Within a week of each other, three prominent commentators, Tom Edsall in The New York Times, John Cassidy in The New Yorker, and William Galston in The Wall Street Journal, all wrote that Americans may not be as supportive of redistribution as some might like to think. Our review of public opinion data confirms their doubts. Polls show that in the abstract, people think government should do more to address inequality, but they do not believe government has a responsibility to do so. Perhaps most importantly, many Americans are skeptical about what government can do about the income gap.
A Selzer & Company/Bloomberg survey shows remarkable stability on this point. Since December 2013, Bloomberg has asked three times whether government should implement policies designed to shrink the gap or stand aside and let the market operate freely even as the gap gets wider. Although Americans divide evenly on the question, a significant chunk of the population—between 43 and 47%—believe government should stand aside even if the gap grows. A large majority of Republicans (75%) and a slim majority of independents (52%) also want government to stand aside, compared to 22% of Democrats.
A question asked by the National Opinion Research Center since 1973 also reveals long-standing ambivalence about a more assertive government role. For approximately 40 years, a plurality of Americans have put themselves in the middle in terms of the government’s role in reducing income differences. Only about three in ten say government ought to reduce differences.
The data, however, are not as clear about why this skepticism exists and why it is so stable. Galston mentioned in his column one reason that the polls confirm: “rising mistrust of government, especially the federal government.” When the Gallup Organization last updated its long trend on trust in the federal government in September 2014, 40% of Americans said they had a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of trust in the federal government to handle domestic problems, the lowest level of trust on this measure that Gallup has ever recorded. Forty-two percent said they had “not very much” trust in the government, while 17% said they had none at all. Virtually every survey we review shows strong skepticism of Washington’s efficacy, and this doubt has seeped into many policy areas. In 2014, when the Pew Research Center asked what the government “can do” about the gap between the rich and everyone else, 38% said “a lot,” 29% “some,” 18% “not much,” and 12% “nothing at all.” “Many people who think inequality is an important problem don’t believe that Washington’s political institutions can be trusted to fix it,” Galston concluded.
Americans may also be skeptical of government efforts to reduce income inequality because they see the income gap as a fact of life — an immutable byproduct of the operation of a free-market economy. In January 2014, Fox News asked registered voters, “How do you feel about the fact that some people make a lot more money than others?” Sixty-two percent responded that they were okay with it because that’s how our economy works. Sixty-nine percent of Republicans, 54% of Democrats, and 65% of independents gave that response. Twenty-one percent of registered voters said, “It stinks, but the government should not get involved,” and 13% said, “It makes me angry, and the government should do something about it.”
Yet another reason may be that, at a more fundamental level, Americans have more faith in themselves than the government to improve their lots in life. In a February 2015 Pew poll, a substantial majority (64%) of Americans said the statement “Most people who want to get ahead can make it if they’re willing to work hard” comes closest to their own views. One-third said “Hard work and determination are no guarantee of success for most people” came closer. When Pew first asked this question in 1994, 68% said people who want to get ahead can make it if they’re willing to work hard. Thirty-percent said hard work is no guarantee of success. Americans still think it’s possible to move up. A strong and stable belief in their own abilities may incline people against a greater role for government to help them “get ahead.”
Heading into the heat of the 2016 presidential race, we will hear a lot more about income inequality. What remains to be seen is which party can talk about the issue in a way that resonates with public views of the appropriate government response, if they think the government should respond at all.
For more polls on income inequality, see the May issue of AEI’s Political Report, “Public Opinion on Income Inequality.”
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