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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Why GDP Data Shouldn’t Be Interpreted in Ways that Support Keynesian Spending

Fighting against statism in Washington is a lot like trying to swim upstream. It seems that everything (how to measure spending cuts, how to estimate tax revenue, etc) is rigged to make your job harder.

A timely example is the way the way government puts together data on economic output and the way the media reports these numbers.

Just yesterday, for instance, the government released preliminary numbers for 4th quarter gross domestic product (GDP). The numbers were rather dismal, but that’s not the point.

I’m more concerned with the supposed reason why the numbers were bad. According to Politico, “the fall was largely due to a drop in government spending.” Bloomberg specifically cited a “plunge in defense spending” and the Associated Press warned that “sharp government spending cuts” are the economy’s biggest threat in 2013.

To the uninitiated, I imagine that they read these articles and decide that Paul Krugman is right and that we should have more government spending to boost the economy.

But here’s the problem. GDP numbers only measure how we spend or allocate our national income. It’s a very convoluted indirect way of measuring economic health. Sort of like assessing the status of your household finances by adding together how much you spend on everything from mortgage and groceries to your cable bill and your tab at the local pub.

Wouldn’t it make much more sense to directly measure income? Isn’t the amount of money going into our bank accounts the key variable?

The same principle is true – or should be true – for a country.

That’s why the better variable is gross domestic income (GDI). It measures things such as employee compensation, corporate profits, and small business income.

These numbers are much better gauges of national prosperity, as explained in this Economics 101 video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity.

The video is more than two years old and it focuses mostly on the misguided notion that consumer spending drives growth, but you’ll see that the analysis also debunks the Keynesian notion that government spending boosts an economy (and if you want more information on Keynesianism, here’s another video you may enjoy).

The main thing to understand is that GDP numbers and the press coverage of that data is silly and misleading. We should be focusing on how to increase national income, not what share of it is being redistributed by politicians.

But that logical approach is not easy when the Congressional Budget Office also is fixated on the Keynesian approach.

Just another example of how the game in Washington is designed to rationalize and enable a bigger burden of government spending.

Addendum: I’m getting ripped by critics for implying that GDP is Keynesian. I think part of the problem is that I originally entitled this post “Making Sense of Keynesian-Laced GDP Reports.” Since GDP data is simply a measure of how national output is allocated, the numbers obviously aren’t “laced” one way of the other. So the new title isn’t as pithy, but it’s more accurate and I hope it will help focus attention on my real point about the importance of figuring out the policies that will lead to more output.

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