“In comparison with the effects of reducing employees’
payroll taxes, the effects of reducing employers’ payroll
taxes are somewhat larger per dollar of forgone revenue.”

I think this may be a stronger explanation than the coordinated efforts to keep people ignorant, like the Rove and Koch brother campaigns. Not that those are unimportant, but they are tapping into and reinforcing an existing attitude. You’ll have a hard time getting most Americans to agree that dog meat is good because it is contrary to our values and how we think about dogs. But if there are enough Americans who hold some level of contempt for poor people (especially if you think all/most poor people are not of your own racial/ethnic/cultural group) and some level of admiration for wealthy people (especially if you think they all must have earned their wealth), then the campaigns that EBDoug focuses her energy and money to oppose will be much more successful.

I suppose the next question is how do we change that? How do we make people less greedy? How can we change who these folks identify with? Is that even possible?

So I guess the real answer is that they don’t realize they’re voting against their own economic self interest. At the very least they don’t identify with Americans of similar income and opportunity. They consider themselves, as John Steinbeck would say, “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

As for their followers, well… I make it a point to distinguish between Republicans and those who vote for them. Because while the GOP’s actions over the past decade are perfectly understandable from a certain perspective – the plutocratic perspective – support from their non-rich constituents is perplexing. You touched on parts of the explanation: many are deluded or flat-out ignorant, many have some strange identity politics going on. I have my own theory.

There is one issue on which every single conservative I’ve met agrees. While their stances on abortion, gay marriage, foreign policy and religion vary widely, this one issue unifies them and invariably elicits the most virulent rhetoric. What’s more, their thinking aligns on this issue no matter their age, education level or income. This issue is welfare. Welfare. The word alone seems to have a negative connotation in this political climate. Why? Here might be a clue:

“In 1991, the book-of-the-month club conducted a survey asking people what book had most influenced their lives. The Bible ranked number one and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged was number two. In 1998, the Modern Library released two lists of the top 100 books of the 20th century. [...] The [second] list was based on more than 200,000 votes cast online by anyone who wanted to vote. The top two on that list were Atlas Shrugged (1957) and The Fountainhead (1943). The two novels have had six-figure annual sales for decades, running at a combined 300,000 copies annually during the past ten years. In 2009, Atlas Shrugged alone sold a record 500,000 copies and Rand’s four novels combined [...] sold more than 1,000,000 copies.”

I’m sure many in this country (especially among my younger generation) have not read these books and are unfamiliar with Ayn Rand or her philosophy of “Objectivism.” And it would be a sweeping accusation to blame her for our political woes today. But her influence seems pervasive; many echo her sentiments, even if they have never heard of her. She tapped something deep in the American psyche with her homage to greed and her contempt for the poor. If we understand that relation, I think we can understand why some people might vote against their own economic self interest.

In your mind, do you attribute the fraud to the GOP leadership, or to the followers? I ask because the tax policies proposed by the GOP leadership are so perverse that I can only imagine that the majority of the nowhere-near-wealthy who follow them, or this line of argument, must be deluded.

I’m also asking because a paper that is coming out in the next issue of Economic Inquiry found in experiments people did choose a redistributive tax system in accordance with their economic self-interests and regardless of their political party. In short, when people (including Democrats) became wealthy in the experiment (by playing a spelling game), they were more likely to choose low tax rates in a progressive tax structure. And when people became poor (including Republicans), they were more likely to choose high tax rates in a progressive tax structure. In previous versions of this paper, the authors state that they believe that the choices for high or low tax rates has to do with putting effort into earning pay; that those who have earned their wealth believe they should not have to pay higher taxes. I would imagine that anyone who has any sense of entitlement related to their wealthy would probably feel and act the same way. (See http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1466979 for an earlier version of this paper).

I am mystified at the support that the GOP leadership gets from low and moderate income people. These folks are following this argument not because it is in their economic self interest. So either they are allowing themselves to be deceived or something else is involved in their support of these kinds of tax proposals. I’m inclined to believe that there is an identity issue that is also tangled up with the support of regressive tax policies by low and moderate income people. But, if you are right, they are also being lied to. I’m not sure which is worse.