The Humpty Dumpty Blues: Disaggregation Bias in the Evaluation of Tax Systems

Written by: Edward J. McCaffery and Jonathan Baron Abstract Three experiments carried out on the World Wide Web assessed the consistency of attitudes toward various tax regimes that differed in their overall levels and degrees of tax rate graduation in the presence of framing manipulations. The regimes had two components: an income and a payroll tax. One frame involved aggregation. Subjects were asked either to design a single, global tax…