Tax Rates, Children, and Framing

One of the many difficulties that come with trying to use polling data to gauge “public opinion” (whatever that means) is that you can get wildly different answers by simply rephrasing a question. This comes into play with economic policy as well – people will respond very differently to a policy based on how it’s phrased, even if the policy itself is the same.

Recently, J. D. Vance has found himself under scrutiny for saying families with kids should pay lower taxes than families without kids. On Twitter, this was phrased by one progressive account as a claim that Vance argued “childless adults should pay a higher tax rate than those with children.” Of course, as others have already pointed out, the basic idea Vance is describing isn’t a call to change the tax code – it’s already part of the tax code. There is already a child tax credit in effect, so it’s already the case that, to use Vance’s hypothetical, someone who makes $100,000 a year and has three kids pays a lower tax rate than someone who makes the same money and is childless.

For now I’ll ignore the debate about whether or not the child tax credit is a good policy. My interest here is the way the policy is framed. If you ask people, “Should childless adults pay higher taxes,” I suspect you’d find many people oppose that policy. But if you ask people, “Should adults raising children get a tax credit,” I suspect that would turn out to be pretty popular. Indeed, it is pretty popular. I’d bet that if you asked a thousand people the first question, then six months later asked them the second question, you’d find a pretty big overlap of people who said “no” to the first but said “yes” to the second. But saying “people with children should get a tax credit” and saying “people without children should pay higher taxes” amounts to saying the same thing. Both policies are equivalent. And indeed, many people on the left who are pontificating about Vance’s comments also strongly support the child tax credit and push for it to be expanded. If you think the child tax credit should be expanded, that’s tantamount to saying the existing tax rate gap between childless adults and those with children isn’t big enough.

So why do people respond so differently to identical policies if they’re phrased differently? I think the main reason is people aren’t really responding to the content of the policy. What they are really reacting to is what they perceive to be the intention of the person proposing the policy. And Vance certainly did his part to make undesirable intentions attributable to him – in the above mentioned video, Vance uses the tax credit as an example of how the state should use tax policy to “reward the things we think are good and punish the things we think are bad.”

So when someone says “we should expand the tax credit to help support parents and children” they sound like a nice person who wants to help struggling parents, whereas Vance’s proposal sounded rooted in a belief that childless adults are “bad” and should be “punished.” The policy proposals are the same, but the first one sounds like it’s motivated by a good intention and the second one sounds like it’s motivated by a bad intention, and many people are responding not to the specifics of the policy, but on what they deem to be the good or bad motives of those proposing the policy. This is perhaps another manifestation of what I’ve elsewhere called “political noncognitivism” – the idea that most people’s support for policies are a way for them to express their attitudes, and not to evaluate propositions or make factual claims about reality.

Stepping outside of politics for a moment, consider the case where a few months back there was some furor over reports that the fast-food chain Wendy’s was considering adopting a “surge pricing” model, where prices would adjust based on demand at specific times of the day. Thus, menu items would be more expensive during the lunch rush, and less expensive at mid-afternoon.

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

There is some reason to think the second framing would be well received because we already see it in the form of happy hours. Many bars and restaurants have happy hours where drinks and menu items are available at a substantial markdown – and happy hour is almost always the time that’s slowest for the bar, after lunch and before dinner. Because happy hour has always been framed as “you get a discount if you come in early” rather than “you’ll pay more if you come in late,” nobody gets angry about it in the way people were angry about Wendy’s possible use of surge pricing, despite the logical equivalence of the policies. 

What do you think, dear reader? Are there any policies you favor that you think would be better supported if only they were framed in a different way in public discourse? Or are there any policies you once supported (or opposed), but changed your mind when you heard them framed in a different way? 

(1 COMMENTS)