The role of misconceptions in support for regressive tax reform

In this paper, I use data from an exceptionally detailed survey of attitudes toward taxation in the United States to investigate the relative importance of one particular misconception-that high-income people would pay more tax under an apparently regressive reform, mostly because many people believe that the distribution of the burden of the existing income tax is regressive-in explaining public support for a flat tax and a retail sales tax. I find that this policy misconception is strongly associated with support for replacing the existing income tax with either of these two alternatives. A similar misconception about the distributional impact of the estate tax explains some of the support for eliminating that tax.