Ukraine’s Self-Imposed Statism Crisis

Using a comparison of Jamaica and Singapore, I recently argued that growth should trump inequality.

Simply stated, a growing economic pie is much better for poor people that incentive-sapping redistribution programs that trap people in dependency.

In other words, nations with smaller government and less intervention produce better results than nations with bloated governments and lots of meddling.

You see that relationship by comparing Jamaica and Singapore, and you also see it when examining other nations.

This is fresh in my mind since I just spoke at the Kyiv stop on the Free Market Road Show.

I told the audience about the reforms that Ukraine needs to strengthen economic performance, but I probably should have simply read what one expert recently wrote about Ukraine and Poland.

Here’s some of what Allister Heath had to say for London’s City A.M.

In the dreadful communist days, Ukraine and Poland used to be equally poor. The former was part of the Soviet Union, and Poland was one of the USSR’s satellite nations, belonging to the Warsaw pact. In 1990, both countries had roughly the same GDP per capita – their economies were eerily similar. A quarter of a century later, everything has changed… It’s a tale of two economic models, and a central reason why Russia – a waning world power desperate to cling on to its historic zone of influence – has felt able to bully Ukraine in such a shocking way. …The big difference is that Poland has pursued free-market policies, reducing the size of its state, introducing a strict rule of law and respect for property rights, privatising in a sensible way, avoiding the kleptocracy and corruption that has plagued regimes in Kiev, and embracing as much as possible Western capitalism.

Allister cites World Bank data to state that “Poland’s GDP per capita is now 3.3 times greater than Ukraine’s.”

I prefer the Angus Maddison data, which doesn’t show quite the same divergence. But if you look at the chart, you still see an amazing change in relative living standards in the two nations.

These numbers are shocking. Even with the Maddison data, Poland quickly passed Ukraine after the collapse of communism and now enjoys more than twice the level of per-capita output (and would probably have about three times as much per-capita GDP if the numbers were updated through 2014).

This doesn’t mean, by the way, that Poland is a pro-market paradise. As Allister explains, it’s not exactly Hong Kong or Singapore.

Poland’s tax system remains far too oppressive, the red tape is too strict and the bureaucracy still too redolent of the bad old days, the labour market is excessively regulated, parts of the population rejects elements of the new order and the country remains relatively poor, which explains why so many of its most ambitious folk have moved to the UK and elsewhere. But Poland has been one of the great success stories of the post-communist era, whereas Ukraine, tragically, has been one of the great failures.

To add some details, Freedom of the World ranks Poland as the 59th-freest economy in the world.

That’s not great, but it’s a lot better than Ukraine, which ranks only 126 out of 152 nations (behind even Russia!).

More important, Poland’s overall score was only 3.90 in 1990 and now it is up to 7.20.

Ukraine, by contrast, has only climbed to 6.16.

As I’ve already stated, their big problem is Putinomics. If they want to catch the West, they need free markets and small government.

P.S. If you examine the five major factors in Freedom of the World, Ukraine does best in the fiscal policy measure (in part because it has a flat tax!), but it has a horrible grade for monetary policy and doesn’t do well in the other areas.

P.P.S. On the issue of ethnic division in the country, Ukraine also would benefit from Swiss-style decentralization.

P.P.P.S. This chart comparing Argentina, Chile, and Venezuela also should be very persuasive to every open-minded person.

P.P.P.P.S. I visited the Maidan Square, which is where the recent revolution took place.

Here’s one of the main buildings that caught fire.

Here are pictures of those killed by (presumably) government snipers.

And here’s yours truly playing tourist.

It’s only an armored personnel carrier, but it got me thinking that maybe I should copy other Americans and get my own tank?

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A Case Study of Why Growth Trumps Inequality

There’s a new book by French economist Thomas Piketty, called “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,”  that supposedly identifies the Achilles’ Heel of the market economy.

Piketty argues that the rate of return to capital is higher than the economy-wide growth rate and that this will lead to untenable inequality as the rich grab a larger and larger share of the pie.

The solution, he claims, is confiscatory tax rates.

I’m not impressed.

Garett Jones of George Mason University has a very good review that casts doubt on Piketty’s hypothesis, but I also think Margaret Thatcher pre-debunked (if I’m allowed to make up a word) Piketty in this classic video from the House of Commons.

Simply stated, if you care about those with lower incomes, your goal should be faster growth.

If the economy is more prosperous, that means a rising tide that will lift all boats.

Piketty’s class-warfare prescription, by contrast, almost certainly will hurt the poor because of anemic growth, largely because higher tax rates will discourage productive behavior and exacerbate the tax code’s bias against saving and investment.

This means less capital and there should be no doubt about the strong link between the capital stock and worker compensation.

But I sometimes worry that this type of analysis sounds too theoretical for a lot of people and that perhaps it would be helpful to offer some tangible real-world evidence.

So it is quite fortuitous that I’m currently in Lithuania as part of the Free Market Road Show and that one of the participants is John Charalambakis, who teaches at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky.

In discussing the importance of economic growth, he explained that Singapore and Jamaica were economically similar in the early 1960s and then asked why they are so different today.

I have to admit that I was skeptical. I know Singapore is much richer today, but was it actually the case that it had the same level of per-capita GDP as Jamaica as recently as 50 years ago?

So I looked at the long-run data and John was exactly right. Take a look at this chart and you’ll understand why rapid growth caused by free markets is so vastly superior to the stagnation caused by statism.

I also included the world average for per-capita GDP so you can see that Singapore easily out-paced a lot of nations, not just Jamaica.

P.S. Keith Hennessey of the Hoover Institution writes that it makes more sense to think of the economy as a garden rather than a pie.

The pie metaphor for the economy is misleading and damaging, especially if you place a high priority on economic growth. …because dividing a pie is zero-sum, the flawed metaphor assumes that if one person’s slice grows larger, it comes at the expense of others. The inapt metaphor and its accompanying flawed logic lead one to conclude that when rich people have a larger share of a bigger economy, they do so “at the expense of” others lower on the income scale. …A flower garden is a better metaphor for looking at economic growth and income distribution. A flower’s growth depends on the individual characteristics of that type of flower and that particular seed. …the rapid growth of a sunflower at one end of the garden largely does not come at the expense of a struggling tulip at the other end. The sunflower may have advantages the tulip does not, even unfair ones, but the fast-growing sunflower is not “taking growth” from the slow-growing tulip. Flowers will grow at different rates for a variety of different reasons. Policymakers should focus their energies on absolute growth rates rather than relative ones.

Keith is correct.

Or, if he isn’t correct, it’s because the garden analogy doesn’t go far enough. If my neighbor is akin to a fast-growing sunflower, that presumably creates more wealth that will benefit me and the other tulips of the world.

In other words, I’m more likely to get richer if my neighbor gets richer.

But if you like the “pie” approach, then this pizza graphic is very appropriate because it gets across the message that the pie isn’t fixed in size.

P.P.S. For more on the inequality vs. growth issue, here’s my PBS debate.

P.P.P.S. The indispensable Tim Carney addresses the relationship between growth and inequality in this post.

P.P.P.P.S. Last but not least, here’s a post with some very sage analysis by George Will, Ronald Bailey, and Scott Winship.

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America Should Copy Europe…if the Goal Is Stagnation and Lower Living Standards

I periodically (some would say over and over and over again, though occasionally made more palatable by using humor and cartoons) warn that the United States should not become a European-style welfare state.

But I wonder whether I spend enough time explaining why this would be a bad idea.

After all, some people may think that you get more security and benefits with the European approach, so why not head in that direction. And these folks aren’t just pointing with approval to the Nordic nations. A writer for the New York Times actually thinks we should copy Italy.

So it is fortuitous that I’m currently in Poland as part of the Free Market Road Show and got to hear a speech by Prof. Leszek Balcerowicz of the Warsaw School of Economics (and former Deputy Prime Minister and head of Poland’s central bank).

Prof. Balcerowicz specifically compared economic performance in Western Europe and the United States, and the results are not very favorable to the welfare state.

Standard economic theory suggests that poor nations should catch up with rich nations. This “convergence theory” actually worked for the first few decades after World War II.

But as you can see from Prof. Balcerowicz’s chart, the convergence process slowed down after the welfare state began to expand in the 1960s. And after the pro-growth reforms of the Reagan years and Clinton years, the United States actually has opened up a bigger lead.

But maybe this chart doesn’t make things sufficiently clear. So I went to the OECD website and found the most recently available data on “average individual consumption,” which is a measure of actual living standards.

The United States is way ahead of Europe. The only three nations close to us include Norway, which has the good fortune of major oil fields, and Luxembourg and Switzerland, which have the advantage of being tax havens.

By the way, I also shared that data series last year, and you can also see some older AIC data in this 2010 post. But it doesn’t matter how you slice the numbers or when you look at the numbers, the United States has a big lead.

And that lead is now getting larger over time. Heck, the Europeans apparently think any growth – even anemic growth of less than 1 percent – is worth celebrating. Talk about low expectations!

This is why we don’t want to copy Europe. If higher living standards are a good idea (and they are!), then we should copy Hong Kong and Singapore, not France and Italy.

P.S. I’ve always thought that this comparison of the per-capita income of Swedes in Sweden and the per-capita income of folks of Swedish ancestry in the United States is very persuasive.

P.P.S. Leszek Balcerowicz has the honor of being named this year’s winner of the Cato Institute’s Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty. He’ll receive his award at a very nice black-tie dinner in New York City on May 21.

P.P.P.S. Speaking of swanky black-tie events, the PotL and I got dressed up last Thursday for the annual CIFA dinner in Monaco.

She’s a lucky girl, huh?

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Bragging about the Debt Brake…but Failing to Explain What Makes It Successful

What happens when you mix something good with something bad?

To be more specific, what happens when you have a big success story, like the spending cap in Switzerland that has dramatically slowed the growth of government, and then expect intelligent and coherent coverage by a government-run media outfit that presumably wants a bigger public sector?

Well, the answer is that you get a very muddled story.

Here’s some of what Swiss Info, which is part of the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation, wrote about that nation’s “debt brake.”

The mind-boggling…debt racked up by governments…has turned some heads towards Switzerland’s successful track record… Swiss voters approved a so-called ‘debt brake’ on federal public finances in 2001, which was put into operation in 2003. A decade later, the mountain of government debt – that soared to dangerous levels during the 1990s and early 2000s – has been reduced by CHF20 billion ($23 billion) from its 2005 peak. The ratio of debt to annual economic output (gross domestic product or GDP)…fell from 53% to 37% between 2005 and the end of 2012.

There’s nothing wrong with that passage. Indeed, you could almost say that Swiss Info was engaging in boosterism.

Moreover, the story points out that other nations have been going in the wrong direction while Switzerland was enjoying success.

…as Switzerland was chipping away at its mountain of debt, other countries were building theirs up. …Since the middle of 2007 public sector debt alone has soared 80% to $43 trillion, according to the Bank for International Settlements.

And the story even notes that other nations are beginning to copy Switzerland.

The Swiss debt brake is the perfect model for other countries to embrace… Germany applied its own version of the Swiss debt brake in 2009, followed by Spain and other European countries.  …“Switzerland came up with the blueprint for what I am sure will be the standard fiscal model of the future,” said Müller-Jentsch.

So why, then, do I think the story has a muddled message?

The answer is that there is no explanation of how the debt brake works and therefore no explanation of why it is a success.

A reader will have no idea, for instance, that the debt brake is actually a spending cap. Readers also will have no way of knowing that red ink has been controlled because the law properly focuses on limiting the growth of spending.

By the way, it wouldn’t have required much research for Swiss Info to include that relevant data. If you do a Google search for “Swiss debt brake,” the first item that appears is the column I wrote in 2012 for the Wall Street Journal.

In that piece, I explained that “Switzerland’s debt brake limits spending growth to average revenue increases over a multiyear period” and I added that “Before the law went into effect in 2003, government spending was expanding by an average of 4.3% per year. Since then it’s increased by only 2.6% annually.”

So why didn’t Swiss Info mention any of this very relevant information? Is it because it tilts to the left like other government-owned media outfits, and the journalists didn’t want to acknowledge that spending restraint is a successful fiscal policy?

I have no idea whether that’s the case, but there is a definite pattern. When I appear on PBS, the deck is usually stacked in favor of statism. Moreover, you won’t be surprised to learn that I’ve had similar experiences with government-run TV in France. And it goes without saying that the BBC in the United Kingdom also leans left (though at least they seem to believe in fair fights).

This video from Swiss Info is similarly vague. It’s a favorable portrayal, but people who watch the video won’t know how the debt brake works or why it has been successful.

P.S.  I don’t know the details about the German version of the debt brake, but it’s probably having some positive impact. The burden of government spending has not increased in that nation since 2009, at least when measured as a share of GDP. Though the Germans also weren’t as profligate as other nations (including the United States) in the years before they adopted a debt brake, so I’ll have to do more research to ascertain whether the German approach is as good as the Swiss approach.

P.P.S. In any event, the moral of the story is that good fiscal policy should be based on the Golden Rule of having government grow slower than the productive sector of the economy.

P.P.S. The Princess of the Levant and I continued our tour of the French Riviera. This photo is from Les Jardins Exotiques at Chateau d’Eze.

As part of my travels, I’ve learned that the unluckiest people in the world are from Menton and Roquebrune in France. That’s because they were part of Monaco until 1860.

So now, instead of enjoying an income tax of zero under Monegasque rule, they are part of France’s wretched fiscal system.

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America’s Most Clueless and Malicious Bureaucrats?

I’ve already suggested that subsidies for the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development are the most wasteful and counterproductive item in the federal budget. At least on a per-dollar-spent basis.

But what about a similar exercise for government red tape?

How would we come up with the worst regulation or the most counterproductive regulatory agency?

Thanks to the IRS, I have a strong candidate for the worst regulation, but if I had to pick the worst agency, I’d probably choose the horribly mis-named Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

These bureaucrats are infamous for bone-headed initiatives, such as:

The EEOC making it hard for trucking companies to weed out drunk drivers.

The EEOC telling a coffee shop it had too many attractive waitresses.

The EEOC forcing companies to make special accommodations for “pee-shy” employees.

The EEOC trying to give special employment rights to crooks.

We now have another item for the list.

The bureaucrats apparently like forcing companies to hire people who are more likely to rip off customers, though sometimes they find judges that aren’t nearly so tolerant.

Let’s see what the Wall Street Journal had to say about the “hilariously caustic rebuke of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.”

The EEOC had sued Kaplan, the for-profit education company, for using “the same type of background check that the EEOC itself uses,” as Judge Raymond Kethledge cheekily put it in the first sentence of his ruling in EEOC v. Kaplan. Despite its own practices, the Obama EEOC has made a cause of suing private companies because it claims that credit and criminal background checks discriminate against minorities.

But so-called disparate impact doesn’t mean discrimination.

Judge Kethledge eviscerated the EEOC like a first-day law student, writing that Kaplan had good reason to conduct credit checks… As for proving disparate racial impact, Judge Kethledge noted that “the credit-check process is racially blind; the [credit-check] vendor does not report the applicant’s race with her other information.” …The unanimous opinion was joined by Damon Keith, one of the most liberal judges on the entire federal bench. If government officials were accountable, EEOC General Counsel P. David Lopez would be fired for losing in such humiliating fashion.

But that’s just one crazy case.

The Wall Street Journal also opined about another strange example of EEOC quackery. The bureaucrats actually believe that stealing should be a protected disability.

Or, to be more technical, that stealing should be an acceptable behavior because of a supposed disability.

In September 2008, Walgreens employee Josefina Hernandez claims she had a hypoglycemia attack, grabbed a bag of potato chips off a shelf and ate them to boost her blood sugar. The drug-store company has a strict policy against “grazing” (i.e., stealing) and so a supervisor fired Ms. Hernandez, an 18-year veteran of the company. Three years later, the EEOC sued Walgreens for discrimination under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act and asked for punitive damages. …The ADA requires employees to request an accommodation for a medical condition, which Mrs. Hernandez never did. Nor does federal law sanction illegal activity—i.e., theft—under cover of a disability, as the Supreme Court made clear in 2003’s Raytheon v. Hernandez.

A green light for thievery from the EEOC

Seems like this should be an open-and-shut case. Which raises the interesting question of why the EEOC decided that the federal government should intervene on behalf of potato chip thievery.

So why pursue such a case in the first place? The EEOC’s lawyers probably figured they had nothing to lose. If they landed a sympathetic judge, they could set a new legal precedent. If they lost, taxpayers would pay for the case anyway. And sure enough, U.S. District Judge William Orrick, an Obama appointee, ruled against the store’s motion for summary judgment last week. The question now is whether Walgreens will continue to fight for the right to fire employees who steal from company shelves, or simply settle to get the EEOC’s lawyers to go away.

I hope all companies fight meddling and stupidity by the federal government.

I do understand that sometimes it makes sense to acquiesce to extortion, at least in the short run. The long-run costs of surrender, though, are very high.

Which is why companies should fight, but they should get support from Capitol Hill. The EEOC budget should be slashed to show that there are consequences to bureaucratic insanity.

P.S. I shared some political humor last year about a make-believe Obama Administration initiative called the “Americans with no Abilities Act.”

Anybody want to guess when that becomes official EEOC policy?

I’m only partially joking. It’s sort of happened already in the United Kingdom.

P.P.S. Don’t forget that EEOC regulation is just one straw of red tape on the camel’s back.

Americans spend 8.8 billion hours every year filling out government forms.

The economy-wide cost of regulation is now $1.75 trillion.

For every bureaucrat at a regulatory agency, 100 jobs are destroyed in the economy’s productive sector.

The Obama Administration added $236 billion of red tapein 2012.

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Clever Article Poking Fun at Libertarians

Whenever I find clever political humor, I like to share with readers.

And because I’m confident in the superiority of liberty over statism, I’m even amused when I find jokes that target my libertarian philosophy. After all, only dour people are unable to laugh at themselves.

Indeed, I’m actually disappointed that I rarely find any good jokes about advocates of small government. I haven’t found any good anti-libertarian humor since this cartoon last January.

I can gladly report, though, that the drought has ended.

Writing for The New Yorker, Tom O’Donnell has some fun at the expense of libertarians.

He has an article on the adventures of a “Libertarian Police Department,” told from the perspective of a patrolman.

I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it.

It seems that some bitcoins (much loved by libertarians) were stolen!

“…Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars’ worth of bitcoins.” The heroin needle practically fell out of my arm. “What kind of monster would do something like that? Bitcoins are the ultimate currency: virtual, anonymous, stateless. They represent true economic freedom, not subject to arbitrary manipulation by any government. Do we have any leads?”

The patrolman rushes to the scene, seeing if someone will pay to solve the crime.

Ten minutes later, I was on the scene. It was a normal office building, strangled on all sides by public sidewalks. I hopped over them and went inside. …“Now, which one of you punks is going to pay me to investigate this crime?” No one spoke up. “Come on,” I said. “Don’t you all understand that the protection of private property is the foundation of all personal liberty?” It didn’t seem like they did.

But our private sector libertarian cop eventually finds a suspect and tries to catch him while dealing with the daunting challenge of government-owned sidewalks!

“Stop right there!” I yelled as I ran. He was faster than me because I always try to avoid stepping on public sidewalks. Our country needs a private-sidewalk voucher system, but, thanks to the incestuous interplay between our corrupt federal government and the public-sidewalk lobby, it will never happen.

The suspect eventually is caught…and confesses that he is part of the “Ben Bernank” club.

…the man yelled, throwing down his weapon. “I give up, cop! I confess: I took the bitcoins.” “Why’d you do it?” I asked… “Because I was afraid…Afraid of an economic future free from the pernicious meddling of central bankers,” he said. “I’m a central banker.” …I shook my head. “Let this be a message to all your central-banker friends out on the street,” I said. “No matter how many bitcoins you steal, you’ll never take away the dream of an open society based on the principles of personal and economic freedom.” He nodded, because he knew I was right. Then he swiped his credit card to pay me for arresting him.

I suggest you read the entire article. It’s not very long, and it delivers some good jabs. Sort of like this collage about the 24 different types of libertarians.

But I suppose I should make a serious point at this stage.

The author is really mocking anarcho-capitalists (just like this Somalia video), yet I suspect that the vast majority of libertarians are in the small-government camp rather than the no-government camp. In other words, they wouldn’t mind a very small government that focused on matters such as life, liberty, and property.

So tracking down bitcoin thieves would be a legitimate function of government!

More specifically, the goal of libertarianism is to make government small and focused so it can effectively carry out its legitimate responsibilities.

P.S. For more libertarian humor, here’s a cartoon on libertarian ice fishing and another showing libertarian lifeguards.

And the “think I do” montage is a classic, as well as this post about “libertarian problems.”

P.P.S. To see if you’re an anarcho-capitalist rather than a small-government libertarian, take this online quiz.

P.P.P.S. Here’s another photo with the PotL. We’re outside of the Royal Palace and looking over Monaco’s yacht harbor.

Monaco is a very rich place and there is no income tax (just like the system that used to exist someplace else). One wonders whether our leftist friends will ever see the connection.

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Debating How Best to Create Jobs: Markets or Government?

Early last month, I wrote an article for The Federalist on job creation.

I used that opportunity to document that there is a serious problem with jobs under Obama, and I explained that the problem existed in part because the President was intervening with so-called stimulus schemes.

The far better approach is for government to “get out of the way.”

Though that’s not really correct. I want changes in government policy. Indeed, major changes. But those policy changes would involve less government, whereas Obama pushed major changes in the other direction.

I took this discussion to the next level in this debate on C-Span.

My opponent, Ross Eisenbrey of the Economic Policy Institute, was my mirror image.

He wanted more spending and I urged less spending.

He called for more intervention and I advocated less intervention.

We would probably even disagree about the answer to 2 + 2 = ?.

Viewers can make their own decisions on who did a better job in the debate. I’ll simply state that my strongest point (at least in my humble opinion) is that businesses only create jobs when they expect new workers will increase net revenue.

But don’t believe me. You can read what actual real-world employers have to say about the topic.

In other words, I agree with the message of this poster. If you think more government is the answer, you’ve asked a very silly question.

P.S. I’m in Monaco for the Convention of Independent Financial Advisors and the Princess of the Levant is with me at the Hotel Hermitage. It’s nice to get a glimpse at the lifestyle of the infamous Top 1 Percent.

Fortunately, Monaco seems to have plenty of guys with women out of their league, so I don’t feel too out of place.

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Financial Bureaucrats on Easy Street, with Consumers and Taxpayers Paying the Bill

I’ve complained many times about government intervention in the financial sector.

The financial and housing crisis, for instance, was largely a consequence of the Federal Reserve’s easy-money policy, combined with the system of corrupt subsidies put in place by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

But there’s another government-imposed cost that burdens the financial sector.

Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Paul Kupiec of the American Enterprise Institute reveals some very sobering – and disturbing – data on pay levels for both the financial industry and its regulators.

Most banks in this country are small businesses and pay employees modest salaries. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the average annual salary of a bank employee was $49,540 in 2012, not much higher than the average annual across all occupations, $45,790.

In other words, there are some very well paid people working for big banks, but most employees in the financial sector earn modest incomes.

But notice that I wrote “most employees.” That’s because there is a big group that is very well paid.

But they aren’t in the business of making loans, allocating credit, and helping to finance future growth.

That’s because these highly compensated folks aren’t in the private sector. They are regulatory bureaucrats.

…one group in banking stands out as highly paid—federal bank regulators. Before the Dodd-Frank Act, the average employee of a federal bank regulatory agency received 2.3 times the average compensation of a private banker. By 2013 this ratio increased to more than 2.7—and in some cases considerably more.

Kupiec provides details on how these bureaucrats get paid much more than wealth creators.

The average compensation at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) exceeded $190,000 in 2012. The staff at the Federal Reserve is likely even better compensated, but the Fed refuses to release employee salaries. You might think high-paying jobs at these agencies require special skills. Not so. At the OCC, secretaries make on average $79,182 per annum. Motor vehicle operators (the agency’s limo drivers) at the FDIC earn $82,130. Human resources management trainees at the CFPB make $110,759 a year. Averages tell only part of the story. In 2012, 68% of FDIC and CFPB staff—and 66% at the OCC—earned above $100,000 a year. Nearly 19% of the CFPB and OCC staff earn more than $180,000 a year. At the OCC, 10.5% of workers earn above $200,000 a year, at the FDIC 9.3%. Fewer than 7% of employees in any of these regulatory agencies earned less than $50,000. In other words, 93% of the employees in these federal bank regulatory agencies earned more than the average banker’s salary in 2012.

So what’s the rationale for overpaid bureaucrats?

Defenders of the status quo claim that high pay is necessary to attract skilled professionals.

Needless to say, that’s not true.

Instead of raising salaries to attract and retain employees for specialized, hard-to-fill jobs, federal bank regulatory agencies have increased the salaries of all employees. Ironically, the hard-to-fill jobs that require substantial education or professional experience—such as attorneys and economists with banking experience—have the smallest premiums over comparable private positions. Salary premiums are especially large for easy-to-fill jobs that require no specialized, hard-to-hire skills.

But here’s the bottom line. Consumers and taxpayers are paying higher fees and receiving fewer benefits because so much money is being diverted from the industry to finance the bureaucracy.

Who pays for these generous salaries? Bank shareholders pay directly through insurance premiums on deposits and examination fees levied by the bank regulatory agencies. These costs are passed on in higher customer fees and loan rates. The high compensation of CFPB employees is funded by taxpayers through the Federal Reserve. The runaway labor costs of these regulator agencies are not subject to congressional control, and they add up. Employee compensation accounts for about 80% of the operating costs of bank regulatory agencies. If the average regulatory employee’s compensation were equalized between bankers and regulators, the direct cost of bank regulation would fall by more than 50%.

At the risk of adding more bad news, the numbers for the financial sector are just the tip of the iceberg.

This video explains how the people who pay taxes get far less compensation than America’s bureaucrat class.

P.S. Lest I leave people a bit depressed, I want to share some good news.

I wrote back in 2011 about a motorist getting nailed for flashing his headlights to warn other drivers about a speed trap.

Here is an excerpt from a report in the Atlanta Journal Constitution about a Judge throwing out a similar charge.

Chris Hill noticed a sheriff’s deputy behind him and flashed his lights to warn a UPS driver coming the other way. The deputy pulled over Hill on U.S. Highway 140 in White City and handed him a $260 ticket for improperly using his headlights, saying another deputy had seen the flashing lights from behind the UPS truck and alerted him to stop the log truck because of the signaling. Outraged, Hill decided to fight the ticket, and on Wednesday, a Jackson County Justice Court judge dismissed the citation, finding that motorists flashing their headlights amounts to speech protected by the Oregon Constitution.

I’m in favor of being tough on crime, but only when laws are just.

So kudos to the Judge in this case. And hopefully jurors around the nation will use their nullification power to block similar cases of government over-reach.

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A New Member of the Moocher Hall of Fame

About one year ago, I decided to create a “Moocher Hall of Fame” to highlight how certain people went above and beyond the call of indolence in their efforts to sponge off taxpayers.

This award isn’t for ordinary deadbeats. You have to do something really special (the bad kind of special) to get recognized.

* Like convincing a government to give you “disability” benefits so you can satisfy your diaper-wearing fetish.

* Such as cutting off your own foot to maintain handouts from the state.

* Or trying to impregnate 12-year old girls to increase household welfare payments.

* And how about plotting to kill the people who are subsidizing your laziness.

We have a new candidate for the MHoF.

Or perhaps I should say candidates. Our contestants are a husband and wife who enjoyed a first class lifestyle at taxpayer expense. Here are some passages from a Fox News report.

 A Minnesota couple who allegedly lived in expensive homes and owned a yacht while taking more than $160,000 in state welfare benefits has been arrested. …Court documents allege the pair illegally obtained food stamps and other benefits from 2005 to 2012. According to the criminal complaints, over the years, the Chisholms received medical assistance, welfare payments and food stamp benefits. …When they first applied for welfare benefits, the couple allegedly listed their residence as Andrea Chisholm’s mother’s home in Minneapolis. Shortly after getting approved, they moved to Florida, according to court documents. They remained in that state for at least 28 months, first on their $1.2 million yacht, and then moving to a house, officials said. They collected welfare from Florida, as well as Minnesota during that time, which is prohibited, according to court documents.

So why should the Chisholms win an award?

Well, I thought it was supposed to be difficult for married adults to sponge off taxpayers, particularly if there was an able-bodied male in the household, yet that didn’t stop the Chisholms from raking in the cash.

I guess you could consider them to be the older – and American – version of Danny and Gina (though I don’t know if that deadbeat couple is/was married).

But that’s not why the Chisholms deserve to be in the MHoF. What caught my attention is that they financed a yacht with welfare payments. That’s going above and beyond the call of indolence.

P.S. I have to confess that Mr. Chisholm reminded me of Rand Paul, at least at first glance.

Separated at birth?

Though I feel like apologizing for implying any connection. After all, Senator Paul has been kind enough to give me credit for jokes I steal from other people. More important, he defends taxpayers.

Whereas Mr. Chisholm likes to steal from taxpayers.

That’s a big difference.

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Should Companies Do What’s Best for Government, or Should They Do What’s Best for Workers, Consumers, and Shareholders?

I’m in favor of free markets.

That means I’m sometimes on the same side as big business, but it also means that I’m often very critical of big business.

That’s because large companies are largely amoral.

Depending on the issue, they may be on the side of the angels, such as when they resist bad government policies such as higher tax rates and increased red tape.

But many of those same companies will then turn around and try to manipulate the system for subsidies, protectionism, and corrupt tax loopholes.

Today, I’m going to defend big business. That’s because we have a controversy about whether a company has the legal and moral right to protect itself from bad tax policy.

We’re dealing specifically with a drugstore chain that has merged with a similar company based in Switzerland, which raises the question of whether the expanded company should be domiciled in the United States or overseas.

Here’s some of what I wrote on this issue for yesterday’s Chicago Tribune.

Should Walgreen move? …Many shareholders want a “corporate inversion” with the company based in Europe, possibly Switzerland. …if the combined company were based in Switzerland and got out from under America’s misguided tax system, the firm’s tax burden would drop, and UBS analysts predict that earnings per share would jump by 75 percent. That’s a plus for shareholders, of course, but also good for employees and consumers.

Folks on the left, though, are fanning the flames of resentment, implying that this would be an example of corporate tax cheating.

But they either don’t know what they’re talking about (a distinct possibility given their unfamiliarity with the private sector) or they’re prevaricating.

Some think this would allow Walgreen to avoid paying tax on American profits to Uncle Sam. This is not true. All companies, whether domiciled in America or elsewhere, pay tax to the IRS on income earned in the U.S. 

The benefit of “inverting” basically revolves around the taxation of income earned in other nations.

But there is a big tax advantage if Walgreen becomes a Swiss company. The U.S. imposes “worldwide taxation,” which means American-based companies not only pay tax on income earned at home but also are subject to tax on income earned overseas. Most other nations, including Switzerland, use “territorial taxation,” which is the common-sense approach of only taxing income earned inside national borders. The bottom line is that Walgreen, if it becomes a Swiss company, no longer would have to pay tax to the IRS on income that is earned in other nations. 

It’s worth noting, by the way, that all major pro-growth tax reforms (such as the flat tax) would replace worldwide taxation with territorial taxation. So Walgreen wouldn’t have any incentive to redomicile in Switzerland if America had the right policy.

And this is why I’ve defended Google and Apple when they’ve been attacked for not coughing up more money to the IRS on their foreign-source income.

But I don’t think this fight is really about the details of corporate tax policy.

Some people think that taxpayers in the economy’s productive sector should be treated as milk cows that exist solely to feed the Washington spending machine.

…ideologues on the left, even the ones who understand that the company would comply with tax laws, are upset that Walgreen is considering this shift. They think companies have a moral obligation to pay more tax than required. This is a bizarre mentality. It assumes not only that we should voluntarily pay extra tax but also that society will be better off if more money is transferred from the productive sector of the economy to politicians.

Needless to say, I have a solution to this controversy.

…the real lesson is that politicians in Washington should lower the corporate tax rate and reform the code so that America no longer is an unfriendly home for multinational firms.

For more information, here’s the video I narrated on “deferral,” which is a policy that mitigates America’s misguided policy of worldwide taxation. And you’ll see (what a surprise) that the Obama Administration wants to make the system even more punitive.

P.S. On this topic, click here is you want to compare good research from the Tax Foundation with sloppy analysis from the New York Times.

P.P.S. Many other companies already have re-domiciled overseas because the internal revenue code is so punitive. The U.S. tax system is so bad that companies even escape to Canada and the United Kingdom!

P.P.P.S. It also would be a good idea to lower America’s anti-competitive corporate tax rate.

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A Gun Graphic that Will Depress Your Leftist Friends

It’s easy to get discouraged if you believe in small government and individual liberty.

It seems that the burden of the public sector is always expanding and that politicians and bureaucrats are always figuring out new ways to restrict our freedoms.

But let’s not lose hope.

We still have a lot of economic liberty, particularly if you count non-fiscal policy factors.

And we still have the Second Amendment.

Heck, we don’t just have the right to keep and bear arms, we exercise that right in massive numbers.

Take a look at this impressive graphic. We’re #1 in some bad ways, but it seems we’re also #1 in a very good way.

Make sure to share this graphic with your statist friends and colleagues. It’s guaranteed to put them in a glum mood for the rest of the day!

And when you share this with your misguided acquaintances, ask them why guns don’t cause murder in nations such as Switzerland and Finland. Maybe you’ll have a breakthrough and they’ll confess that gun control isn’t the solution.

Incidentally, in addition to having lots of guns in America, we also are quite ready to defy the government if politicians try to take them away.

What’s happening in Connecticut is merely one example of this wonderful form of civil disobedience.

Since we’re on the topic of gun ownership vs. gun control, here’s another image that will cause heartburn for your leftist friends.

Same theme as the 4th image in this post.

And let’s not forget the best-ever poster on gun control.

Last but not least, here’s a poster sent to me by the PotL.

It’s the same message found at the top of this post and at the bottom of this post.

If you want more info – both serious and humorous – on gun control, click here.

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Another Amazing Example of Government Stupidity and Political Correctness

If you had to pick the most inane, pointless, and intrusive example of government stupidity, what would you pick?

We have lots of examples of regulators running amok.

• Regulations making it difficult for trucking firms to weed out drunk drivers.
• Year-long sting operations by federal milk police.
• Rules harassing coffee shops with bikini-clad sales staff.
• OSHA requirements for expensive safety harnesses for people working 11 feet off the ground.

But we also have really absurd examples of wasteful spending.

• Forcing taxpayers to pay millions of dollars for pro-Obamacare and pro-IRS propaganda.
• Doing interviews – at a per-person cost of $6,000 – about erectile dysfunction and sticking the tab on us.
• Giving disability benefits to a grown man who wants to wear diapers and live as an “adult baby.”
• Squandering $400K on experimental underwear that detect cigarette smoke.
• Paying 35 times the market price for some Kindles.
• A $100,000 library grant to a city without a library.
• Throwing $100 million in the garbage by subsidizing a leftist bureaucracy in Paris that advocates for higher taxes in the United States.

We even have examples of government stupidity that can be characterized as a combination of wasteful spending and foolish regulation, such as one part of the government squandering money on research about how to encourage condom use by providing prophylactics of different sizes while another part of the government has regulations preventing the private sector from providing prophylactics of different sizes.

Today’s post, however, could win a prize for the most profound and disturbing example of government stupidity. It mixes foolish red tape with over-the-top political correctness.

Here are some jaw-dropping details of the federal government running amok in Michigan.

A set of seating is being torn down outside the Plymouth Wildcats varsity boys’ baseball field, not long before the season begins, because the fields for boys’ and girls’ athletics must be equal. A group of parents raised money for a raised seating deck by the field, as it was hard to see the games through a chain-link fence. The parents even did the installation themselves, and also paid for a new scoreboard. But, after someone complained to the U.S Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, an investigated by the department determined the new addition was no longer equal to the girls’ softball field next door, which has old bleachers and an old scoreboard.

This is utterly absurd for several reasons, most notably that the federal government shouldn’t have any role in education, much less efforts to micro-manage high school sports facilities.

But even if one accepts that Washington bureaucrats should interfere in such matters, it’s important to understand that it is bureaucratic lunacy to interpret “Title IX requirements to offer equal athletic opportunities to both boys and girls” to somehow mean equal seating.

Sexist bleachers?!?

What happens if there are fewer people who want to watch female sports? Should there be a requirement to build bleachers that are mostly empty?

Or maybe we can blend Obamacare to Title IX and create a mandate that parents and others in the community have to attend female sporting events 50 percent of the time?

Actually, I shouldn’t even joke about such an idea, lest some bureaucrat think it’s a serious proposal.

P.S. The Keynesians will be happy. They like it when wealth and/or capital is destroyed since that supposedly forces “stimulative” rebuilding exercises.

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Some Good News on Tax Reform (if You Prefer the Flat Tax over the National Sales Tax)

I’m ecumenical on tax reform. I’ll support any plan that rips up the internal revenue code and instead lowers tax rates, reduces double taxation, and cuts out distorting loopholes.

And as I explain in this interview, both the flat tax and national sales tax have a low tax rate. They also get rid of double taxation and they both wipe out the rat’s nest of deductions, credits, exclusions, preferences, and exemptions.

You’ll notice, however, that I wasn’t very optimistic in the interview about the possibility of replacing the IRS with a simple and fair tax system.

But perhaps I’m being needlessly gloomy. New polling data from Reason-Rupe show that there’s very strong support for reform. At least if you favor a flat tax.

This doesn’t mean we can expect genuine tax reform tomorrow or the next day.

President Obama is viscerally committed to class-warfare tax policy, for instance, and special interest groups would vigorously resist if there was a real possibility (they would say threat) of scrapping the current tax code.

But it does suggest that tax reform – at least in the form of a flat tax – could happen if there was real leadership in Washington.

So maybe my fantasies will become reality!

And one of the best arguments for reform is that the internal revenue code is an unfair mess.

Consider how rich people are treated by the tax code. The system is so complicated that we can’t tell whether they’re paying too much (because of high rates and pervasive double taxation) or paying too little (because of special preferences and tax shelters).

Regardless, we do know that they can afford lots of lobbyists, lawyers, and accountants. So even though they are far more likely to be audited, they have ample ability to defend themselves.

But the real lesson, as I explain in this CNBC interview, is that the right kind of tax reform would lead to a simple system that treats everyone fairly.

I’m also glad I used the opportunity to grouse about the IRS getting politicized and corrupted.

But I wish there had been more time in the interview so I could have pointed out that IRS data reveal that you get a lot more revenue from the rich when tax rates are more reasonable.

And I also wish I had seen the Reason-Rupe poll so I could have bragged that there was strong support for a flat tax.

Unfortunately, I wouldn’t have been able to make the same claim about the national sales tax. I haven’t seen any recent public opinion data on the Fair Tax or other similar plans, but a poll from last year failed to find majority support for such a proposal.

And a Reason-Rupe poll from 2011 showed only 33 percent support for a national sales tax.

That won’t stop me from defending the national sales tax. After all, it is based on the same principles as a flat tax.

But the polls do suggest (as do anecdotes from the campaign trail) that a flat tax is a more politically viable option for reformers.

The moral of the story is that it makes more sense to push for the flat tax. After all, if I have an easy route and a hard route to get to the same destination, why make life more difficult?

Though the ultimate libertarian fantasy is shrinking government back to what the Founding Fathers had in mind. Then we wouldn’t need any broad-based tax of any kind.

P.S. Here’s my choice for the strangest-loophole award.

P.P.S. Since I shared a poll today with good news, I may as well link to a tax poll that left me somewhat depressed.

P.P.P.S. Let’s end with some IRS humor.

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More Obamacare Failure

If Obamacare is a success, as the White House and establishment media would like us to believe, then why is the Obama Administration so anxious to hide the numbers?

After all, surely we haven’t set the bar so low that the Administration can claim victory simply because it has coerced and/or bribed a few million people into an Obamacare plan?

Here’s some of what the Wall Street Journal recently wrote about a very suspicious change in the way the government measures health insurance coverage.

Out of the blue, the Census Bureau has changed how it counts health insurance—at the precise moment when ObamaCare is roiling the insurance markets. Since 1987, the Current Population Survey, or CPS, has collected information on the health-insurance coverage status of Americans. …But this year the Census revamped the CPS household insurance questions, muddying comparisons between the pre- and post-ObamaCare numbers. …Robert Pear of the New York Times obtained internal Census documents that note that the new CPS system produces lower estimates of the uninsured as an artifact of how the questionnaire is structured. …For changes this substantial, standard procedure would be to ask the new and old questions concurrently. With an overlap, researchers could study changes over time using the long-term historical information without introducing bias, as well as interpret emerging developments with new tools. …this sudden change will undermine public trust in the supposedly nonpartisan institutions of government. Muddying a useful source of information about ObamaCare’s results is definitely unfortunate, but our guess is that it wasn’t coincidental.

Allow me to re-phrase that last sentence. The disingenuous change to the Census data on insurance is about as coincidental as the Administration’s efforts to re-define poverty and about as random as the IRS’s decision to only undermine and attack the political rights of Tea Party groups.

But there’s more to say about Obamacare than merely pointing out dishonest manipulation of government data.

We also have some very bad news for taxpayers.

Here’s what Chuck Blahous wrote for E21, starting with an observation of how the media wants to boost Obama.

Earlier this month there was tremendous press attention to new data indicating that enrollment in the Affordable Care Act (ACA)’s health insurance exchanges had surpassed 7 million. …much of the press, desperate to write something positive after months of reporting on website glitches and insurance plan cancellations, characterized the milestone as good political news for ACA supporters.

I’ve already explained that the supposed good news is actually bad news, but Chuck has some very important details on how taxpayers are especially vulnerable.

…what is unfolding before our eyes is a colossal fiscal disaster, poised to haunt legislators and taxpayers for decades to come.It is quite possible that the ACA is shaping up as the greatest act of fiscal irresponsibility ever committed by federal legislators. …the ACA is a commitment to permanently subsidize comprehensive health insurance for millions who could not otherwise afford it, which the federal government has no viable plan to finance. Moreover, experience shows that it is very difficult to scale back such spending once large numbers of Americans have been made dependent.

The article includes a graph that compares the early costs of major entitlement programs.

As you can see, Obamacare’s fiscal burden is second only to Medicare.

Chuck then explains that the costs in the early years for new entitlements are just a drop in the bucket.

…after these initial rollouts, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid costs grew far faster than originally envisioned, sometimes due to subsequent legislation, sometimes due to unanticipated healthcare cost growth. It wouldn’t be surprising for either factor to affect the ACA, which would be even more problematic… We do know that the ACA’s financing mechanisms are already falling apart. The ACA’s much-reported website glitches and enrollment shortfalls had actually suggested an upside; if enrollment continued to fall short of previous projections, it was possible that some of the fiscal damage could be contained. But if enrollment has picked up as the law’s financing mechanisms disintegrate, the fiscal damage will be worse than anticipated.

Needless to say, this is hardly shocking news.

Entitlements inevitably become fiscal swamps and the costs almost always are far higher than the early estimates.

Here’s an oldie-but-goodie video I narrated on the topic of ever-climbing taxpayer burdens for health entitlements.

I’d like to claim that this video proves I have great insight and brilliance, but that would be akin to claiming superior ability for predicting that Chicago is warmer in July than in February.

P.S. Since we’re on the topic of government-run healthcare, I recently wrote about Vermont’s plans for a single-payer system.

Except I didn’t really write about the Green Mountain State’s experiment with socialism. Instead, I used the opportunity to discuss third-party payer, which is America’s real government-created healthcare problem.

Now it’s time to say something specifically about what’s happening in Vermont. Though, to be more accurate, all I really need to do is quote Megan McArdle’s column from Bloomberg.

Of the plans that states have hatched for the Affordable Care Act, none has been bolder than that of Vermont, which wants to implement a single-payer health-care system, along the lines of what you might find in Britain or Canada.

Except Vermont politicians haven’t bothered to find a way to pay for this boondoggle.

Vermont needs to find some way to pay for it. Although Act 48 required Vermont to create a single-payer system by 2017, the state hasn’t drafted a bill spelling out how to raise the additional $1.6 billion a year (based on the state’s estimate) the system needs. The state collected only $2.7 billion in tax revenue in fiscal year 2012, so that’s a vexingly large sum to scrape together. …Paying for this program would likely make Vermont the highest-taxed state in the nation, by quite a lot.

Megan thinks the cost would so high that Vermont will abandon the scheme. And she has a very optimistic assessment on what this means nationally.

…this is going to be expensive. So expensive that I doubt Vermont is actually going to go forward with it. This should be instructive for those who hope — or fear — that Obamacare has all been an elaborate preliminary to a nationwide single-payer system. It isn’t. The politics are impossible, and even if they weren’t, the financing would be unthinkable.

I very much hope she’s right, and I’ve actually expressed optimism that Obamacare has changed (in a favorable way) the political dynamics on the healthcare issue.

But I’m still not quite as hopeful as Megan.

Leftists are too clever to make an all-or-nothing push for single-payer on the national level. They know that’s too risky.

But they have been quite adept at incremental changes to expand the role of government and undermine markets.

And if they ever get a new source of revenue, like an energy tax, financial transactions tax, or a value-added tax, then they’ll be able to push for even more statism.

P.P.S. If you want some fun reading about single-payer, check out these horror stories about the system in the United Kingdom.

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Will Taxpayers Be Forced to Bail Out Union Pensions?

As a supporter of genuine capitalism, which means the right of contract and the absence of coercion, I don’t think there should be any policies that help or hinder unions.

The government should simply be a neutral referee that enforces contracts and upholds the rule of law.

Similarly, I also don’t have any philosophical objection to employers and employees agreeing to “defined benefit” pension plans, which basically promise workers a pre-determined amount of money after they retire based on factors such as average pay and years in the workforce.

After all, my money and property aren’t involved, so it’s not my business.

That being said, these so-called “DB plans” have a bad habit of going bankrupt. And that means the rest of us may get stuck with the bill if there’s a taxpayer bailout.

I discuss these issues in an interview with Fox Business News.

My main point is that there’s a deep hole in many of these plans, so someone is going to feel some pain.

I don’t want taxpayers to be hit, and I also don’t think well-managed pensions should be gouged with ever-rising premiums simply because other plans are faltering.

But I bet both will suffer, as will workers and retirees in the under-funded plans.

As part of the interview, I also warned that other “DB plans” are ticking time bombs. More specifically, most pensions for state and local bureaucrats involve (overly generous) pre-determined commitments and very rarely have governments set aside the amount of money needed to fund those promises.

And the biggest DB time bomb is Social Security, which has an unfunded cash-flow liability of more than $30 trillion. That’s a lot of money even by Washington standards.

But I closed with a bit of good news.

As workers and employers have learned that DB plans tend to be unstable and unsustainable, there has been a marked shift toward “defined contribution” plans such as IRAs and 401(k)s.

These plans are the private property of workers, so there’s no risk that the money will be stolen or squandered.

But even this good news comes with a caveat. We closed the interview by fretting about the possibility that governments will steal (or at least over-tax) these private pension assets at some point in the future.

That’s already happened in Argentina and Poland, so I’m not just being a paranoid libertarian.

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Tax Day Fantasies

I realize this may be a thought crime by DC standards, but it sure would be nice to eliminate the high tax rates that undermine economic growth and reduce American competitiveness.

At the risk of sharing too much information, I fantasize about a world without the internal revenue code. In addition to getting rid of high tax rates, I also want to abolish the pervasive double taxation of income that is saved and invested.

Just as important, I want to wipe out the distorting loopholes that tilt the playing field in favor of politically connected interest groups. And I daydream about how much easier tax day would be if ordinary people didn’t have to figure out how to comply with an ever-changing tax code.

But perhaps you’re a normal person and you don’t dwell on these topics. Your fantasies probably have nothing to do with fiscal policy and instead involve that hottie in your neighborhood.

That’s fine. I’m actually envious of well-adjusted people who don’t fixate on the cesspool of Washington.

But – at the very least – I want you to agree that America needs fundamental tax reform. And to help persuade you,  here are some fresh stories to remind you that the tax code and the IRS are a blight on society.

For instance, how do you feel about the IRS engaging in partisan politics, as reported by the Washington Times.

Even as the IRS faces growing heat over Lois G. Lerner and the tea party targeting scandal, a government watchdog said Wednesday it’s pursuing cases against three other tax agency employees and offices suspected of illegal political activity in support of President Obama and fellow Democrats. …the Office of Special Counsel…said it was “commonplace” in a Dallas IRS office for employees to have pro-Obama screensavers on their computers, and to have campaign-style buttons and stickers at their office. In another case, a worker at the tax agency’s customer help line urged taxpayers “to re-elect President Obama in 2012 by repeatedly reciting a chant based on the spelling of his last name,” the Office of Special Counsel said in a statement. …Another IRS employee in Kentucky has agreed to serve a 14-day suspension for blasting Republicans in a conversation with a taxpayer.

For more information about this nauseating scandal, read the wise words of Tim Carney and Doug Bandow.

Or what about the time, expense, and anxiety that the tax code causes for small businesses? Heck, even the Washington Post has noticed this is a big issue.

More than half of small employers say the administrative burdens and paperwork associated with tax season pose the greatest harm to their businesses, according to a new survey by the National Small Business Association. Forty-seven percent say the actual tax bill hits their companies the hardest. On average, small-business owners spend more than 40 hours — the equivalent of a full workweek — filing their federal taxes every year. One in four spends at least three full weeks on the annual chore. There is also the expense of doing that work. Only 12 percent of employers filed their taxes on their own this year, down from 15 percent last year — and hiring help can be pricey. Half spent more than $5,000 on accountants and administrative costs last year. One in four spent more than $10,000.

I was tempted to say compliance costs add insult to injury, except that understates the problem. Watch this video if you want to understand why the tax code needs to be junked.

And let’s not forget that high tax rates are pointlessly destructive and bad for America. Dozens of companies have redomiciled in other jurisdictions to get out from under America’s punitive corporate tax system. And more are looking at that option. Here are some excerpts from a report in the U.K.-based Financial Times.

Walgreens has come under pressure from an influential group of its shareholders, who want the US pharmacy chain to consider relocating to Europe, in what would be one of the largest tax inversions ever attempted. …The move, known as an inversion, would dramatically reduce Walgreens’ taxable income in the US, which has among the highest corporate tax rates in the world. …In a note last month, analysts at UBS said Walgreens’ tax rate was expected to be 37.5 per cent compared with 20 per cent for Boots, and that an inversion could increase earnings per share by 75 per cent. They added, however, that “Walgreens’ management seems more hesitant to pull the trigger near-term due to perceived political risks.”

By the way, “perceived political risks” is a polite way of saying that the team at Walgreens is worried that the company might be targeted by the crowd in Washington. In other words, it will be attacked if it does the right thing for workers, consumers, and shareholders.

But that’s blaming the victim. All you really need to know is that America’s corporate tax system is so harsh that companies don’t just escape to Ireland, Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, and Bermuda. They even find better fiscal policy in Canada and the United Kingdom!

Last but not least, do you trust the IRS with your confidential financial data? If you answer yes, seek help right away from a mental health professional and check out these stories.

According to the Washington Times:

A new cost-saving computer technology being implemented by the IRS has left the agency vulnerable to hacking, putting taxpayers’ info at risk, an investigative report has found. …although the IRS has developed cybersecurity guidelines, many of the servers aren’t following them, said a report by the agency’s internal watchdog, the Inspector General for Tax Administration. In fact, the servers failed 43 percent of the tests investigators put them through, though they aren’t releasing what those tests and settings are due to security concerns.

According to a Bloomberg report:

A U.S. Internal Revenue Service employee took home a computer thumb drive containing unencrypted data on 20,000 fellow workers, the agency said in a statement today. …The IRS said it’s working with its inspector general to investigate the incident. The IRS statement didn’t say why the incident was discovered now, didn’t include the name of the employee who used the thumb drive and didn’t say whether the employee still works at the IRS.

And National Review has reported:

The Internal Revenue Service stole and improperly accessed 60 million medical records after raiding a California company, according to a legal complaint filed in March with the California superior court for San Diego. …“No search warrant authorized the seizure of these records; no subpoena authorized the seizure of these records; none of the 10,000,000 Americans were under any kind of known criminal or civil investigation and their medical records had no relevance whatsoever to the IRS search.”

So what’s the bottom line? I suppose there are different interpretations, but my view is that the system is irretrievably broken. It needs to be shredded and replaced.

What are the options?

My real fantasy is to have a very small federal government. Then we wouldn’t need a broad-based tax of any kind.

But I also have incremental fantasies. Until we can shrink the federal government to its proper size, let’s at least figure out ways of collecting revenue that are much less destructive and much less unfair.

The flat tax is one possible answer.

I’m also a fan of the national sales tax, though only if we first amend the Constitution to ensure that politicians don’t pull a bait-and-switch and burden us with both an income tax and sales tax!

To be more specific, I’m a fan of the Fair Tax, but only if we make sure that politicians never again have the ability to impose an income tax.

P.S. Since we’re on the subject of taxes, folks in Northern New Jersey, Southern New York, and New York City may be interested in a tax symposium this Thursday at Ramapo College in Mahway, New Jersey. Along with several other speakers, I’ll be pontificating on the following question: “The Income Tax:
Necessary Evil, Or the Root of All Evil?”

The college is convenient to I-287 near the New York/New Jersey border. Say hello if you attend.

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Are You Getting Your Money’s Worth from Washington?

Last year, I conducted an informal poll at a conference in Paris.

I explained to the audience that the public sector consumed about 57 percent of the French economy and I asked them whether they got more services and better government than the people of Germany (where government consumed 44 pct of GDP), Canada (41 pct), or Switzerland (34 pct).

Unsurprisingly, not a single hand went up.

But maybe we should ask the same question in America. Are we getting the government we want?

That’s the message of this clever video.

I have a couple of editorial comments.

1. The video made a very good point about health insurance not being real insurance in a world of government intervention.

2. I also agree that much of the federal government is illegitimate, but that point is irrelevant since we have Justices on the Supreme Court who don’t care that the federal government is supposed to be limited to those functions listed in Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution.

3. The system is based on coercion. If you don’t pay taxes, you go to jail. If you resist, they shoot you. Only in Washington is that type of system known as “voluntary compliance.”

4. The video is absolutely correct that the nation did just fine for most of our nation’s history with no income tax.

But enough of my commentary. Let’s think for a few minutes of what would happen if we could use our tax returns to allocate our tax dollars. How many people would voluntarily finance the waste at places such as the Department of Housing and Urban Development or Department of Agriculture?

But even the legitimate parts of government are riddled with waste. I believe in national defense, for instance, but that doesn’t mean I want to pay for stupid statues, subsidize green fuel, or prop up Europe’s welfare states by keeping outmoded military alliances.

That’s why I’m not surprised to see that Americans think, according to a new Reason-Rupe poll,  that 50 cents out of every tax dollar is wasted.

My leftist friends, when confronted with this type of polling data, are generally dismissive. They say ordinary people are misinformed and stupid because fraud rates for government programs (as shown in the P.S. of this post) tend to be far lower than 50 percent.

But their definition of “waste” is far too narrow. I don’t care if every single dollar of food stamps goes to people who are “eligible” or if the rules are followed for every mass transit subsidy. Those are not legitimate and proper functions of Washington.

When government is taking money from some people and using those funds to buy votes from other people, every penny is being wasted.

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Agreeing with Leftists (Sort of) about the World’s Sixth-Largest “Tax Haven”

To put it mildly, I’m not a fan of the so-called Tax Justice Network. In a moment of typical understatement, I referred to the U.K.-based group as “…a bunch of crazy Euro-socialists.”

And to give you an idea of why I don’t like them, here’s some of what I wrote about them two years ago.

…the Tax Justice Network [is] closely allied with governments in left-wing nations such as France, and they share the same goals as statist international bureaucracies such as the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. If they succeed in crippling tax competition and setting up some sort of global network of tax police, more politicians will raise tax rates, causing more misery, and bringing more nations one step closer to Greek-style fiscal collapse.

With this bit of background, it goes without saying that I very rarely agree with TJN.

But just as a stopped clock is right twice daily, the Tax Justice Network on rare occasions will produce some worthwhile research. For example, here are some passages from my article in the latest issue of the Cayman Financial Review (where I’m a member of the Editorial Board).

…would anybody, if asked to list the world’s 10 biggest tax havens, put together a list that includes Germany, Japan and the United States? Sounds absurd, but that’s precisely what the ideologues at the Tax Justice Network (TJN) asserted in the Financial Secrecy Index (FSI) released last November. …To be fair, though, the methodological approach used in the FSI report is not wholly objectionable. The TJN is seeking to come up with a measure that combines both the degree to which a jurisdiction has “secrecy” laws and the extent to which that jurisdiction attracts global capital. In other words, the TJN’s philosophical leanings are extreme and the organization obviously is motivated by a desire to hinder tax competition and fiscal sovereignty, but the FSI report provides an interesting way of seeing which so-called tax havens play the biggest role in the world economy.

And one of the biggest tax havens – number 6 according to TJN – is the United States.

I have no objection to their choice.

It makes sense to include the United States because there are several attractive policies for global investors, including the non-taxation and non-reporting of certain types of capital income. Moreover, several states have very friendly incorporation laws.

When I’m talking about “friendly incorporation laws,” I’m referring to the fact that states such as Delaware, Nevada, Wyoming, and others make it easy for everyone – particularly foreigners – to set up companies. This is a good thing for business and investment, but it irks statists because many American states don’t require the collection and sharing of information that foreign governments want for purposes of enforcing bad tax law.

So the United States is a de facto tax haven.

But that’s just part of the story. When I discuss the “non-taxation and non-reporting of certain types of capital income,” I’m referring to the fact that the internal revenue code generally does not impose tax on interest and capital gains paid to  foreigners (specifically nonresident aliens). And because we don’t tax those payments, there’s no requirement to report that information to any government. As you can imagine, this irks the left because it means there’s no information to share with foreign governments that want to track – and tax – flight capital.

To reiterate, this makes the United States is a de facto tax haven.

These laws are extremely beneficial to the American economy. To get an idea of why the United States is a big winner from being a “tax haven,” look at this chart showing historical data on the amount of money foreigners have invested in stocks, bonds, and other forms of indirect (sometimes called passive) investment in America.

By any standard, $13 trillion is a lot of money. Those funds boost our financial markets, enable job creation, and increase economic performance. We don’t know how much of that money is invested in the United States because we have a friendly and confidential tax system for nonresident aliens, but it surely helps to explain why there’s so much foreign investment in America.

Let’s be thankful that the United States is a so-called tax haven. Those pro-growth policies help to offset Obama’s bad policies. Indeed, two Canadian economists found that tax havens actually are economically beneficial for high-tax nations.

But that’s not the moral of the story. Yes, I like that America is a tax haven for foreigners, but the real moral of the story is that we should apply the same good policies to Americans.

Let’s get rid of the corrupt internal revenue code and adopt a simple and fair flat tax. That means a low tax rate, of course, but it also means no double taxation of income that is saved and invested.

Which means Americans would get the same pro-growth treatment now reserved for foreigners.

For more information, here’s my video on the economic argument for tax havens.

P.S. You won’t be surprised to learn that hypocritical leftists love using tax havens to protect their money even though they want to deny that freedom to the rest of us.

P.P.S. I’m such an avid defender of tax havens that I almost wound up in a Mexican jail. That’s dedication!

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More Obamacare Cartoons

The statists are claiming Obamacare is now a success.

Needless to say, I think this is a laughable assertion. Indeed, I shared a very clever graphic from Ted Cruz to help explain why it’s hardly a big achievement to destabilize the insurance market and then coerce and/or bribe some people into using Obamacare.

More recently, I debunked the claim that government-caused inefficiency in the current healthcare system somehow is an argument for a single-payer system.

But I’m getting tired of kicking the dead horse of government-run healthcare. As time passes, it will become increasingly apparent that Obamacare is making things worse rather than better.

So I’d rather enjoy some laughs by sharing some Obamacare cartoons.

Let’s start with this Nate Beeler gem about Obama “succeeding” after the goalposts were moved.

Reminds me of this funny cartoon from Gary Varvel.

And speaking of Varvel, he doesn’t seem to think that Obamacare will become more popular over time.

It’s amazing that some people think this botched system is a success. Let’s call it the soft bigotry of low expectations.

As Lisa Benson illustrates.

And if you agree that Obama is being graded on a curve by a biased press, the Glenn McCoy cartoon in this post also will make you chuckle.

And since I just mentioned Glenn McCoy, here’s his contribution today. Same theme as Varvel, and just as funny.

Last but not least, we have the award-winning Michael Ramirez.

I’m surprised, by the way, that I don’t see many cartoons using the Titanic analogy. Perhaps my memory is fading, but I think this cartoon from Eric Allie is the only other time that a ship heading toward an iceberg has appeared on my blog.

P.S. Since I’m a big advocate of reducing the burden of government spending, this chart from Mercatus is definitely worth sharing.

It shows the huge amount of fraud and waste in many government programs.

But remember that we don’t want to shrink the federal government because of waste, fraud, and abuse.

We want Washington to be smaller because we respect the Constitution and think it’s wrong to trap people in government dependency.

And, needless to say, the easiest way to make matters worse is to acquiesce to higher taxes. That would give politicians an excuse to spend even more money and surely kill any chances of meaningful entitlement reform.

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Why Did Western Nations Continue to Prosper in the 20th Century even though Fiscal Burdens Increased?

In the pre-World War I era, the fiscal burden of government was very modest in North America and Western Europe.

Total government spending consumed only about 10 percent of economic output, most nations were free from the plague of the income tax, and the value-added tax hadn’t even been invented.

Today, by contrast, every major nation has an onerous income tax and the VAT is ubiquitous. These punitive tax systems exist largely because – on average –  the burden of government spending now consumes more than 40 percent of GDP.

To be blunt, fiscal policy has moved dramatically in the wrong direction over the past 100-plus years. And thanks to demographic change and poorly designed entitlement programs, things are going to get much worse according to BIS, OECD, and IMF projections.

While these numbers, both past and future, are a bit depressing, they also present a challenge to advocates of small government. If taxes and spending are bad for growth, why did the United States (and other nations in the Western world) enjoy considerable prosperity all through the 20th Century?

I sometimes get asked this question after speeches or panel discussions on fiscal policy. In some cases, the person making the inquiry is genuinely curious. In other cases, it’s a leftist asking a “gotcha” question.

I’ve generally had two responses.

1. The European fiscal crisis shows that the chickens have finally come home to roost. More specifically, the private economy can withstand a lot of bad policy, but there is a tipping point at which big government leads to massive societal damage.

2. Bad fiscal policy has been offset by good reforms in other areas. More specifically, I explain that there are five major policy factors that determine economic performance and I assert that bad developments in fiscal policy have been offset by improvements in trade policy, regulatory policy, monetary policy, and rule of law/property rights.

I think the first response is reasonably effective. It’s hard for statists to deny that big government has created a fiscal and economic nightmare in many European nations.

But I’ve never been satisfied with the second response because I haven’t had the necessary data to prove my assertion.

However, thanks to Professor Leandro Prados de la Escosura in Madrid, that’s no longer the case. He’s put together some fascinating data measuring economic freedom in North America and Western Europe from 1850-present. And since he doesn’t include fiscal policy, we can see the degree to which there have been improvements in other areas that might offset the rising burden of taxes and spending.

Here’s one of his charts, which shows the growth of economic freedom over time. For obvious reasons, he doesn’t include the periods surrounding World War I and World War II, but those gaps don’t make much of a difference. You can clearly see that non-fiscal economic freedom has improved significantly over the past 150-plus years.

Most of the improvement took place in two stages, before 1910 and after 1980.

It’s also worth noting that things got much worse during the 1930s, so it appears the developed world suffered from the same bad policies that Hoover and FDR were imposing in the United States.

Indeed, here’s another chart, which highlights various periods and shows which policies were moving in the right direction or wrong direction.

As you can see, the West enjoyed the biggest improvements between 1850-1880 and after 1980 (let’s give thanks to Reagan and Thatcher).

There also were modest improvements in 1880-1910 and 1950-1960. But there was a big drop in freedom between the World War I and World War II, and you can also see policy stagnation in the 1960s and 1970s.

By the way, I wonder what we would see if we had data from 2007-2014. Based on the statist policies of Bush and Obama, as well as bad policy in other major nations such as France and Japan, it’s quite likely that the line would be heading in the wrong direction.

But I’m digressing. Let’s get back to the main topic.

The moral of the story is that we’ve been lucky. Bad fiscal policy has been offset by better policy in other areas. We’re suffering from bigger government, but at least we’ve moved in the direction of free markets.

That being said, we may now be in an era when bad fiscal policy augments bad policy in other areas.

For further information, this video explains the components of economic success.

P.S. I’ve written before that government bureaucrats don’t work as hard as folks employed in the economy’s productive sector.

Well, that’s becoming official policy in some parts of Sweden.

A section of employees of the municipality of Gothenburg will now work an hour less a day… The measure is being self-consciously conceived of as an experiment, with a group of municipal employees working fewer hours and a control group working regular hours – all on the same pay. …Mats Pilhem, the city’s Left-wing deputy mayor, told The Local Sweden that he hoped “staff members would take fewer sick days and feel better mentally and physically after working shorter days”.

Heck, if you want fewer sick days, just tell them they never have to show up for work. And I’m sure they’ll “feel better mentally and physically” with that schedule.

I’m also amused by this passage from the article.

Anna Coote, Head of Social Policy at the New Economics Foundation, a UK-based think tank, welcomed the proposals. “Shorter working hours create a more committed and stable workforce,” Ms Coote told The Telegraph.

Gee, what a surprise. If you overpay a group of people and tell them they can spend more time at home, they’ll be very anxious to keep those jobs.

Sounds like a great deal…unless you’re a taxpayer.

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The Left’s Pro-Single Payer Health Care Graphic: Right Diagnosis, Wrong Prescription

The new leftist website, Vox, has an article by Sarah Kliff on Vermont’s experiment with a single-payer healthcare system.

But I don’t really have much to say about what’s happening in the Green Mountain State, other than to declare that I much prefer healthcare experiments to occur at the state level. Indeed, we should reform Medicaid and Medicare and also fix the tax code so that Washington has no role in healthcare. Then the states can experiment and compete to see what works best.

But that’s a topic for another day. The real reason I cite Kliff’s article is that Ezra Klein tweeted this image from the article and stated that is was “The case for single payer, in one graphic.”

I don’t know if the numbers in the graphic are correct, but I have no reason to think they’re wrong.

Regardless, I certainly don’t disagree with the notion that our healthcare system is absurdly expensive and ridiculously inefficient.

In other words, the folks at Vox have accurately diagnosed a problem.

However, do these flaws prove “the case for single payer”?

It’s probably true that “single payer” has a lower monetary cost than the system we have today (assuming you don’t include the cost of substandard care and denied treatment), but that doesn’t mean it’s the ideal system.

Indeed, there is a better way to deal with the waste, inefficiency, and bureaucracy of the current system. The answer is free markets and genuine insurance, both of which would help address the real problem of third-party payer.

Third-party payer, for those who are new to the healthcare field, is what you get when somebody other than the consumer picks up the tab. And because of government intervention, that’s what happens with about 90 percent of healthcare spending in the United States. Here’s what John Goodman had to say about this problem.

Almost everyone believes there is an enormous amount of waste and inefficiency in health care. But why is that? In a normal market, wherever there is waste, entrepreneurs are likely to be in hot pursuit — figuring out ways to profit from its elimination by cost-reducing, quality-enhancing innovations. Why isn’t this happening in health care? As it turns out, there is a lot of innovation here. But all too often, it’s the wrong kind. There has been an enormous amount of innovation in the medical marketplace regarding the organization and financing of care. And wherever health insurers are paying the bills (almost 90 percent of the market) it has been of two forms: (1) helping the supply side of the market maximize against third-party reimbursement formulas, or (2) helping the third-party payers minimize what they pay out. Of course, these developments have only a tangential relationship to the quality of care patients receive or its efficient delivery.

And here’s some analysis from a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

In most industries, higher quality is associated with higher prices. That is not true in medical care, however, largely because of the public sector. …Every analysis of medical care that has been done highlights the significant waste of resources in providing care. Consider a few examples: one study found that physicians spent on average of 142 hours annually interacting with health plans, at an estimated cost to practices of $68,274 per physician (Casalino et al., 2009). Another study found that 35 percent of nurses’ time in medical/surgical units of hospitals was spent on documentation (Hendrich et al., 2008); patient care was far smaller. …In retail trade, the customer is the individual shopper. If Wal-Mart finds a way to save money, it can pass that along to consumers directly. In health care, in contrast, the situation is more complex, since patients do not pay much of the bill out-of-pocket. Rather, costs are passed from providers to insurers to employers… About one-third of medical spending is not associated with improved outcomes, significantly cutting the efficiency of the medical system and leading to enormous adverse effects.

Here’s my humble contribution to the discussion, starting with an explanation of how special tax breaks deserves some of the blame.

…how many people realize that this bureaucratic process is the result of government interference? For all intents and purposes, social engineering in the tax code created this mess. Specifically, most of us get some of our compensation in the form of health insurance policies from our employers. And because that type of income is exempt from taxation, this encourages so-called Cadillac health plans. …We have replaced (or at least agumented) insurance with pre-paid health care.

I then explain why this isn’t a good idea.

Insurance is supposed to be for unforseen major expenses, such as a heart attack. But our gold-plated health plans now mean we use insurance for routine medical costs. This means, of course, we have the paperwork issues…, but that’s just a small part of the problem. Even more problematic, our pre-paid health care system is somewhat akin to going to an all-you-can-eat restaurant. We have an incentive to over-consume since we’ve already paid. Except this analogy is insufficient. When we go to all-you-can-eat restaurants, at least we know we’re paying a certain amount of money for an unlimited amount of food. Many Americans, by contrast, have no idea how much of their compensation is being diverted to purchase health plans. Last but not least, we need to consider how this messed-up approach causes inefficiency and higher costs. We consumers don’t feel any need to be careful shoppers since we perceive that our health care is being paid by someone else. Should we be surprised, then, that normal market forces don’t seem to be working?

And I ask readers to think about the damage this approach would cause if applied in other sectors of the economy.

Imagine if auto insurance worked this way? Or homeowner’s insurance? Would it make sense to file insurance forms to get an oil change? Or to buy a new couch? That sounds crazy. The system would be needlessly bureaucratic, and costs would rise because we would act like we were spending other people’s money.  But that’s what would probably happen if government intervened in the same way it does in the health-care sector.

This is probably more than most people care to read, but it underscores the point that we don’t have a free market in health care. Not now, and not before Obamacare.

So the folks at Vox are right about the current system being a mess. But I disagree with the notion that more government is a way to solve problems created by government.

The real answer, as I’ve already noted, is to get Washington out of health care. This means entitlement reform AND tax reform.

And if you want to get a flavor of why this would generate better results, watch this Reason TV video and read these stories from Maine and North Carolina.

So how do we get there? Repealing Obamacare is a necessary but far from sufficient condition. Cato’s Adjunct Scholar, John Cochrane, has a nice roadmap of what’s really needed.

Though Vermont certainly is welcome to travel in the other direction. It’s always good to have bad examples and I wouldn’t be surprised if the “Moocher State” played that role.

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Member of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers Admits White House 77 Cents Pay Gap Claim Is Bogus

President Obama and many other leftist politicians are running around the nation claiming that supposedly greedy employers are deliberately choosing to reduce their profits.

They’re not actually making that specific claim, but that’s what they’re asserting, for all intents and purposes, when they claim that women are not getting equal pay for equal work.

Inaccurate, but nonetheless clever

If genuine and pervasive sexism existed, then non-discriminatory employers could dramatically reduce labor costs – and therefore dramatically increase profits – by getting rid of overpaid male workers and hiring women. Does anyone really think entrepreneurs and business owners are willing to sacrifice big profits simply because of anti-women animus?

That’s what Obama would like us to believe. And he wants the government to have the power to second-guess the decisions of private businesses. Heck, he probably would like to make America like Europe, where there are efforts to impose gender quotas.

And one of his chief economists tried to back up the President’s claims. Here’s some of what Ashe Schow wrote on the issue for the Washington Examiner.

While detailing executive actions President Obama plans to take Tuesday regarding equal pay for women, Betsey Stevenson, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said very defiantly that…women… continue to make less than men. …“They’re stuck at 77 cents on the dollar, and that gender wage gap is seen very persistently across the income distribution, within occupations, across occupations, and we see it when men and women are working side by side doing identical work.” That sounds awfully specific. Stevenson certainly sounds like she’s saying men and women doing the exact same job are earning very different pay.

Ms. Stevenson certainly was trying to be a loyal employee.

But then something very unusual happened. A journalist actually asked a real question.

And Ms. Stevenson, who obviously didn’t want to make herself a laughingstock to her colleagues in the economics profession, was forced to admit that the President is peddling nonsense.

…as soon as Stevenson was actually questioned about the statistic by McClatchy reporter Lindsay Wise, the White House adviser crumbled, admitting her earlier comments were inaccurate. “If I said 77 cents was equal pay for equal work, then I completely misspoke,” Stevenson said. “So let me just apologize and say that I certainly wouldn’t have meant to say that.” …Don’t expect Obama to admit any of this as he travels around the country continuing to claim that women don’t earn as much as men.

So why did Ms. Stevenson quickly back down? Well, perhaps she is familiar with the work of Christina Hoff Sommers, who has explained that men and women do get equal pay when you adjust for career choices, labor supply, and other factors.

There’s lots of evidence that the supposed sexist pay gap is a political weapon rather than economic reality.

Mary Perry and Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute just wrote a very thorough debunking of the pay gap myth for the Wall Street Journal. Here are some of the key passages, starting with an explanation that the pay gap largely disappears when you make apples-to-apples comparisons.

…the numbers bandied about to make the claim of widespread discrimination are fundamentally misleading and economically illogical. …Men were almost twice as likely as women to work more than 40 hours a week, and women almost twice as likely to work only 35 to 39 hours per week. Once that is taken into consideration, the pay gap begins to shrink. Women who worked a 40-hour week earned 88% of male earnings. Then there is the issue of marriage and children. The BLS reports that single women who have never married earned 96% of men’s earnings in 2012.

Wow. No wonder Steve Chapman wrote that the left’s pay-gap rhetoric is “a myth resting on a deception.”

But there’s more.

Risk is another factor. Nearly all the most dangerous occupations, such as loggers or iron workers, are majority male and 92% of work-related deaths in 2012 were to men. Dangerous jobs tend to pay higher salaries to attract workers. Also: Males are more likely to pursue occupations where compensation is risky from year to year, such as law and finance. Research shows that average pay in such jobs is higher to compensate for that risk.

Finally, Perry and Biggs seal the argument by pointing out that discrimination doesn’t make sense in a competitive market.

…gender-disparity claims are also economically illogical. If women were paid 77 cents on the dollar, a profit-oriented firm could dramatically cut labor costs by replacing male employees with females. Progressives assume that businesses nickel-and-dime suppliers, customers, consultants, anyone with whom they come into contact—yet ignore a great opportunity to reduce wages costs by 23%. They don’t ignore the opportunity because it doesn’t exist.

By the way, this does not mean that discrimination doesn’t exist.

I’m sure there are still some employers who let sex or race play a role in their decisions. But such people are not only immoral, but also stupid. They are giving up potential profits to indulge their own insecurities.

And other employers will take advantage of their foolishness.

In other words, the free market is the best way to fight discrimination, not government intervention.

P.S. Walter Williams explains that racial and sexual profiling sometimes makes sense.

P.P.S. I explain that anti-discrimination laws can boomerang against intended beneficiaries.

P.P.P.S. There is real evidence that tall people and attractive people are paid more, though I nonetheless argue that government is incapable of addressing this issue.

P.P.P.P.S. For those who are genuinely worried about discrimination, particularly against minorities, the real issues to address are Social Security and government schools.

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The Lesson We Should Learn from the Fort Hood Shooting

One of the best ways of reducing crime is to make anti-social behavior more expensive. Simply stated, the goal is to alter the cost-benefit analysis of criminals.

This doesn’t mean, by the way, that I’m assuming that bad guys are geniuses who put together spreadsheets or engage in elaborate calculations. Instead, I’m simply suggesting that crime becomes less attractive if thugs have a feeling that they’ll be more likely to get caught and/or more likely to get harsh punishment.

And, as I explained in my IQ test for liberals and criminals, bad guys also will be less likely to commit crimes if they know there’s a non-trivial chance that they may get shot. I know that would change my cost-benefit analysis if I was a crook.

But it’s not just my satirical IQ test. You get the same results from real experts such as John Lott and David Kopel.

This is why there’s less crime when law-abiding people own guns (as humorously depicted here and here by Chuck Asay).

Unfortunately, an army base is one place where bad guys can feel confident that they’ll find unarmed victims.

This is worth discussing since, for the second time, we have a sad example of innocent – and disarmed – people getting killed at Fort Hood.

Glenn McCoy has a cartoon that aptly summarizes this issue.

I’m sure some statists would argue that both the cartoon and my analysis are wrong because the killers (Ivan Lopez earlier this month and Major Hasan back in 2009) were crazy and simply wanted to kill the maximum number of people.

But experts have shown that even nutjobs engage in planning and figure out that they will have more ability to kill if they choose venues where potential victims are disarmed.

And even if we hypothesize that some crazy people might be too unstable to make those calculations, what’s wrong with allowing people to carry weapons on a military base so they can defend themselves?!?

But I’m not holding my breath expecting the ideologues in the Obama Administration to change their anti-Second Amendment policies.

Though at least we can be happy that more and more states are acknowledging reality and expanding concealed-carry rights and implementing stand-your-ground laws.

P.S. I’m increasingly optimistic that we are beating the statists on this issue. Honest leftists (see here and here) are acknowledging the value of private firearms ownership. We have very strong polling data from cops that gun control is misguided. And ordinary citizens would engage in massive civil disobedience (as we’re seeing in Connecticut) if the thugs in government tried to confiscate guns.

P.P.S. But let’s not get complacent. Statists may be losing some battles, but they won’t give up in their war against the Constitution. And they’re using government schools to push a fanatical anti-gun agenda. And they’re also working through the United Nations in an effort to get gun control through the back door. Though I suppose we should be happy that American statists aren’t as crazy as their British counterparts.

P.P.P.S. Let’s close with some gun control humor. If you want to know how leftists concoct data against gun ownership, here’s a good example. And here’s a video showing how leftists think about guns. Folks will also enjoy this comparison of how guns are viewed by liberals, conservatives, and Texans. And I think we can all agree that this driver is being very polite.

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The Golden Rule of Spending Restraint

My tireless (and probably annoying) campaign to promote my Golden Rule of spending restraint is bearing fruit.

The good folks at the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal allowed me to explain the fiscal and economic benefits that accrue when nations limit the growth of government.

Here are some excerpts from my column, starting with a proper definition of the problem.

What matters, as Milton Friedman taught us, is the size of government. That’s the measure of how much national income is being redistributed and reallocated by Washington. Spending often is wasteful and counterproductive whether it’s financed by taxes or borrowing.

So how do we deal with this problem?

I’m sure you’ll be totally shocked to discover that I think the answer is spending restraint.

More specifically, governments should be bound by my Golden Rule.

Ensure that government spending, over time, grows more slowly than the private economy. …Even if the federal budget grew 2% each year, about the rate of projected inflation, that would reduce the relative size of government and enable better economic performance by allowing more resources to be allocated by markets rather than government officials.

I list several reasons why Mitchell’s Golden Rule is the only sensible approach to fiscal policy.

A golden rule has several advantages over fiscal proposals based on balanced budgets, deficits or debt control. First, it correctly focuses on the underlying problem of excessive government rather than the symptom of red ink. Second, lawmakers have the power to control the growth of government spending. Deficit targets and balanced-budget requirements put lawmakers at the mercy of economic fluctuations that can cause large and unpredictable swings in tax revenue. Third, spending can still grow by 2% even during a downturn, making the proposal more politically sustainable.

The last point, by the way, is important because it may appeal to reasonable Keynesians. And, in any event, it means the Rule is more politically sustainable.

I then provide lots of examples of nations that enjoyed great success by restraining spending. But rather than regurgitate several paragraphs from the column, here’s a table I prepared that wasn’t included in the column because of space constraints.

It shows the countries that restrained spending and the years that they followed the Golden Rule. Then I include three columns of data. First, I show how fast spending grew during the period, followed by numbers showing what happened to the overall burden of government spending and the change to annual government borrowing.

Last but not least, I deal with the one weakness of Mitchell’s Golden Rule. How do you convince politicians to maintain fiscal discipline over time?

I suggest that Switzerland’s “debt brake” may be a good model.

Can any government maintain the spending restraint required by a fiscal golden rule? Perhaps the best model is Switzerland, where spending has climbed by less than 2% per year ever since a voter-imposed spending cap went into effect early last decade. And because economic output has increased at a faster pace, the Swiss have satisfied the golden rule and enjoyed reductions in the burden of government and consistent budget surpluses.

In other words, don’t bother with balanced budget requirements that might backfire by giving politicians an excuse to raise taxes.

If the problem is properly defined as being too much government, then the only logical answer is to shrink the burden of government spending.

Last but not least, I point out that Congressman Kevin Brady of Texas has legislation, the MAP Act, that is somewhat similar to the Swiss Debt Brake.

We know what works and we know how to get there. The real challenge is convincing politicians to bind their own hands.

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The Obama Administration Engages in Contortions to Claim that Obamacare Is a Success

I’ve observed, reported, mocked, written, and explained that Obamacare is a cluster-you-know-what.

So I’m rather bemused and frustrated by the latest pro-Obamacare spin that the law is a “success” because there are now 7 million people who have picked a plan.

There are lots of reasons for normal people to have a what-the-expletive-deleted response to this declaration of victory. For instance:

The goal of Obamacare was to insure the uninsured, yet that number has barely budged, so why is the Administration allowed to move the goalposts to something far more modest?

Obamacare also was supposed to lower premiums by $2500 and allow everyone to keep their plans and their preferred providers, so what happened to those goals?

And why should we even believe the White House spin when we have no idea whether people who have picked a plan have actually paid for that plan?

Moreover, what’s so impressive about getting some people to sign up for plans when they can get something that’s subsidized by taxpayers or other consumers?

But here’s an image put together by Senator Cruz’s office that may be the best – and certainly most amusing – look at the Administration’s supposed “achievement.”

Amen. People are being both coerced and bribed to sign up for Obamacare, in many cases after the law forced the cancellation of plans that they liked.

So why are we supposed to applaud the fact that a small fraction of the population has chosen the only possible option?

That’s the same mentality that allows politicians to brag about our “voluntary” tax system. As if any of us send our hard-earned money to the crooks in Washington for any reason other than the fact that otherwise we would get arrested.

P.S. Since I commented on our acquiescence to the IRS and our “voluntary” tax system, I will admit that I’m amused and chagrined by this poster. It’s minimized since it uses a sometimes-inappropriate synonym for wimps.

P.P.S. Since this post was about the “broken window” theory of Obamacare, let’s make sure to give ultimate credit to Bastiat, who came up with the original broken windows analogy (as captured by this cartoon mocking Keynesian economics).

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From Wyoming to New York: America’s Best and Worst States for Tax

Last August, I shared a fascinating map from the Tax Foundation.

It showed which states have chased away taxable income and which ones have attracted more taxpayers (along with their taxable income).

In other words, what are the “Golden Geese” doing with their money?

Well, the obvious and unsurprising answer is that they are escaping high-tax states and moving to states that aren’t quite so greedy.

Now we have another map from the Tax Foundation. They’ve just released the latest data on state and local tax burdens as a share of state income. Because of lags in data, we’re looking at 2011 numbers, but that’s not important. The main thing is to notice that the states with the highest tax burdens are very much correlated with the states that suffered the great loss of taxable income.

You can tell a few additional things just by looking at the map, most notably that the high-tax states are largely along the Pacific coast, in the upper Midwest, and much of the Northeast.

The rest of the nation seems more reasonable.

If you specifically want to know the best and worst states, I’ve put together a list. But I’ve reversed the order. The state with the lowest tax burden is #1 while the state with the greediest politicians is #50.

A couple of observations on the data.

First, it helps to have no state income tax. The top four states, and seven out of the top 10, avoid that punitive levy.

Second, while it’s no surprise to see which states are at the bottom because of harsh tax burdens, it will be interesting to see how Chris Christie and Scott Walker explain the poor rankings of their respective states should they run for President.

This isn’t to say it’s their fault. After all, New Jersey and Wisconsin were high-tax states when they took office. But it will be incumbent upon them to say what they’ve done to make a bad situation better (or at least to keep a bad situation from getting worse).

Here are some more interesting maps, including international comparisons, national comparisons, and even one local comparison.

Which nations have the most red ink.

Which nations are money laundering centers (hint, not tax havens).

A crazy left-wing “Happy Planet” map.

Another silly map showing that America is supposedly one of the world’s most authoritarian nations.

Here are some good state maps with useful information.

Which states give the highest welfare payments.

In which state is the burden of government spending climbing most rapidly.

Which states are in a “death spiral” because of too many takers and too few makers.

Which states have too many school bureaucrats compared to teachers.

There’s even a local map.

How many of the nation’s richest counties are in the D.C. metro region.

P.S. I wrote recently about the foolishness of anti-money laundering laws, which impose very high costs without having any positive impact in terms of thwarting crime.

Now bureaucrats want to make these laws even worse. Casinos are going to be required to be more intrusive, regardless of whether there’s any evidence or suspicion that customers have done anything wrong. I’m not a gambler, so I don’t worry about the fate of Las Vegas, but even I feel sorry for the casinos since many high rollers from overseas will decide to go to Macau, Monaco, or other locations where they’re not treated poorly because of misguided government.

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Support the VAT…if You Oppose Entitlement Reform and Want More spending and More Debt

I’m a supporter of a single-rate tax regime, especially if there’s no double taxation of income that is saved and invested.

That’s why I like the flat tax.

But I’ve expressed concern about the national sales tax, even though it’s basically the same as a flat tax (the only real difference is that the flat tax takes a bite out of your income when it is earned, while the sales tax takes a bite of your income as it is spent).

The reason for my skepticism is that I don’t trust politicians. I fear that they will adopt a sales tax, but never replace the income. As a result, we’ll wind up like Europe, with much bigger government.

And also much more red ink – even though politicians claim tax hikes and new taxes will lead to balanced budgets.

I’m not just being paranoid. Not only is this what occurred in Europe, the same thing is now happening in Japan.

Here’s some of what the Wall Street Journal has to say about “reforms” to the value-added tax in the land of the rising sun.

Japan on Tuesday increased its consumption tax to 8% from 5%. An increase to 10% is written into the law for next year, and don’t imagine for a minute that this will be the last. Welcome to the value-added-tax ratchet, which only goes in one direction—up. Tokyo first imposed a 3% consumption tax in 1989, after politicians had tried for a decade to enact one. …The new tax was billed as part of a tax reform, but the reform never materialized.

And as I warned in a prior column, the VAT has become a recipe for bigger government in Japan.

The new tax didn’t solve Japan’s deficit woes, as the debt to GDP ratio climbed to 50%, so in 1997 politicians increased the rate to 5%. Again politicians promised the increase would be offset by income-tax reforms. Again the reform proved illusory. …The additional revenue still didn’t satisfy Tokyo’s spending ambitions, and debt has since climbed well above 200% of GDP despite the VAT increase. …So now the rate is going up again in the name of, you guessed it, shoring up government finances as the population ages.

The OECD likes this development, which is hardly a surprise, but it’s bad news for those of us who favor growth and opportunity.

Japan’s experience points up the broader political problem with a value-added tax wherever it has been imposed. Economists tout the VAT for generating revenue without creating disincentives to work and invest. But in practice the consumption levy merely becomes one more tax in addition to current taxes and thus one more claim by the political class on the private economy. …The lesson for tax reformers elsewhere, not least in America, is to beware the VAT because once it is imposed it is only going up.

And it’s worth noting that the Europeans also have been increasing the VAT in recent years.

Simply stated, this is a levy to finance bigger government.

I elaborate in my video on the VAT.

P.S. You can see some amusing – but also painfully accurate – cartoons about the VAT by clicking here, here, and here.

P.P.S. I also very much recommend what George Will wrote about the value-added tax.

P.P.P.S. I’m also quite amused that the IMF accidentally provided key evidence against the VAT.

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Moral Corruption at the OECD: Using Dishonesty to Advance the Statist Agenda

I’m frequently baffled at the stupidity of Republicans.

When they took control of Congress back in 1994, for instance, they had unrestricted ability to get rid of the bureaucrats that generated bad economic analysis at both the Joint Committee on Taxation and the Congressional Budget Office.

Yet notwithstanding more than a decade of congressional power, GOPers did almost nothing to neutralize the bureaucrats who produced shoddy research that helped the left push for more spending and higher taxes.

Sort of like a football team allowing the opposing coach to pick the refs and design game plans for both teams.

Another painful example is that Republicans never used their majority status to defund the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

This international bureaucracy is infamous for pushing policies to expand the power of government. That’s not too surprising since it’s dominated by European welfare states. But it is amazing that Republicans seem to think it’s perfectly fine to send about $100 million each year to subsidize the OECD’s agenda.

Particularly when the OECD so often pushes policies that are directly contrary to American interests.

It has allied itself with the nutjobs from the so-called Occupy movement to push for bigger government and higher taxes in the United States.

The bureaucrats are advocating higher business tax burdens, which would aggravate America’s competitive disadvantage.

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.

It supports Obama’s class-warfare agenda, publishing documents endorsing “higher marginal tax rates” so that the so-called rich “contribute their fair share.”

The OECD advocates the value-added tax based on the absurd notion that increasing the burden of government is good for growth and employment.

It even concocts dishonest poverty numbers to advocate more redistribution in the United States.

Let’s elaborate on the last item dealing with poverty in the United States. According to the OECD, poverty is more sever in the United States than it is in relatively poor nations such as Greece, Portugal, and Hungary.

Indeed, the bureaucrats in Paris even put together a chart showing how “bad” America ranks in this category.

But it’s all bunk. Utterly dishonest garbage. Here’s some of what I wrote last year on this topic.

…if you read the fine print, you may notice one itsy-bitsy detail. The chart isn’t a measure of poverty. Not even close. Indeed, the chart wouldn’t change if all of the people of any nation (or all nations) suddenly had 10 times as much income. That’s because the OECD is measuring is relative income distribution rather than relative poverty. And the left likes this measure because coerced redistribution automatically leads to the appearance of less poverty. Even if everybody’s income is lower!

But the OECD isn’t letting up. In a new “Society at a Glance” look at the United States last month, here’s what the OECD claimed.

The relative poverty rate in the U.S. is 17.4%, compared to an OECD average of 11.1%. Only Chile, Israel, Mexico and Turkey have higher poverty rates than the U.S.

But unlike in other publications, the OECD didn’t bother to include any fine print admitting that its poverty measure has nothing to do with poverty.

That’s grotesquely dishonest and morally corrupt.

And since we’re on the topic of corruption, let’s broaden our discussion. National Review’s Kevin Williamson has an article on the rampant corruption among elected officials.

But what caught my attention weren’t the parts about pro-gun control politicians trying to help sell weapons to terrorists. Instead, I especially appreciated the broader lesson he provides for readers.

James Madison famously observed that “if men were angels, no government would be necessary.” But he also understood that men do not become angels once they win elections, become police, or are appointed to positions of power. Our constitutional order strikes an elegant balance between policing the non-angels outside of government and constraining the non-angels within government, setting the ambitions of the three branches against one another and subdividing the legislative branch against itself. …Adam Smith’s formula for prosperity — “peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice” — is the very modest ambition that conservatives aim for. Limited government is the tool by which government can be made to do good without necessarily being good, or being composed of good men. …The corruptibility of the political classes is fenced in by limiting the power of the political classes per se. You cannot expand the scope and scale of government without expanding in parallel the scope and scale of government corruption.

Amen to that. That’s the core message of this video I narrated, which explains that shrinking the size and scope of government is the only effective way to reduce corruption.

Remember the lesson of this superb poster: If more government is the answer, you’ve asked a very strange question.

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Is France about to Change Course?

Greetings from Obamaland!

Actually, that’s wrong in two respects. First, I’m actually in France. And even though I’ve joked that Obama wants to make America like France, technical accuracy requires me to admit that my real location is Paris, where I participated earlier today in the latest stop on the Free Market Road Show.

Second, I used the “Obamaland” joke when writing a few days ago about my visit to Greece. So I should probably not over-utilize any literary crutch.

With those caveats out of the way, allow me to wax poetic about troubles in the land of wine, cheese, and 35-hour work weeks.

Actually, I won’t wax at all. Let’s look at what a former Frenchwoman has to say.

Veronique de Rugy of Mercatus, a native of France who escaped to the United States, has a column looking at the turmoil and angst in her home country.

…another European Union member is quietly slipping into economic despair. After years of fiscal mismanagement, France is in a bad, bad place. …France spends more of its GDP on government-57 percent-than any other country in the Eurozone. The country’s unemployment rate is at a 16-year high of 11 percent, and a startling number of richer and younger French people are leaving for more hospitable economic environments abroad. …Since the creation of the Eurozone in 1999, France has only managed a 0.8 percent annual growth rate.

The statists in France seem to think the right way of dealing with this crisis is to double down on statism.

…the French government’s response to anemic growth and higher unemployment has been to tack toward less economic freedom, not more. …President Francois Hollande of the Socialist Party has refused to trim France’s social-welfare spending-the highest of all developed economies-and has chosen instead to chip away at the country’s huge deficit by raising taxes.

Hollande’s statism doesn’t seem to be earning him any friends.

Hollande’s commitment to big government hasn’t won him any friends. The French rank him as the least popular president of the Fifth Republic, and young people are voting with their feet. According to the data from French consulates in London and Edinburgh, the number of French people living in London is probably somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000. That’s more than the number of French people living in Bordeaux, Nantes, or Strasbourg.

I know one reason they’re running away.

Taxes, mandates, and regulations make everything so expensive that a McChicken sandwich at McDonald’s, which costs only $1 in the United States, costs about three times as much in Europe based on current exchange rates (as you can see from the pictures I snapped in the metro).

Anyhow, the people of France seem to understand that’s something’s amiss.

Hundreds of thousands of them are escaping as fast as they can. Even the New York Times can’t help but notice!

And in recent local elections, President Hollande’s party took a bath.

Here’s some of what the New York Times reported about recent local elections.

French voters dealt a blow to the government of François Hollande on Sunday, rejecting left-leaning candidates for local office in at least 155 cities while embracing more conservative politicians…the Socialists lost former strongholds like Toulouse and Limoges, as well as many smaller towns. …Economic troubles cast a long shadow over the elections, as Mr. Hollande’s efforts to reverse the trend showed few results… Overall unemployment in France at the end of 2013 was about 11 percent.

Doesn’t sound like the socialists are doing so well. So does this mean Hollande may get tossed out of office in a few years?

Perhaps, but the real question is whether that would make a difference. It seems that the so-called right-wing politicians in France (and elsewhere in Europe) are so squishy and statist that they make Republicans look like paragons of principle.

Here’s some more of what Veronique wrote in her Reason article about Hollande’s predecessor.

…data compiled by tax-watchdog groups and the media in 2012 show that during Sarkozy’s rule, from 2007 to 2012, taxpayers were subjected to 205 separate increases, including excise taxes on televisions, tobacco, and diet sodas, multiple increases in capital taxation, and a wealth-tax hike. Sarkozy is also responsible for increasing the top marginal income tax rate from 40 to 41 percent in 2010, and again to 45 percent in 2012.

In other words, Paul Krugman is right that there’s a plot against France.

But he’s wrong to imply that folks like me are in the cabal. The real threat to France is French politicians.

P.S. The best April Fool’s humor I saw was this “story” sent by a friend in the Bahamas. Sounds like it could have been written by John Stossel.

In an absolutely astounding announcement today, Janet Yellen made a stern and heartfelt apology for 100 years of asset bubbles, depressions, recessions, panics, banking crises, and all-around inflation caused by the Federal Reserve.

Flanked on both sides by former Fed Chairmen Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan, and Paul Volker, Ms. Yellen stated emotionally, “As grand wizards of the financial system, we must accept full responsibility for the consequences that our decisions have had on the lives of ordinary people around the world…”

“Frankly,” Ms. Yellen continued, “I can’t believe in this day and age that total control of the money supply is awarded to a tiny handful of unelected central bankers. It is a most undemocratic system and should be abolished immediately.”

If you like Federal Reserve humor, allow me to call your attention to this video from the Fed Chairman’s childhood, this special Fed toilet paper, Ben Bernanke’s hacked Facebook page, the Bernanke-who-stole-Christmas image, a t-shirt celebrating the Fed Chairman, and the famous “Ben Bernank” video.

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Assessing the New Ryan Budget

Congressman Paul Ryan, the Republican Chairman of the House Budget Committee, has unveiled the GOP’s latest budget plan.

Is this proposal deserving of applause or criticism? The answer is yes and yes, with a bit of emphasis on the former.

Let’s start with some depressing news. The Ryan budget has gotten weaker each year.

Three years ago, he put forth a budget that limited spending so that it grew 2.8 percent per year.

Two years ago, he put forth a budget that limited spending so that it grew 3.1 percent per year.

Last year, he put forth a budget that limited spending so that it grew 3.4 percent per year.

His latest budget continues this slide in the wrong direction. Here are the numbers from the new budget, showing that the burden of government spending will rise by an average of 3.5 percent annually over the next 10 years.

And this is during a time when inflation is projected to be about 2 percent per year!

Since it would be foolish to ever expect perfection from the political process, let’s now look at the positive features of the Ryan budget.

1. Spending may be growing, but it would grow at a slower rate than the President’s proposed budget.

2. Spending may be growing, but it would grow at a slower rate than nominal economic output, thus satisfying Mitchell’s Golden Rule.

3. Perhaps most important, the budget contains genuine and structural reform of both Medicare and Medicaid, so it at least partially solves the long-run fiscal crisis.

4. The budget also foresees tax reform, including lower tax rates for households, a 25 percent corporate tax rate, and a move toward territorial taxation.

Now let’s close with some hard-to-judge news.

The tax reform would be “revenue neutral,” so it’s difficult to accurately assess the proposal without knowing the “revenue raisers” that would offset the “revenue losers” listed above (particularly since lawmakers would be bound by static scoring).

If lower tax rates are financed by getting rid of distortions such as the healthcare exclusion, the net effect is very positive.

But if lower tax rates are financed with increased double taxation (a major shortcoming of the Cong. Camp tax plan), then it’s unclear whether policy has improved.

One final comment. I’m disappointed that the House Budget Committee’s report approvingly cites Congressional Budget Office analysis to suggest that the Ryan budget would boost economic performance.

I think that’s a tactically and morally dubious approach. It’s tactically misguided because the Ryan budget supposedly hurts growth from 2015-2017 according to CBO’s short-term Keynesianism.

And it’s morally dubious because it’s wrong to use bad arguments to advance good policy. The supposed added growth beginning in 2018 is based on the assumption that interest rates are the significant determinant of economic growth – which is the same thinking displayed in the left-wing debt video I shared yesterday.

Paul Ryan and the House GOP can legitimately claim that the proposed budget is good for growth. But improved economic performance would be the result of a smaller burden of government spending and a potentially less destructive tax system. Those are the policies that free up labor and capital for the productive sector and boost incentives to utilize those resources efficiently.

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