Tax rates, children and framing

One of the many problems with using polls to gauge “public opinion” (whatever that means) is that you can get completely different answers by simply rephrasing a question. This also plays a role in economic policy: people will react very differently to policies depending on their formulation, even if the policies themselves are the same.

Recently, JD Vance came under scrutiny for saying that families with children should pay lower taxes than families without children. On Tweet, this was framed by a progressive report as Vance arguing that “childless adults should pay a higher tax rate than adults with children.” Of course, as others have done already As mentioned, the basic idea Vance describes is not a call to change the tax code – it is already part of the tax code. There’s already a child tax credit in place, so it’s already the case that, to use Vance’s hypothesis, someone who makes $100,000 a year and has three children pays a lower tax rate than someone who makes the same money and is childless.

For now, I’ll ignore the discussion about whether or not the child tax credit is a good policy. My interest here is the way the policy is shaped. When you ask people, “Should childless adults pay higher taxes,” I suspect many people are against that policy. But if you ask people, “Should adults raising children get a tax break,” I suspect this would prove quite popular. Indeed, it is quite popular. I’m willing to bet that if you asked a thousand people the first question and asked them the second question six months later, you’d find a pretty big overlap of people who said “no” to the first, but said “yes” to the question. 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 equivalent. And indeed, many on the left who are pontificating about Vance’s comments also strongly support the child tax credit and are pushing for its expansion. To argue that the child tax credit should be expanded is tantamount to saying that the existing tax rate gap between childless adults and those with children is not wide enough.

So why do people react so differently to identical policies when they are worded differently? I think the main reason is that people don’t really respond to the content of the policy. What they are really responding to is what they see as the intent of the person proposing the policy. And Vance has certainly done his part to attribute undesirable intentions to him – in the aforementioned video, Vance uses the tax credit as an example of how the state should use tax policy to “reward the things that we think are good and to punish the things we think are right’. think it’s bad.”

So when someone says “we need to expand the tax credit to help support parents and children,” he sounds like a nice person who wants to help struggling parents, while Vance’s proposal sounded rooted in the belief that childless adults are “bad” and that should be too. punished.” The policy proposals are the same, but the first sounds like it is motivated by a good intention and the second sounds like it is motivated by a bad intention. Many people respond not to the specifics of the policy, but to what they think it is. to be the good or bad motives of those proposing the policy. This is perhaps another manifestation of what I have seen elsewhere.political non-cognitivism” – the idea that most people’s support for policies is a way for them to express their attitudes, rather than to evaluate proposals or make factual claims about reality.

Stepping away from politics for a moment, let’s look at the case where there was some uproar a few months ago over reports that the fast food chain Wendy’s was considering introducing a ‘surge pricing’ model, whereby prices would are adjusted based on demand at specific times of the month. day. So menu items would be more expensive during the lunch rush, and cheaper in the mid-afternoon.

This upset a lot of people – but perhaps a simple change in framing would have changed people’s minds. The policy was generally described as “you should be charged more if you go when it’s busy” which sounded bad to most. But what if instead it was simply rephrased as “you get a discount if you come when it’s slower”? Logically the two policies are equivalent, but the first makes people feel like they’re being taken advantage of, while the second makes people feel like they’re getting a bonus.

There’s some reason to believe the second framing would be well received, because we’re already seeing it in the form of happy hours. Many bars and restaurants have happy hours where drinks and menu items are available at a significant discount – and happy hour is almost always the slowest time for the bar, after lunch and before dinner. Because happy hour has always been framed as “you get a discount if you come early” instead of “you pay more if you come late,” no one gets upset about it, the same way people were upset about Wendy’s possible use of surge pricing, despite the logical equality of policy.

What do you think, dear reader? Are there policies that you support that you think would be better supported if only they were formulated differently in the public debate? Or are there policies you once supported (or opposed) but changed your mind when you heard them worded differently?