I study how people understand, reason, and learn about two major tax policies: income taxation and estate taxation. Using large-scale social economics surveys issued to representative U.S. samples and associated experiments, I elicit respondents’ factual knowledge about tax policy and the income or wealth distributions. Most important, I study their understanding of the mechanisms of tax policy and the reasoning that underlies their policy views. In decomposing policy views, I find that support for income and estate taxes is most strongly correlated with social preferences, that is, the perceived benefits of redistribution and concerns around the fairness of inequality and taxation, as well as with broader views of the government. Efficiency concerns play a more minor role. These correlational patterns are confirmed by the experimental approach, which shows people instructional videos that explain the workings and consequences of one of the aspects of tax policy (the Redistribution and the Efficiency treatments) or that bring the two together and focus on the trade-off (the Economist treatment). The Redistribution and Economist treatments significantly increase support for more progressive income or estate taxes, while the Efficiency treatment has no effect. There are large partisan gaps in both the final policy views and at every step of the reasoning about the underlying mechanisms of taxes. Democrats’ and Republicans’ divergences in tax policy views can ultimately be traced back to different normative criteria (social preferences) and views of the government, rather than to different perceptions of the efficiency implications of taxation.

中文翻译：

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了解税收政策：人们如何推理？*

我研究人们如何理解、推理和了解两大税收政策：所得税和遗产税。使用对美国代表性样本进行的大规模社会经济学调查和相关实验，我引出受访者对税收政策和收入或财富分配的事实知识。最重要的是，我研究了他们对税收政策机制的理解以及他们政策观点背后的推理。在分解政策观点时，我发现对所得税和遗产税的支持与社会偏好（即重新分配的感知利益）和对不平等和税收公平性的担忧以及政府更广泛的观点最相关。效率问题的影响较小。这些相关模式被实验方法证实，它向人们展示了教学视频，这​​些视频解释了税收政策（重新分配和效率处理）的一个方面的运作和后果，或者将两者结合在一起并专注于权衡（经济学人处理）。再分配和经济学家处理显着增加了对累进所得税或遗产税的支持，而效率处理没有效果。在最终的政策观点和关于税收潜在机制的每一步推理中都存在很大的党派分歧。民主党和共和党在税收政策观点上的分歧最终可以追溯到不同的规范标准（社会偏好）和政府的观点，而不是对税收效率影响的不同看法。