With tax day now in the rear view mirror, it’s a good time to review what the public really thinks about taxes. Data collected over many years indicate that the public’s views are surprisingly nuanced and far from the blanket anti-tax stereotype promoted by conservatives. Here are the basic contours of the public’s views.

1. The public is closely divided on whether the amount of federal income tax they pay is too high or about right. Gallup has asked the same question since 1947: “Do you consider the amount of federal income tax you have to pay as too high, about right, or too low?”  In the latest survey (April, 2013), half said their taxes were too high, 45 percent said they were about right and 2 percent said they were too low.  In the previous year’s survey, there were actually slight more who said their taxes were about right (47 percent) than said their taxes were too high (46 percent). Concern about being overtaxed is clearly still an issue in American politics, but it’s hardly overwhelming.

2. Most Americans feel that the income tax they pay is fair. Although many people say their taxes are too high, majorities of Americans in Gallup polling since the late 1990s on generally say that their tax burden is fair.  In April, 2013, 55 percent said their amount of federal income tax they paid was fair, compared to 42 percent who thought it was unfair.

3. But most Americans believe that, overall, the tax system is unfair. Roper polling conducted from the 1970’s to the late 1990’s shows majorities of Americans over this entire period saying that the income tax system is somewhat or quite unfair for most people. Sixty-two percent of likely voters in a 2003 GQR poll said the federal tax system is not fair and only 32 percent said it is fair.  More recently, a 2011 Pew poll found 55 percent saying the federal tax system is not too fair or not fair at all compared to 43 percent who thought the system was moderately or very fair.

4. They believe it’s unfair primarily because the wealthy and corporations aren’t paying their fair share. Gallup polling from April 2013 shows an overwhelming majority of Americans (77 percent) saying lower income people pay either too much (40 percent) or their fair share (37 percent) of taxes.  Even more strongly, 95 percent say middle income people pay either too much (42 percent) or their fair share (53 percent) of taxes.  In contrast, 61 percent believe upper income people pay too little in taxes and 66 percent believe corporations pay too little.

5. As a consequence, there’s strong support for raising taxes on the rich. In recent years, the public has shown overwhelming support for eliminating the Bush tax cuts for those making over $250,000 a year.  Support has also been lop-sided for Buffet rule taxation (those making a million or more a year should pay at least 30 percent in taxes) and for taxing capital gains income the same as work income.

These data do not make the American taxpayer sound like the tax-hating rebel so dear to the hearts of conservatives like Grover Norquist.  In fact, that taxpayer sounds more like a latent class warrior.  That’s something for progressives to keep in mind moving forward.

Gallup is out with its fairly regular Tax Day polling showing that 50 percent of Americans believe the amount of federal income tax they have to pay is too high.   On its own, pollsters say, this figure doesn’t really tell us much.  Only by looking at data over time can we determine what this figure means.

Or can we?

In April 2012, near the end of President Obama’s “socialist” first term when the top marginal tax rate was 37.9 percent on regular income, 46 percent of Americans said their federal taxes were too high — tied for an all-time low.  Back in 1985, during the supply-side glory years of Ronald Reagan when the top marginal tax rate was 50 percent on regular income, 63 percent of Americans said their federal taxes were too high.  Five years later, in 1990, after even more tax cuts had pushed the top rate down to 33 percent, the percentage was exactly the same – 63 percent.  And way back in 1947, shortly after the (by today’s GOP standards) practically communist FDR/Truman years had jacked the top marginal tax rate to 86.5 percent on regular income above $200,000 per year, 54 percent of American taxpayers in a slightly different sample said their taxes were too high. This is almost precisely the same percentage of Americans (53 percent) who felt that way in 2007 after multiple rounds of President George W. Bush’s tax cuts:

Doing a rough calculation of the numbers provided in the most recent Gallup release, the average percentage of Americans across the 48 polls listed from 1947-2013 who say the amount of federal tax they pay is too high is 58 percent — or the exact percentage of Americans who felt that way in 1967 when the top income tax rate on regular income was a lofty 70 percent and in 1997 when it was 43.7 percent.

Apparently, there’s no rhyme-or-reason at all to Americans’ views about federal taxes as they relate to the actual top income tax rate.  Supply-siders everywhere don’t know whether to cry or rejoice.

Today is Tax Day, the day on which federal and state taxes are due for all Americans. Republicans have, of course, spent the year since Tax Day 2012 arguing that tax rates are too high and pushing for tax cuts for the wealthy at both the federal and state level. In reality, however, America’s tax code provides substantial benefits to the rich that working class Americans don’t get to enjoy.

State tax codes are heavily slanted toward the rich, as we’ve highlighted before. At the federal level, huge tax expenditures also make the tax code friendlier to the wealthiest Americans. The United States spends more than $1.3 trillion a year on tax expenditures, and while some of them help the middle class, many of them are aimed specifically at the wealthy, who receive an extra $250,000 a year in income thanks to tax breaks. Here are five ways the tax code benefits the wealthy:

1. Deductions: The majority of tax breaks come through deductions, and while several deductions have substantial benefits for working class Americans, the advantages for the wealthy are much larger. Because of the way they are structured, popular deductions like those for mortgage interest, retirement savings, and charitable giving provide far bigger benefits for the wealthy than they do for average Americans, creating an “upside-down” effect that gives the biggest tax breaks to those who need them least and making the tax code look “more progressive than it actually is.” President Obama has proposed capping individual deductions at 28 percent, meaning the wealthy would get the same benefit as taxpayers in the middle class tax bracket. Other proposals, such as converting all deductions to tax credits, would make the tax code even more fair for middle- and lower-class families.

2. Capital gains: The capital gains preference taxes income from investments at a lower rate than ordinary wage income, providing a huge tax break to investors. Republicans argue that the low capital gains rate boosts the economy, but there is little evidence that higher capital gains rates hurt the economy. Instead, the preference increases income inequality, since capital gains income is earned almost solely by the wealthy. Cuts to the capital gains rate since Ronald Reagan equalized it with tax rates on normal income, in fact, are “by far the largest contributor” to increased income inequality over the last three decades, according to recent studies.

3. Carried interest: The carried interest loophole, which President Obama closes in his recent budget proposal, benefits wealthy hedge fund managers who take their pay from investors’ profits instead of through management fees, which makes the income subject to the lower capital gains rate than ordinary income rates. The loophole applies to virtually no one, but it allows those who use it — wealthy hedge fund managers and private equity executives like Mitt Romney — to substantially lower their tax rates. Eliminating it would both make the tax code more equitable and save as much as $21 billion over 10 years.

4. Estate tax: The estate tax rose at the beginning of 2013, but the tax deal that helped avert the “fiscal cliff” also locked in huge exemptions for the wealthy. The estate tax now allows individuals to exempt up to $5.25 million from taxation, meaning heirs to a couple’s estate can inherit $10.5 million without paying taxes. The estate tax now applies to only the wealthiest 0.14 percent of Americans, and from the income that is passed down each year (almost entirely from wealthy families), it raises less than 1 percent of revenue.

5. Deductions for vacation homes: The mortgage interest tax deduction, aimed at promoting home ownership, allows homeowners to deduct interest paid on their second home as well. That obviously benefits the wealthy, since they are more likely to have second homes, but it gets worse: the deduction can also apply to large yachts that have sleeping spaces, giving a tax break to wealthy boat owners. This loophole alone costs the U.S. an estimated $10 billion each decade.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) is dropping his deeply unpopular tax plan after several weeks of outcry from advocates for the poor and business groups alike. The proposal would have abolished income and corporate taxes in exchange for a higher sales tax, effectively hitting the poor with higher taxes while giving the wealthiest Louisiana residents enormous tax cuts.

In a speech to open the 2013 legislative session, Jindal announced he would give in to the pushback:

I realize that some of you think I haven’t been listening. But you’ll be surprised to learn I have been. And here is what I’ve heard from you and from the people of Louisiana — yes, we do want to get rid of the income tax, but Governor, you’re moving too fast and we aren’t sure that your plan is the best way to do it.

So I’ve thought about that. And it certainly wasn’t the reaction I was hoping to hear. And now I’m going to give you my response and it’s not the response people are accustomed to hearing from politicians. Here is my response: Ok, I hear you. So I am going to park my tax plan.

Now, to be clear, I still like my plan. but I recognize success requires give and take. And I recognize that in this instance, I need to be the one who gives so that we can have the chance to achieve success. But I’m not going to pout, I’m not going to take my ball and go home.

Jindal’s plan would have raised taxes on an estimated 80 percent of the state’s residents while cutting taxes by more than $25,000 for the richest 1 percent. The poorest Louisianans already pay a higher share of their incomes in taxes than the wealthiest 1 percent, and Jindal’s regressive tax would have added an average of $395 of taxes on the poorest 20 percent.

While acknowledging the vehement opposition to his plan, Jindal still called for the abolishment of the income tax, without specifying how he would replace it without shifting the same repercussions onto low-income Louisianans.

The governor’s approval rating plummeted in the past few months. Two-thirds of Louisianans explicitly opposed his tax plan.

Though Jindal has conceded defeat, similar plans to replace income taxes with higher sales taxes are being considered in Kansas, Nebraska, and North Carolina.

President Obama and Senate Democrats have presented deficit reduction plans that would rely on both spending cuts and increased tax revenues, but Republicans continue to insist that the U.S. has only a “spending problem” and that deficit reduction does not require new revenues.

The premise of the argument from Republicans is that Americans already face an extraordinarily heavy tax burden. Citizens for Tax Justice, however, compared levels of taxation in 2010 in the other industrialized countries that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and found that the U.S. not only collects far less in tax revenues than the average OECD country, but that it also collects less in taxes as a share of its economy than all but two other OECD nations, as the chart at right shows.

The U.S. share of taxes has likely increased slightly since 2010, the latest year for which OECD data is available, because of tax increases from Obamacare and from the fiscal cliff deal that restored Clinton-era tax rates on all incomes above $450,000. Those increases likely won’t push the U.S. up the chart and would leave it well short of the OECD average. Similar data for corporate taxes shows that the U.S. collects less than all but one other OECD countries.

The U.S. has historically collected less in taxes and spent less than the majority of its OECD counterparts, in part because it operates such a stingy social safety net that doesn’t assist the least fortunate in society as well as programs in other countries do. Still, the chart shows that the U.S. is far from a high-tax country, and Democratic offers to raise modest amounts of revenues in the budget process would hardly send the nation’s level of taxation through the roof.

Bucking the national trend of asking the poor to pay more in taxes while giving breaks to the wealthiest Americans, Maine’s House of Representatives this week approved an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit and rejected an attempt to cut capital gains taxes.

A handful of states have done the opposite recently. Arkansas, Ohio, Louisiana, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Kansas, Oklahoma, and North Carolina‘s legislatures have all backed efforts to lower taxes on the rich. But Maine’s legislature is looking to give more money to those who need it most instead of the rich:

Portland Democrat Rep. Peter Stuckey’s bill, LD 455, An Act to Increase the State Earned Income Credit, would double the state earned income tax credit for low-income individuals and families to 10 percent of the federal earned income tax credit and make it fully refundable at the state level.

Democrats said the bill would provide financial relief to those who need it most, people who are likely to spend the money locally on necessities such as rent and groceries.

“We heard over and over again that the people who are going to get this credit are going to buy groceries, gas for their cars, and pay their rent,” said Rep. Adam Goode, D-Bangor, who co-chairs the Legislature’s Taxation Committee. “These are people we are sure are going to spend the money right away.”

Those who backed the capital gains tax cut in Maine, the same people who oppose the EITC expansion, incorrectly believe that a capital gains cut will help boost the economy. In actuality, the Congressional Research Service has found no correlation between economic growth and lower capital gains taxes.

On the other hand, the federal version of the EITC helps boost both employment and education among the poor. In 2011, 4.9 million children, and 9.4 million people overall, were lifted out of poverty thanks to the federal EITC.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) is among the Republican governors pushing an overhaul of his state’s tax code that would abolish the state income tax and replace it instead with increased sales taxes. Such plans are inherently regressive, and Jindal’s is no exception: one analysis found that it would raise taxes on 80 percent of the state’s residents while giving large tax cuts to the richest.

Perhaps its no surprise, then, that a recent poll from Southern Media Opinion & Research found that Jindal’s plan is “particularly unpopular” with Louisianans:

Gov. Jindal’s proposed tax reform plan was particularly unpopular. Sixty three percent opposed the plan to abolish personal and corporate income taxes and raise state sales taxes, while only 27 percent supported it.

Louisiana’s tax system is already regressive, and Jindal’s plan would raise taxes by an average of $395 on the poorest 20 percent of the state’s residents; the richest 1 percent, meanwhile, would see a tax cut totaling more than $25,000. And while Jindal is pushing the plan as a way to boost the state’s economy, evidence suggests the plan wouldn’t do much to help. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities examined states that cut taxes in the mid-1990s and found that their resulting economic and job growth was slower during the next economic cycle than it was in states that did not cut taxes.

States across the country are pushing tax cuts as a way to stimulate economic growth, and an Arkansas House Committee joined them yesterday by approving an income tax cut and raising an exemption on investment taxes. While approving two tax proposals that will largely benefit the wealthy, however, the committee rejected a proposal that would give a tax break to low-income families.

The efforts are aimed at stimulating job and economic growth, according to Republican state legislators, the Associated Press reports:

The income tax proposal, which will cost the state about $57 million a year, is expected to be the largest piece of the tax cut package being negotiated. The proposal would lower the top income tax rate from 7 percent to 6.875 percent and increase the minimum income it applies to from $34,000 to $44,000. The reduction would take effect for the 2014 tax year. The lawmaker behind the idea said it would help Arkansas generate jobs by making its tax rate more competitive with surrounding states. [...]

The panel also endorsed Carter’s proposal to increase the income tax exemption on capital gains of at least $5 million from 30 percent to 70 percent. It would also create a 70 percent exemption for any net capital gains relating to the sale of Arkansas property acquired after Jan. 1, 2014.

Even as it raises the minimum amount needed to qualify for taxation, the income tax proposal would grant more than half of its benefits to Arkansans who make more than $155,000 a year, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. The capital gains exemption, which ITEP calls one of the two “most regressive state income tax loopholes,” would only benefit wealthy families. But cutting taxes to stimulate growth isn’t the best strategy: a report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities released this week found that states that implemented tax cuts in the 1990s saw slower economic growth afterward than states that did not.

At the same time, the committee rejected a proposed Earned Income Tax Credit that would have given breaks to low-income residents, just as the EITC does on federal taxation. Arkansas’ tax code is already among the most regressive in the country, according to ITEP. It’s poorest residents pay 11.9 percent of their income in taxes, the 10th highest percentage among the 50 states and Washington DC. The richest one percent of its residents pay just 6 percent of their income in taxes. Gov. Mike Beebe (D) has warned the legislature that his budget does not include room for costly tax cuts, which should prevent Arkansas’ House Republicans from making the tax code even more regressive.