable rates for certain types of income, other kinds of exclusions that remove income from taxation. And many people in the US benefit from some of these tax breaks. For example, unlike many countries, we tend to get our health insurance through employers rather than the government. In the US there's no tax imposed on those health insurance premiums. So that's an example of a tax break that goes to a wide swath of Americans. But if you look at the overall value of these tax breaks, and the whole system is called the tax expenditure system, if you look at the total value, it disproportionately goes to the top 10%, the top 1%, and then finer and finer gradations of the top 1%. So what's happened is that both the reduction of the rates and the introduction of all these breaks means that the effective rate of taxation has fallen at the high end. And so the federal income tax remains progressive, but far less progressive than it was in the past. And by the past I mean prior to the Reagan revolution that starts in the 1980s. And then on the state and local side, the tax system has always been highly regressive because that's where we have sales taxes, the consumption tax I mentioned before. And so state and local tax system was regressive, has become more regressive over time. And altogether our tax system, when you combine those, every level of government is almost flat. It is the case that higher earners pay a greater share of their income than low earners, but not that much more compared to their share of income.

[Ursula Hackett]

So this brings us to the central puzzle that you are dealing with in this work and that is the question of progressive taxation and the extent to which, on the one hand, Americans profess enthusiasm for the abstract ideal of progressive taxation. You know, the idea that higher income groups should pay higher rates and help fund the government on a sort of ability to pay principle that you mentioned. But on the other hand, those same non rich ordinary Americans don't necessarily like progressive taxes in practice. So I wonder whether you could just give us a sense of how you attack that central problem in your book.

[Professor Andrea Campbell]

Yeah, it's this fascinating paradox because many ordinary Americans, the non rich, do adhere strongly to the theory of progressive taxation. That is what they want in the abstract. In my survey data, I describe different kinds of tax systems to the survey respondents. And you know, large majority say they prefer the tax, the progressive system, as opposed to a regressive system or a flat system. And large majorities also want the rich to pay more. But then when you turn from those abstract theoretical preferences to their preferences on individual taxes. Yes. So when you look at their attitudes towards specific taxes, the taxes they dislike the most and most want to see decreased are the progressive taxes, the income tax, the estate tax, the capital gains tax, and strangely, the taxes that they object to the least are the ones that cost them more as a share of income, especially the state sales tax, which for the bottom 60% of Americans actually comes to a higher share of their income per year than the federal income tax. And so in other words, Americans tax attitudes are upside down in two respects. Their individual tax attitudes don't match up with their abstract preferences, nor do they match up with their self interest. They literally like taxes that cost them more and dislike taxes that cost them less.

[Ursula Hackett]

So I mean, it strikes me that it's quite the line between sort of objective fact and sort of normative position becomes a bit harder to draw when you're dealing with these sort of contestable concepts like self interest or fairness or proportionality. I mean, one of the things that really struck me that you talk about in your book is you note that Republicans and conservatives are more likely to characterize regressive taxes as proportional on the basis that everyone pays the same. Right. So you know, you're saying, well, how do we sort of Understand that idea of proportionality, I suppose, is sort of the thing in question there, or for example, also elsewhere in the book. And it's a different context, but I think pays into this question about how the rich typically see the government as an obstacle rather than as a provider of functions, whether that's securing property rights or maintaining markets and so on. And then the question sort of arises about whether this is lack of knowledge or ideological commitment or sort of willful disregard or how you would sort of go about characterizing that. And so I think I want to know a bit more about how you understand these concepts of self interest and proportionality and fairness when these things are so deeply contested as a matter of ideological conflict.

[Professor Andrea Campbell]

Absolutely. Well, fairness is always in the eye of the beholder. And this phenomenon of Republican respondents saying that these regressive taxes like the sales tax are fair is completely fascinating to me. And again, it goes back to this notion of individualism. And there's a couple things going on here. One is that many of my survey respondents, especially Republicans, although not only respondents, feel very strongly that everyone should pay something. So there's a lot of resentment toward the federal income tax where low earners are removed from that system. Right, because it's unfair in many people's eyes that some pay nothing. And so one reason that the sales tax is more positively viewed is that it's difficult to escape. Everyone goes into a store and buys an item and pays the sales tax. No one can escape it. And it's true that both the low income people can escape it, but also high income people. Right, because one source of resentment in the US is that high income people seem to be able to slip the bounds of the income tax system with all of their tax planning and taking advantage of all these credits and so on. So this notion that everybody pays and is very strong. The other notion, and this gets to this, to the, to the proportionality or flat respect, is many people also like the fact that say the sales tax, not only does everyone pay, but everyone pays the same rate, regardless of your income. In my state of Massachusetts, you go into a store and buy an iron, buy an item, and everyone pays the 6.25% sales tax. And that too has an appeal to many people, especially Republicans, as I found in my survey data, because there's something about everyone paying the same also seems fair. And part of it also might have to do with the complications of math that, that it's difficult to comprehend taxes as a share of income and that these, these taxes that appear to be flat or proportional because the rate is flat are much more of a burden for low lower income people. So part of it I think is comprehension and cognition. But part of it is this ideological commitment to the fact that everyone pays the same. Everyone is contributing to the public purse. We're not differentiating amongst ourselves with these kinds of flat rate taxes. So appeal that appeals to many Americans and especially Republicans as I find. I'm Ashley Graham and as a parent I know the back to school transition can be a lot when it comes to wellness. Ollie supports me and my family through it all. Kids multi is big in my house. It supports their immune system and they love to take it. A win win for everybody. Shop these [e-mail] or retailers nationwide. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.

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[Professor Andrea Campbell]

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[Ursula Hackett]

I want to come back to this question of the ability of the rich to manipulate their share as, as in, in relation to some of the things that your respondents said about the sales tax. Because on the one hand you, you know, and, and one of the things that's wonderful about this book, I should say to everybody, is that you're drawing in sort of freestyle, open responses that, that real people are talking about in relation to how they understand taxes. So you get a really rich sense of what are people actually thinking under the hood, as it were. And one of the things that your respondents say about sales taxes is that the rich can't manipulate that share.

[Professor Andrea Campbell]

Right?

[Ursula Hackett]

So there's no loopholes to not pay. Everyone bumps into it, no one can evade it. Those are the sorts of things that people are saying. But then they do also say that the sales tax is very controllable, like don't want to pay the tax, don't buy the item. And I'm just wondering how we can sort of reconcile those different understandings of the sales tax.

[Professor Andrea Campbell]

That's right. You know, in some respect people are thinking about what are others paying. And that's why they like the fact that everyone has to pay the sales tax right relative to the affluent and the rich. The controllable part is also very interesting because many taxes feel uncontrollable to people. That you pay the payroll tax and the income tax is withheld from your paycheck. You have no control over how much you pay in those taxes unless you just choose to work less, which might be difficult for many people. The property tax also is not responsive to your income. You know, if you lose your job, you still owe property tax on your house, or if you retire, you still owe probably the same property tax on your house. So those are, you know, not responsive to people's circumstances. Whereas people feel that with the sales tax they have choice. And so some of the tax attitudes I find people are thinking about what are others paying and how fair is that? Some of the attitudes and some of the, the reasons why people have their views are more about their own situation and how they feel about their own burden. And so that's where we're getting this differentiation, I think, between some people liking the sales tax because the rich can't escape it and some people liking the sales tax because they feel that they can control how much they owe.

[Ursula Hackett]

That's so interesting. And I mean, I suppose another consideration for people is what people ultimately expect to get back from the system. And one of the things I thought was quite striking when you, in relation to your work on the Social Security payroll tax, where it's obviously very costly for a lot of income groups and yet it's seen as the least unfair tax. And that's an interesting juxtaposition because people in the survey say they eventually expect to get back what they put in through the benefits in older age and they seem to be taking a longer term view of that tax. And so I suppose, and it comes back to this question of how we define self interest. We're thinking about it here in a very short term way, but perhaps people's understanding of that tax and maybe some of the other taxes in your account are just taking a longer term view of self interest. I mean, over a lifetime. What do you think about that?

[Professor Andrea Campbell]

Right. Well, I think that's most, that's definitely most apparent in a payroll tax. You know, so many other taxes, it's very difficult to see where the money goes. That's especially true of taxes at the federal level. Those revenues just seem to go into this big pot of money to the evil federal government. And who knows how they're going to use it. Some of the local and state taxes, especially the sales tax, and another reason why the sales tax is relatively more acceptable to many Americans is that it is a state tax. People feel more positively toward their state governments than the national government. And you can feel, and some people say with property tax, even those who feel relatively less negative about the property tax, at least it goes to local fire and police or it goes to local public schools. You can see your tax dollars being used. That relationship with, with tax dollars being associated with a visible benefit is most apparent with the payroll tax. The way that the payroll tax was sold historically to Americans was this individual contract with government. You pay this money in over your working life, you will get a benefit in retirement. The benefit is tied somewhat to your earnings. So, you know, higher income people get a higher benefit, although the replacement rates are better for lower income people. But it's seen by Americans as this sacrosanct contract between worker and government. And the benefits are highly visible. Everyone knows about Social Security, pension benefits in retirement. It enabled people to retire because prior to that system being established during the Great Depression, older people just lived with their families or kept working until they could no longer work. That is one of the few earmarked taxes in the US System where people can draw this direct line between taxes paid and benefits received. Which is why even though it's a highly regressive tax and quite expensive for many Americans, in fact, three quarters of Americans pay more in payroll tax every year than income tax. Now, most of them don't realize that, but also they get a benefit, a very visible benefit in return and that makes the tax relatively more acceptable.

[Ursula Hackett]

I mean, let's talk about visibility because one of the things that you've already mentioned in this conversation, which I have an interest in as well, is this question of tax breaks and tax expenditure system. I mean, you really hammer home, I think, some fascinating information about the system of tax breaks in the US in particular the enormous size of this tax expenditure system. I think it's incredible to reflect upon the fact that the amount of federal revenues not collected because of tax breaks nearly equals and at times has exceeded the amount that is collected by the individual income tax. And you cite in the book Vanessa Williamson's finding that filling out federal tax forms every April gives taxpayers this sort of glimpse of how many breaks they can't benefit from, reminds them that others are maybe being taxed less. And I wondered how that finding fits in with some of the work that's been done by Suzanne Mettler and others on the submerged state, where.

[Professor Andrea Campbell]

It'S all.

[Ursula Hackett]

About what people know or think they know about state benefits and what makes.

[Professor Andrea Campbell]

Them really, really angry.

[Ursula Hackett]

I mean, is it that they don't recognize tax expenditures as a government benefit, which is kind of the submerged state line, but they think that direct spending is going to others, or is it that they're angry because they do recognize tax expenditures as government benefits, but they just don't think they're going to be able to collect them themselves? I just wondered if you could untangle that a bit for us. I think it's a really interesting thought.

[Professor Andrea Campbell]

Oh, absolutely. Yes. This wonderful work by Suzanne Mettler and Chris Farris and some other folks looking at the tax expenditure system oftentimes characterizes it as the hidden welfare state or the submerged welfare state, because as Suzanne finds, people who get benefits from a direct spending program, say public housing, are much more likely to say they benefit from a government program than those that get a tax break. There's a tax break in the US for home mortgage interest deduction. And so she concludes from that that these tax breaks, even though they're oftentimes addressed at similar public policy problems, are not recognized by the recipients. And what I find is that that's partly true and partly not true. People know a little bit about the tax break system. They know roughly, very roughly, who, which income groups benefit from different breaks. So for example, people are aware that breaks for getting your health insurance through your employer or retirement benefits through your employer. They, they recognize that those benefits are going in part to the middle class. They don't fully comprehend the fact that upper income groups get way more of that benefit. But they, but they do comprehend that, okay, those, those go to middle income groups. They also know enough to realize that the earned income tax Credit, which is a subsidy for low wage workers, they, they recognize that that goes to lower income groups and they also recognize some of the tax breaks that disproportionately go to the rich. They realize there's a tax break for charitable contributions. And they do recognize that the high income groups disproportionately benefit from that. And they realize that the, the preferential, the low rate on capital gains income also benefits upper income groups. So there's some vague understanding of the distribution of taxes. Not entirely correct, but vaguely correct. Ish. And what's interesting is that therefore their attitudes toward these breaks, which ones they want to see enhanced or reduced, roughly mirror their attitudes towards direct spending programs. So political scientists for many years have studied attitudes towards direct spending programs and many, especially white Americans tend to, to disapprove of spending on means tested programs that are targeted at lower income people and like spending that's done on the middle class. And I find that the tax break attitudes mirror that, that the, the programs are perceived as going to lower income people like the eitc, also the child tax credit. Interestingly though, there's more enthusiasm for cutting those than there is enthusiasm for cutting the breaks that go to the middle class. And the one other element here is the role of racial resentment. So if I focus on white Americans, those who are more, who harbor more animus toward non white people, a few things interesting about them. One is that they dislike progressive taxes more than other whites. They want to see federal spending on low income people, direct federal spending decreased, and they want to see tax expenditures, tax breaks for lower income people like the EITC or the child tax credit decreased. And so in other words, you know, racial resentment is a very strong predictor of all three of the phenomena that I look at. Tax attitudes, spending attitudes, and tax break or indirect spending attitudes.

[Ursula Hackett]

So racial is taking on this enormous significance in terms of, in terms of determining how people, what people's tax attitudes are. I mean, what about partisanship and ideology? I mean people might think, well, you know, hey, what role are they playing with respect to how people think about taxes?

[Professor Andrea Campbell]

Right? Well, you might think that attitudes toward taxes would be determined very strongly by partisanship in the United States. If you just look at our major political parties, the Republican party has for deck, well, for time immemorial has been associated. It's been the small government party, right? And certainly since the 1980s and the Reagan revolution, when Reagan puts together a kind of new coalition in the Republican Party, A desire for low taxes and lots of tax cuts is the glue that holds that coalition together. And that remains the point even today. You know, we just had this, the big beautiful bill that passed this summer features tax cuts brought to you by the Republican party. So that's a long standing phenomenon. Right. And so you might think that Republicans in the public would always have distinctive attitudes compared To Democrats more skepticism towards taxes than Democrats. And that is not uniformly the case. There are some exceptions and it depends on what kind of attitude you're looking at. So for example, if you just ask people what's the worst tax? What were the taxes that you most dislike? Both Republicans and Democrats will cite the federal income tax, the estate tax. Interestingly, political independents, those who don't affiliate with either the Democratic or Republican party are particularly anti tax. So that's quite interesting part of our politics because those people are the proverbial swing voters. And so there is this, these attitudes where Republicans are skeptical about taxes, independents are even more skeptical about taxes. But a large share of Democrats too have negative feelings about taxes. Means this all advantages politically advantages the Republican Party, because if they have an anti tax platform, they draw votes across all three groups. So there's. So there's that. But then there's times when. Or another example of when Republicans are not quite as distinctive as you might imagine. There's not great data over time on tax attitudes. In fact, I had originally wanted to do a very historical book looking at tax attitudes over time and found that the public opinion data are just very thin if we go back in time. But there is one question that has been asked by Gallup and the General Social Survey run by sociologists since 1947, the Gallup version, which asked people simply, federal income taxes you pay this year, too high, too low. About right. And you might imagine that Republicans coming from the low tax, small government party would always be more likely than Democrats to say my federal income taxes are too high. But in fact they only say that when there's a Democratic president. When there's a Republican president, the attitudes of Republicans and Democrats don't really differ. So it's very. The effect of partisanship on attitudes is very situational and very conditional, which also is quite interesting.

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[Ursula Hackett]

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[Ursula Hackett]

It's absolutely fascinating. And I mean that really is astonishing, this finding you have for independents that they are even more likely than Republicans, even more likely than Republicans on basically any tax to say that it's unfair. And I mean, I just wondered, can you just expand on that? I mean, why. Why are these independents so unbelievably anti tax? Yeah, well, I guess a lot of.

[Professor Andrea Campbell]

Them are, you know, the reason their independence is in some ways disaffected from politics and perhaps by extension disaffected from government. And so that makes them anti, anti tax. Some of it may be a little bit of lower information levels. You know, we know that independents have less political knowledge. You know, they're less interested in politics, they follow politics less than those who say they're Democrats or Republicans. And so may, it may be that they simply respond to questions like this, kind of parroting the elite rhetoric that they hear. And so much of rhetoric around taxes in the US is, is anti tax. So they're just repeating that. But it also is very interesting to think about just the nature of American public policy. There's been a lot of interesting work in recent years about why is it that American public policy, whether we're talking about, you know, spending policy or tax policy, is relatively conservative. And some researchers have been looking at elected politicians and what do they think their constituents want in a variety of policy areas and discovering that there are misperceptions, that many elected politicians or their staffs tend to think their constituents are more conservative than they actually are, in part because the constituents who come forth and express their attitudes tend to be the more privileged ones who tend to be more conservative. And so a few things are going on. So one reason that public policy United States tends to go in this conservative direction is that there's this misperception on the part of elected politicians about what people really want. But another reason could be that just in terms of electoral incentives, if you're running for office and you need to attract not just the votes of your, of voters in your own party, but also those independents who are such important swing voters, you can win more votes with an anti tax, low tax platform because you're going to attract those, those independent voters.

[Ursula Hackett]

One tax we haven't really talked about yet is the estate taxes. Because here you've got some really interesting puzzles there. I mean, we're having some very intense debates right now in the UK about inheritance taxes. And I actually looked up some of the figures. I mean, most Brits, 55% of Brits, think that inheritance tax is unfair or very unfair, compared with fewer than 20% who say it's fair or very fair, even though, as we know, less than 5% of estates actually ultimately attract inheritance tax. And you unearth similar opposition to estate taxes in the US and you're finding that even those with below median incomes who want more government spending, who say the income gap has increased and that's a bad thing, and you say that government policy contributes to Differences in income. And you say rich people pay less than they should in federal income taxes. Even amongst those for whom all of those things are true, they still support repeal in huge numbers of estate taxes. It's like two thirds or something of this, of the people for whom all of those statements are true say that we should repeal estate taxes. Tell us about this opposition. Where does it come from? Why do people hate a tax that basically nobody pays?

[Professor Andrea Campbell]

It is extraordinary, isn't it? And estate taxes are something that has puzzled a number of political scientists and other social scientists for a long time. It is very strange, right, because again, Americans at an abstract level want the rich to pay more. And yet the tax which is the most progressive, the estate tax, is the most hated by normal Americans. So it doesn't make sense from a self interest perspective because they will, you know, a tiny number of people of Americans pay the tax. You know, it's, it's fewer than 2,000 estates per year when 2 million Americans die every year. Right? It's a tiny, tiny incidence. So from a self interest point, it makes no, no sense. You just cited the ways in which people's other attitudes do not comport with their estate tax attitudes. If you think inequality is bad and so on, you still want the estate tax abolished. So I think there's a few things going on here. One is that governments can tax different things. You can tax income, you can tax consumption, like with a VAT or a sales tax. You can tax wealth like the property tax or the estate tax. My survey respondents really dislike taxing wealth. The property tax very disliked and the estate tax very disliked. And I think what happens is that people extrapolate from their personal experience and they think that the way wealth is accrued is that you earn income. You don't spend all that earn income, you save part of it. And wealth is the natural accumulation of those savings. And because wealth derives from income, in the experience of ordinary people, they think it's already been taxed and it is unfair to tax that again. Also, people have a very strong desire to leave something for their children. And so if they have sacrificed and not spent all of their money and put something aside, they want to, they want to leave that for their children. Some people. So, and then a third factor is people hear that certain people who appear to be rich on paper, like farmers or small business owners, are disproportionately hit by the estate tax and that their heirs have to liquidate, you know, sell off the family farm or liquidate the family business to meet these These tax obligations, and that's incredibly unfair because farmers and entrepreneurs are archetypes of American individualism. Right. So several things going on here. Those stories were intentionally told by rich estate tax opponents in order to foster this opposition among non rich Americans, even though those stories of farms and businesses being sold off are largely apocryphal. So part of this is messaging from the right and estate tax opponents, which has been very successful in creating these misperceptions about how widespread the estate tax is, which we've known that before. But this notion that taxing wealth is disliked, I think is a new thing. There's also an element here of racial attitudes, as with the other progressive taxes I study those who harbor more racial resentment don't like the estate tax. And I think it's because estate tax revenues just go into the, you know, the general revenues pot. That money might be spent on, you know, federal programs for lower income people. And that just report though, you know, it's. Those programs are perceived as disproportionately going to non whites. And so that's especially unfair, especially because farmers, small business owners are coded white in, in American rhetoric. And so, so the estate taxes, there's, there's multiple reasons why ordinary Americans, even though it does not comport with their abstract preference for taxing the rich more and certainly doesn't comport with their self interest, there's multiple reasons why people especially dislike the estate tax, even though it strikes many of us as illogical.

[Ursula Hackett]

I mean, I think it's fascinating that you mentioned these narratives around farmers and entrepreneurs having to liquidate the family farm and the ways in which those are coded white in terms of political rhetoric. And I was thinking as I was reading your great book about some of the many other works in American political development, but particularly Chloe Thurston and Emily Zakin's book about the politics of debt relief. In particular, their focus on your collective focus on the sort of visibility, public awareness in distribution of politics, role of racial resentment, the construction of certain populations as being deserving versus undeserving recipients of government largesse, and the sort of power of white coded groups like farmers to organize, to protect their self interest and also to racialize state building more broadly. I just sort of wondering how you position your work with respect to some of the other work that's being done in American political development about how certain types of financial reliefs are normalized and others are politically contested and so on.

[Professor Andrea Campbell]

Yeah, thank you. Yeah. Well, the, the Thurston Zakin book is marvelous, right? Showing how 19th century debt relief for farmers is something that becomes accepted because those farmers are white. Whereas in the 20th century, when it's consumers who are facing debt problems, those consumers are coded as out of control. What is wrong with you? You can't control your spending. That's why you're in trouble. Therefore we are not going to forgive your debts in the way that we forgave the debts of farmers in the 19th century because it's your fault that you're in debt. And you can see how that might be racialized with these, these very, very racialized perceptions in us about who, who controls themselves and who doesn't. Right? Yeah. So, so my book, so there's, there's less on tax public opinion in political science than one might think. You know, there's a seminal work by Sears and Citron about the property tax revolt that emerges in the late 70s in California and then spreads around the nation and helps usher in the Reagan revolution of anti tax sentiment. And politicians in the Republican party realizing that they can benefit electoral electorally from emphasizing taxes and the need, the need for tax cuts, that work looked at self interest and discovered some aspects of self interest in people's tax attitudes. Like homeowners were more supportive of these property tax reductions than renters, but also discovered the role of racial resentment that those who are racially resentful dislike the property tax more. So that was one early work and there's sort of, that's one reason I wanted to look at self interest across a broad array of taxes, not just the property tax and also the role of racial resentment in, across a broad array of taxes. And then you sort of fast forward to the, the Bush tax cuts of the early 2000s. There was a spate of work then, much of it actually around the estate tax, you know, work by Michael Gratz and Ian Shapiro and by Larry Bartels. Looking at, you know, these puzzling estate tax attitudes, the fact that people's preferences about inequality seem to have no relationship to their dislike of, of the estate tax. But these, you know, works were focused on particular taxes in particular points in time without really looking at the broad array of taxes. And so that was one motivation for the book. And then as you note, there's this wonderful work that's being done about credit and who has and does not have credit, what are systems of bankruptcy, who is banked, who is not banked in the U.S. you know, has access to formal financial institutions or not. And so part of the work and the fact that part of it does revolve around whites attitudes about race that end up in sort of, you know, infecting, for lack of a better word. So many of their tax attitudes that appear to have nothing to do with race is very much situated in that. That literature about how so much of what happens in the United States gets refracted through the racial lens.

[Ursula Hackett]

Absolutely. And I mean, we've talked quite a bit about whites attitudes towards tax. I wondered if you could tell us a bit about what you find in the book about black and Hispanic taxpayers, because I thought that was really interesting. They had some very distinctive attitudes that are related to their experiences with government coercion.

[Professor Andrea Campbell]

That's right. Well, another goal this book was to look at the attitudes of black and Latino people because the existing work really does focus on white taxpayers and their grievances and resentments and so on. And there was almost virtually no work about, well, what about everybody else and their tax attitudes? Andrew Carle, who's an historian who looks at the property tax, has this wonderful line in his work that black Americans especially are only viewed as the object of white's ire and never as taxpayers in their own right. But of course they pay taxes. And what's interesting is that there's a literature in history, in sociology and in law which is about the fact that black and Latino Americans actually pay more in taxes than similarly situated white Americans for a whole variety of both intentional and unintentional reasons. So just to give a couple of examples, these are probably unintentional, or at least were originally unintentional. If you look at the federal income tax, black Americans are less likely to have access to the tax break system. They're less likely, for example, to have jobs where employer provided health insurance or retirement plans are on offer. And so at the same income level, they're taxed on more of their income than white Americans who are more likely to have untaxed income because they're enjoying those employer benefits that are not taxed. So that's one sort of subtle example. There are less subtle examples. Andrew Carle has a wonderful book called the Black Tax about the property tax in the United States, which has had a highly disproportionate effect on black Americans in many ways. Black Americans historically were shunted into certain neighborhoods where they were allowed to buy houses and not allowed to buy houses elsewhere. They oftentimes had to pay more for those houses because they couldn't get more favorable interest rates because some programs from the federal government, for example, were only available to white and not black would be homeowners or Purchasers. So black Americans had to be in certain neighborhoods, had to pay more even to be in those neighborhoods. Then city assessors would over assess their homes for property tax purposes. And so they're literally paying more in property tax for a similarly valued, you know, for a house that's equivalent. Right. That was all intentional. That was a way for cities to squeeze black homeowners and have lighter taxes on white homeowners. Black Americans couldn't protest because they weren't allowed to vote. A lot of these practices emerged in the Jim Crow era. And remarkably, this is remarkable. Recent analyses by Chris Berry of Chicago shows that this disproportionate property tax taxation continues to this day, which is extraordinary to me. And then today there's also an additional overlay where city governments who are strapped for cash will do what are called tax auctions. If a homeowner falls behind on their property taxes, rather than working with the homeowner to, you know, for a payment plan, they'll just put a lien on the house and then foreclose and auction off the house and the city will take the revenues. And those kinds of practices are disproportionately visited upon black homeowners and not white, white homeowners. And so there's this whole vast, fascinating literature. There's also a wonderful book by a tax scholar, Dorothy Brown, about other ways in which black Americans are over taxed. Also Latino Americans having to do with just the ways in which black Americans and Latino Americans earn money, hold assets, consume where they buy their homes. All these things end up in their, in ultimately their disproportionate taxation at every level of government, remarkably. So I was very curious, what are their tax attitudes as a result? And so if you look at attitudes towards government in general, black and Latino Americans are more positive toward government when a larger role for government. They're more likely to say they're liberal, they're more supportive of federal spending and a lot of social policy areas. But then when you look at their tax attitudes, they are more likely than white Americans to say these taxes, every, basically every tax is unfair. And they're more likely to say these taxes should be decreased, which is remarkable to me. And in some instances, black Americans are more likely to say taxes should be decreased than white Republicans, which, you know, is extraordinary. And it's, and I, and it's, and it's not that I think there's self interest per se going on here, because I can't really, you know, I could never argue that like, oh, black Americans have self interest relative to taxes and white Americans don't. It's not quite that. It's that black Americans have often suffered from a coercive state in the US at every level of government, whether we're talking our social policy systems, certainly our judicial system is disproportionately black Americans are the victims of disproportionate police practices and incarceration and so on. And I think what these black survey respondents are doing is extrapolating from these very negative experiences of a coercive state to this other state practice taxation, which is coercive for everyone. But this particular population has been the subject of more coercion in these other areas and therefore might be more suspicious of when the tax man comes around.

[Ursula Hackett]

This is so, so interesting. Andrea, I have one final question for you. In light of the fact that you've really opened up this very broad conversation about American public opinion on taxes, what's next for you? What are you working on at the moment? Where are you taking this project next? I'd love to hear more about that.

[Professor Andrea Campbell]

Oh, absolutely. Well, in the final part of the book, and for anyone who's a social scientist listening to this, if you're looking for hypotheses to pursue, I lay out so many areas of tax public opinion that we need to explore. This book is really just the first bite at some of these phenomena. And so I hope that people will, researchers will take up the mantle and explore some of the hypotheses that I raise and that I'm able to do in a, in a sort of initial way with this book, but but certainly deserve more exploration. First and foremost, I think the tax attitudes of black and Latino Americans, that's just untilled territory that, that needs more work. As for me personally, my next project, I think I may go back to, in some ways, my first book about how policies make citizens and senior citizens in the United States and how they became such super participators in American democracy because in part because of the work about taxes, I think we're going to look back in the United States and realize that for a few brief decades we had one major social policy success, which was we alleviated poverty among senior citizens. And all those systems that we've put in place in both the public sector and the private sector are all eroding and what's going to happen with the senior citizens of the future. And of course, there's a great deal of concern about our lack of investment in children in the United States, which is absolutely true to our detriment But I think, you know, one thing that we've done, like the one social policy success was senior citizens. And maybe we spend too much on senior citizens, but we're letting all these protections disappear, not disappear, but fall behind. The need erode. And so that's, I think, what's up next for me.

[Ursula Hackett]

That's incredible. Andrea, thank you so, so much. It's been a really wonderful ride ranging conversation, everybody. The book is Taxation and Race, Party and Class in American Tax Attitudes. Andrea, thank you so much for coming on the show.

[Professor Andrea Campbell]

Thank you. It was a pleasure, Sam.