Vanessa Williamson on Taxes and Read My Lips

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4.7 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 3 April 2017

⏱️ 69 minutes

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Summary

Are Americans overtaxed? How does the average American feel about the tax system and tax reform? Vanessa Williamson of the Brookings Institution talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about her book, Read My Lips. Williamson shares the results of her survey of American attitudes toward taxation and government spending. People misperceive much about who pays what and the structure of the tax system, particularly the payroll tax. But some of what appears to be errors--about foreign aid and government waste for example, come from the average person's definition of these terms being different from the narrow meaning.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:08.5	I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:13.1	Our website is econtalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this podcast, and find
0:18.1	links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:21.0	You'll also find our archives where you can listen to every episode we've ever done
0:25.2	going back to 2006.
0:27.5	Our email address is mailadycontalk.org.
0:30.0	We'd love to hear from you.
0:31.4	Today is March 16th, 2017.
0:36.4	And my guest is Vanessa Williamson, fellow in governance studies at Brookings.
0:42.0	She studies taxation, the politics of redistribution, and she's the author of Read My Lips, why Americans
0:48.0	are proud to pay taxes, which is our topic for today's conversation.
0:52.1	Vanessa, welcome to Econ Talk.
0:54.1	No, thanks for having me.
0:56.0	Your book's about the attitudes of Americans towards taxes and government spending.
1:00.3	And before we get into what you found, let's tell us a little about where the numbers
1:04.2	come from.
1:05.2	You did a survey as well as a set of interviews.
1:07.3	So give us some of that background, please.
1:09.9	Yeah, so I was looking at survey data about taxation, and there's a lot of surveys out
1:15.9	there.
1:16.9	So some of the information from the book comes from other people's surveys, but there
	...

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