Taxpayers’ attitudes, behavior, and perception of fairness

This paper investigates taxpayers’ attitudes, behavior, and perception of fairness with respect to taxation using data drawn from a survey among German employees. It is shown that there is a large gulf between subjects’ attitudes towards taxation and their behavior. Although most subjects profess that their own taxation is either too high or far too high, up to 60 percent of them judge tax burdens to be fair which exceed actual taxation by far. Moreover, the great majority of those subjects opting for a proportional tax scale implicitly state tax burdens which are consistent with a progressive tax scale only. Finally, we find overwhelming rejection of one of the core elements of the German income tax system, namely spouse tax splitting.