Populism and Fiscal Illusion

There is a widespread concern that anti-elitist or populist opinion is on the rise. The policy concern is that political opportunists would exploit voter rational ignorance for their own cynical purposes. In this article I demonstrate that, in the field of taxation, this sort of behaviour already occurs. Fiscal illusion can be described as deceiving taxpayer-voters into paying more tax than they would otherwise agree to. Taxpayers are already victims of political opportunism unrelated to the rise of populism.