Why citizens don’t like paying for public goods with their taxes– and how institutions can change that

Why are Americans so against paying taxes to fund basic government functions such as roads and education? In new research, Alan M. Jacobs and J. Scott Matthews find that many citizens object to paying for public investment because they do not trust politicians to spend new revenues as promised. Using online experiments with voting-age US citizens, they find that support for using taxation to pay for investment was dependent on how much voters trusted the institution charged with carrying out the work. Local governments and the military were trusted to a much greater degree than Congress, especially among conservatives. Citizens were also more willing to pay more for public goods when they were told that the new taxes would be set aside in a dedicated trust fund account.