amusing adult fairy tale about it, Pomperipossa in the World of Money. The
“Pomperipossa Effect” may have contributed to the downfall of the Palme
government that year.
Similar narratives of people paying more than 100% of their marginal income
in taxes went viral in subsequent years, even in the United States, forming a
constellation of narratives.20 These stories fed on one another. These narratives
were about government incompetence, not arguments for lowering tax rates that
were already well below 100% overall, but they supported a general impression
that tax rates had gone too high. We can find evidence for the existence of this
narrative constellation by searching digitized newspapers for the term highest tax
bracket. In the 1950s, even though the highest US income tax bracket was
extremely high, ranging from 84% to 92%, ProQuest News & Newspapers
produces only 33 stories with this phrase. In the decade of the 1980s, even
though the highest income tax bracket was gradually being reduced from 70% to
28%,21 there were 520 ProQuest stories featuring the term. Since the 1980s, the
epidemic of stories about the highest tax bracket has continued to grow.
Attention to the highest tax brackets naturally drew attention to the lowest tax
brackets and to effectively negative tax rates for the poorest, who were now
judged in a less sympathetic light. In the United States, the term welfare mother
refers to an unmarried woman and her children who are supported by unwilling
male taxpayers. Use of the term exploded from zero in 1960 to a peak in the
early 1970s, after President Lyndon Johnson announced his Great Society plan to
eliminate poverty.
Property taxes came in for strong criticism too. In the 1970s, the news media
began to notice a public opinion change (strongly in evidence for at least another
decade after that) associated not with a celebrity but with a California
referendum called Proposition 13. Passage of the proposition led to a 1978
constitutional amendment in California that put a firm limit on property tax
increases. The “taxpayer revolt,” so named in newspapers of the time, swept the
United States:
The taxpayer revolt that has started in California is about as grass-rootsy as
Grape Nuts. But it has California state and local officials shriven with fear
and perhaps guilt … Proposition 13 is spawning imitators in half the states of
the Union.22

The stories that were circulating in an epidemic sweeping across the United
States in 1978 were of tax rates so high that some homeowners could no longer
afford to live in their homes and were forced to sell. Related stories railed
against government inefficiency and corruption in the spending of tax revenue.
These ideas, and the underlying narrative of a “tax revolt” in the United States,
became contagious. But the taxpayer revolt came and went quickly, in the few
years around 1978.
In the background was the rise of a free-market, laissez-faire narrative in the
second half of the twentieth century in Anglo-Saxon countries. This rise was
promoted by stories, such as Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel The Fountainhead. Its
readership was limited in the 1940s, but the novel gradually rose to ever-greater
prominence through the rest of the twentieth century. Rand’s 1957 novel, Atlas
Shrugged, went viral. The novel was about a large national strike of productive
people against the majority of people, the looters who support government
regulation (including taxes) to extract wealth for their own selfish interests. The
influence of Rand and her novels has continued to grow since her death in 1982,
unlike the taxpayer revolt story, which was contagious only briefly. It seems that
the novels were a slower but ultimately larger epidemic. A bit earlier, the phrase
stimulate the economy had emerged in the late 1950s, and its use grew rapidly
from 1978 to 1980, suggesting that tax cuts for higher-income people might
serve as an energizer, freeing the supposedly superior people to contribute to
society.