The Per Capita think-tank today released a survey of attitudes on tax and spend. The number one point they extracted from the survey results was that ‘Australians want a more progressive tax system’:

95% of respondents believe that low income earners and middle income earners are taxed too much, while only 16% believe that high income earners pay too much tax. However, only 3% of those surveyed feel low and middle-income earners pay too little tax, whereas 53 per cent believe that high income earners do not pay enough.

But as Per Capita itself notes, almost nobody believes that they personally pay too much tax. One reason for this is that many higher-income earners have an erroneous view of how well off they are relative to the community as a whole. In a 2004 paper I reported survey research asking people to place themselves in income deciles. Only 2% of people thought they were in the top two deciles. Continue reading “Income and tax illusions” →