What income and wealth tax rates do Americans want?

In an interesting new article published in the Journal of Public Economics (appears to be open access, but just in case there is an ungated earlier version here), Raymond Fisman (Boston University), Keith Gladstone (Princeton), Ilyana Kuziemko (Boston University), and Suresh Naidu (Columbia University), investigated how much income and wealth tax Americans prefer.

Specifically, they collected data from several surveys using Amazon Mechanical Turk over the period from 2014 to 2019, plus the Understanding American Survey (UAS) in 2019. In each survey, respondents were presented with scenarios of hypothetical people with different levels of income and net wealth (assets minus debt), and asked how much tax the hypothetical person should pay. Using that data, Fisman et al. are able to extract the income and wealth tax rates preferred by the sample, on average. You can try the survey out for yourself here. 

They found that:

...their chosen tax bills imply a linear tax rate on income of approximately 13–15%, in line with past work...

When we restrict the relationship of the tax bill and wealth to be linear, the implied average tax rate on wealth is about 1.2% in our baseline estimate.

They also find that the source of wealth matters for their research participants' preferences on taxing wealth:

Preferred taxes on wealth from savings are 0.8%, versus over 3% on wealth from inheritance.

The results are reasonably similar across all of the various survey samples (the mTurk sample is of course less representative than the UAS sample, so it was useful that they checked robustness across different samples), including being fairly stable across samples taken four years apart. The results seem sensible enough, and imply that Americans are not averse to wealth taxes. They also imply a preference for trading off somewhat lower income taxes in exchange for a tax on net wealth.

That last point is the one issue I have with this research. Taxing net wealth seems to me to be a little fraught. Should someone with a $2 million dollar house and a 95% mortgage, and a person with no debt but $100,000 in a retirement savings account, pay the same amount of tax on wealth? That's a normative question that is not easy to answer. However, it seems to me that Fisman et al. have shown a sensible way to better understand taxpayers' preferences in terms of these normative questions. It would also be interesting to know whether, if presented with fiscal estimates based on the implied tax rates they chose, their preferred taxes would change. These are useful questions for future research, especially on how people interpret taxes on net wealth differently or similarly to taxes on gross assets (not accounting for debt).