Open Collections

Williams, Benjamen

University of British Columbia

Tax cuts are a common political platform. People largely supported the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, despite the wealthiest being the main beneficiaries. I explore a political debate on why people supported these tax cuts. One side argues that people are ignorant of the effects of taxes on the economy, and the other side argues that people aren’t ignorant, but rather unmotivated to give genuine thought to the survey questions. I use responses to a 2016 post-election survey to evaluate both sides of this political debate. I find that the respondents favored tax increases much more than cuts. I further find that party affiliation and ideology are both significant and strong predictors of support for tax cuts or increases in an OLS regression model. In group comparisons show that the most educated Republicans were more likely to support tax increases than the rest of their party, while Democrats with the lowest level of education supported tax increases the least. I also evaluate responses to an original 2024 survey of the Canadian population, which determines whether people agree with information about the economy in a tweet compared to official news media. I observe a considerably lower level of agreement in the economic information of the tweet than other news articles, however the amount that people agreed with the information had little to no influence on support for tax increases. An OLS regression analysis did not yield any significance.

Text

2025-01-13

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/90104

Political Science

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/