Tag Archives: Chris Edwards

Progs Give New Meaning To “Tax Distortions”

16 Tuesday Apr 2019

Posted by in Taxes

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Tax day has come and gone, but I’m struck by 1) the incredible misconceptions people express about the change in their tax liabilities caused by the 2018 income tax legislation; and 2) the confusion about how our progressive income tax system actually works! Some of these misapprehensions are encouraged by progressives who would rather misinform the public than evaluate policy on its own terms. I am not a fan of our income tax system, nor all aspects of the 2018 tax law, but let’s at least discuss it honestly.

First, a substantial majority of taxpayers paid lower taxes on their 2018 income than they would have under prior tax rules (also see here). However, as I’ve observed before, many people conflate the change in the amount of their tax refund with the change in their taxes paid. And again, the progressive media hasn’t helped to allay this misconception, as noted by Vox cofounder Matthew Yglesias when he tweeted this:

“Nobody likes to give themselves credit for this kind of messaging success, but progressive groups did a really good job of convincing people that Trump raised their taxes when the facts say a clear majority got a tax cut.”

Even worse, members of Congress misrepresent the facts with little media backlash. For example, Andrew Wilford of the National Taxpayers Union Foundation reports the following:

“… the tax cut actually made the tax code more progressive, not less.  … Of course, none of this stopped Democrats such as Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) from claiming that the TCJA was a “middle-class tax hike.” Nor did it prevent three separate Democratic senators from claiming that the average family making up to $86,000 would see a tax hike of $794, despite the fact that the source for this claim clarified that this tax hike would apply to only 6.5 percent of households in this income bracket.”

It’s amazing just how drastically our income tax system is misunderstood or often misrepresented by the media. Apparently, it’s considered politically advantageous to do so. Chris Edwards offers the following quote from Christine Elba in the Washington Post:

“Meanwhile, the wealthier among us (remember: corporations are people, too!) are able to hire tax lawyers, consultants and accountants to clue them in on lightly advertised but heavily lobbied for loopholes that allow them to pay a lower tax rate or even no taxes at all.”

That is simply not a fair characterization of our income tax system. Edwards goes on to demonstrate the progressive nature of U.S. income taxes based on information from the Tax Policy Center. Not only do statutory federal income tax rates rise with income, but so do average effective tax rates, which account for the effects of deductions, credits and exclusions. In fact, average effective rates are negative in the lowest income groups and are zero on balance for the lowest 50% of earners. And average effective rates keep rising in the top quintile, moving up through the top 10%, 5%, 1% and 0.1%. Ms. Elba is clearly confused. And if she is aware of the pernicious double-taxation of corporate income, she probably would never admit it.

Apparently the current state of income tax progressivity is not enough to satisfy statists and redistributionists, who take license to lie about it in order to make their case for higher taxes on the rich, and even the not-so-rich. But here’s some advice for Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, and others who insist that, while they are rich, they desperately want to pay more taxes: you are free to do so without penalty. Better yet, give it to a good charity instead!

Tax Cuts Yes, Simplification a Mixed Bag

18 Monday Dec 2017

Posted by in Taxes, Trump Administration

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President Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) this morning, the GOP tax bill with an acronym that simply won’t roll off my tongue. A useful summary of the Act produced by the House -Senate conference, and the full text of the Act, appear at this link. The TCJA hews more toward the earlier Senate bill than the House version. I’ve written about both (the House bill here and both here). Here is a good summary of the Act from Peter Suderman at Reason.com.

In my earlier assessments, I relied upon the principle of tax reform and real simplification as a justification for a tax cut without revenue neutrality. There are a few reforms and partial reforms, and the bill may simplify taxes for a number of individual taxpayers. However, on the whole I’m disappointed with the progress made by the GOP in those areas.

Notwithstanding my disappointment with the overall reform effort, the TCJA cuts taxes for most Americans and is likely to have salutary effects on economic growth and the job market. In fact, one of the most remarkable things about  the Act is the claim made by its adversaries on the Democrat side of the aisle. They apparently believe that the benefits of the TCJA flow primarily or even exclusively to the rich. This is a huge mistake for them. High-income taxpayers will receive greater benefits in absolute dollars, but not proportionally. This is shown by the table above, prepared by Chris Edwards from data produced by the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT). In fact, the TCJA will extend tax reductions to a larger share of the middle class than either of its predecessor bills would have done. You cannot meaningfully reduce the taxes generated by a steeply progressive tax system without reducing the absolute dollars paid by high-income taxpayers. And you can’t lay the groundwork for sustainable economic growth without improving the investment incentives faced by high-income taxpayers and producers.

Here are some additional additional thoughts on the bill:

Yeah, I like me some tax cuts: The Act reduces taxes for many individuals and families by doubling the standard deduction and reducing tax rates. More importantly, perhaps, it will also reduce taxes for C-corporations, providing some relief from double taxation of corporate income, as will the switch to a territorial tax system on U.S. corporations doing business abroad. The latter is a real reform, while I consider the former a partial reform. Investment incentives are improved via the corporate rate cut and elimination of the corporate Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) — a real reform, as well as the ability to write-off spending on new equipment immediately. As I argued last month, lower corporate taxes are likely to benefit both workers and consumers. The actions of few companies (AT&T, Comcast, Wells Fargo, and Fifth-Third) seem to demonstrate that this is the case: they have announced bonuses and increases in their base wage rates in the immediate wake of the TCJA’s massage.

Pass-through tax cuts are iffy: One of the most difficult parts of the TCJA to evaluate involves the implications for pass-through business entities like sole proprietorships, partnerships and S-corporations. Some might not receive significant cuts. The Act includes a maximum 25% rate on business income, but that is dependent on the proportion of the owner’s income deemed to be business income under the new rules. It also allows a flat deduction of 20% against business income. These provisions will be of benefit to very successful and very capital-intensive pass-throughs. Owners of smaller or less profitable firms will get the benefit of lower individual tax rates and the higher standard deduction, but might not have income high enough to benefit from the 25% rate cap.

Simpler for some, but it is not simplification: The doubled standard deduction will mean fewer taxpayers claiming itemized deductions. That sounds like simplification, but many will find it reassuring to calculate their taxes both ways, so a compliance burden remains. The Act retains or partially retains a number of deductions and credits slated for elimination in earlier versions, failing a simple principle held by reformers: eliminate deductions in exchange for lower rates. Along the same lines, the individual AMT is retained, but the exemption amount is increased, so fewer taxpayers will pay the AMT. Again, simpler for some, but not real simplification.

Elimination of the corporate AMT is simplification, as are immediate expensing of equipment purchases and territorial tax treatment. However, most of the complexities of corporate taxes remain, as do certain tax breaks targeted at specific industries. What a shame. And unfortunately, taxes for pass-through entities are anything but simplified under the Act. Complex new rules would govern the division of income into business income and the owners’ wage income.

Reducing deductions and bad incentives: The mortgage interest deduction encourages over-investment in housing and subsidizes the wealthiest homebuyers. The TCJA leaves it intact for existing mortgages, but allows the deduction to be claimed on new mortgage loans of up to $750,000. So the bad incentive largely remains, though the very worst of it will be eliminated. There have been complaints that this change could reduce home prices in states with the highest real estate prices. Good — they have been inflated by the subsidy at the expense of other taxpayers.

The tax write-off for state and local taxes (SALT) will be limited to $10,000 a year under the TCJA, though it adds some flexibility by allowing that sum to be met by any combination of state or local income, sales or property taxes. This change will reduce the subsidies from federal taxpayers residents of high-tax states, and should make leaders in those states more circumspect about the size of government.

The TCJA preserves and even expands a number of individual deductions and credits, subsidizing families with children, medical expenses, student loans, graduate students, educational saving, retirement saving, and the working poor. The interests benefiting from these breaks will be relieved, but this is not simplification.

Yet another case of “simpler for some” is the estate tax: it remains, but the exemption amounts are doubled. The estate tax does not produce much revenue, but it is fundamentally unjust: it ensnares the families of deceased property owners, farmers and small businesses; planning for it is costly; and it often forces survivors to sell assets quickly, sustaining losses, in order to meet a tax liability. The TCJA will significantly reduce this burden, but the tax framework will remain in place and will be an ongoing temptation to ravenous sponsors of future tax legislation.

Individual cuts are temporary: The corporate tax changes in the TCJA are permanent. They won’t have to be revisited (though they might be), and permanence is a desirable feature for sustaining the impact of positive incentives. The individual cuts and reforms, however, all expire within eight to ten years. The sun-setting of these provisions is, as some have said, a gimmick to reduce the revenue impact of the Act, but sunsetting means another politically fractious battle down the road. It is also a device to ensure compliance with the Byrd Act, which limits the deficit effects of legislation under Senate reconciliation rules. Eight years is a fairly long “temporary” tax cut, as those things go; for now, the impermanence of the cuts might not weaken the influence on spending. However, that influence is likely to wane as the cuts approach expiration.

Deficit Effects: The TCJA’s impact on the deficit and federal borrowing is likely to be somewhere north of $500 billion, possibly as much as $1.4 trillion. Deficits must be funded by government debt, which competes with private debt for the available pool of savings and must be serviced, repaid via future taxes or inflated away. In the latter sense, government borrowing is not really different from current taxes, a proposition known as Ricardian equivalence.

Nonetheless, the incentives, complexities and compliance costs of our current tax code are damaging, and the TCJA at least accomplishes some measure of reform. Moreover, the incremental debt is small relative to the impact of prior estimates of government borrowing over the next decade, with or without extension of the individual tax cuts. The most fundamental problem that remains is excessive government spending and its competing demands for, and absorption of, resources, with no market guidance as to the value of those uses.

Statists and Stasis: The Dismal Solutions of Anti-Capitalists

26 Wednesday Aug 2015

Posted by in Capitalism, Markets, Socialism, Tyranny

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Thought Hanging

The anti-capitalist Left is quick to condemn private businesses of unfair practices and even unethical behavior. In their estimation, certain prices are not just and profits are somehow undeserved rewards to private property, risk-taking and entrepreneurial sweat. They somehow imagine that meeting market demands is an easy matter, or worse, that market demands are not “socially useful”. Few have ever attempted to run a business, or if they have, they were unsuccessful and resent it. They also cannot grasp the social function served by private markets, to which we owe our standard of living and much of our culture.

What alternatives do these deep thinkers suggest? A socialist utopia? Jonathan Newman discusses the many practical problems presented by socialism and why it always fails to achieve success comparable to societies that rely on free markets. Newman’s treatment covers the inability of administered pricing to convey accurate information and effective incentives, the waste induced by queuing, neglect of comparative advantage, waste induced by production quotas, retarded innovation and technological development, and a deeply embedded stasis in the face of changing conditions. Little wonder that poverty is a consequence.

Warren Meyer at Coyote Blog has written of the stasis seemingly promoted by the progressives. They are quite protective of the status quo. Ironically, and quite rightly, Meyer calls them “deeply conservative”, too conservative to accept the dynamism of a capitalistic society. From Meyer:

“Progressives want comfort and certainty. They want to lock things down the way they are. They want to know that such and such job will be there tomorrow and next decade, and will always pay at least X amount. Which is why, in the end, progressives are all statists, because only a government with totalitarian powers can bring the order and certainty and control of individual decision-making that they crave..

Progressive elements in this country have always tried to freeze commerce, to lock this country’s economy down in its then-current patterns. Progressives in the late 19th century were terrified the American economy was shifting from agriculture to industry. They wanted to stop this, to cement in place patterns where 80-90% of Americans worked on farms.“

Freezing the diffusion of technology and often the state of technology itself is a consequence of socialist policy. And technology may well be the enemy of the Left in another sense: An interesting twist is provided by Fred Foldvary of the Mercatus Center in “Government Intervention Is Becoming Obsolete“. He writes that technology is undermining all of the usual economic rationales for intervention: asymmetric information, external effects, public goods, and monopoly. The article is brief, but he refers the reader to more extensive treatments.

A good example of socialism’s perverse appeal is the rhetoric of Senator Bernie Sanders, now a candidate for the Democrat Presidential nomination. Sanders has criticized the “the dizzying (and socially useless) number of products in the deodorant category….” At Reason.com, A. Barton Hinkle wondered what Sanders might consider the appropriate number of deodorant choices in our society. Would he wish to dictate a limited number as a matter of policy? And what other “socially useless” choices might he choose to limit in his failure to grasp that these choices reflect the incredible health and vibrancy of a market economy. Here’s Hinkle:

“… central planners think they can allocate economic resources better than the unguided hand of individual free choice. Like any good scientific experiment, this one is easily replicated, and has been time and again. See, for example, Venezuela, which has now run out of toilet paper, tampons, and other basic necessities because some people there think they should make all the choices for other people. And yet for many, the repeated lesson still has not sunk in. In an unintentionally hilarious essay about Cuba not so long ago, one writer noted that “the people are hungry here. There are severe food shortages. I do not understand why a tropical island would lack fruits and vegetables . . . and my only assumption is that maybe they have to export it all.”

Never forget that government can only pursue policy objectives via coercive power. I don’t think socialists have forgotten at all. Without the power to coerce, nothing proposed or done by the state can be accomplished and enforced. This is the course that progressive, anti-capitalists must follow to achieve their collectivist vision. But Chris Edwards reminds us that “Coercion Is Bad Economics” with the following points about government:

  • When it “uses coercion, its actions are based on guesswork.“
  • Its “actions often destroy value because they [arbitrarily] create winners and losers.“
  • Its “activities fail to create value because the funding comes from a compulsory source: taxes.”
  • Its “programs often fail to generate value because the taxes to support them create “deadweight losses” or economic damage.“

By arranging voluntary, mutually beneficial trades, market forces avoid all of these problems. As Robert P Murphy explains in The Freeman, “Capitalists Have a Better Plan“.

The anti-capitalists do not hesitate to saddle private businesses with confiscatory tax and regulatory burdens in the name of their own vision of society. Want to live in a bleak world of decline? Then here’s your prescription, courtesy of the anti-capitalist Left: regulate heavily, monitor transactions, impose wage and price controls, dismantle markets, tax at punitive levels, confiscate property, censor “offensive” speech, extend dependence on the state, absorb private savings and crowd out private investment with government borrowing, and inflate the money stock. Smells like a crappy “utopia”.