Taxes and Tradeoffs

The conventional wisdom about public opinion and taxes goes something like this: Democrats are more likely to support higher taxes on the wealthy and tax breaks for lower- and middle-income households. Republicans are more likely to support broad tax cuts and to warn that higher taxes discourage work, saving, and investment. Independents often fall somewhere in between.

But when specific tax proposals are put to voters, the picture is often less divided. In polls over the past year, more than 55% of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents have expressed support for:

• Exempting homeowners 65 and older from property taxes

• Eliminating federal income tax on the first $75,000 of earnings

• Increasing the Child Tax Credit

• Reducing taxes on Social Security income

• Eliminating taxes on tips

• Maintaining the 2017 tax cuts (extended in 2025) for individuals and households below specified income levels

• Increasing taxes on the wealthiest individuals

The general sentiment is toward reducing the tax burden on sympathetic groups and asking more of people at the very top, although Republicans barely clear 55% on the latter concept.

What’s missing with all this are tradeoffs. Reducing the tax burden for one group shifts the burden to someone else, requires spending cuts, or adds to government deficits. But polls typically don’t present tax-policy proposals in terms of tradeoffs. So it’s not surprising to see broad support for tax cuts in some polls while, in another recent poll, 60%+ of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents agree the federal budget deficit is a “very big problem.”

Even if the wealthiest pay more, there are only so many of the wealthiest. The math of tax policy ultimately requires confronting the contradictions between the tax breaks people favor, the spending programs they want to preserve, and the deficits they say are already too large.

Tax breaks for sympathetic groups

The strongest cross-partisan agreement is for tax breaks aimed at groups voters tend to see as deserving or vulnerable.

Seniors

Seniors are the clearest example. Large majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents support exempting homeowners aged 65 and older from property taxes.

Also for seniors: When the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act was being debated, majorities in all three groups supported reducing taxes on Social Security income—something the Act included via a new tax deduction.

These proposals appeal to a widely shared idea: people who have worked for decades and entered retirement should not be pushed out of financial security by taxes. But now let’s consider a tradeoff. In many states, property taxes are a key source of funding for public schools; less property tax paid by seniors means less school funding for kids.

Families with Children

And speaking of kids, cross-party majorities are on board to increase the Child Tax Credit:

The Child Tax Credit originated in 1997 and has been expanded or adjusted many times since. The polled proposal is similar to a temporary expansion of the credit enacted under the Biden administration in response to the COVID pandemic.

Tip-Earning Workers

In the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump floated the concept of “no tax on tips.” The reaction was positive enough that his opponent Kamala Harris later proposed her own similar concept. After being elected, Trump included a tax deduction on tip wages as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025.

“No tax on tips” was a politically appealing idea because it helped people widely seen to work hard for the money, and it was instantly understandable from its name. But what about the preschool teacher who makes the same amount of money as her friend the waitress yet gets no tax break because the teacher doesn’t work for tips? Tradeoffs, again.

Maintaining the 2017 Tax Cuts

Beyond tax cuts for sympathetic groups are broad-based proposals that target much of the tax base.

In December 2017, Donald Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), a bill passed with only Republican votes. It lowered most individual income tax rates, nearly doubled the standard deduction, and expanded the Child Tax Credit. Most of the individual provisions were set to expire at the end of 2025. Without action, about 62% of filers would have faced a tax increase in 2026, according to the Tax Foundation’s estimate.

In June 2025, with that expiration looming, voters were asked whether the cuts should be extended for individuals earning less than $100,000 and married couples earning less than $200,000:

2025’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act went beyond what the poll asked. Rather than capping the extension at the surveyed income levels, it made the TCJA’s individual provisions permanent for all earners, including high-income households. The cost is large: extending the TCJA’s individual and estate provisions was estimated to reduce federal revenues by roughly $4 trillion over a decade—the single largest piece of the OBBBA’s fiscal impact.

Expanding the Zero Tax Bracket

In 2026, Democratic Senator Cory Booker proposed the Keep Your Pay Act. It would more than double the standard deduction on federal income taxes. For a married couple filing jointly, the deduction would go from $32,200 to $75,000. Booker has thus pitched the idea as making the first $75,000 of income tax-free.

When The Economist/YouGov poll asked about the topic, cross-partisan majorities liked the idea:

Not mentioned was the $5.4 trillion cost of the proposal over ten years, as estimated by the Yale Budget Lab. Booker’s plan includes increased taxes on the wealthy, but the $5.4 trillion figure is the net cost after factoring in those offsets.

Increasing Taxes on the Wealthy

Booker is not unique in proposing to offset new tax cuts with increased taxes on the wealthy. Democrats have long had this orientation. But many in the Trump-era Republican party have also shown a willingness to entertain the idea.

This poll was from September 2025, and the Republican response was barely above Americans Agree’s threshold of 55% agreement—so it’s more of a faint indicator of cross-partisan agreement than a strong signal.

But even if the signal grows stronger, taxing the wealthy can only go so far. Although high-income households hold a large share of national income and wealth, it’s not enough to finance every popular tax cut, preserve every popular spending program, and stabilize long-term debt at the same time. More tradeoffs will be necessary.

Taxes, Polarization, and Democracy

Tax policy has a precarious place in a democracy. It’s easy for politicians to win favor by promising tax cuts. It’s easy for the public—including cross-partisan majorities—to like many types of tax cuts when the tradeoffs go unmentioned. That is how the United States has come to a $39 trillion national debt: by happily spending more and taxing less, especially in the past few decades.

In the past, there have been moments when leaders from both parties joined to break the cycle. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 was the classic modern example: a Republican president, Democratic House leaders, and senators from both parties agreed to lower rates, broaden the tax base, remove many preferences, and keep the overall package roughly revenue-neutral. The bill passed the Senate 74–23 and the House 292–136 before President Reagan signed it into law.

But in today’s more polarized political environment, there is little prospect for that kind of bipartisanship. For politicians in both parties, the prevailing politics run in the other direction: preserve existing tax breaks, add new ones for sympathetic groups, promise that someone else will pay, and leave the long-term fiscal consequences for later.

Public concern about the national debt may eventually become a brake on this pattern. But that will require voters to see tax proposals less as isolated acts of generosity and more as choices within an overall budget.

The point is not that every popular tax break is irresponsible, or that every dollar of new spending must be rejected. The point is that tax politics becomes distorted when each proposal is judged on its own sympathetic story, while the costs are left outside the frame. It’s a good example of how Americans can agree on parts of the picture to the detriment of the whole.