Who wants wealth taxes?

Abstract

Despite persistently high levels of wealth inequality across advanced democracies, inheritance tax rates have declined in recent decades and net wealth taxes largely remain theoretical. We argue that taxing inherited wealth is politically difficult because, paradoxically, the people who have the strongest material interest in higher inheritance taxation are those least likely to express an opinion. Instead, the political terrain is shaped by the preferences of homeowners, and their children, who have a strong material interest in lower inheritance taxes. Empirically, we evaluate this argument using original survey data from the United Kingdom and Europe. In two survey experiments, we then examine how exposure to information influences views on wealth taxation. While we find no effect of providing information about the distribution of housing wealth, preferences are influenced by primes that highlight either the participants’ material interest or frame the tax critically as death or double taxation.