What kind of person thinks cheating on taxes is okay?

What's the profile of someone who thinks cheating on one's taxes is okay?

Using a General Social Survey question, this is what I found:

Thinking cheating on taxes is okay (sample size = 2,348, standardized coefficients)

Age  -.05*
Male  .07***
Non-white  .08***
City size   .05*
Immigrant  -.04
Education  -.08*** 
Church attendance   -.12***
Liberalism   .10***

So people who think cheating on taxes is not wrong are likely to be (from strongest to weakest): not religious, liberal, non-white, less educated, male, young, and living in a big city. Pretty close to a profile of a street criminal.

UPDATE: Amusing, isn't it, that liberals want to force you to turn over so much of your money to the government, but think it's fine to avoid paying their own taxes.

Religiosity and tax fraud

Here's a study that uses World Values Survey data and finds that greater religiosity is associated with less acceptance of tax fraud:

Religion provides an important basis for social integration and the prevention of deviant behavior, such as tax fraud, a crime that costs society billions of dollars in lost revenue. The literature on tax fraud and tax fraud acceptability (TFA) has neglected religiosity as a social bond that may deter this type of behavior. Furthermore, existing work is based on the United States; there are no systematic cross-national studies. In particular, there is no research exploring the "moral communities" hypothesis that religiosity's effect on deviance will vary according to the strength of national moral communities. The present study addresses these two gaps in the literature by analyzing data on 45,728 individuals in 36 nations from the World Values Surveys. We control for other predictors of TFA, including social bonds, economic strain, and demographic factors. The results determined that the higher the individual's level of religiosity, the lower the TFA. Results on the moral community's hypothesis were mixed. However, in a separate analysis of individual nations, the presence of a "moral community" (majority of the population identifies with a religious group) explained 39 percent of the variation in the presence or absence of the expected religiosity-TFA relationship. Furthermore, the presence of a communist regime in a nation, often known for the oppression of religious groups who then may view the regime as illegitimate, diminished the impact of religion on TFA.

Liberals and cheating on taxes

Ah, Tax Day.

A recent survey by Pew revealed that 86 percent of conservatives agree that "not reporting all income on your taxes is morally wrong" compared to only 68 percent of liberals. 

Conservatives want lower taxes but feel they should pay what they owe. Liberals want you to pay more but don't stress about paying their own.   

Democrats love to tax the crap out of you, and skip on paying their share

From Half Sigma's blog:

Timothy Geithner, and now Nancy Killefer and Tom Daschle. All tax cheats. It’s funny how these Democrats are happy to spend other taxpayers’ money on social programs, but not so eager to actually pay taxes themselves.

Amen. I wish religious people said amen repeatedly so I could do it now. Let me add Al Franken--who has also been accused of failing to pay taxes. (Let's not forget Bill Richardson's shenanigans too).

The General Social Survey asked 733 Americans if they thought cheating on taxes is wrong, and also asked who they voted for in 1996. The graph shows that 16.3% of Clinton voters think tax evasion is not wrong or a little bit wrong, compared to 9.1% of Dole supporters.