A recent Real Clear Politics-Emerson poll shows Pennsylvania residents oppose capping the wealth of individuals but appear to support raising taxes on billionaires and corporations. As RCP reports:

We began by asking Pennsylvanians whether the law should cap how much wealth any one person may hold. The answer was a “no”: 62% oppose such a maximum, compared with 21% who support it, and 17% who aren’t sure. That might make Pennsylvania look comfortable with concentrated wealth, but the rest of the survey suggests otherwise. We also find that 64% of respondents support raising taxes on billionaires, wealthy corporations, and Big Tech to help pay for healthcare, food access, transit, and education.

So folks in Pennsylvania don’t like targeting wealth. That’s good news if you live in a market-based economy where capital accumulation raises living standards for everybody (which we do, by the way). But they also appear comfortable raising top rates on wealthy individuals and businesses, right?

Wrong.

Pennsylvanians and Americans more generally support raising tax rates on the wealthy and corporations only because they underestimate how much those groups pay.  Our work with the Winston Group over the years has made this clear – when asked how much the wealthy pay, respondents generally cited rates well below their current tax rates. Moreover, when asked what’s the most those same taxpayers should pay, the responses were well within the range of what they already pay:

As our write-up from the 2022 poll summarized:

  • A majority of voters do believe that corporations and wealthy individuals are not paying their fair share of taxes (61-26 believe-do not believe). Independents believe this 60-23, and Republicans believe it more than not, at 46-39.

  • However, voters underestimate what the wealthy and individually/family-owned businesses actually pay. People believe that wealthy individuals pay an average 21% rate and that individually/family-owned businesses pay a 24% rate (they also estimated a 24% rate for small businesses). They correctly estimated that corporations pay a 21% rate.

  • As for the maximum rate at which these entities should be taxed, voters believed that wealthy individuals should pay more (33%), but that perception still underestimates what they are currently paying. Voters thought small businesses (17.8%) and individually/family-owned businesses (17.5%) should pay less compared to what they thought these businesses actually pay.

It gets better. When voters learn that much of the proposed rate hike on the wealthy will fall on pass-through businesses, support for the policy collapses, even before they learn about who pays what.

As you can see, support for raising the top rate falls nearly in half – 53 to 29 percent – when voters learn that the new rate would apply to small and family-owned businesses.

So what did we learn here? Regarding wealth taxes, voters simply don’t support targeting wealth, despite a multi-year campaign to villainize it. On the income tax front, meanwhile, some policymakers want to tax billionaires at rates up to 60 or 70 percent but voters only support rates about half that level. As we’ve noted before, Americans are very reasonable about what they expect even the wealthiest individuals or corporations to pay. And finally, regarding private businesses, voters think they are overtaxed now and don’t support raising their rates further.

It’s not all good news. You can see the maximum rate voters support has risen slightly over the past seven years, suggesting the omnipresent campaign to paint the wealthy as tax cheats is having some effect. We need a counter campaign to educate voters and policymakers alike on how the tax system works, how it has become more progressive over the past forty years, and how taxpayers respond strongly and negatively to excessively high tax rates. We either begin educating folks on the realty of our tax code, or we’re going to end up with some really harmful policies getting enacted.