Why the So-Called Marketplace Fairness Act Is a Misguided Expansion of Power for State Governments

I’m either a total optimist or a glutton for punishment. I recently explained the benefits of “tax havens” for the unfriendly readers of the New York Times.

Now I’m defending a different form of tax competition for CNN, another news outlet that leans left. In this case, the topic is whether states can reach beyond their borders for tax revenue.

Here’s some of what I wrote about the so-called Marketplace Fairness Act that was just approved by the Senate and presumably will soon be considered by the House. I start by explaining that the powers of governments should be constrained by borders.

Let’s assume you live in Utah, Hawaii or South Carolina, and you go to Nevada for a vacation. While in Las Vegas, you spend some money in the casinos. Gambling is illegal in the state where you live, so should the cops in your home state be able to track your activities and arrest you for what happened in Nevada? The answer, needless to say, is no. Or at least it should be no. Common sense tells us that state laws should only apply to things that happen inside a state’s borders. But this sensible principle is being tossed out the window by the U.S. Senate, which has approved a proposal that would give states the ability to impose their taxes on out-of-state sellers.

I also explain that this issue isn’t about whether the Internet should be taxed. Indeed, as a fan of the flat tax, I don’t want special favors or special penalties in the tax code. Internet profits and Internet sales should face the same (ideally low) taxes as all other sectors of the economy.

Instead, the fight is really about whether a state government has the right to force out-of-state merchants to act as deputy tax collectors. If you believe that borders should limit the power of governments, the answer is no.

But that rubs politicians the wrong way.

…some governors and state legislators don’t like this system because many states don’t bother imposing any tax on sales to out-of-state consumers. And even if states levied taxes on sales to out-of-state consumers, what about the five states that don’t have any sales tax? Wouldn’t those states become “tax havens” for Internet sales? For these reasons, some politicians fret that the Internet will put competitive pressure on them to keep their sales tax rates from getting too high.

But this is exactly why politicians shouldn’t be allowed to tax beyond their borders. We want tax competition in order to limit the greed of the political class.

States with no payroll income taxes, such as Nevada, Florida, Tennessee, Texas and New Hampshire, help restrain the greed of politicians in states that have punitive income tax systems, such as California, Illinois, New York and Massachusetts. And if politicians in the high-tax states refuse to adjust their bad tax policies, then people should have the freedom to escape and earn income in other states. The same principle applies to sales taxes. If politicians in, say, Arizona are worried that consumers will go online or travel across the border to avoid the punitive sales tax, then they should reduce their sales tax rate.

So what’s the bottom line?

Politicians can choose to maintain uncompetitive tax systems, of course, but they also should be prepared to accept the consequences. I don’t think California and Illinois should try to become the France and Greece of America, but that’s something for the voters of those states to figure out for themselves. In any event, they shouldn’t have the right to force out-of-state sellers to act as deputy tax collection officials if they decide to impose bad tax policy. …To be blunt, a sales tax cartel is bad news for tax policy and bad news for privacy. Let’s limit the power of state governments so they can only screw up things inside their own borders.

Let’s close on a light note. Here’s a clever cartoon from Nate Beeler.

I agree with the cartoon’s message, at least to the extent that onerous taxes can be very deadly to an industry. But, as noted above, I don’t want special tax-free status for the Internet.

So the ideal cartoon would show lots of surfers from all industries exercising the freedom to pick the waves with the smallest and least destructive sharks. Some might even call that federalism.

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A Libertarian Quandary: Should Drugs Be Legalized if It Means Bigger Government?

Here’s a new edition of my “you be the judge” series.

These are posts designed to explore some of the more challenging aspects of a pro-libertarian philosophy.

Today’s example comes from Colorado, which had displayed a libertarian streak on issues ranging from school choice to drug legalization.

But the latter issue is the source of today’s quandary. Should marijuana be legal if it means more tax revenue that will be used by the political elite to expand the burden of government spending?

Here are the details from the Denver CBS station.

A draft bill floating around the Capitol late this week suggests that a new ballot question on pot taxes should repeal recreational pot in the state constitution if voters don’t approve 15 percent excise taxes on retail pot and a new 15 percent marijuana sales tax. Those would be in addition to regular state and local sales taxes. …Marijuana activists immediately blasted the proposal as a backhanded effort to repeal the pot vote, in which 55 percent of Coloradans chose to flout federal drug law and declare pot legal in small amounts for adults over 21.

If my math is correct, the politicians want a 30 percent special tax on marijuana, which is on top of the regular taxes that would be imposed.

That would be fine with me – if the proposal specified that the additional tax revenue was offset by a tax cut of equal size.

But as I explained in my “starve-the-beast” post, higher taxes usually finance bigger government.

Indeed, some politicians openly admit that they want the new revenue to expand the budget.

Sen. Larry Crowder, R-Alamosa, said the whole purpose of legalizing recreational marijuana was to raise money for education and other programs. “So if there’s no money, we shouldn’t have marijuana,” Crowder said. …In Washington state, the only other place where voters last year approved recreational pot, the ballot measure set taxes at 75 percent, settling the question. Both states are still waiting to find out whether the federal government plans to sue to block retail sales of the drug, set to begin next year.

Though I didn’t realize that the state of Washington imposes a 75 percent tax on marijuana. How…um…French!

More Money for Government? The Ultimate Buzz Kill

So what’s the bottom line? If I lived in Colorado, would I vote to keep pot legal even if it meant more money from the buffoons in the state capital?

Since drug legalization is about 990 out of 1000 in my list of priorities, I’m tempted to say no.

On the other hand, it would be nice to reduce the onerous burden of the War on Drugs, which has been used an excuse to expand the size and scope of government.

What do you think?

P.S. If you want more examples of “you be the judge,” previous editions are listed below.

• Is fleeing to Cuba a justifiable way to keep your children away from government control?
• Is it appropriate to put politicians on trial for economic malfeasance?
• Is it excessive vigilante justice to set your daughter’s rapist on fire?
• Should prisoners with AIDS be segregated from other convicts?
• Which tax collection tactic is more brutal and unjust?
• When a wheelchair-bound guy uses a baseball bat to punish his granddaughter’s molester, what’s the right response?
• Should politicians set pay levels at government-owned firms?
• Is sharia law sometimes appropriate?
• Is the Netherlands right to segregate troublemakers from the general population?
• What do you do about self-destructive behavior in a government-run healthcare system?
• Should there be laws against incest among consenting adults?
• Should motorists be allowed to warn other drivers about speed traps?
• Is jury nullification the right approach for victimless crimes?
• Was this angry father wrong to take matters into his own hands?
• Should drunk-rafting be a crime?
• Should rich people pay higher speeding fines?

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The Revised Bowles-Simpson Tax-Hike Plan Might Be even Worse than the Previous Version

I wrote last September that the budget plan put forward by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson was fatally flawed.

There were some positive features in the plan, to be sure, such as lower marginal tax rates. And I suppose it’s worth noting that the burden of government spending didn’t climb as fast under their proposal as it did in Obama’s budget, though that’s hardly an accomplishment.

But there were lots of fatal flaws in the Bowles-Simpson plan. It included a big tax increase, even though America’s fiscal problem is entirely the result of too much spending.

Moreover, the so-called entitlement reform in Bowles-Simpson wasn’t reform. It was basically a random package of means testing and price controls, and we have lots of experience showing that this approach doesn’t yield sustainable savings.

Well, Bowles and Simpson now have a new plan. Have they learned from their past mistakes? Have they responded to earlier criticisms? Have they made a more serious effort to restrain spending? To genuinely reform entitlements? To shut down useless agencies, programs, and department?

Not that you’ll be surprised, but the answer to all those questions is a big fat NO. Ryan Ellis of Americans for Tax Reform has a short analysis of the plan’s shortcomings and here are some of the highlights (though lowlights might be a better word).

The Simpson-Bowles plan headline report says it only raises taxes by $585 billion over a decade by eliminating or limiting tax deductions and credits (beyond what is needed to lower rates). …However, the plan also calls for “Chained CPI,” which the President’s FY 2014 budget says raises taxes by another $100 billion over the decade, and this plan’s Figure 21 (buried deep in the appendix) says will raise taxes by $124 billion. …There’s a third hidden tax increase, again only to be found buried in Figure 21.  This is “program integrity,” which is a polite euphemism for creating a fishing expedition audit slush fund for the IRS.  This is expected to raise another $30 billion by 2023. Put it all together, and the plan raises taxes by $739 billion over the next decade. …All of the tax hikes described above are just the first stage of new tax hikes in the Simpson-Bowles plan.  There’s also a shadowy “Step Four” which calls for even deeper tax increases to “fix” the entitlement crisis.

In other words, the plan is taxes, then more taxes, followed by additional taxes, topped off by a promise of even more taxes.

Ryan also notes that the plan doesn’t do anything about the fiscal disaster of Obamacare and that it also exacerbates the tax code’s punitive bias by increasing double taxation of income that is saved and invested.

Gee, what’s not to love about such a proposal?

Nonetheless, a lot of people feel compelled to say nice things about Bowles-Simpson. I don’t know whether it’s because they blindly assume a “bipartisan” plan must be good.

Or perhaps they think that a plan needs to be “balanced” between tax increases and spending cuts.

I don’t have any objection to bipartisanship, assuming politicians are proposing good ideas, but let’s take a closer look at this notion of “balance.”

1. Why should we raise taxes when the current fiscal mess is the result of the excessive spending of the Bush-Obama years?
2. Why should we raise taxes when the long-run fiscal mess is the result of rising spending caused by poorly designed entitlement programs?
3. Why should we raise taxes when the “spending cuts” we get in exchange are based on dishonest Washington budget math?
4. Why should we raise taxes when bitter experience teaches us that politicians will simply raise spending?

Let’s close by elaborating on this final question. A couple of years ago, a columnist at the New York Times complained that Republicans used to be much more susceptible to getting seduced by these “balanced” budget deals.

But the reporter inadvertently showed that tax-hike deals are a mistake. It turns out that the only budget deal which actually worked was the one in 1997 that lowered taxes instead!

I’m not making an argument for the Laffer Curve, by the way. The fiscal success of the late 1990s was a result of genuine spending restraint, as explained in this video. The lower taxes were simply a bit of icing on the cake.

My main point is that genuine fiscal restraint is far less likely to happen if tax hikes are on the table. After all, why would politicians have any incentive to do the right thing if there’s a possibility of simply siphoning more money from the economy’s productive sector?

We see the same pattern in other nations. When governments such as Canada and New Zealand actually imposed genuine limits on the growth of government spending, good things happened.

But when governments supposedly try to deal with fiscal problems by raising taxes, you get dismal results. Just look at mess in Europe, where tax increases have been nine times larger than spending cuts.

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Burden of Government Spending Will Be $2 Trillion Higher in 2023 According to Obama’s Budget

If you include all the appendices, there are thousands of pages in the President’s new budget.

But the first thing I do every year is find the table showing how fast the burden of government spending will increase.

That’s Table S-1 of the budget, and it shows that the President is proposing $41 trillion of spending over the next 10 years.

But perhaps most relevant, he wants the federal budget to be $2 trillion higher in 2023 than it is today.

And this is based on the White House’s dodgy assumptions. The numbers almost certainly will look a bit worse when the Congressional Budget Office re-estimates the President’s budget.

By the way, there’s a reason the above chart looks familiar. It almost identical to the ones I put together last year and the year before. So give Obama points for consistency. Rain or shine, year in and year out, he proposes that government spending should rise by $2 trillion every time he proposes a budget.

He’s also consistent in that he demands higher taxes. Americans for Tax Reform has a list of the “Top 10″ tax hikes in the President’s budget. Most of them are based on the President’s class-warfare ideology, though he also wants to hit lower-income people with a big hike in the tobacco tax.

Another example of unfortunate consistency is that the President whiffs on entitlement reform. Unlike the House of Representatives, there’s no proposal to fix Medicare or Medicaid.

He does have a “chained CPI” proposal that would slightly reduce cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security, but that would be a substitute for the reforms that are needed to both control costs and give workers the option to boost retirement income with personal accounts.

Moreover, chained CPI is a huge tax hike, as explained by my colleague Chris Edwards.

So what’s the bottom line? Well, there isn’t one. We’re going to have gridlock for the foreseeable future. The House has passed a decent budget with some modest entitlement reform, but there’s no way that the Senate will accept that plan.

Similarly, there’s no way (knock on wood!) that the House will acquiesce to the President’s raise-taxes-but-leave-spending-on-autopilot proposal. Or the big-government plan from Senate Democrats.

So neither side will move the ball.

We’ll have some fiscal skirmishes, to be sure, with the debt limit and the FY2014 appropriations bills being obvious examples.

But nothing big will happen until either 2015 (if the Democrats win control of the House) or 2017 (if Republicans win the White House and control of the Senate).

By then, we’ll be two or fours years closer to being the next Greece.

P.S. Actually, I think many other nations are in a position to be the next Greece, though it’s discouraging that some estimates indicate that our long-run fiscal status is worse than basket cases such as Italy and France.

P.P.S. As these cartoons suggest, maybe our real fiscal problem is that the President refuses to admit there’s a problem?

P.P.P.S. But I think this cartoon more accurately shows our real challenge.

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Early Details Show Obama Will Propose a Bait-and-Switch Budget Plan Containing Higher Taxes and More Spending

Are we about to see a new kinder-and-gentler Obama? Has the tax-and-spend President of the past four years been replaced by a fiscal moderate?

That’s certainly the spin we’re getting from the White House about the President’s new budget. Let’s look at this theme, predictably regurgitated in a Washington Post report.

President Obama will release a budget next week that proposes significant cuts to Medicare and Social Security and fewer tax hikes than in the past, a conciliatory approach…the document will incorporate the compromise offer Obama made to House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) last December in the discussions over the “fiscal cliff” – which included $1.8 trillion in deficit reduction through spending cuts and tax increases. …unlike the Republican budget that passed the House last month, Obama’s budget does not balance within 10 years.

Since America’s fiscal challenge is the overall burden of government spending, I’m not overly worried about the fact that Obama’s budget doesn’t get to balance.

But I am curious whether Obama truly is proposing a “conciliatory” budget. Are the tax hikes smaller? Are the supposed spending cuts larger?

Actually, there are no genuine spending cuts since the President’s budget is based on dishonest baseline budgeting. At best, we’re simply talking about slowing the growth of government.

But since Mitchell’s Golden Rule is based on the very modest goal of having government grow slower than the private sector, it’s possible that Obama may be proposing something worthwhile.

But possible isn’t the same as probable. Indeed, it appears that the budget is predicated on a giant bait-and-switch since the beneficial spending restraint imposed by sequestration would be repealed!

Obama’s budget proposal, however, would eliminate sequestration.

This appears almost as an afterthought in the Washington Post article, but it should be the lead story. The White House wants to get rid of a policy that genuinely limits the growth of spending.

We won’t have the official numbers until the budget is released next Wednesday, but I’ll be very curious to see whether the supposed spending cuts elsewhere in his budget are greater than or less than the spending increases that will occur if sequestration is canceled. Particularly since the President also is proposing lots of new spending on everything from early child education to brain mapping.

Moreover, it seems as though Obama tax numbers are based on dodgy math as well. The White House is claiming that this is a “conciliatory” budget because he’s no longer proposing $1.6 trillion of tax hikes.

The budget is more conservative than Obama’s earlier proposals, which called for $1.6 trillion in new taxes and fewer cuts to health and domestic spending programs. Obama is seeking to raise $580 billion in tax revenue by limiting deductions for the wealthy and closing loopholes for certain industries like oil and gas. Those changes are in addition to the increased tobacco taxes and more limited retirement accounts for the wealthy that are meant to pay for new spending.

Let’s try to disentangle the preceding passage. The President wants $580 billion of new taxes from “deductions” and “loopholes.” But he also wants an unknown pile of revenue from new tobacco taxes and from restricting IRAs. And keep in mind that he already got $600 billion as part of the fiscal cliff.

Until we get official numbers, we can’t say anything with certainty, but I’ll be checking on Wednesday to see how much revenue the President intends to grab as a result of the tobacco and IRA provisions. Suffice to say that I won’t be surprised if the net impact of all his tax hikes is close to $1.6 trillion. Especially since he’s also proposing to manipulate CPI data, a change that would generate another $100 billion in revenues.

In other words, the revenue side of his budget likely will be a bait-and-switch scam, just like the spending side is a joke once you understand that he wants to get rid of sequestration.

I hope I’m wrong, but I fear that my concerns will be validated next Wednesday and we’ll see another budget that has no real entitlement reform and more class-warfare tax hikes.

P.S. The budget approved by the House of Representatives avoided any tax increases and restrained spending to that it will grow by an average of 3.4 percent annually. Not exactly draconian, but that approach does balance the budget in 10 years.

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Revenge of the Laffer Curve…Again and Again and Again

If I live to be 100 years old, I suspect I’ll still be futilely trying to educate politicians that there’s not a simplistic linear relationship between tax rates and tax revenue.

You can’t double tax rates, for instance, and expect to double tax revenue. Simply stated, there’s another variable – called taxable income – that needs to be added to the equation. This simple insight is what gives us the Laffer Curve.

This is common sense in the business community. No restaurant owner would ever be foolish enough to think that revenues will double if all prices increase by 100 percent. People in the real world know that this would mean lower sales.

At best, revenues will rise by much less than 100 percent in that scenario. And if sales drop by enough, revenues may actually fall.

Perhaps because so few of them have business experience, it seems that politicians have a hard time grasping this simple concept.

The latest examples come from Europe, where the never-ending greed for more revenue has resulted in the imposition of financial transaction taxes.

So how’s that working out? Are politicians collecting the revenue they expected?

Hardly. Here are some of the details from a City A.M. column.

…taxes on financial transactions across Europe have devastated market activity and failed to raise as much as politicians hoped, according to new figures out yesterday.

The article cites three powerful examples, starting with Hungary.

Hungary implemented a 0.1 per cent tax at the start of the year. But it raised less than half the revenue the state had hoped for, bringing in 13bn Hungarian Forints (£36m) in January.

Wow, less than 50 percent of the revenue that politicians were expecting. But the politicians probably don’t care about the collateral damage they’re imposing on the economy because they’ll get to buy votes with another 13 billion Forints (about $55 million).

Now let’s see how the French are doing.

France forged ahead on its own, introducing a 0.2 per cent tax on sales of shares of major firms. But that only raised €200m (£169.4m) from August to November, well below to €530m expected.

Gee, what a shame, the politicians in Paris are only getting about one-third as much money as they were expecting. That’s even worse than Hungary.

But they’ll surely squander that bit of cash as fast as possible.

Our last example comes from Italy. There are no revenue numbers yet, but the decline in financial activity suggests this tax also will be a flop.

And Italy launched its FTT this month. Figures from TMF Group suggest it has cut trading volumes by 38 per cent already

Though politicians may decide it’s a success since they may get more than 50 percent of what they were originally estimating.

That kind of forecasting error would get somebody fired at any private business, but being a politician means never having to say you’re sorry.

And it certainly never means learning from mistakes. The evidence on the Laffer Curve is ubiquitous, with powerful examples in Ireland, the United Kingdom, Italy, France, Spain, as well as Bulgaria and Romania. Or states such as Illinois, Oregon, Florida, Maryland, Washington, DC, and New York.

P.S. Even President Obama has sort of acknowledged the supply-side principles that are the basis of the Laffer Curve.

P.P.S. Remember that the goal of good tax policy is NOT to maximize revenue.

P.P.P.S. I warned the European Union’s Taxation Commissioner about the dangers of a tax on financial transactions last year. Needless to say, my sage counsel appears to have been ignored.

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Targeting Multinationals, the OECD Launches New Scheme to Boost the Tax Burden on Business

I’ve been very critical of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Most recently, I criticized the Paris-based bureaucracy for making the rather remarkable assertion that a value-added tax would boost growth and employment.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

• The OECD has allied itself with the nutjobs from the so-called Occupy movement to push for bigger government and higher taxes.
• The OECD, in an effort to promote redistributionism, has concocted absurdly misleading statistics claiming that there is more poverty in the US than in Greece, Hungary, Portugal, or Turkey.
• The OECD is pushing a “Multilateral Convention” that is designed to become something akin to a World Tax Organization, with the power to persecute nations with free-market tax policy.
• The OECD supports Obama’s class-warfare agenda, publishing documents endorsing “higher marginal tax rates” so that the so-called rich “contribute their fair share.”

Now the bureaucrats have concocted another scheme to increase the size and scape of government. The OECD just published a study on “Addressing Base Erosion and Profit Shifting” that seemingly is designed to lay the groundwork for a radical rewrite of business taxation.

In a new Tax & Budget Bulletin for Cato, I outline some of my concerns with this new “BEPS” initiative.

…the BEPS report…calls for dramatic changes in corporate tax policy based on the presumption that governments are not seizing enough revenue from multinational companies. The OECD essentially argues that it is illegitimate for businesses to shift economic activity to jurisdictions that have more favorable tax laws. …The core accusation in the OECD report is that firms systematically—but legally—reduce their tax burdens by taking advantage of differences in national tax policies.

Ironically, the OECD admits in the report that revenues have been trending upwards.

…the report acknowledges that “… revenues from corporate income taxes as a share of gross domestic product have increased over time. …Other than offering anecdotes, the OECD provides no evidence that a revenue problem exists. In this sense, the BEPS report is very similar to the OECD’s 1998 “Harmful Tax Competition” report, which asserted that so-called tax havens were causing damage but did not offer any hard evidence of any actual damage.

To elaborate, the BEPS scheme should be considered Part II of the OECD’s anti-tax competition project. Part I was the attack on so-called tax havens, which began back in the mid- to late-1990s.

The OECD justified that campaign by asserting there was a need to fight illegal tax evasion (conveniently overlooking, of course, the fact that nations should not have the right to impose their laws on what happens in other countries).

The BEPS initiative is remarkable because it is going after legal tax avoidance. Even though governments already have carte blanche to change business tax policy.

…governments already have immense powers to restrict corporate tax planning through “transfer pricing” rules and other regulations. Moreover, there is barely any mention of the huge number of tax treaties between nations that further regulate multinational taxation.

So what does the OECD want?

…the OECD hints at its intended outcome when it says that the effort “will require some ‘out of the box’ thinking” and that business activity could be “identified through elements such as sales, workforce, payroll, and fixed assets.” That language suggests that the OECD intends to push global formula apportionment, which means that governments would have the power to reallocate corporate income regardless of where it is actually earned.

And what does this mean? Nothing good, unless you think governments should have more money and investment should be further penalized.

Formula apportionment is attractive to governments that have punitive tax regimes, and it would be a blow to nations with more sensible low-tax systems. …business income currently earned in tax-friendly countries, such as Ireland and the Netherlands, would be reclassified as French-source income or German-source income based on arbitrary calculations of company sales and other factors. …nations with high tax rates would likely gain revenue, while jurisdictions with pro-growth systems would be losers, including Ireland, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Estonia, Luxembourg, Singapore, and the Netherlands.

Since the United States is a high-tax nation for corporations, why should Americans care?

For several reasons, including the fact that it wouldn’t be a good idea to give politicians more revenue that will be used to increase the burden of government spending.

But most important, tax policy will get worse everywhere if tax competition is undermined.

…formula apportionment would be worse than a zero-sum game because it would create a web of regulations that would undermine tax competition and become increasingly onerous over time. Consider that tax competition has spurred OECD governments to cut their corporate tax rates from an average of 48 percent in the early 1980s to 24 percent today. If a formula apportionment system had been in place, the world would have been left with much higher tax rates, and thus less investment and economic growth. …If governments gain the power to define global taxable income, they will have incentives to rig the rules to unfairly gain more revenue. For example, governments could move toward less favorable, anti-investment depreciation schedules, which would harm global growth.

You don’t have to believe me that the BEPS project is designed to further increase the tax burden. The OECD admits that higher taxes are the intended outcome.

The OECD complains that “… governments are often under pressure to offer a competitive tax environment,” and that “failure to collaborate … could be damaging in terms of … a race to the bottom with respect to corporate income taxes.” In other words, the OECD is admitting that the BEPS project seeks higher tax burdens and the curtailment of tax competition.

Writing for Forbes, Andy Quinlan of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity highlights how the BEPS scheme will undermine tax competition and enable higher taxes.

…the OECD wants to undo taxpayer gains made in recent decades thanks to tax competition. Since the 1980′s, average global income taxes on both individuals and corporations have dropped significantly, improving incentives in the productive sector of the economy to generate economic growth. These pro-growth reforms are the result of tax competition, or the pressure to adopt competitive economic policies that is put on governments by an increasingly globalized society where both labor and capital are mobile. Tax competition is the only force working on the side of taxpayers, which explains the organized campaign by global elite to defeat it. …If taxpayers want to preserve gains made thanks to tax competition, they must be weary of the threat posed by global tax cartels though organizations such as the OECD.

Speaking of the OECD, this video tells you everything you need to know.

The final kicker is that the bureaucrats at the OECD get tax-free salaries, so they’re insulated from the negative impact of the bad policies they want to impose on everyone else.

That’s even more outrageous than the fact that the OECD tried to have me thrown in a Mexican jail for the supposed crime of standing in the public lobby of a public hotel.

P.S. I just gave a speech to the Anguilla branch of the Society for Trust and Estate Professionals, and much of my remarks focused on the dangers of the BEPS scheme.

I took this picture from my balcony. As you can see, there are some fringe benefits to being a policy wonk.

And I travel to Nevis on Sunday to give another speech.

Tough work, but somebody has to do it. Needless to say, withe possibility of late-season snow forecast for Monday in the DC area, I’m utterly bereft I won’t be there to enjoy the experience.

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Bill Maher: Born-Again Libertarian?

Maybe actors and other Hollywood types are only acting when they embrace statism?

We’ve already seen Hollywood liberals like Rob Schneider and Jon Lovitz complain about class-warfare policy.

And Gerard Depardieu moved out of France to escape the suicidally destructive taxes being demanded by French president Francois Hollande.

But the most shocking news is that even Bill Maher is getting irked that he’s being treated like a pinata.

Take a look at this short video. Ignore the first 2/3rds, which is Rachel Maddow making inane comments about the Ryan budget, and notice what Maher says in the final part.

Wow. He notes that the rich pay the overwhelming share of the federal tax burden (hmmm…I wonder if he watched this video).

And he’s not overly happy about California raping him with a new top tax rate of 13.3 percent.

Closet libertarian?

So now he’s saying he may move out of the state, just like Phil Mickelson. I won’t believe it ’til I see it, but for every well-known celebrity who publicly speculates about migrating to a zero-income tax state, there are probably dozens of investors, entrepreneurs, and small business owners who actually take that step.

And this, folks, is one of the reasons why class-warfare tax policy is so pointlessly destructive.

Reagan showed us in the 1980s that lower tax rates on upper-income taxpayers can generate more tax revenue. California is doing the same experiment, but in reverse.

Magnitudes matter, so we’ll have to wait and see before determining the net impact of Jerry Brown’s tax hike on California tax revenue. But I will blindly assert with confidence that revenues will be far below what politicians are hoping to collect.

In other words, we will see the revenge of the Laffer Curve, regardless of what Bill Maher decides.

P.S. I can’t help adding that Rachel Maddow doesn’t know what she’s talking about. The Ryan budget does not propose a net tax cut, so it’s absurd to claim – or even imply – that there will be “tax cuts for the rich” financed by changes to healthcare. That budget does propose reforms to Medicare and Medicaid, but those changes are to salvage the programs by making them sustainable.

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More Entrepreneurs Say “Au Revoir” to the Administration Fiscale, Escape France’s Confiscatory Tax Regime

As a general rule, it’s not right to take pleasure at the misfortune of others.

But I think we’re allowed an exception to that Schadenfreude rule when the “others” are greedy politicians pursuing spiteful policies. We want the political elite to suffer misfortune because of our desire to promote freedom and prosperity for ordinary people.

With that in mind, I have a big smile on my face because Francois Hollande’s class-warfare tax policy in France is a bigger failure than even I predicted it would be.

I’m particularly happy that the geese with the golden eggs are flying away. And the flock seems to get bigger every day.

Here are some amusing excerpts from a story in the Financial Times.

New evidence of top French executives leaving the country has emerged as President Francois Hollande battles a stalling economy and tumbling approval ratings. Two senior executives at Moet Hennessy, the champagne and cognac arm of the LVMH luxury group, are moving to London from Paris and the head of Dassault Systemes, the software arm of Dassault Aviation, said some senior managers of his company had left and he was considering following suit. …The news follows Mr Arnault’s own application for Belgian citizenship, leaked last September, which poured fuel on a fiery debate in France about entrepreneurship, patriotism and high taxes.

Yup, just like Joe Biden, French politicians want people to think it’s patriotic to give more money to wasteful and incompetent politicians.

“I am the John Galt of France”

And then they have the gall (no pun intended) to complain when the intended victims decide they don’t want to cooperate in their own disembowelment.

You can see why I have a smile on my face.

While I’m happy that some people are escaping Hollande’s punitive tax grasp, there are plenty of victims that can’t escape. France’s economy is in the toilet and millions of ordinary people are suffering.

Figures released on Monday showing a worse-than-expected 1.2 per cent fall in industrial production in January over December underlined the grim outlook facing Mr Hollande, whose approval ratings have fallen this month to as low as 30 per cent. The economy went into reverse in the last quarter of 2012, unemployment has hit 10 per cent of the workforce

Not surprisingly, the politicians are not learning any lessons. They either have their heads buried in the sand or they lash out at those who offer constructive criticism.

The government has denied claims of a tax exodus and denounced as “French bashing” criticism such as the declaration last month by Maurice Taylor, head of tyremaker Titan International, that he would be “stupid” to buy a French factory.

Hollande and his cronies can pretend that successful taxpayers aren’t escaping, but reality will hit them over the head when they count how much tax revenue they receive this year and next year.

In other words, we’re going to see an interesting Laffer Curve experiment.

We saw in America that rich people paid a lot more to the IRS when Reagan lowered their tax rates in the 1980s.

Francois Hollande is trying to run the same experiment, only in reverse.

Anybody want to take a wild guess how that’s going to turn out?

P.S. As shown in this remarkable chart, the real problem in France is that government is far too big. And if the public sector is consuming more than 50 percent of a nation’s economic output, it’s impossible to have a good tax system.

Some big-government nations – such as Sweden and Denmark – try to minimize the damage of high tax burdens, but there’s no way to have a non-destructive tax system when the government wants to take half of what people produce.

And France is trying to maximize the pain rather than minimize the pain, so it’s a safe bet that Hollande’s policies won’t end well.

P.P.S. The debacle in France helps explain why we should celebrate tax competition. The fact that entrepreneurs can migrate to nations with better (or less worse) tax systems is a valuable way of penalizing politicians that impose bad policy.

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The IMF, Higher Taxes, and Mitchell’s Law

Here are three common-sense principles.

1. Higher taxes are misguided. They undermine prosperity and finance bigger government.
2. Bailouts also are misguided. They facilitate corruption and encourage moral hazard.
3. And international bureaucracies are misguided. They promote statism and squander money.

So what’s the “perfect storm” of bad policy?

How about when international bureaucracies offers a bailout in exchange for higher taxes?

Here are some very unpleasant details from Reuters about how the International Monetary Fund is working with other international bureaucracies to coerce Cyprus into raising taxes in order to provide a bailout.

International lenders would like Cyprus to raise its corporate tax and introduce a levy on capital gains and a financial transaction tax to ensure it can repay a euro zone bailout it asked for last year, euro zone officials said on Thursday. …One official, briefed on the talks between the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission – known as the Troika – and the new government in Nicosia, said no decisions had yet been taken on any of the taxes.

I’ve already explained that Cyprus got in trouble because government spending rose faster than the ability of the private sector to finance it.

So if the problem is that the burden of government spending is excessive, then how does it make sense to increase the corporate tax burden? To impose a capital gains tax? Or to levy a tax on financial transactions?

The answer, of course, is that it doesn’t make sense.

This is a very perverse example of Mitchell’s Law, with the pinhead bureaucrats at the IMF and elsewhere misallocating global capital on the condition that Cyprus increase an already onerous tax burden.

One bad policy leading to another bad policy. And it’s happening with our money. Something to think about the next time the fiscal pyromaniacs at the International Monetary Fund ask for additional bailout authority.

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Obama Suffers a Painful Loss in the First Big Fiscal Battle of His Second Term

The statist agenda of ever-growing government requires more money going to Washington, which is why I think that proponents of limited government should do everything they can to block tax increases.

This is the “starve the beast” theory, and I’ve previously explained why I think it is a necessary part of any long-run strategy to restrain the burden of government spending.

He would never admit it, but Obama seems to agree, which is why he is dogmatically fixated on doing everything he can to seduce Republicans into supporting higher taxes.

But he miscalculated in thinking that the fiscal cliff tax hike somehow meant that he had permanently neutered the GOP, and he definitely goofed when he tried to use the sequester as a weapon to bully Republicans into another tax hike.

Ignoring the President’s hyperbole about the supposed catastrophic effects of a very modest reduction in the growth of the federal budget, Republicans have held firm.

And the President has suffered a painful political and policy defeat.

Here’s some of what was reported in The Hill about the President’s attitude.

The first months of President Obama’s second term are being built around a simple premise: No caving. …Obama is in an ultra-assertive mood, practically daring Republicans to defy his wishes. …Obama’s attitude is more akin to that of a general leading his forces into battle, confident that he can decimate the enemy. …On the sequester, for instance, Obama did little more than pay lip-service to the idea of a last-minute compromise to avert the package of cuts.

Well, Republicans did “defy his wishes” and it’s the worst possible outcome for the President. The growth of spending is being slowed and taxes are not going up.

Democrats on Capitol Hill also thought that the fiscal cliff tax hike would be a precedent for lots of future tax hikes. As reported by Politico, their analysis was misguided.

Democrats toasted the New Year’s fiscal cliff deal with the belief that they had set a crucial new precedent: Tax hikes would be part of any future deficit reduction package. Two months later, the champagne buzz is wearing off. …the exuberance expressed by many Democrats at the beginning of the year was misplaced. Efforts to avert the sequester never achieved liftoff, and Democrats are realizing that new tax revenues are off the table for the immediate future. …“We’ve tried everything we can,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) told reporters Thursday. “They will not budge on anything dealing with revenue.”

Byron York has the best analysis, explaining in his Washington Examiner column that Obama gambled and (at least so far) lost.

Nine months ago, Barack Obama likened his Republican opposition to an illness. If he could just defeat Mitt Romney, Obama said, then the illness might subside. “I believe that if we’re successful in this election — when we’re successful in this election — that the fever may break,” Obama told a fundraiser in Minneapolis last June. After Obama won re-election, there was extensive discussion among his supporters about whether the Republican “fever” would, in fact, break.

But this strategy appears to have boomeranged. Byron thinks that the White House is now in a weak position.

There was little speculation about whether something quite different might happen: Would determined GOP opposition break Obama’s fever?  That is, could Republicans weaken the president’s resolve to defeat the GOP and further raise taxes? That appears to be what has occurred, at least for the moment. …Friday morning, Obama seemed resigned to the possibility that he cannot win the further tax increases he seeks, and that after enlisting his entire administration in a campaign to frighten Americans about sequestration, the cuts have become a reality that he has to acknowledge.

While I’m glad the President goofed, I’m not under any illusion that winning a battle is the same thing as winning a war.

It’s quite possible that the modest sequester savings will be undone as part of the “continuing resolution” legislation to fund the federal government between March 27 and the rest of the fiscal year.

There will also be a debt limit fight later in the Spring, which will give proponents of bigger government another bite at the apple (though it’s a double-edged sword since advocates of limited government also can use the debt limit as a vehicle for reform).

And the President obviously won’t give up on his campaign for higher taxes. I worry that he’ll trick gullible GOPers into a tax hike at some point, either as part of a Trojan Horse tax reform or as part of a budget summit that produces something like Bowles-Simposon, a package of real tax hikes and illusory entitlement reforms.

But we can fight those battles down the road. Today, let’s enjoy the sweet smell of victory.

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Virginia’s RINO Infestation Results in Higher Taxes and More Spending

The number one goal for fiscal policy is to reduce the burden of government spending.

The simple way to achieve this goal is to adhere to Mitchell’s Golden Rule and and make sure the private sector grows faster than the public sector.

But when politicians fail to exercise that modest amount of fiscal restraint, bad things happen.

Consider my state of Virginia, which is largely controlled by Republicans. Except party labels apparently don’t mean much because state spending has been growing at twice the rate of inflation.

And when politicians engage in profligacy on the spending side of the fiscal ledger, it’s just a matter of time before they engage in greed on the other side of the fiscal ledger.

That’s certainly happened in Virginia, where the interest groups, lobbyists, bureaucrats, and politicians just achieved a major victory over taxpayers.

The Wall Street Journal is appropriately disappointed.

“I hope you’re not upset that I’m copying your fiscal policy, Mr. President”

There’s one thing uglier than a Democratic tax-and-spend spree. A Republican one. On Friday Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell and a GOP-run legislature approved a five-year, $6 billion transportation bill financed almost entirely with higher sales and car taxes.

Here are some of the grim details.

The sales tax rises to 6% from 5% in Hampton Roads and populous Northern Virginia and to 5.3% everywhere else. The hated car tax (which Republicans once vowed to eliminate) rises to 4.3% from 3%, meaning a new $30,000 car or truck will come with a $1,290 tax bill. Then there’s a new 0.25% sales tax on homes in Northern Virginia, plus a new hotel tax.

More taxes, not surprisingly, will mean more spending.

Mr. McDonnell even cut an 11th-hour deal with Democrats over the expansion of Medicaid under ObamaCare. …Mr. McDonnell says the commission means Virginia won’t expand Medicaid as long as Republicans control the legislature, but wait until the hospital lobby gets done working the same Republicans who raised taxes.

The governor doubtlessly has made lots of friends with the interest groups that dominate Richmond, so he’ll have plenty of opportunities to cash in when he leaves office.

The state’s taxpayers, by contrast, won’t be so lucky. And now the GOP is now divided and dispirited and will face an uphill battle in this November’s elections.

This fiasco will haunt Republicans in a state that holds elections in November. Probable Democratic nominee for Governor Terry McAuliffe endorsed the bill knowing it erases any GOP advantage on taxes and spending. Mr. Cuccinelli, the likely Republican nominee, opposed the bill but must now find a way to rally a splintered GOP and demoralized conservatives. At least Republicans can erase Mr. McDonnell’s name as a national candidate or VP choice in 2016.

I don’t lose a lot of sleep worrying about Republican political prospects, but I am irked that politicians are taking more of my money for their vote-buying schemes.

To add insult to injury, I’m not rich, so I don’t have the ability to directly benefit from tax competition by moving to a zero-income-tax state such as Florida or Texas.

And moving to Maryland or DC would be jumping out of the fiscal frying pan and into the tax fire, so that’s also not an option.

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Corporate Jet Loopholes, Depreciation, and Common-Sense Tax Policy

I’m not a fan of loopholes in the tax code.

I’ve complained about the number of pages in the tax code, the number of provisions in the tax code, and I’ve even groused about the rising number of pages in the instruction manual for the 1040 tax form.

And I’ve specifically come out against tax preferences for ethanol, housing, municipal bonds, charity, and state and local taxes.

But just as you don’t necessarily know whether someone is tall or short without knowing the average height of a population, you can’t automatically identify loopholes without first defining an ideal tax system. In other words, you need a benchmark (referred to as “the tax base” or “taxable income”) in order to measure what’s a loophole.

Unfortunately, that’s not an easy task because there are two competing visions of the ideal benchmark. I’ve addressed this issue previously, in this post on the “tax expenditure con job,” but let’s dig into the weeds a bit.

1. Those on the left, including the Joint Committee on Taxation, use what is sometimes called the “Haig-Simons” definition of a tax base. Also known as the “comprehensive income tax base,” this system assumes that there should be double taxation of income that is saved and invested (as shown by this startling chart). Another way of saying this is that the Haig-Simons approach assumes the government should tax income plus changes in the value of assets. Moreover, the Haig-Simons system assumes “worldwide taxation” and that businesses can’t deduct investment costs as they occur.
2. Those on the right, by contrast, support what is generally called “consumption-based” taxation. This doesn’t mean a tax collected at the cash register (though a national sales tax is an example of a tax with a “consumption base”). Instead, it simply refers to a system where income is taxed only one time. So, for example, a flat tax is a consumption-base tax since income is taxed only one time as it is earned, just as a national sales tax is a consumption-base tax since income is taxed only one time as it is spent. Moreover, a consumption-base system assumes “territorial taxation” and that business expenses should be deductible in the year the money changes hands.

While some features of the tax code – such as the healthcare exclusion – are loopholes according to both the Haig-Simons system and the consumption-base system, you get a divergence of opinion in key areas.

a) In a consumption-base world, there’s no double taxation and the capital gains tax therefore doesn’t exist. But from the perspective of the Haig-Simons tax base, the fact that capital gains are taxed at 23.8 percent instead of 39.6 percent is characterized as a loophole.

b) In a consumption-base world, there’s no double taxation and all savings gets the equivalent of IRA or 401(k) treatment. But from the perspective of Haig-Simons tax base, IRAs and 401(k)s are loopholes.

c) In a consumption-base world, there’s territorial taxation and no attempt to impose tax on income earned (and subject to tax) in other countries. But the Haig-Simons tax base assumes “worldwide taxation,” which means that “deferral” is a loophole rather than a way of mitigating a discriminatory penalty.

So why am I getting into boring details on this wonky issue? In part, because it helps people understand that tax reform is not just a matter of having a low tax rate. It’s also very important to define income correctly.

But I also think some background knowledge is necessary to explain why the White House is blowing smoke when they relentlessly demagogue against “corporate jets” as part of their never-ending campaign for class-warfare tax policy.

Let’s examine some excerpts from an ABC News report.

Listening to the White House, you’d think the key to averting the across-the-board spending cuts (the dreaded “sequester”) set to in place on March 1 is closing the tax break for owners of private jets. …Carney has brought up the corporate jet tax break at every single briefing this week. Listening to the White House, you might think that the “balanced” Democratic plan to avert the spending cuts would close that loophole for private jets. But you would be wrong. The Senate Democratic plan – which has been endorsed by the White House and is, in fact, the only Democratic plan actively under consideration right now – doesn’t touch corporate jets. …The tax break…allows the owners of private jets to depreciate their airplanes over five years instead of the standard seven years for commercial airplanes.

I don’t want you to focus on the demagoguery or the potential hypocrisy. Instead, consider the final sentence of the excerpt.

It turns out that the supposed “loophole” is really a penalty from a consumption-base perspective. If a company purchases a jet for $20 million, they should be able to deduct – or expense – that $20 million when calculating that year’s taxable income (after all, what is profit other than total revenue minus total costs?).

A sensible tax system defines profit as total revenue minus total costs – including purchases of private jets

But today’s screwy tax code forces them to wait five years before fully deducting the cost of the jet (a process known as depreciation). Given that money today has more value than money in the future, this is a penalty that creates a tax bias against investment (the tax code also requires depreciation for purchases of machines, structures, and other forms of investment).

Anyhow, because the tax bias imposes a five-year wait rather than a seven-year wait, the Obama White House would like us to believe that companies are getting some sort of egregious loophole.

Nonsense. In a good tax regime, companies should be able to deduct expenses in the year they are incurred. The fact that they have to wait five years is a penalty. But the White House wants us to perceive this penalty as a loophole or subsidy because it could be even more onerous.

By the way, if we’re worried about actual subsidies that benefit corporate jets, Tim Carney’s already explained that we should focus on the cronyists at the Export-Import Bank. And I heartily agree.

P.S. Defining the right “tax base” doesn’t imply anything about tax rates. You can have a so-called progressive rate structure or a single rate with either the Haig-Simons system or a consumption-base system.

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The New York Times Calls (again) for Higher Taxes on Middle-Class Americans

All statists want much bigger government, but not all of them are honest about how to finance a Greek-sized welfare state.

The President, for instance, wants us to believe that the rich are some sort of fiscal pinata, capable of generating endless amounts of tax revenue.

Using IRS tax data, I’ve shown that this is a very inaccurate assumption. And I’ve also used IRS data to show the President that there are big Laffer-Curve effects when you try to rape and pillage high-income Americans.

Heck, even the Europeans have realized that you can only squeeze so much blood from that stone.

Notwithstanding the misleading rhetoric from the Obama Administration, there are some honest folks on the left who understand and acknowledge that you can’t have bigger government unless you put ordinary people on the chopping block.

• The New York Times endorsed higher taxes on the middle class in 2010.
• The then-House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer also gave a green light that year to higher taxes on the middle class.
• In 2012, MIT professor and former IMF official Simon Johnson argued that the middle class should pay more tax.
• The Washington Post also called for higher taxes on the middle class last year, as did Vice President Joe Biden’s former economist.
• A New York Times columnist also called for broad-based tax hikes on the middle class tin 2012.
• Last year, a Senior Fellow from Demos argued for higher taxes on all Americans, specifically middle class.

The New York Times seems really fixated on screwing Joe Lunchbucket. Here are some excerpts from an editorial in today’s paper.

…new taxes on high-income Americans are a matter of necessity and fairness; they are also a necessary precondition to what in time will have to be tax increases on the middle class. …As the economy strengthens and the population ages, more taxes will be needed from further down the income scale… But there will never be a consensus for more taxes from the middle class without imposing higher taxes on wealthy Americans, who have enjoyed low taxes for a long time.

What’s particularly interesting about this editorial is that the New York Times is very explicit about political strategy. They support more class-warfare taxes in order to set the stage for higher taxes on the middle class.

We can’t say we haven’t been warned.

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The Laffer Curve KO’s the IRS

What’s the revenue-maximizing tax rate?

Since I’m interested in the growth-maximizing tax rate instead, I don’t think that’s even a legitimate question.

That being said, it seems like everyone – both on the left and on the right – should agree that it makes no sense to set tax rates so high that the government loses revenue.

That implies, after all, that the tax system is so punitive that the revenue-raising impact of the higher tax rate is more than offset by the revenue-losing impact of lower taxable income.

But if you ask five economists to identify the revenue-maximizing point, you’ll probably get nine answers.

But one thing we can say for sure is that the revenue-maximizing tax rate on Manny Pacquiao is less than 39.6 percent.

Here are some details from Yahoo Sports.

Manny Pacquiao’s chief adviser insisted Monday that the Filipino superstar’s preference is for his next bout – a fifth fight against Juan Manuel Marquez – to take place away from Las Vegas, with the off-shore Chinese gambling resort of Macau emerging as the “favorite.” The Dec. 8 fight between Manny Pacquiao and Juan Manuel Marquez was held at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. (AP)Michael Koncz told Yahoo! Sports that the 39.6 percent tax rate Pacquiao would face if he were to fight again in the U.S. makes a fall bout in Las Vegas “a no go.” Promoter Bob Arum…said Pacquiao would not have to pay taxes if the fight takes place in casinos in either Singapore or Macau. “Manny can go back to Las Vegas and make $25 million, but how much of it will he end up with – $15 million?” Arum said. “If he goes to Macau, perhaps his purse will only be $20 million, but he will get to keep it all, so he will be better off.”

This is just an isolated example, to be sure, but I’ve already shared IRS data confirming that the rich have tremendous control over the timing, level, and composition of their income.

And just as is the case with athletes like Pacquiao (and soccer players), wealthy investors and entrepreneurs also have the ability to take advantage of tax competition by shifting economic activity to jurisdictions with better tax policy.

Indeed, these are some of the reasons why upper-income taxpayers wound up paying more money to the IRS after Reagan cut the top tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent.

Sadly, Barack Obama seems to have a hard time grasping the relationship between tax rates, taxable income, and tax revenue – even though I prepared a simple lesson to help him understand the that there’s not a simplistic linear relationship.

So maybe this short video will help him understand the basic concept of the Laffer Curve.

Then again, maybe the President understands, but just doesn’t care. He’s already stated, after all, that he favors more punitive tax policies even if the government doesn’t collect any extra revenue.

P.S. Just in case you’re not convinced by some IRS data and the experiences of a boxer, there is lots of empirical evidence for the Laffer Curve.

• Such as this study by economists from the University of Chicago and Federal Reserve.
• Or this study by the IMF, which not only acknowledges the Laffer Curve, but even suggests that the turbo-charged version exists.
• Or this European Central Bank study showing substantial Laffer-Curve effects.
• Or this research from the American Enterprise Institute about the Laffer Curve for the corporate income tax.
• Or the United Nations admitting that the Laffer Curve limits the feasible amount of taxes that can be imposed.

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The Great TCI Anti-VAT Mutiny of 2013

The value-added tax is a pernicious levy.

It’s basically a hidden form of national sales tax, imposed every time a transaction occurs at any stage of the production process.

But what irks me about the VAT is not its design (indeed, it shares some key characteristics with the flat tax). What gets me agitated about the VAT is the fact that politicians always seem to treat the tax as a way of financing a larger burden of government spending.

That’s certainly what we’ve seen in Europe, both when the VAT was first implemented beginning about 45 years ago and more recently when many nations increased the rate to finance bailouts and faux Keynesian stimulus.

With this background, you’ll understand why I get excited whenever I see signs of anti-VAT fervor. Even in tiny and largely unknown British colonies such as the Turks and Caicos Islands.

Here are some excerpts from Tax-News.com.

On February 1, 2013, at a lengthy House of Assembly session, the newly elected Government backed a bill proposed by the opposition to block the introduction of the 11% VAT from April. 16 members backed the measure, with just 2 in favor of proceeding with the implementation of VAT. Since the announcement that VAT would be introduced, Turks and Caicos citizens and business groups have vehemently contended that VAT is inappropriate for the islands and is being “forced through” by the interim Government, at the behest of UK authorities.

Not surprisingly, given the pervasive statism in London (where the VAT rate was recently boosted to 20 percent), the U.K. government is on the wrong side of the issue, demanding that the VAT be imposed.

Last month, the UK’s Minister for the Overseas Territories, Mark Simmonds, rebuffed a request from the Turks and Caicos Islands’ new Premier, Rufus Ewing, that the implementation of the islands’ new value-added tax regime be deferred to allow time for the development of an alternative. He suggested that the islands review the regime in April 2014, a year after it is implemented.

The suggestion to “review” the VAT after one year is laughable. Sort of like asking someone to review their heroin usage after a year of addiction.

For those of us anchored in the real world, the only way to stop the VAT is to block it from ever being implemented. Because once politicians get hooked on a new source of revenue, there’s almost no hope of getting them to voluntarily relinquish those funds.

All that being said, I’m not a fan of the TCI government. Just like happened in the Cayman Islands (discussed in detail here), the government of the Turks and Caicos Islands spent too much money and put too many people on the payroll and paid them above-market wages (gee, sound familiar?).

They got in financial trouble, which led to intervention by the mother country.

But getting help from England on fiscal policy is like asking for dining advice from Hannibal Lecter.

The old TCI government was guilty of overspending, and now the U.K. thinks the answer is overtaxing.

I hope the new TCI government is able to somehow thwart the VAT. But if they’re serious about stopping that odious tax, then they better take some genuine steps to restrain government spending and prune bureaucratic expenses.

I’m not sure what lesson we have for the United States, other than the fact that we should fight to our last breaths before we let this awful tax get imposed in America. This video has more details.

P.S. Here are three very good cartoons on the VAT (here, here, and here).

P.P.S. Richard Teather of Bournemouth University in the United Kingdom has produced an independent report on whether a value-added tax is appropriate for TCK.

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If Spending Is Capped So It Grows at the Rate of Inflation, the Budget Is Balanced in 2018

New 10-year budget projections have been released by the Congressional Budget Office, so it’s time once again for me to show how easy it is to balance the budget with modest spending restraint (though never forget that our goal should be smaller government, not fiscal balance).

• I first did this back in September 2010, and showed that we could balance the budget in 10 years if federal spending was limited so it grew by 2 percent annually.
• I repeated the exercise in January 2011 after new CBO numbers were released, and re-confirmed that a spending cap of 2 percent would eliminate red ink in just 10 years.
• In August of that year, following the release of the CBO Update, I showed again that the budget could be balanced in just a decade by limiting spending so it climbed by 2 percent per year.
• Back in January after CBO produced the new Economic and Budget Outlook, I crunched the numbers again and showed how a spending cap of 2 percent would balance the budget over 10 years.
• Since even a weak economic recovery generates more revenue, the CBO numbers from last August showed that the budget could be balanced if spending was restrained so that it grew by 2.5 percent per year for a 10-year period.

The new numbers show the path is even easier. The budget can be balanced in 5 years if spending grows at the rate of inflation (the green line) and in just 10 years if spending is limited so that it grows 3.4 percent annually (the light blue line).

Today’s path to balance is even easier because of better 10-year growth numbers, and also because of projections that the recent tax increase will generate more revenue (the dark blue line shows total projected revenue over the decade).

Because of Laffer Curve reasons, I’m skeptical about whether all that additional revenue will materialize, so both the chart and the underlying numbers are a bit speculative.

But what they do show is that the nation’s fiscal problems easily can be addressed with some modest spending restraint. Sort of a practical application of Mitchell’s Golden Rule.

Here’s my video explaining the importance of spending restraint. The numbers are now outdated, but the concept is still completely relevant.

As noted at the beginning of the post, I’m much more concerned about reducing the burden of government spending. Balancing the budget is a secondary concern.

That’s why we should impose genuine budget cuts and not just restrain the growth of spending. That would also make it easier to adopt good tax policy.

Maybe, in a parallel universe where politicians are motivated by liberty, we can even get entitlement reform and a flat tax.

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Exposing the Absurdity of Washington’s Anti-Sequester Hysteria

To save America from the supposedly “savage” and “draconian” budget cuts caused by sequestration, President Obama has instead asked Congress to approve an alternative fiscal package containing additional tax increases.

So why is the sequester so bad? Does it slash the budget by 50 percent? Does it shut down departments, programs, and agencies?

Sounds good to me. We need to reduce the burden of government spending, so some genuine budget cuts would be very desirable.

The pro-spending lobbies in Washington certainly are acting as if spending would be “cut to the bone.” As documented by my colleague Tad DeHaven, they’re claiming horrible things will happen.

So what’s the real story? Well, the Congressional Budget Office today released its annual Budget and Economic Outlook, and Tables 1-1 and 1-5 allow us to see the “brutal” impact of the sequester.

As you can see from this chart, the sequester will “cut” spending so much that the budget will grow by “only” $2.4 trillion over the next 10 years.

Rather anticlimactic, I admit. No widows dying in snowbanks. No blood flowing in the streets.

So you can let the women and children back in the room. It turns out that all the hyperbole and hysteria about the sequester is based on the dishonest Washington definition of a budget cut – i.e., when spending doesn’t rise as fast as projected in some artificial baseline.

Yes, some parts of the budget are disproportionately impacted, such as defense. But even the defense budget climbs over the 10-year period and the United States will still account for close to 50 percent of global military outlays when the dust settles.

The bottom line is that there’s no reason to worry about the sequester and there’s certainly no reason to go along with Obama’s plan to replace the sequester with a tax-heavy budget deal.

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Is Anybody Surprised that the First Bottle of Tax Booze Didn’t Cure the Spendaholics?

Those of you old enough to remember the Cold War may remember something called the Brezhnev Doctrine. This was the rule concocted by the Soviet tyrants that basically said a nation could never regain freedom once it fell under communist rule.

In my simple way of looking at such matters, this rule translated into: “What’s mine is mine, what’s yours is negotiable.”

We have a somewhat similar situation with American fiscal policy. The proponents of bigger government have openly stated that their top goal – both from a policy perspective and political perspective – is higher taxes.

But what they haven’t told us is that there is no limit on the amount of additional revenue they want to confiscate from people in the productive sector of the economy.

In other words, “What’s yours is yours until they decide to grab more.”

So even though President Obama just got his class-warfare tax increase on the so-called rich (as well as a big tax hike on all American workers), is seems all that did is whet his appetite for even more of our money.

Here’s the key excerpt from The Hill.

President Obama insisted Sunday that additional tax revenue will need to be part of future deficit deals… “There is no doubt we need additional revenue…,” he said.

Gee, what a surprise. It appears you don’t cure an alcoholic by giving him more to drink. Likewise, you don’t rein in the spending demands of the political class by giving them more revenue.

Unsurprisingly, the Senate Majority Leader also thinks there should be more money in Washington and less in your pockets. Here are a couple of relevant passages from Politico.

Any budget deal in Congress must “without any question” include revenue, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said in an interview aired Sunday. …To lift the sequester, Reid said, the deal needs to include new revenue.

It’s worth noting that Obama and Reid aren’t randomly expressing their addiction to other people’s money. These statements are an explicit signal that they will not allow any changes to fiscal policy unless they get to further fleece the American people.

So what are the practical implications?

• Some lawmakers want to tinker with the sequester because the defense budget is disproportionately impacted. That can’t happen without giving Obama and Reid a tax hike. So the only solution is to go with the sequester.
• Some lawmakers want to reform entitlements to avert America’s long-run fiscal crisis. That can’t happen without giving Obama and Reid a tax hike. So the only solution is to wait for 2017 (particularly since Obama and Reid doubtlessly would insist on the wrong types of entitlement changes that would simply kick the can down the road).

But those are short-term considerations.

The real moral of the story is that we have a serious spending problem in Washington. In theory, higher taxes could be the price to get needed reforms to control the size of government. But in reality, higher taxes are always a substitute for good fiscal policy.

So accept the fact that gridlock is the best possible outcome for the next four years and don’t get seduced into a tax hike. Unless, of course, you want to make it easier for the crowd in Washington to increase the burden of government spending.

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Rather than Helping the Poor, Higher Tax Rates Redistribute Rich People

Daniel Hannan is a member of the European Parliament from England. He is one of the few economically sensible people in that body, as demonstrated in these short clips of him speaking about tax competition and deriding the European Commission’s corrupt racket.

And as you can see from his latest article in the UK-based Telegraph, he’s also very wise on issues of class warfare tax policy and Laffer Curve responses to punitive taxation.

France’s richest man, Bernard Arnault, is shifting his fortune to Belgium. Gérard Depardieu, the country’s greatest actor (figuratively and literally)is moving to Russia. And, if rumours are to be believed, Nicolas Sarkozy is planning a new career in London. That’s the problem with very high taxes – they don’t redistribute wealth; they redistribute people. …the rich don’t sit around waiting to be taxed. …many financiers can open their businesses abroad simply by opening their laptops. The result of a hike in tax rates is thus often a fall in tax revenue – which means, of course, that the rest of us end up paying more to cover the share of the departed plutocrats.

Hannan understands that rich people have considerable control over the timing, level, and composition of their income, which is precisely why there are powerful Laffer Curve effects when politicians go after the so-called rich (as I tried to explain in a lesson for President Obama).

But Hannan also makes a good point about complexity.

The complexity of a tax system is every bit as damaging to competitiveness as the overall tax rate. The more convoluted the tax code becomes, the more time we have to take off work to comply with it.Tolley’s Tax Handbook is now 11,500 pages long, twice what it was when Gordon Brown became chancellor, and the number of tax lawyers has increased commensurately. …The very wealthy, who can afford ingenious tax advisers and high upfront fees, turn this complexity to their advantage, sheltering their assets in various pockets unintentionally created by government schemes. Again, the rest of us then have to pay more to make up their portion.

Since we have 72,000 pages of complexity and corruption in our tax code, I can’t help but comment that the Brits are lucky that they “only” have 11,500 pages (assuming, of course, that the methodology in both page counts is similar).

In both cases, though, Hannan is right in stating that complexity benefits those who can hire lots of tax lawyers, financial planners, accountants, and other tax advisers.

The answer, of course, is a flat tax. Hannan doesn’t explicitly embrace that option, but he does write about the benefits of lower rates and fewer distortions.

There is one other point he makes that is worth noting. He cites a former Labour Party politician who explicitly was willing to have less prosperity if it meant more equality.

You might, of course, agree with Roy Hattersley, who once said that he’d rather have 5% more equality than 10% more prosperity. That is a respectable position, but at least be honest about it. Wealth taxes create more equal, but poorer societies.

Margaret Thatcher eviscerated that destructive mentality many years ago in this famous speech, but this is an area where proponents of limited government need to do more work.

There are plenty of well-meaning people who mistakenly think the economy is a fixed pie. If we want to help them understand the benefits of small government and free markets, we need to come up with more effective ways of educating them about the important implications of even small differences in economic growth.

I try to make that point in this PBS interview, but I suspect these charts comparing North Korea and South Korea and comparing Chile, Argentina, and Venezuela are much more compelling.

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California’s One-Man Laffer Curve

I’ve already condemned the foolish people of California for approving a referendum to raise the state’s top tax rate to 13.3 percent.

This impulsive and misguided exercise in class warfare surely will backfire as more and more productive people flee to other states – particularly those that don’t impose any state income tax.

We know that people cross state borders all the time, and it’s usually to travel from high-tax states to low-tax states. And we’ve already seen some evidence that the state’s new top tax rate is causing a loss of highly valued jobs.

This mobility of labor and talent is one of the reasons why California is going to get a very painful lesson about the Laffer Curve.

Politicians (with help from short-sighted voters) can raise tax rates. But they can’t force people to earn income.

Now it looks like one of the super-rich is fed up and looking to make himself less vulnerable to California’s kleptocrats.

Here are some excerpts from an ESPN story.

Phil Mickelson said he will make “drastic changes” because of federal and California state tax increases. …The 42-year-old golfer said he would talk in more detail about his plans — possibly moving away from California or even retiring from golf… Mickelson said. “I’ll probably talk about it more in depth next week. …There are going to be some drastic changes for me because I happen to be in that zone that has been targeted both federally and by the state and, you know, it doesn’t work for me right now. So I’m going to have to make some changes.” …”If you add up all the federal and you look at the disability and the unemployment and the Social Security and the state, my tax rate’s 62, 63 percent,” said Mickelson, who lives in Rancho Santa Fe. “So I’ve got to make some decisions on what I’m going to do.”

He’s actually overstating his marginal tax rate. I suspect it’s closer to 50 percent.

California politicians got too greedy and now they may get 13.3 percent of nothing

But so what? It’s still outrageous and immoral that government is confiscating one-half of the income he generates.

Heck, medieval serfs were virtually slaves, yet they only had to give at most one-third of their output to the Lord of the Manor.

I hope he’s serious and that he escapes from the Golden State’s fiscal hell-hole.

And if he does, what will it mean for California government finances?

Well, here’s what Wikipedia says about his income.

According to one estimate of 2011 earnings (comprising salary, winnings, bonuses, endorsements and appearances) Mickelson was then the second-highest paid athlete in the United States, earning an income of over $62 million, $53 million of which came from endorsements.

Now let’s bend over backwards to make sure we’re not exaggerating. Notwithstanding the Wikipedia estimate, let’s assume his annual taxable income will be only $40 million for 2013 and beyond.

With a 10.3 percent top tax rate, California would collect about $4.12 million per year. And Mickelson apparently thought that was tolerable.

But guess how much the politicians will collect if he leaves the state? I’m tempted to say zero, but they may still get some revenue because of California-based tournaments and other factors.

Find Phil Mickelson

I can say with great confidence, however, that California won’t collect $5.32 million, which is probably what the politicians assumed when they seduced voters into approving the 13.3 percent tax rate.

After all, that assumption only works if Mickelson is willing to be a fiscal slave for Jerry Brown and the rest of the crooks in Sacramento.

As such, I’ll also state with certainty that California’s politicians won’t collect $4 million if Mickelson leaves for another state. Or $3 million. Or $2 million. Or even $1 million.

The best they can hope for is that Mickelson decides to stay in the state while also reducing his taxable income. In that scenario, the politicians might still pocket a couple of million dollars.

Not as much as they collected when the tax rate was 10.3 percent, and far less than what they erroneously assumed they would get with a 13.3 percent rate.

Regardless of Mickelson’s ultimate decision, California is going to be in trouble because most rich people – whether they’re golfers, celebrities, investors, or entrepreneurs – have considerable control over the timing, level, and composition of their income. And they can afford to move.

This is why you don’t want to be on the downward-sloping portion of the Laffer Curve. Everyone’s a loser, both politicians and taxpayers.

So we’re going to see the Laffer Curve get revenge on California and I’ll be first in line to say “serves you right, you blood-sucking parasites.”

If you want more information, here’s my video on the Laffer Curve.

And if you want to watch the full three-part series, they’re all included in this Laffer Curve lesson that I put together for the President. He seems oblivious to real-world evidence, but others may find the information useful.

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Just Because California Is Terrible, that Doesn’t Mean Texas Is Perfect

Texas is in much better shape than California. Taxes are lower, in part because Texas has no state income tax.

No wonder the Lone Star State is growing faster and creating more jobs.

And the gap will soon get even wider since California voters recently decided to drive away more productive people by raising top tax rates.

But a key challenge for all governments is controlling the size and cost of bureaucracies.

Government employees are probably overpaid in both states, but the situation is worse in California, as I discuss in this interview with John Stossel.

But being better than California is not exactly a ringing endorsement of Texas fiscal policy.

A column in today’s Wall Street Journal, written by the state’s Comptroller of Public Accounts, points out some worrisome signs.

As the chief financial officer of the nation’s second-largest state, even I have found it hard to get a handle on how much governments are spending, and how much debt they’re taking on. Every level of government is piling up incredible bills. And they’re coming due, whether we like it or not. Even in low-tax Texas, property taxes have risen three times faster than the inflation rate and four times faster than our population growth since 1992. Our local governments, meanwhile, more than doubled their debt load in the last decade, to more than $7,500 in debt for every man, woman and child in the state. In Houston alone, city-employee pension plans are facing an unfunded liability of $2.4 billion. But too many taxpayers aren’t given the information they need to make informed decisions when they vote debt issues. Recently I spent several months holding about 40 town-hall meetings with Texans across our state. Each time, I asked the attendees if they could tell me how much debt their local governments are carrying. Not a single person in a single town had this information.

In other words, taxpayers need to be eternally vigilant, regardless of where they live. Otherwise the corrupt rectangle of politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists, and interest groups will figure out hidden ways of using the political process to obtain unearned wealth.

P.S. The second-most-viewed post on this blog is this joke about Texas, California, and a coyote, so it must be at least somewhat amusing. If you want some Texas-specific humor, this police exam is amusing and you’ll enjoy this joke about the difference between Texans, liberals and conservatives. And if you want California-specific humor, this Chuck Asay cartoon hits the nail on the head.

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Based on a Review of Studies Looking at the Impact of Taxes on Growth, Academic Research Gives Obama a Record of 0-23-3

How do you define a terrible team? No, this isn’t going to be a joke about Notre Dame foolishly thinking it could match up against a team from the Southeastern Conference in college football’s national title game (though the Irish win the contest for prettiest make-believe girlfriends).

I’m asking the question because a winless record is usually a good indication of a team that doesn’t know what it’s doing and is in over its head.

With that in mind, and given the White House’s position that class warfare taxation is good fiscal policy, how should we interpret a recent publication from the Tax Foundation, which reviews the academic research on taxes and growth and doesn’t find a single study supporting the notion that higher tax rates are good for prosperity.

None. Zero. Nada. Zilch.

Twenty-three studies found a negative relationship between taxes and growth, by contrast, while three studies didn’t find any relationship.

For those keeping score at home, that’s a score of 0-23-3 for the view espoused by the Obama Administration.

This new Tax Foundation report is also useful if you want more information to debunk the absurd study from the Congressional Research Service that claimed no relationship between tax policy and growth. Indeed, the TF report even explains that serious methodological flaws made “the CRS study unpublishable in any peer-reviewed academic journal.”

So what do we find in the Tax Foundation report?

…what does the academic literature say about the empirical relationship between taxes and economic growth? While there are a variety of methods and data sources, the results consistently point to significant negative effects of taxes on economic growth even after controlling for various other factors such as government spending, business cycle conditions, and monetary policy. In this review of the literature, I find twenty-six such studies going back to 1983, and all but three of those studies, and every study in the last fifteen years, find a negative effect of taxes on growth.

And what does this mean?

…results support the Neo-classical view that income and wealth must first be produced and then consumed, meaning that taxes on the factors of production, i.e., capital and labor, are particularly disruptive of wealth creation. Corporate and shareholder taxes reduce the incentive to invest and to build capital. Less investment means fewer productive workers and correspondingly lower wages. Taxes on income and wages reduce the incentive to work. Progressive income taxes, where higher income is taxed at higher rates, reduce the returns to education, since high incomes are associated with high levels of education, and so reduce the incentive to build human capital. Progressive taxation also reduces investment, risk taking, and entrepreneurial activity since a disproportionately large share of these activities is done by high income earners.

To be blunt, the report’s findings suggest the Obama White House is clueless about tax policy.

…there are not a lot of dissenting opinions coming from peer-reviewed academic journals. More and more, the consensus among experts is that taxes on corporate and personal income are particularly harmful to economic growth… This is because economic growth ultimately comes from production, innovation, and risk-taking.

Here’s my cut-and-paste copy of the table summarizing all the academic research.

So what’s the bottom line? The Tax Foundation report concludes with the following.

In sum, the U.S. tax system is a drag on the economy.  Pro-growth tax reform that reduces the burden of corporate and personal income taxes would generate a more robust economic recovery and put the U.S. on a higher growth trajectory, with more investment, more employment, higher wages, and a higher standard of living.

In other words, America would be more prosperous with a simple and fair system such as the flat tax.

Too bad the political elite is more focused on maintaining (or even exacerbating) a corrupt status quo, even if it means less prosperity for the nation.

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Americans Realize Washington Is the Problem, Support Cap to Control Spending

I periodically share polling data, in part because such information tells us what people think, but also because this type of research warns us where we need to focus our educational efforts and also gives us guidance on better ways to frame our message.

In recent months, for instance, I’ve gleefully noted that voters disagree with Paul Krugman on the economic impact of government spending.

But I also was shocked to see another poll that found French and Italians were more supportive of spending cuts than Americans.

Here’s some new polling data that seems very encouraging. Americans, by an overwhelming margin, think that Washington is causing serious harm to the nation.

But it’s important to look at this data dispassionately.

Maybe people merely object to gridlock, meaning that it would be a mistake to interpret these results as being a reflection of widespread libertarian sentiment.

So it’s important that advocates of freedom build upon these polling results to educate people about the risks of giving more money and power to a dysfunctional town.

The good news is that we do see significant skepticism about policies to expand the size and scope of the federal government.

I recently shared some data showing that most Americans wisely suspect that higher taxes would result in bigger government rather than less red ink.

I also found similar results in a Reason poll from 2011.

That same poll also found strong support for a limit on federal spending, which warms my heart since I’ve been trying to build support for a Swiss-style spending cap in America.

Here are some other encouraging pieces of polling data.

• More than two-to-one support for personal retirement accounts.
• Recognition that big government is the greatest danger to America’s future.
• An increasingly negative view of the federal government.
• More than eight-to-one support for less spending rather than higher taxes.
• Strong support for bureaucrat layoffs and/or entitlement reforms instead of higher taxes.
• Three-fourths of voters think the top tax rate should be no higher than 30 percent.
• And my favorite poll results are the ones showing that voters understand that the goal is less spending, not lower deficits.

But let me close by stating that our goal is to preserve the freedom we have and restore the liberties that we have lost.

Public opinion data is useful in that it tells us how people think and suggests ways to frame our message.

But it should never cause us to change our principles.

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Do Higher Tax Rates Hurt Growth?

Because of Obama’s class-warfare tax hike and additional tax increases by kleptocrats at the state level, many successful taxpayers will now lose more than 50 percent of any additional income they generate for the American economy.

I discuss the implications of this punitive tax policy in this CNBC interview.

Normally, this is the section where I highlight certain points I made, or bemoan the fact that I failed to mention an important fact or overlooked a key argument. Today, though, I want to address the do-taxes-impact-growth issue raised by Robert Frank.

More specifically, I want to debunk the Congressional Research Service study that he indirectly mentioned about two minutes into the segment. This is the report that asserted that it doesn’t matter if we impose high tax rates on investors, entrepreneurs, small business owners, and other “rich” taxpayers.

The results of the analysis suggest that changes over the past 65 years in the top marginal tax rate and the top capital gains tax rate do not appear correlated with economic growth. The reduction in the top tax rates appears to be uncorrelated with saving, investment, and productivity growth. The top tax rates appear to have little or no relation to the size of the economic pie.

The good news is that I don’t really need to debunk this CRS study because Steve Entin already has undertaken that unpleasant task. Writing for the Tax Foundation, Steve points out some rather fatal flaws in the CRS study.

The study makes no effort to determine the channels through which the tax changes ought to work to affect the economy, looks at the wrong measure of progress over the wrong time frame, and takes inadequate account of what other tax or economic events are occurring at the same time that might mask the results. …Other changes in taxes and other influences on the economy occurring at the same time can easily hide or counteract the effect of the top tax rate changes alone. It is often impossible to hold other things constant to allow one to see the impact of the single item one wants to assess. When these other influences are omitted from the model, the “missing variables” problem poisons the results. …one should look at the long-term change in the capital stock and the ultimate level of output, not the short-term rise in investment and the short-term change in the growth rate. If one looks only at the growth rate, and not at the level of GDP, one could conclude that the tax rate change has only a temporary benefit, when in fact it is permanently helpful. …Looking only at the amount of investment triggered in the year following the tax change misses the point. The same holds true in the opposite direction for a tax increase. It takes years to retire through attrition the excess capital made redundant by a tax increase. Looking only at the change in investment in the year after the tax cut, rather than the cumulative increase in the stock of capital over time, misses about 95 percent of the impact. You can’t predict this fall’s apple crop by counting the number of seedlings planted this spring. The CRS study omits important variables and poisons its results by not holding other factors constant. The variables it does examine are indirectly related to the relationship one should be studying, but the study does not follow them for long enough to get the whole picture. The study is as weak now as it was when it was first issued. Grade: F.

By the way, the Wall Street Journal pointed out that the author of the CRS study is not exactly dispassionate and neutral on these matters.

You won’t be surprised to learn that Mr. Hungerford has donated to the Obama campaign and Senate Democrats and worked as an economist at the White House budget office under Bill Clinton.

In closing, I did address the taxes-growth issue last year. I wasn’t debunking the CRS study, but I was exposing the errors in some very similar analysis by a writer for the New York Times.

Here’s the key passage from that post.

Yes, lower tax rates are better for economic performance, just as wheels matter for a car’s performance. But if a car doesn’t have an engine, transmission, steering wheel, and brakes, it’s not going to matter how nice the wheels are.

In other words, I was focusing on the fact that you can’t accurately and honestly examine tax policy without looking at the impact of other public policy issues.

I made that point in the CNBC interview, of course, though it’s unclear whether the message got through.

But I think the Clinton years and Bush years make my point. Bill Clinton was bad on tax policy in 1993, but was good on almost everything else (including a cut in the capital gains tax rate in 1997), whereas George W. Bush was okay on tax policy, but was bad on just about everything else.

So here are a couple of very simple questions.

1. Given what we now know about the increase in economic freedom under Clinton and the loss in economic freedom under Bush, is anybody surprised that the economy did better under Clinton than it did under Bush?
2. Does anybody think that the economy prospered under Clinton because he raised tax rates in 1993?
3. Does anybody think the economy was anemic under Bush because he lowered taxes in 2001 and 2003?

Depending on how you answer those questions, you may be qualified to work at the Congressional Research Service.

But if you understand that it’s important to look at the overall burden of government when measuring the impact of public policy on economic performance, then…well, I’m not sure whether I can promise anything other than you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that you’re intellectually honest and economically literate.

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The Never-Ending Class Warfare Crusade

The most-viewed post in the history of this blog is the “riding in the wagon” cartoon, but the post that has received the highest number of star-ratings is my video on class warfare.

I hope that means people share my concerns about the destructive and punitive mentality of so many of the kleptocrats in Washington.

Speaking of which, I debated one of those people on Bloomberg TV.

We got a decent amount of time, so a lot of topics were discussed. Here are the ones that merit a comment or two.

• Stealing all the income of the rich wouldn’t be enough to finance big government, though I should have used the three-month figure Mattie Duppler shared in her video indictment of Obama’s tax policy.
• There should be a cap so that nobody has to pay more than 25 percent of their income to government. I actually think that’s far too high, but polling data shows that this is a good way of framing the issue.
• Our fiscal problem is an excessive burden of government spending.
• Entitlement reform must be part of the answer.
• My opponent says higher taxes are patriotic, so I guess he belongs in the same category as Joe Biden and Francois Hollande. I guess we’ll call them the Three Stooges of statism.
• He also claims that it would be “fair” to go back to Bill Clinton’s top tax rate, but anybody want to bet that Michael will now call for even higher tax rates now that Obama succeeded in pushing the top rate to 39.6 percent?
• And we definitely know he doesn’t want to go back to Bill Clinton spending levels, so he wants the bad part of the 1990s but not the good part.
• Michael asserts that the United States is a low-tax nation, simply because we don’t tax as much as Europe. But, given the economic stagnation and lower living standards on the other side of the Atlantic, why would anybody want to mimic those failed welfare states.
• Unsurprisingly, I make my typical point about how we can balance the budget if we merely limit federal spending so that it grows 2.5 percent annually. In other words, Mitchell’s Golden Rule leads to good results.
• But I do agree with Michael that payroll taxes are too high (not that this is what he really thinks), though I should have echoed my January 2 post and said that those taxes should be reduced as part of genuine Social Security reform.

One point I failed to emphasize, though, is that class-warfare taxes won’t raise much revenue because of Laffer Curve effects. My comments about successful people escaping places like France and California touched on the issue, but I should have been much more explicit.

P.S. Was I right, or was I right, when I wrote that the real national title game was played on December 1? Such a tragedy that Georgia fell four yards short of the championship.

Since ‘Bama trounced Notre Dame by 28 points and edged Georgia by 4 points, I guess that means the Bulldawgs would have crushed the Irish by 24 points. Which would have been even more impressive than when we beat them 17-10 to win the 1980 national championship.

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Do Tax Cuts “Starve the Beast”?

There’s a debate among policy wonks about whether a no-tax-hike policy is an effective way of restraining the burden of government spending.

At the risk of over-simplifying, the folks who support the “starve the beast” theory argue that there are political and/or economic limits to government borrowing, so if you don’t let politicians tax more, you indirectly impose a cap on total spending (outlays = tax revenue + borrowing limit). We’ll call this the STB approach, for obvious reasons.

Critics of the theory, by contrast, say that a low-tax policy creates fiscal illusion by making government spending seem artificially cheap. After all, standard microeconomic analysis tells us that people will demand more of something when the perceived price is low (get a $1 of spending for 80 cents of tax = recipe for higher outlays). We’ll call this the “pay for government” approach, or PFG.

There’s almost surely some truth to both arguments, but the real issue if whether one effect is dominant – particularly in the long run. In other words, should supporters of small government fight tax increases? Or welcome them?

I’ve never studied this issue, but my gut instinct has been on the “STB” side of the debate. Here are a few of the reasons.

1. The politicians and interest groups that favor bigger government seem especially anxious to convince anti-tax lawmakers to change their minds. If nothing else, that suggests higher taxes would “feed the beast.” I suppose this could be a clever example of reverse psychology, but something tells me that Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi lack the cleverness and subtlety to pull off that kind of trick.
2. The people who pay for government generally aren’t the ones who reap the benefits. And if you keep increasing taxes on the “rich,” as Obama proposes, why would that affect the preferences of the rest of the population? Especially the huge chunk of the population that doesn’t pay income tax? Simply stated, the PFG approach incorrectly assumes that payers and payees are the same.
3. Casual empiricism certainly suggests that higher taxes are associated with more government, not less red ink. We see this, for instance, in the evidence I recently shared from Europe. Taxes have jumped in recent decades, but government debt also has climbed, which implies all additional revenue was spent, and then some.
4. Just look at the real world, specifically the fiscal crisis in nations such as Greece. At the risk of stating the obvious, the recent events in Europe confirm that there does come a point when governments lose the ability to borrow. So if taxpayers somehow can prevent politicians from seizing more money, there is a de facto limit on government spending.

Seems like the STB approach makes sense, but not everyone thinks my theoretical musings and generic observations are all that’s needed to settle an argument.

Particularly when there are some very sensible people on the other side. The late Bill Niskanen wrote in the 2006 Cato Journal that:

There are three major problems with the starve-the-beast argument: (1) it is not a plausible economic theory; (2) it is inconsistent with the facts; and (3) it has diverted attention away from the political reforms needed to limit government growth.

I fully agree with Bill that there should be much more focus on restraining the growth of government, so there’s no disagreement on his third point. I think he’s wrong on the first point because half the population no longer pays federal income tax and the top 20 percent pay the lion’s share, but that’s a bit of a judgment call.

What about the facts? Bill does some regression analysis for the 1949-2005 period, where he looks at the change in federal spending as a share of GDP and tests its relationship with the level of tax receipts as a share of GDP, the change in the unemployment rate, and the change in interest payments (the latter two variables are there to hopefully wash out the effects of the business cycle and to limit the analysis to the spending that lawmakers actually can control).

Bill crunches the numbers and concludes:

For no extended period did these estimates reveal a significant positive relation between the change in federal spending as a percent of GDP and the level of federal receipts as a percent of GDP, the necessary condition for the starve-the-beast hypothesis to be confirmed.

Moreover, Bill even found evidence for the PFG approach when he looked solely at the 1981-2005 period.

A 1 percentage point increase in current federal receipts as a share of GDP apparently reduces the change in current federal spending as a share of GDP by about one-seventh of 1 percent a year indefinitely.

I don’t doubt that Bill’s numbers are sound. Indeed, Cato Adjunct Scholar Michael New re-crunched the numbers for the Cato Journal in 2009 and produced similar findings, even when looking only at non-defense discretionary spending.

But I don’t find this research very compelling, and it’s not just because I’m from Austrian school, which sometimes has a reputation for being skeptical about empirical analysis.

Here are some reasons why I’m not convinced, and even the biggest quant jocks in the world should share these concerns.

1. Is 57 years of data (1949-2005) or 25 years of data (1981-2005) really enough to draw any sweeping conclusions, particularly when there could be many other factors involved? We would be very reluctant to jump to conclusions about the demand for Big Macs by interviewing a handful of customers and looking at just three variables.
2. More important, why didn’t Bill measure changes in spending against legislated tax changes? After all, lawmakers rarely pay attention to tax receipts as a share of GDP, and that variable rarely if ever is part of the lawmaking process. But politicians are acutely aware of whether they are voting to either reduce taxes or increase them.
3. And why use spending as a share of GDP rather than nominal spending or inflation-adjusted spending, particularly since Congress votes to spend specific amounts of money, not for outlays as a percent of economic output.
4. Equally perplexing, why didn’t Bill include lags in his research? I’m not aware of any STB proponents who claim that there’s an instantaneous impact. Instead, they argue that long-term limits on revenue can impose long-run restraints on spending.

To be fair, Bill was breaking some new ground. There was not a lot of empirical analysis to that point, so there was no right or wrong way to test the relationship between taxing and spending. Niskanen picked one approach, and it’s the role of subsequent researchers to poke and prod the results and contemplate alternatives.

That’s exactly what Christina Romer and David Romer did in their article that appeared in the 2009 Brookings Papers on Economic Activity. They investigated the data from several angles and decided it made the most sense to look at legislated tax changes and look at the long-run impact on spending. And, in an attempt to test the STB hypothesis, they looked solely at major tax bills designed to reduce government revenue.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that this gave them only four pieces of data – the Revenue Act of 1948, the Kennedy tax cuts, the Reagan tax cuts, and the 2001/2003 Bush tax cuts.

Setting aside this problem of limited data, what did Romer and Romer discover? Their headline results were similar to Niskanen’s.

The results provide no support for the hypothesis that tax cuts restrain government spending.

That sounds like bad news for STB advocates. But if you dig into their findings, you find out that the real problem is that politicians can’t resist the temptation to feed the beast.

…roughly three-quarters of a long-run tax cut is typically undone by legislated tax increases of various sorts within five years. …The fact that policymakers have been able to largely reverse tax cuts helps to explain why the cuts have not reduced spending.

In other words, you can’t starve the beast if you don’t maintain the diet.

Which is basically what other economists concluded when analyzing the work of Romer and Romer. Here’s what Steven Davis of the University of Chicago wrote.

…if it takes 5 years for a new policymaker to reverse a previous tax cut, so that it remains in effect for 10 years rather than 5, the starve-thebeast effect roughly doubles. In the extreme case where tax cuts cannot be reversed, government spending cuts must eventually absorb the entire adjustment. Clearly, then, tax cuts can produce large starve-the-beast effects if they are sufficiently sticky.

And Jeffrey Miron of Harvard University had a similar interpretation.

…concerns over letting children play with matches—that is, giving politicians access to increased tax revenue—are valid. Thus, advocates of small government would seem to have good reason to oppose tax increases.

All things considered, I think that STB is correct.

But I’ll close by returning to one of Bill Niskanen’s points. He warned that the focus on tax limitation was harmful because it “diverted attention away from the political reforms needed to limit government growth.”

I fully agree. Too many politicians focus on the easy – and more politically popular – job of fighting tax increases. But then they fail to support measures to restrain the burden of government spending.

Or, as we saw during the Bush years, they cut taxes and then opened the spigot on the spending side of the fiscal equation. No wonder Romer and Romer found that tax cuts generally are reversed. Tax cuts are difficult to maintain and preserve if they are simply gimmicks put in place by feckless politicians.

P.S. Another interesting tidbit is that Romer and Romer acknowledge the Laffer Curve.

We also find that the overall rebound in revenue exceeds the portion due to legislated changes. The key source of the nonlegislated change in revenue is almost certainly the effect of the tax cut on economic activity.

Too bad Christina Romer didn’t share that insight with the President when she was at the Council of Economic Advisers.

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The only Good Death Tax Is a Dead Death Tax

Just before the end of the year, I shared some fascinating research about people dying quicker or living longer when there are changes in the death tax. Sort of the ultimate Laffer Curve response, particularly if it’s the former.

But the more serious point is that the death tax shouldn’t exist at all, as I’ve explained for USA Today. And in this CNBC debate, I argue that it is an immoral form of double taxation.

You’ll see that Jared sneakily tries to include wealth taxes and death taxes together in order to accuse me of an inaccuracy, but the chart (click to enlarge) clearly shows that there are many jurisdictions that wisely avoid this anti-competitive levy.

The data is a few years old, but it’s clear that the United states has one of the most punitive death tax systems in the world.

Unfortunately, this is a good description of many parts of our tax system. We also have the world’s highest corporate tax rate and we also have very high tax burdens on dividends and capital gains (and the tax rates on both just got worse thanks to the fiscal cliff legislation).

But probably the key difference between us is that Jared genuinely thinks government should be bigger and that the tax burden should be much higher.

Though I will give him credit. Not only does he want class-warfare tax hikes, such as a higher death tax, but he openly admits he wants to rape and pillage the middle class as well.

Not surprisingly, I argue that more revenue in Washington will exacerbate the real problem of a federal government that is too big and spending too much.

P.S. Here’s a cartoon that is only funny if you don’t think too deeply about what it means.

P.P.S. You’ll notice that the video in this post has good quality, unlike the fuzzy resolution and discontinuous footage in clips I’ve recently shared. That’s because Cato’s expert on such things is back in the office and we’re no longer relying on my sub-par technical knowledge.

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Unhappy New Year from Washington

Here’s the class-warfare present that the clowns in Washington are giving us for the New Year.

According to some estimates, this “balanced approach” in this plan has $54 of tax increases for every $1 of spending cuts. That’s even worse than what’s been happening in Europe.

Keep in mind, though, that this assumes the dishonest Washington definition of a “cut,” which merely means spending doesn’t climb as fast as some artificial baseline that assumes an ever-rising burden of government spending.

But look at the bright side. Things have to get better from this point. Right? Maybe? Oh, wait, we still have the debt limit fight.

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What Was the Most Tragic Policy Development of 2012?

I’m not sure I could pick out a significant victory for human freedom in 2012.

Maybe I’m missing something, but the only good policy that’s even worth mentioning was the decision in Wisconsin to rein in the special privileges and excessive compensation for government workers.

But there definitely have been lots of sad developments.

The hard part is picking the most disappointing story.

1. Was it the craven decision by John Roberts to put politics before the Constitution and cast the deciding vote for Obamacare? This certainly could be the most disappointing event of the year, but technically it didn’t represent a step in the wrong direction since the Supreme Court basically gave a green light to unlimited federal power back in the 1930s and 1940s. The Obamacare case is best characterized as a failure to do the right thing. A very tragic decision, to be sure, but it maintained the status quo.

2. Was it the lawless decision by the Internal Revenue Service to impose a horrible regulation that forces American banks to put foreign law above U.S. law? This was a very bad development in the battle for tax competition, financial privacy, and fiscal sovereignty. But in the grand scheme of things, it’s just another in a long line of policies (such as FATCA) designed to increase the power of governments to impose and enforce bad tax policy.

3. Was it the Japanese government’s decision to double the value-added tax? I’m definitely not a fan of adding a VAT on top of the income tax, but Japan made that mistake years ago. The choice to increase the tax rate just shows why it’s dangerous to give politicians any new source of revenue. So this isn’t the worst policy development of 2012, particularly since the new Japanese government may suspend the tax hike.

4. Was it the delusional decision by 54 percent of California voters to impose a big, class-warfare tax hike? I thought the vote for Prop 30 was a very troubling development since it signaled that voters could be tricked into enacting class-warfare tax policy, even though they should have realized that more revenue for the state’s politicians would simply exacerbate the eventual fiscal collapse. But since I think this will be a learning experience on what not to do, I can’t put this at the top of my list.

5. Was it the French government’s punitive decision to impose a 75-percent top tax rate? This is a spectacularly misguided policy, and it’s already resulting in an exodus of entrepreneurs and other successful people. But just as I enjoy have California as a negative role model, I like using France as an example of bad policy. So it would be a bit hypocritical for me to list this as the worst policy of 2012.

6. Or was it the envy-motivated decisions by politicians in both Slovakia and the Czech Republic to replace flat tax systems with so-called progressive tax regimes? This is a strong candidate for the worst policy of the year. It’s very rare to see governments do the right thing, so it’s really tragic when politicians implement good reforms and later decide to reinstate class-warfare policies.

All things considered, I think this last option is the worst policy development of 2012. To be sure, I’m a bit biased since my work focuses on public finance issues and I’ve spent 20 years advocating for tax reform.

But I think there’s a strong case to be made, by anyone who believes in freedom, that politicians from Slovakia and the Czech Republic deserve the booby prize for worst public policy development of 2012.

Alvin Rabushka, sometimes referred to as the Father of the Flat Tax , summarizes the grim news.

On December 4, 2013, the center-left parliament of Slovakia modified the country’s historic 19% flat-rate tax…  Effective January 1, 2013, the income tax rate for corporations was raised from 19% to 23%, while that on individuals earning more than €39,600 (€1=$1.30) a year was raised to 25%, thereby creating two brackets of 19% and 25%. …On November 7, 2012, the lower house (Chamber of Deputies) of the national parliament approved a proposal to impose a second higher rate of 22% on annual income exceeding Czech Koruna (CZK) 100,000 ($5,200) per month.  President Vaclav Klaus signed the bill on December 22, 2012, which will take effect on January 1, 2013.

What’s especially depressing about these two defeats is that the supposedly right-wing parties deserve the blame.

Two nations filled with brain-dead conservative politicians

In Slovakia, all but one of the right-leaning parties in the old government decided to support the Greek bailout, leading to the collapse of the government and the election of a new socialist government that then sabotaged tax reform.

And in the Czech Republic, the current right-of-center government decided to scrap the flat tax for “fairness” reasons. I’m sure that will really be comforting to the Czech people as the economy suffers from less growth.

To understand what the people of those nations are losing, here’s my video on the flat tax.

Now for a bit of good news. There are still more than 25 flat tax jurisdictions in the world, including two of my favorite places – Hong Kong and Estonia.

So there are still some pockets of rationality. It’s just very unfortunate that the scope of human liberty is getting smaller every year.

P.S. The absolute worst thing that happened in 2012, if we look beyond public policy, was Georgia falling 4 yards short of beating Alabama in the Southeastern Conference Championship.

P.P.S. Speaking of sports, the best thing about 2012 occurred in Virginia Beach back in October.

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