This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, July 25th, 2007.

I'm Caleb Brown.

A Financial Times poll indicates that Americans and Europeans are less than favorable toward

globalization.

Indur Golani, author of the Cato Institute book The Improving State of the World,

responds. According to a new poll in Financial Times, large majorities of Americans and Europeans

believe that their governments should tax the rich more.

Europeans actually go a step further. They would like to see their governments

institute pay caps for executives. The newspaper says it could it's meant to

counter unjustified rewards and what they perceive to be the negative effects of globalization.

I have no idea how these polls were taken, but when people ask questions regarding whether or not taxes should be raised on a higher level of income.

A lot of people will say yes, but if they were also asked at the same time would you be

willing to increase taxes on higher level on upper income people if it means that perhaps your income will also go down I think

they would get a different response you know one of the things we've seen in the

United States is that as tax rates have gone down,

revenues to the government have actually increased.

More importantly, the economy seems to be doing a lot, lot better. If the economy wasn't doing a lot better,

a lot more people would have trouble finding jobs, retaining jobs, and they would themselves be more economically insecure.

And I think it's incorrect methodology on the part of polls to ask people without alerting them to the

consequences of what their responses might entail. That's one response that I have.

The other thing is I'm concerned if people withdraw from globalization, the effects

could be tragic in the developing world. In the last, since 1981, the number of people in absolute poverty, that is the number of people who

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