One of the many difficulties that comes with trying to use polling data to measure “public opinion” (whatever that means) is that you can get very different answers simply by reframing the question. This is relevant to economic policy as well – people will react very differently to a policy based on how it is presented, even if the policy itself is the same.
Recently, JD Vance found himself under fire for saying that families with children should pay lower taxes than families without children. On Twitter, this was described by one progressive account as a claim that Vance said “adults without children should pay a higher tax rate than those with children.” Of course, as others have pointed out, the basic concept that Vance describes is not a call to change the tax code – it’s already part of the tax code. There’s already a child tax credit in effect, so it’s already the case that, to use Vance’s hypothetical, someone who makes $100,000 a year and has three children pays lower taxes than someone who makes the same amount and has no children.
For now I will ignore the debate about whether or not the child tax credit is good policy. What interests me here is how the policy was made. If you ask people, “Should childless adults pay higher taxes,” I suspect you’ll find a lot of people who oppose that policy. But if you ask people, “Should seniors who are raising children get a tax credit,” I suspect that might be more popular. Indeed, it is is something very popular. I’d bet that if you asked a thousand people the first question, and then six months later you asked them the second question, you’d get a good mix of people who said “no” to the first but said “yes” to the second. But saying “people with children should get a tax credit” and “people without children should pay higher taxes” are saying the same thing. Both policies are equivalent. And indeed, many people on the left who comment on Vance’s comments also strongly support the child tax credit and push to extend it. If you think the child tax credit should be expanded, that’s like saying the existing tax rate gap between adults without children and those with children isn’t big enough.
So why do people respond so differently to the same policies when they are explained differently? I think the main reason is that people don’t really respond to the content of the policy. What they are reacting to is what they see as the intention of the person proposing the policy. And Vance has certainly done his part to create unpopular goals for his own sake — in the aforementioned video, Vance uses the tax credit as an example of how the state should use tax policy to “reward things we think are good and punish things we think are bad.”
So when someone says “we should increase the tax credit to help parents and children” they sound like a good person who wants to help struggling parents, while Vance’s proposal sounds based on the belief that childless adults are “bad” and should be “punished.” The policy proposals are the same, but the first one sounds like it’s motivated by good intentions and the second one sounds like it’s motivated by bad intentions, and most people don’t respond to policy goals, but to what they see. be the good or bad motives of those who propose the policy. This is perhaps another manifestation of what I have called elsewhere “political irreverence” – the idea that many people’s support for policies is their way of expressing their opinions, not analyzing propositions or making factual claims about reality.
Stepping outside of politics for a moment, consider the situation when a few months ago there was an uproar over reports that fast-food chain Wendy’s was considering implementing a “scaling pricing” model, where prices would change based on demand from time to time. day. Thus, menu items will be more expensive during lunch, and less expensive in the mid-afternoon.
This upset a lot of people – but maybe a simple change in the framing would change people’s opinions. The policy was often described as “you’ll be charged more for traveling when it’s busy,” which sounded bad to many. But what if instead it was simply rebranded as “you get a discount for coming in if it’s slow”? Logically, the two policies are equivalent, but the first makes people feel like they are being taken advantage of, while the second makes people feel like they are getting a bonus.
There is some reason to think that the second draft would be well received because we are already seeing it in the form of happy hours. Many bars and restaurants have happy hours where the drinks and menu items are available at the highest mark – and happy hour is almost always the slowest time at the bar, after lunch and before dinner. Because happy hour has always been labeled as “you get a discount if you arrive early” rather than “you’ll pay more if you arrive late,” no one is as upset about that as people were about using Wendy’s. price increases, without reasonable balance of policies.
What do you think dear reader? Are there any policies of your choice that you think would be better supported if they were included in the public discourse in a different way? Or are there policies that you once supported (or opposed), but changed your mind when you felt they were done differently?
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