20.02.2019 Democrats Want to Tax the Wealthy. Many Voters Agree.

- The New York Times

Democrats Want to Tax the Wealthy.

Many Voters Agree.
A proposal to tax wealth finds support across party lines, along with the premise that the
government should combat inequality.

By Ben Casselman and Jim Tankersley

Feb. 19, 2019

As leading Democrats roll out proposals to increase taxes on the rich, the American people are
largely behind them.

A majority of people support Democratic proposals to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans,
according to a poll conducted this month for The New York Times by the online research
platform SurveyMonkey, though their opinions vary between specific plans. Voters
overwhelmingly see income inequality as a problem the government should be trying to
address.

Support for taxing the rich cuts across party lines: A majority of Republicans support a
proposal from Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a Democratic presidential
candidate, to tax a group of the wealthiest Americans on their net worth. Views on raising the
top income-tax rate are more sharply split.

The tax-the-rich sentiment is strongest by far among Democrats, who see it as a moral issue.
Subscribing to a view expressed recently by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the
first-term New York Democrat, nearly two-thirds of Democrats say it is immoral to have an
economic system where some people have billions of dollars while others have very little.

“They’re not paying their fair share,” said one Democrat, Fred Wood, a retired teacher in
Williamsport, Pa. “It’s just not right when folks cannot afford health care.”

Polling support is by no means a guarantee that Americans would elect a tax-the-rich

challenger to President Trump — who mused as a candidate about raising taxes on the rich
but as president signed a $1.5 trillion tax cut that reduced the top marginal income tax rate and
primarily benefits high earners. Polls by Gallup and other organizations over the decades have
regularly found that a majority of Americans believe that corporations and the wealthy pay too
little in taxes, but voters have frequently elected presidents who cut those taxes, instead.

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20.02.2019 Democrats Want to Tax the Wealthy. Many Voters Agree. - The New York Times

What appears different this time, analysts say, is the emphasis that leading Democratic
candidates are placing on taxing the rich. “This is about politicians catching up to where
Americans have been,” said Leslie McCall, a political scientist at the CUNY Graduate Center.

As a result, progressive policy hands say they are increasingly confident that if a Democrat
wins the White House and the party gains full control of Congress, taxes on the rich will go up.
That is partly because of the “finally dawning realization among Democrats that taxing the
rich is good politics along with good policy,” said Michael Linden, a fellow at the liberal
Roosevelt Institute.

“My bet is that it won't be one big thing” that ends up raising taxes on the rich, Mr. Linden
said. “I bet it will be a lot of medium-sized things. A higher top rate, for sure. Rooting out or
limiting some of the tax expenditures that disproportionately benefit the rich. I think the
corporate rate will start to creep back up. And I think new taxes like a wealth tax, or some
other form of capital taxation, are very likely.”

More Democrats are taking up the theme.

Rising inequality and policies to fight it have emerged as a central theme in the Democratic
primary campaign. Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who three years ago
railed against “millionaires and billionaires” in an insurgent bid for the Democratic
nomination, said on Tuesday that he would again seek the nomination on a platform of free
public college and “Medicare for all.” This time around, he will face competition for the left
flank of his party, including from Ms. Warren, who has proposed taxing the assets — not just
the annual income — of the richest Americans to pay for universal child care.

“Across party lines, Americans want the very wealthiest families to pay their fair share so we
can have an economy that works for everyone,” Ms. Warren said in a statement in response to
the polling for The Times.

Such proposals are likely to draw strong support from a Democratic electorate that has shifted
sharply to the left since Mr. Sanders’s last run. Eighty-seven percent of Democrats in the
Times poll said the government should seek to reduce the wealth gap.

But it isn’t just Democrats who are concerned by inequality. A majority of independents, and
substantial minorities of Republicans, want the government to tackle the issue. And a slim
majority of Republicans support a wealth tax like the one Ms. Warren has proposed.

Virginia Connolly is a conservative Republican who supports President Trump and wants to
build a wall on the Mexican border. But she says she wants to tax wealthy Americans to pay
for programs for veterans, children and the homeless.

“I think that raising taxes on the rich should have happened a long time ago,” she said. “The
rich, what are they going to do with all that money?”

Ms. Connolly, 47, runs a business cleaning homes in DeLand, Fla., north of Orlando. When that
work failed to pay her bills, she took a part-time job at Winn-Dixie, a grocery store chain where
she earns $14 an hour. Even so, she barely makes enough to feed herself and her three
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20.02.2019 Democrats Want to Tax the Wealthy. Many Voters Agree. - The New York Times

children.

A wealth tax finds support, but challenges loom.

The Times poll found strong support for a wealth tax akin to Ms. Warren’s plan. Sixty-one
percent of Americans said they approved of imposing a 2 percent tax on the wealth of
households with a net worth of more than $50 million. (Under Ms. Warren’s plan, the rate
would rise to 3 percent on wealth over $1 billion, but the Times survey didn’t ask about that
provision.) An earlier Morning Consult poll found similar results.

“We pay taxes on our property, why not on your wealth?” said Gary Montoya, a school safety
officer in Panama City, Fla.

Mr. Montoya, 39, is a registered Republican and a supporter of Mr. Trump. But he said taxes on
the rich must rise to reduce the federal budget deficit, among other priorities.

The idea of a wealth tax, however, is newly prominent in American politics, and it isn’t clear
whether support will hold up. Republicans haven’t had time to attack the policy, as they have
with the estate tax, and it would face legal challenges if enacted. Moreover, voters used to
hearing about income-tax rates might not fully understand the idea of a wealth tax, said
Vanessa Williamson, a political scientist at the Brookings Institution who has studied public
opinion on taxation.

The wealth tax also raises practical challenges that could turn off some voters. Kris Stallard, a
data analyst in Tulsa, Okla., says he wants to raise taxes on the rich, and has no problem with a
wealth tax in principle. But he questions how it would work in practice.

“You might own houses, businesses, that sort of thing,” said Mr. Stallard, a Democrat. “Is the
government going to take parts of businesses from people?”

On higher income-tax rates, a sharper split emerges.

Other Democrats are taking a more traditional approach to taxing the rich: raising income
taxes on the highest earners. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has proposed a marginal rate as high as 70
percent on annual income over $10 million. The top rate today is 37 percent, down from 39.6
percent before the Republican tax law that passed in late 2017.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal avoids the legal and logistical challenges of Ms. Warren’s plan.
And it is just as popular with Democrats, 75 percent of whom support the idea. But it is less
popular over all. Only a narrow majority of Americans, 51 percent, support the idea.
Republicans oppose it by a ratio of more than two to one.

A self-described “left-leaning independent,” Kathy Holmes could be the sort of voter

Democrats need to win to defeat Mr. Trump. A small-business owner in Kansas City, Mo., Ms.
Holmes once voted for Ross Perot, the Texas billionaire who sought the presidency twice in the

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20.02.2019 Democrats Want to Tax the Wealthy. Many Voters Agree. - The New York Times

1990s, but these days mostly supports Democrats. Still, she says she has been disappointed by
both parties, and is intrigued by the possible candidacy of the former Starbucks chief
executive Howard Schultz.

Ms. Holmes, 54, said she would like to see the rich pay more in taxes. But she said a 70 percent
rate “could get a little too out of control.” She said higher taxes on the rich should be a means
to an end, not an end unto themselves.

“I don’t think that they should be incredibly penalized for being wealthy,” she said. “It’s a tough
balance between free enterprise and ʻgo for it and be a gazillionaire.’”

About the survey: The data in this article came from an online survey of 9,974 adults
conducted by the polling firm SurveyMonkey from Feb. 4 to Feb. 10. The company selected
respondents at random from the nearly three million people who take surveys on its platform
each day. Responses were weighted to match the demographic profile of the population of the
United States. The survey has a modeled error estimate (similar to a margin of error in a
standard telephone poll) of plus or minus 1.5 percentage points, so differences of less than that
amount are statistically insignificant.

Ben Casselman writes about economics, with a particular focus on stories involving data. He previously
reported for FiveThirtyEight and The Wall Street Journal. @bencasselman • Facebook

Jim Tankersley covers economic and tax policy. Over more than a decade covering politics and economics
in Washington, he has written extensively about the stagnation of the American middle class and the
decline of economic opportunity. @jimtankersley
A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 20, 2019, on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Many Voters Are in Favor Of
Taxing The Wealthy

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