Income Inequality and How We Feel About Government Action

Our respondents did, in fact, react to our tutorial by increasing their already significant concern about inequality: the tutorial raised the share of respondents who indicated that inequality was a “very serious problem” by over 40 percent.

However, our results also revealed — with one key exception — that support for redistribution increased to a much smaller degree. Our tutorial had only a small effect on support for increasing taxes on millionaires and raising the minimum wage, and no effect on support for other policies that help low-income families, like the earned-income tax credit and food stamps.

Researchers from Columbia, MIT, Harvard and UC-Berkeley conducted a survey of more than 5,000 Americans to figure out how people feel about income inequality, and if they believed income inequality could be addressed through government action. In short: Yes, people believe income inequality in the U.S. is a real issue, but they are unsure if the government can do anything about it, because it was the implementation of government policies that helped fuel income inequality in the first place.

The mission, then, is to figure out policies we can all agree on, like the earned-income tax credit that helps the working poor, which both liberal and conservative lawmakers and every president from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama have supported. Unfortunately, that kind of universal bipartisan support is rare.

Photo: FtCarsonPAO

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