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Why citizens don’t like paying for public goods with their taxes– and how institutions can change that

Jacobs, Alan M. and Matthews, J. Scott (2015) Why citizens don’t like paying for public goods with their taxes– and how institutions can change that. USApp - American Politics and Policy Blog (01 Sep 2015). Website.

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Abstract

Why are Americans so against paying taxes to fund basic government functions such as roads and education? In new research, Alan M. Jacobs and J. Scott Matthews find that many citizens object to paying for public investment because they do not trust politicians to spend new revenues as promised. Using online experiments with voting-age US citizens, they find that support for using taxation to pay for investment was dependent on how much voters trusted the institution charged with carrying out the work. Local governments and the military were trusted to a much greater degree than Congress, especially among conservatives. Citizens were also more willing to pay more for public goods when they were told that the new taxes would be set aside in a dedicated trust fund account.

Item Type: Online resource (Website)
Official URL: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/
Additional Information: © 2015 The Author(s) CC BY-NC 3.0
Divisions: LSE
Subjects: H Social Sciences > HB Economic Theory
H Social Sciences > HM Sociology
J Political Science > JC Political theory
J Political Science > JK Political institutions (United States)
Date Deposited: 08 May 2017 09:07
Last Modified: 15 Sep 2023 20:03
URI: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/75821

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