Yesterday, I remarked in this space on the skewed perceptions of the Republican tax law of 2017. There’s a mismatch between independent analyses of the tax law and poll findings about it. Many more people got a tax cut than appear to realize it, and many fewer people got a tax increase than think they did. I noted that the New York Times had run a story on the phenomenon that attributed the disconnect to a successful campaign of misleading spin by liberals. But I also pointed out that previous Republican tax cuts had been greeted the same way — with fewer people saying that their taxes had been cut, and more people saying that their taxes had risen, than the facts justified — and speculated that public skepticism about government may be playing a role.
Kevin Drum has taken issue with my post, which he sees, for some reason, as trying to “explain away” the law’s unpopularity. (For the record, the month the law was passed, I predicted that many people who got a tax cut would not realize it.) He offers two competing explanations. First, he says that the tax cut was small for a lot of people, so it’s no surprise that people aren’t excited about it — which is an explanation that doesn’t actually explain much of the phenomenon in question. Why do so many people think their taxes rose when they didn’t? Nor does it explain the data from 1986 that I mentioned yesterday. A Roper poll, to add more specificity to my allusion, found that forty-five percent of respondents thought the bipartisan tax reform passed that year was going to raise their taxes.
Second, Drum says that Republicans “futzed around with the withholding tables so that lots of people got smaller refunds. Then they wonder why ordinary people aren’t impressed.” The available numbers don’t really bear out this theory. The latest IRS statistics show that comparing returns processed by now to returns processed by this point last year, the average refund is down only 1.1 percent.
So I’ll stick with my theory that the skewed perception of the tax law reflects not just political spin and aspects of the law’s design, but a pessimistic bias on the part of the public. This theory is not what Republicans are highlighting: They want, naturally, to put a spotlight on the misleading liberal spin. It also, arguably, suggests that the prevalent Republican political theory for placing tax cuts high on their agenda is mistaken. So I am not sure why Drum feels he has some stake in contesting the possibility I raise. But to each his own.