Britons Share Unexpected Consensus on Which Taxes to Raise or Cut

Why This Question Matters

How governments choose which taxes to raise or cut shapes who bears the burden of public services and drives political conflict. Most public-opinion work measures broad attitudes toward taxation, but it rarely links those attitudes to the concrete budget problem governments face: how to raise or reduce a specific marginal amount of revenue from different tax sources.

What Barnes, de Romémont, and Lauderdale Did

The authors fielded a novel tax-preference experiment with UK respondents that asked people to choose between alternative tax "levers"—distinct ways of raising or cutting revenue—where each option was calibrated to change the same amount of government revenue. The design forces respondents to reveal preferences over the composition of tax revenue (which sources to change) rather than over the size of government spending or total tax burden.

Key Findings

• Different tax levers show substantial variation in overall popularity: some options attract much more support than others.
• Despite that variation, there is a notable "hidden consensus": the relative ordering of preferred and least-preferred levers is strikingly similar across income groups and across partisanship. In short, income and party ID matter less for the ranking of levers than might be expected.
• These patterns emerge from comparisons that hold the revenue amount constant, isolating composition preferences from preferences over revenue scale.

Why It Matters for Policymakers and Scholars

The results suggest that when governments contemplate marginal adjustments to revenue, public preferences about which sources to touch may be more uniform across social and partisan divides than conventional wisdom implies. For scholars, the study introduces an experimental tool that ties listed tax preferences to a concrete budgetary choice—helping bridge survey measures of opinion with the practical trade-offs policymakers face.

Next Steps

The experiment opens avenues for examining which features of tax levers (distributional effects, visibility, administration) drive the consensus and whether similar patterns hold in other countries or for larger revenue changes.