America’s Built-In Greek Fiscal Future

I had a very bad lunch today.

But not because of what I ate. My lunch was unpleasant because I moderated a noontime panel on Capitol Hill featuring Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and my Cato colleague Chris Edwards.

And I should hasten to add that they were splendid company. The unpleasant part of the lunch was the information they shared.

The Senator, in particular, looked at budgetary projections over the next 30 years and basically confirmed for the audience that an ever-expanding burden of federal spending is going to lead to a fiscal crisis.

To be blunt, he showed numbers that basically matched up with this Henry Payne cartoon.

Here’s a chart from his presentation. It shows the average burden of spending in past years, compared to various projections of how much bigger government will be – on average – over the next three decades.

The Senator warned that the most unfavorable projection (i.e., “CBO ALT FISC”) was also the most realistic one. In other words, federal spending will consume a much larger share of economic output over the next three decades than it has over the past two decades.

But our fiscal outlook is actually even worse than what you see in his slide.

The Senator’s numbers are based on average spending levels over the 2015-2044 period. That’s very useful – and sobering – data, but if you look at the annual numbers, you’ll see that the trendline gives us additional reasons to worry.

More specifically, spending for the major entitlement programs (Social Security and Medicare, as well as Medicaid) is closely tied to the aging population. So as more and more baby boomers retire over the next couple of decades, spending on these programs will become more burdensome.

In other words, our fiscal problem will be much larger in 2040 than it will be in 2020.

Here are the long-run numbers from the Congressional Budget Office. The blue line is federal spending on various programs and the pink line is total spending (i.e., programmatic spending plus interest payments). And keep in mind that these numbers don’t include state and local government spending, which presumably will chew up another 15 percent of our economic output!

In other words, America will become Greece.

And don’t delude yourself into thinking that CBO must be wrong. I’m not a big fan of the Congressional Budget Office (particularly CBO’s economic analysis), but these numbers are driven by demographics.

Moreover, CBO’s grim outlook is matched by similarly dismal numbers from the IMF, BIS, and OECD.

By the way, CBO doesn’t do projections once federal government debt exceeds 250 percent of GDP, so the gray-colored trendline beginning about 2048 is not an official projections. It’s merely an estimate of the total spending burden assuming that the federal budget is left on autopilot.

Of course, we’ll never reach that level. We will suffer a fiscal crisis before that point. But when it happens to us, the IMF won’t be there to bail us out for the simple reason that the IMF’s credibility is based on the backing of American taxpayers.

And we’ll already have been bled dry!

So unless we find some very rich Martians (who are also stupid enough to bail out profligate governments), it won’t be a pretty situation. I’m not sure we’ll have riots, such as the ones that have taken place in Europe, but there will be plenty of suffering.

Fortunately, there is a solution. All we need is a modest bit of fiscal restraint so that government grows slower than the private sector. That would completely reverse Senator Johnson’s dismal long-run numbers.

And some countries have shown that multi-year periods of fiscal restraint are possible.

The real question, though, is whether politicians in America would be willing to adopt the entitlement reforms that are needed to control the long-run growth of spending.

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We Get Bad Analysis when Statists Write Economic History

When major changes occur, especially if they’re bad, people generally will try to understand what happened so they can avoid similar bad events in the future.

This is why, when we’re looking at major economic events, it’s critical to realize that narratives matter.

For instance, generation after generation of American students were taught that the Great Depression was the fault of capitalism run amok. But we now have lots of evidence that bad government policy caused the Great Depression and that the downturn was made more severe and longer lasting thanks to further policy mistakes by Hoover and Roosevelt.

The history textbooks are probably still wrong, but at least there’s a chance that interested students (and non-students) will come across more accurate explanations of what happened in the 1930s.

More recently, the same thing happened after the financial crisis. The statists immediately tried to convince people that the 2008 mess was a consequence of “Wall Street greed” and “deregulation.”

Fortunately, many experts were available to point out that the real problem was bad government policy, specifically easy money from the Fed and the corrupt system of subsidies from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

So hopefully future history books won’t be as wrong about the financial crisis as they were about the Great Depression.

I raise these examples because I want to address another historical inaccuracy.

Let’s go back about 100 years ago to the s0-called “progressive era.” The conventional story is that this was a period when politicians reined in some of the excesses of big business. And if it wasn’t for that beneficial government intervention, we’d all still be oppressed peasants working in sweatshops.

There’s just one small problem with this narrative. It’s utter nonsense.

Let’s look specifically at the issue of sweatshops. Writing for the Independent Institute, Ben Powell looks at the history of sweatshops and whether workers were being mistreated.

He starts with a bit of history.

Sweatshops are an important stage in the process of economic development. As Jeffery Sachs puts it, “[S]weatshops are the first rung on the ladder out of  extreme poverty”. …Working conditions have been harsh and standards of living low throughout most of human history. …Prior to the Industrial Revolution,  textile production was decentralized to the homes of many rural families or artisans, and output was limited to what could be produced on the  spinning wheel and hand loom. …Yarn spinning was mechanized in 1767 with the invention of the spinning jenny, and water power was harnessed shortly  thereafter. With these inventions and steam power later, large-scale textile factories that are similar to today’s sweatshops emerged. The conditions in these  early sweatshops were worse than those in many Third World sweatshops today. In some factories, workers toiled for sixteen hours a day, six days per week.

Then he looks at what actually happened in Great Britain, which is where sweatshops began.

Yet workers flocked to the mills. …sweatshop workers…were attracted by the opportunity to earn higher wages than they could elsewhere. In fact, economist Ludwig von Mises defended the factory system of the Industrial Revolution,…writing, “The factory owners did not have the power to compel anybody to take a factory job. They could only hire people who were ready to work for the wages offered to them. Low as these wage rates were, they were nonetheless more than these paupers could earn in any other field open to them.” …Mises’s argument is supported by historical evidence. Economist Joel Mokyr reports that workers earned a wage premium of 15 to 30 percent by working in the factories compared with other alternatives. The transformation of Great Britain during this time was dramatic. As economist and historian Donald McCloskey describes it, “In the 80 years or so after 1780 the population of Britain nearly tripled, the towns of Liverpool and Manchester became gigantic cities, the average income of the population more than doubled… Peter Lindert and Jeffery  Williamson similarly find impressive gains in the standard of living between 1781 and 1851. Farm labor’s standard of living went up more than 60 percent,  blue-collar workers’ standard increased more than 86 percent, and overall workers’ standard increased more than 140 percent. Along with this increase in  the standard of living came a decrease in the share of women and children working beginning sometime between 1815 and 1820.

Ben then looks at the American experience. Once again, he finds that sweatshops allowed workers to earn more income than they could by staying on the farm.

And this was part of a process that enabled the United States to become much richer over time.

…workers flocked to the mills. At first, in the cities north of Boston it was mainly rural women and girls who left the farm to populate the early textile mills.  During the 1830s in Lowell, a woman could earn $12 to $14 a month (in 1830s dollars) and after paying $5 for room and board in a company boarding house  would have the rest left over for clothing, leisure, and savings. It wasn’t uncommon for women to return home to the farm after a year with $25 to $50 in a  bank account. This was far more money than they could have earned on the farm and often more disposable cash than their fathers had. …much like in Great Britain, living standards improved over time. In 1820, before the Industrial Revolution, annual per capita income in the United States stood at a little  more than $2,000. By 1850, it had grown by 50 percent to more than $3,000 and then doubled again by 1900 to more than $6,600. Along with the rise in  incomes came improvements in working conditions and greater consumption.

Eventually, of course, the sweatshops disappeared. But Ben explains that it was because of higher living standards rather than government intervention.

Sweatshops are eliminated mainly through the process of industrialization that raises a country’s income. The increased income comes from increased  worker productivity, which raises the upper bound of compensation. The increased productivity isn’t just in one firm, but in many firms and industries, and  thus workers’ next-best alternatives improve, raising the lower bound of compensation. As the economy grows, the competitive process pushes wages up.  Because health, safety, leisure, and so on are normal goods, workers demand more of their compensation on these margins as their total compensation increases. The result is the eventual disappearance of sweatshops.

Now let’s look at the broader issue of whether the “progressive era” was bad news for big business.

The answer is yes and no. Politicians imposed lots of legislation that was bad for the free market, but the crony capitalists of that era were big supporters of intervention.

Tim Carney elaborates in a column for the Washington Examiner.

Every American knows the fable of the Progressive Era and that “trust buster” Teddy Roosevelt wielding the big stick of federal power to battle the greedy corporations. We would be better off if more people knew the work of the man who dismantled this myth: historian Gabriel Kolko… His thesis: “The dominant fact of American political life” in the Progressive Period “was that big business led the struggle for the federal regulation of the economy.”

Here’s what really happened.

Many corporate titans in the early 20th Century, buying into the pervasive hubris of the day, believed that a state-managed economy was the inevitable end of a rational society—the conclusion of what Standard Oil’s top lobbyist Samuel Dodd called the “march of civilization.” Competition, in their eyes, was destructive redundancy. “Competition is industrial war,” James Logan of the U.S. Envelope Company wrote in 1901. “Ignorant, unrestricted competition carried to its logical conclusion means death to some of the combatants and injury for all.”  Steel baron Andrew Carnegie constantly strove to turn the steel industry into a cartel and keep prices high. Competition, however, always had a way pulling prices down. As Carnegie wrote in 1908, “It always comes back to me that Government control, and that alone, will properly solve the problem.” Kolko also showed how the socialists welcomed corporate-state collusion to advance monopoly as part of “progress.”

And, as Tim explains, it’s still happening today.

This has its echoes in contemporary progressive politics… When conservatives challenged Obamacare’s individual mandate, the White House had the backing of the insurance industry and the hospital lobby. After Obama won at the Supreme Court, liberal Bill Scher wrote in the New York Times that progressive victories historically flow from the Left’s alliances with Big Business. …Liberal scholar William Galston at the Brookings Institution explains the economics at play. “Corporations have sizeable cash flows and access to credit markets, which gives them a cushion against adversity and added costs,” he wrote in 2013, explaining why the big guys often welcome regulation.

In other words, big business often is the enemy of genuine capitalism and free markets.

Not only did the big companies, including insurance and pharmaceuticals, support Obamacare.

They’re now supporting the corrupt Import-Export Bank.

And they’re perfectly happy to support higher taxes, at least when the rest of us are being victimized.

They also supported the sleazy TARP bailout.

The moral of the story is not just the big business can be just as bad as big labor. The real moral of the story is captured by this poster.

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Do You Want the Global Destruction of Financial Privacy to Enable Higher Tax Rates and Bigger Government?

It’s a bad idea when governments demand information on your bank accounts and investments so they can impose economically destructive double taxation.

It’s a worse idea when they also demand the right to tax economic activity in other jurisdictions (otherwise known as “worldwide taxation“).

And it’s the worst possible development when governments decide that they should impose a global network of data collection and dissemination as part of a scheme of worldwide double taxation.

Yet that’s exactly what’s happening. High-tax nations, working through the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, want to impose a one-size-fits-all system of “automatic information exchange” that would necessitate the complete evisceration of financial privacy.

David Burton of the Heritage Foundation explains the new scheme for giving governments more access to peoples’ private financial information.

…the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development released the full version of the global standard for automatic exchange of information. The Standard for Automatic Exchange of Financial Account Information in Tax Matters calls on governments to obtain detailed account information from their financial institutions and exchange that information automatically with other jurisdictions on an annual basis.

I think this is bad policy, regardless. It is based on imposing and enforcing bad tax policy.

But David goes one step farther. He warns that this global network of tax police includes many unsavory nations.

It is one thing to exchange financial account information with Western countries that generally respect privacy and are allied with the United States. It is an entirely different matter to exchange sensitive financial information about American citizens or corporations with countries that do not respect Western privacy norms, have systematic problems with corruption or are antagonistic to the United States. States that fall into one of these problematic categories but are participating in the OECD automatic exchange of information initiative include Colombia, China and Russia. …The Obama administration enthusiastically supports the OECD initiative.

Moreover, David wisely does not believe we should trust the Obama Administration’s hollow assurances that other nations won’t misuse the data.

…even the administration has realized important privacy issues at are stake. Robert B. Stack, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for International Tax Affairs, has testified that “the United States will not enter into an information exchange agreement unless the Treasury Department and the IRS are satisfied that the foreign government has strict confidentiality protections…” Leaving these determinations to a tax agency with little institutional interest in anything other than raising tax revenue is dangerous. There is little doubt sensitive financial information about American citizens and businesses can and will be used by some governments for reasons that have nothing to do with tax administration, such as identifying political opponents’ financial resources or industrial espionage. In addition, individuals in corrupt governments may use the information for criminal purposes such as identity theft, to access others’ funds or to identify potential kidnapping victims. It is naïve to think otherwise. …The Senate should not ratify this protocol. The risks to American citizens and American businesses are too great.

David is exactly right, but too restrained and polite in his assessment.

Richard Rahn, my colleague at Cato, is more blunt in his analysis. Here’s some of what he wrote for the Washington Times.

Do you want the Obama administration sharing all of your financial information with the Russian, Chinese and Saudi Arabian governments? You may be thinking, not even President Obama would go that far. Not so… The rationale behind this despicable idea is to more effectively enable governments, such as that of France and the United States, to identify tax evaders. This might sound like a good idea until one realizes that every individual and business will be stripped of all of their financial privacy if this becomes the law of the land… all of the information that financial institutions now report to the U.S. government to try to ensure income-tax compliance, including your account balances, interest, dividends, proceeds from the sale of financial assets — would be shared with foreign governments. This would apply not only for individuals, but also for both financial and nonfinancial businesses, plus trust funds and foundations. 

Richard then explains that we can’t even trust the bureaucrats at the IRS.

The United States and other governments will, of course, claim that your sensitive financial information will remain confidential — and that you can trust the governments. After the recent Internal Revenue Service scandals — which recur every decade or so — why would anyone believe anything the IRS says? Remember, the IRS leaked information on some of Mitt Romney’s donors during the 2012 presidential campaign. It was blatantly illegal, and the IRS (i.e., you the taxpayer) paid a small fine, but no one went to jail. Many U.S. presidents have misused the IRS, starting at least as far back as Franklin Roosevelt, and the American people are always told “never again,” which is the beginning of the new lie.

And he logically concludes it would be even more foolish to trust foreign tax bureaucracies.

Particularly the tax authorities of the many nations that abuse human rights and persecute minorities, as well the tax police in nations that are too incompetent to be trusted with sensitive data.

…just think what is going to happen when all of those corrupt officials in foreign governments get ahold of it. Some will use the information for identity theft and to raid bank accounts, others for industrial espionage, some to identify potential kidnapping victims and some for political purposes. The potential list goes on and on. The U.S. Treasury Department says it will insist on strict confidentiality protections. (Lois Lerner, please call your office.) If you are a Ukrainian-American who donates to Ukrainian free-market and democratic causes, would you really think that Vladimir Putin’s team, having your financial information, would not misuse it? If you are an American Jew who donates to Israeli causes, do you really think that all of those in the Saudi government who now have full access to your confidential financial information are not going to misuse it? The Chinese are well known for using malware against their opponents. Just think of all the mischief they could cause if they had access to all of the sensitive financial information of human rights advocates in America.

Richard draws the appropriate conclusion. Simply stated, there’s no way we should have a global regime of automatic information exchange simply because a handful of high-tax nations want to remake global tax policy so they can prop up their decrepit welfare states.

As Lord Acton famously reminded us, governments are prone to misuse information and power. The instrument behind this information-sharing ploy is the OECD, which started out as a statistical collection and dissemination agency to promote free trade among its members. It has now morphed into an international agency promoting big government and higher taxes, and the destruction of financial freedom — while at the same time, by treaty, its staff salaries are tax-exempt. No hypocrisy there. Thinking Republicans and Democrats should unite around opposition to this terrible treaty and defund the OECD. Those who vote for it will deservedly be easy marks for their political opponents.

And kudos to Richard for urging the defunding of the OECD. It is absurd that American tax dollars are funding a Paris-based bureaucracy that constantly urges policies that would undermine the U.S. economy.

Especially when they’re insulated from the negative effects of the policies they push. Since they’re on the public teat, they don’t suffer when the private economy is battered. And they don’t even have to pay tax on their very generous salaries.

P.S. I’m very glad to report that at least one lawmaker is doing the right thing. Senator Rand Paul is leading the fight to block proposals that would put Americans at risk by requiring the inappropriate collection and sharing of private financial information.

P.P.S. By way of background, the OECD scheme is part of an effort to cripple tax competition so that high-tax nations can impose higher tax rates and finance bigger government. To learn more about tax competition (and tax havens), watch this four-part video series.

P.P.P.S. The OECD scheme is basically a multilateral version of the horrid “FATCA” legislation signed by Obama back in 2010.

P.P.P.P.S. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I think a global tax database is even worse than an Obamacare database on our sex lives.

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Policy Makers Should Make the Tax System Better rather than Banning Corporate Inversions

One of the worst things about working in Washington is that it’s so easy to get frustrated about the fact-free nature of political debates.

For instance, there’s now a big controversy about companies “re-domiciling” or “inverting” from the United States to lower-tax nations such as Ireland and Switzerland.

This should not be controversial. Unless, of course, you think businesses shouldn’t be allowed to move from California to Texas. Or from New York to Tennessee.

And even if you somehow think taxpayers don’t have the right to legally protect themselves from punitive taxation, there are two very stark facts that should guide the political debate.

First, the United States has the world’s highest corporate tax rate, which undermines job creation and competitiveness in America, regardless of whether there are inversions.

Second, the United States has the most punitive “worldwide” tax system, meaning the IRS gets to tax American-domiciled companies on income that is earned (and already subject to tax) in other nations.

This is why, as I explain in this video, that the politicians who are protesting against inversions are putting demagoguery above jobs.

One of the most important aspects of this debate, though, doesn’t involve the intricacies of corporate taxation. Instead, it’s a broader public finance point about whether it’s good public policy to disadvantage shareholders, workers, and consumers in order to give politicians more money to spend.

In my mind, that’s a no-brainer.

P.S. Kudos to Rand Paul for being one of the few politicians who is willing to publicly defend companies that engage in legal tax planning.

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Great Moments in Government, from Banning Bake Sales to Limiting Mistresses

Michelle Obama wants the federal government to tell us what kind of food to eat.

I actually wouldn’t object if she merely used a bully pulpit to encourage healthier eating. But the busy-body crowd in Washington has a hard time distinguishing between giving advice and engaging in coercion.

So we now have legislation that gives Washington the power to interfere with food in local schools.

But not everybody is rolling over, particularly when federal rules are coercing states into banning bake sales. The National Journal reports on growing resistance to this absurd example of nanny statism from Washington. Here are some excerpts.

…states are…fighting nutrition standards that would considerably alter one of the most sacred rituals of the American public school system: bake sales. Twelve states have established their own policies to circumvent regulations in the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 that apply to “competitive snacks,” or any foods and beverages sold to students on school grounds that are not part of the Agriculture Department’s school meal programs, according to the National Association of State Boards of Education. Competitive snacks appear in vending machines, school stores, and food and beverages, including items sold at bake sales. …The pushback is not about students’ taste buds, but their wallets. Food fundraisers are a crucial source of revenue for schools, state education officials say. “Tough economic times have translated into fewer resources and these fundraisers allow our schools to raise a considerable amount of money for very worthwhile education programs,” the Georgia Department of Education wrote in a recent press release. …The statement called the federal guidelines on fundraisers “an absolute overreach of the federal government.”

Kudos to the Georgia officials who complained about government overreach.

But don’t forget that local governments certainly are capable of overreach as well, as this cartoon illustrates.

If you think banning bake sales is an example of government run amok, then you’ll be equally perturbed by what’s happening in California.

According to the Associated Press, some residents are being put in a no-win situation of being fined by either state or local government based on whether or not they water their lawns.

I’m not joking. Check out these blurbs from the story.

Laura Whitney and her husband, Michael Korte, don’t know whether they’re being good citizens during a drought or scofflaws. On the same day the state approved mandatory outdoor watering restrictions with the threat of $500 fines, the Southern California couple received a letter from their city threatening a $500 penalty for not watering their brown lawn. …They’re among residents caught in the middle of conflicting government messages as the need for conservation clashes with the need to preserve attractive neighborhoods. “My friends in Los Angeles got these letters warning they could be fined if they water, and I got a letter warning that I could be fined for not watering,” Whitney said. “I felt like I was in an alternate universe.”

It’s not an alternative universe. As Andy Johnson, Anthony Smelley, Charlie Engle, Tammy Cooper, Nancy Black, Russ Caswell, Jacques Wajsfelner, Jeff Councelller, Martha Boneta, Salvatore Culosi, and James Lieto can atttest, governments routinely abuse innocent people.

But at least we can take comfort in the fact that governments outside of America engage in equally silly actions.

Though I confess I’m not sure how to categorize the news that’s being reported by the BBC. As you can see from these excerpts, there’s apparently now a rule in China limiting public officials to no more than three mistresses.

We’ve heard a lot about China’s far-reaching anti-corruption campaign at the behest of President Xi Jinping. …But according to a report in the English-language newspaper China Daily, “adultery” is now banned for party members. …But just when you thought the party was taking a puritanical stand, the newspaper said that when authorities had previously accused officials of “moral corruption” they defined this as having more than “three mistresses”.

The Princess of the Levant didn’t allow me to engage in any field research on this issue during my recent trip to Shanghai, so I can’t comment on the accuracy of the story.

Though I wonder whether Chinese officials got any advice from America’s 42nd president before imposing these rules?

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Great Moments in Government

You won’t know whether to laugh or cry after perusing these stories that will be added to our “great moments in government” collection.

For instance, did you realize that American taxpayers were saddled with the responsibility to micro-manage agriculture in Afghanistan? You’re probably surprised the answer is yes.

But I bet you’re not surprised that the money was flushed down a toilet. Here are some excerpts from a report on how $34 million was wasted.

American agricultural experts who consider soybeans a superfood…have invested tens of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to try to change the way Afghans eat. The effort, aimed at making soy a dietary staple, has largely been a flop, marked by mismanagement, poor government oversight and financial waste, according to interviews and government audit documents obtained by the Center for Public Integrity. Warnings by agronomists that the effort was unwise were ignored. The country’s climate turns out to be inappropriate for soy cultivation and its farming culture is ill-prepared for large-scale soybean production. Soybeans are now no more a viable commercial crop in Afghanistan than they were in 2010, when the $34 million program got started… The ambitious effort also appears to have been undone by a simple fact, which might have been foreseen but was evidently ignored: Afghans don’t like the taste of the soy processed foods.

Sadly, this $34 million boondoggle is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s been said that Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires. Well, it’s also the graveyard of tax dollars.

…the project’s problems model the larger shortcomings of the estimated $120 billion U.S. reconstruction effort in Afghanistan, including what many experts depict as ignorance of Afghan traditions, mismanagement and poor spending controls. No one has calculated precisely how much the United States wasted or misspent in Afghanistan, but a…special auditor appointed by President Obama the following year said he discovered nearly $7 billion worth of Afghanistan-related waste in just his first year on the job.

I’m guessing that most of the $120 billion was squandered using traditional definitions of waste.

But using a libertarian definition of waste (i.e., money that the federal government should not spend), we can easily calculate that the entire $120 billion was squandered.

Let’s now discuss another example of American taxpayer money being wasted in other nations. I’ve written previously about the squalid corruption at the Export-Import Bank, but Veronique de Rugy of Mercatus is the go-to expert on this issue, and she has a new article at National Review about “a project in Brazil that, if it goes bust and the Brazilians can’t pay the American contractor, your tax dollars will end up paying for.”

And what is this project?

…an Export-Import Bank–backed deal to build the largest aquarium in South America…the taxpayer exposure is $150,000 per job “supported.” Some people in Brazil are rightly upset about this. The Ex-Im loan may have lower interest rates and better terms than a regular loan, but this is probably money the indebted and poor Brazilian government can’t afford. …a real problem with the Ex-Im Bank: On one hand, it gives cheap money to large companies who would have access to capital markets even in its absence. But on the other hand, it encourages middle-income or poor countries to take on debt that they probably can’t afford, whether the products purchased are “made in America” or not.

Gee, aren’t we happy that some bureaucrats and politicians have decided to put us on the hook for a Brazilian aquarium.

But let’s try to make the best of a bad situation. Here’s a depiction of what you’re subsidizing. Enjoy.

Subsidized by American taxpayers

I hope you got your money’s worth from the image.

Perhaps I’m being American-centric by focusing on examples of bad policies from the crowd in Washington.

So let’s look at an example of government foolishness from Germany. It doesn’t involve tax money being wasted (at least not directly), but I can’t resist sharing this story because it’s such a perfect illustration of government in action.

Check out these excerpts from a British news report on over-zealous enforcement by German cops.

A one-armed man in Germany has received a full apology and refund from the police after an overzealous officer fined him for cycling using only one arm. Bogdan Ionescu, a theatre box office worker from Cologne, gets around the usually cycle-friendly city using a modified bicycle that allows him to operate both brakes – one with his foot. But on 25 March he was pulled over by a police officer who, he says, told him he was breaking the law. Under German road safety rules, bicycles are required to have to have two handlebar brakes. After a long argument at the roadside, the officer insisted that Mr Ionescu’s bike was not roadworthy and issued him with a €25 (£20) fine.

At least this story had a happy ending, at least if you overlook the time and aggravation for Mr. Ionescu.

Our last (but certainly not least) example of foolish government comes from Nebraska, though the culprit is the federal government.

But maybe “disconcerting” would be a better word than “foolish.”

It seems that our friends on the left no longer think that “dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” In a very troubling display of thuggery, the Justice Department dispatched a bureaucrat to “investigate” a satirical parade float.

Here’s some of what was reported by the Washington Times.

The U.S. Department of Justice has sent a member of its Community Relations Service team to investigate a Nebraska parade float that criticized President Obama. A Fourth of July parade float featured at the annual Independence Day parade in Norfolk sparked criticism when it depicted a zombie-like figure resembling Mr. Obama standing outside an outhouse, which was labeled the “Obama Presidential Library.” The Nebraska Democratic Party called the float one of the “worst shows of racism and disrespect for the office of the presidency that Nebraska has ever seen.” The Omaha World-Herald reported Friday that the Department of Justice sent a CRS member who handles discrimination disputes to a Thursday meeting about the issue. …The float’s creator, Dale Remmich, has said the mannequin depicted himself, not President Obama. He said he is upset with the president’s handling of the Veterans Affairs Department, the World-Herald reported. “Looking at the float, that message absolutely did not come through,” said NAACP chapter president Betty C. Andrews.

If you look at the picture (and other pictures that can be seen with an online search), I see plenty of disrespect for the current president, but why is that something that requires an investigation?

There was plenty of disrespect for the previous president. And there as also disrespect for the president before that. And before that. And before…well, you get the idea.

Disrespect for politicians is called political speech, and it’s (supposedly) protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution.

That’s even true if the float’s creator had unseemly motives such as racism. He would deserve scorn if that was the case, and parade organizers would (or at least should) have the right to exclude him on that basis.

But you don’t lose your general right to free speech just because you have unpopular and/or reprehensible opinions. And the federal government shouldn’t be doing anything that can be construed as suppressing or intimidating Americans who want to “disrespect” the political class.

P.S. Since we’re on the topic of politicized bureaucracy, we have an update to a recent column about sleazy behavior at the IRS.

According to the Daily Caller, there’s more and more evidence of a big fire behind all the smoke at the IRS.

Ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s computer hard drive was “scratched” and the data on it was still recoverable. But the IRS did not try to recover the data from Lerner’s hard drive, despite recommendations from in-house IRS IT experts to outsource the recovery project. The hard drive was then “shredded,” according to a court filing the IRS made to House Ways and Means Committee investigators.

Gee, how convenient.

I used to dislike the IRS because of the tax code. Now I have an additional reason to view the bureaucrats with disdain.

P.P.S. One last comment on the controversy surrounding the parade float. Racism is an evil example of collectivist thinking. But it is also reprehensible for folks on the left to make accusations of racism simply because they disagree with someone.

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Krugman’s “Gotcha” Moment Leaves Something to Be Desired

I’ve had some fun over the years by pointing out that Paul Krugman has butchered numbers when writing about fiscal policy in nations such as France, Estonia, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

So I shouldn’t be surprised that he wants to catch me making an error. But I’m not sure his “gotcha” moment is very persuasive. Here’s some of what he wrote for today’s New York Times.

Gov. Jerry Brown was able to push through a modestly liberal agenda of higher taxes, spending increases and a rise in the minimum wage. California also moved enthusiastically to implement Obamacare. …Needless to say, conservatives predicted doom. …Daniel J. Mitchell of the Cato Institute declared that by voting for Proposition 30, which authorized those tax increases, “the looters and moochers of the Golden State” (yes, they really do think they’re living in an Ayn Rand novel) were committing “economic suicide.”

Kudos to Krugman for having read Atlas Shrugged, or for at least knowing that Rand sometimes referred to to “looters and moochers.” Though I have to subtract points because he thinks I’m a conservative rather than a libertarian.

But what about his characterization of my position? Well, he’s right, though I’m predicting slow-motion suicide. Voting for a tax hike isn’t akin to jumping off the Golden Gate bridge. Instead, by further penalizing success and expanding the burden of government, California is engaging in the economic equivalent of smoking four packs of cigarettes every day instead of three and one-half packs.

Here’s some of what I wrote.

I’m generally reluctant to make predictions, but I feel safe in stating that this measure is going to accelerate California’s economic decline. Some successful taxpayers are going to tunnel under the proverbial Berlin Wall and escape to states with better (or less worse) fiscal policy. And that will mean fewer jobs and lower wages than otherwise would be the case.

Anyhow, Krugman wants readers to think that California is a success rather than a failure because the state now has a budget surplus and there’s been an uptick in job creation.

Here’s more of what he wrote.

There is, I’m sorry to say, no sign of the promised catastrophe. If tax increases are causing a major flight of jobs from California, you can’t see it in the job numbers. Employment is up 3.6 percent in the past 18 months, compared with a national average of 2.8 percent; at this point, California’s share of national employment, which was hit hard by the bursting of the state’s enormous housing bubble, is back to pre-recession levels. …And, yes, the budget is back in surplus. …So what do we learn from the California comeback? Mainly, that you should take anti-government propaganda with large helpings of salt. Tax increases aren’t economic suicide; sometimes they’re a useful way to pay for things we need.

I’m not persuaded, and I definitely don’t think this counts as a “gotcha” moment.

First, I’m a bit surprised that he wants to brag about California’s employment numbers. The Golden State has one of the highest joblessness rates in the nation. Indeed, only four states rank below California.

Second, I don’t particularly care whether the state has a budget surplus. I care about the size of government.

Krugman might respond by saying that the tax hike generated revenues, thus disproving the Laffer Curve, which is something that does matter to supporters of small government.

But the Laffer Curve doesn’t say that all tax hikes lose revenue. Instead, it says that tax rate increases will have a negative impact on taxable income. It’s then an empirical question to figure out if revenues go up a lot, go up a little, stay flat, or decline.

And what matters most of all is the long-run impact. You can rape and pillage upper-income taxpayers in the short run, particularly if a tax hike is retroactive. In the long run, though, people can move, re-organize their finances, and take other steps to reduce their exposure to the greed of the political class.

In other words, people can vote with their feet…and with their money.

And that’s what seems to be happening in California. Take a look at how much income has emigrated from the state since 1992.

Next we have a map showing which states, over time, are gaining taxable income and which states are losing income (and I invite you to look at how zero-income tax states tend to be very green).

The data isn’t population adjusted, so populous states are over-represented, but you’ll still see that California is losing while Texas is winning.

And here is similar data from the Tax Foundation.

So what’s all of this mean?

Well, it means I’m standing by my prediction of slow-motion economic suicide. The state is going to become the France of America…at least if Illinois doesn’t get there first.

California has some natural advantages that make it very desirable. And I suspect that the state’s politicians could get away with above-average taxes simply because certain people will pay some sort of premium to enjoy the climate and geography.

But the number of people willing to pay will shrink as the premium rises.

In other words, this Chuck Asay cartoon may be the most accurate depiction of California’s future. And this Lisa Benson cartoon shows what will happen between now and then.

But I won’t hold my breath waiting for a mea culpa from Krugman.

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Deconstructing the Initiative-Sapping, Taxpayer-Abusing Welfare State

I’ve written many times about America’s looming fiscal collapse, and I’ve also pontificated about America’s costly and failed welfare state.

I even have speculated about when America reaches a tipping point, with too many people riding in the wagon of government dependency (as illustrated by these famous cartoons, which even have a Danish equivalent).

If you read all my posts on these issues, I like to think you’d be very well informed on these topics. But if you want to save time, my colleague Tom Palmer put all these issues together in a recent speech in Australia.

Best of all, he includes lots of great material on the moral and historical aspects of this discussion.

The good news is that there are signs of progress, at least outside the United States. Denmark, for instance, has cut back on its welfare state.

And now, even the United Kingdom has engaged in some serious welfare reform.

Here are some excerpts from a column in the UK-based Telegraph.

 Why should there have been this improvement in the labour market? …The most convincing explanation is surely the Government’s welfare reforms. They have made it more difficult and less attractive to live off benefits, thereby increasing the supply of workers. In economists’ jargon, the natural rate of unemployment has fallen.

Another Telegraph column digs into the details.

…more jobs are being created in Britain than in the rest of Europe put together. …There has clearly been a game-changer… What confounded the eggheads was that the number of workers is growing four times faster than the number of working-age people: in other words, Britons have become far more likely than pretty much anyone else to look for –and find – work. Why?

The answer is simple economics and incentives.

Fewer people now claim the three main out-of-work benefits than at any time during the Labour years. This, of course, is perfectly explained by IDS’s reforms, which make it a lot harder to live on welfare. Those who have been on incapacity benefit for years have been summoned to assessment centres to see what work they’re fit to do. Far more of the unemployed are being penalised for missing job interviews. A benefits cap has been imposed; housing benefit is being reformed; and the so-called “spare room subsidy” has been abolished, making life more expensive for those on benefits with unused rooms. …this is not about punishing “shirkers”, but helping good people trapped in a bad system. Fixing that system means making life harder for people who have it pretty tough already, at least for a short while. But under the Labour regime, such people were being led down the path to dependency and poverty. A new road had to be built, leading to work. And only now is it becoming clear quite how many people are taking it.

Here’s a chart showing how actual job creation is beating the forecasts.

These are remarkable numbers, particularly when you compare them to the job forecast put forth by the Obama White House, which grossly over-stated the number of jobs that would exist under the so-called stimulus.

The key takeaway is that incentives matter. When you give people unemployment insurance, you reduce incentives to find work. When you give people Obamacare, you reduce incentives to earn income. When you give people welfare and food stamps, you reduce incentives for self-reliance.

And when you add together the panoply of redistribution programs operated by government, it’s easy to see why far too many people are being trapped in government dependency.

If you like charts, here’s a very sobering image of how the welfare state destroys incentives for upward mobility. And if you like anecdotes, here’s a dismal story about government making leisure more attractive than productivity.

P.S. At least one honest leftist acknowledges that there’s a problem.

P.P.S. On a lighter note, here’s a satirical Declaration of Dependency from the left.

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The Economic Future of China and Hong Kong

I’m currently in Asia, where I just finished a series of speeches about economic policy in China and Hong Kong.

These two jurisdictions offer very powerful lessons about the importance of economic policy.

Hong Kong is supposed to be Nirvana for libertarians. It holds the top spot in the Economic Freedom of the World rankings. It has an optional flat tax. It has a private retirement system. And based on IMF data, government spending “only” consumes 18.4 percent of GDP (compared to 38.6 percent of economic output in the United States and 54.4 percent of GDP in France).

In reality, Hong Kong is far from perfect. It may have a lot more economic freedom than other jurisdictions, but there is widespread government intervention in certain sectors, such as housing. And while a flat tax and spending burden of 18.4 percent of GDP sound good, let’s not forget that the western world became rich in the 1800s when there was no income tax and the public sector consumed less than 10 percent of GDP.

But when you rank countries on the basis of economic freedom, you don’t compare jurisdictions to a nonexistent libertarian utopia. You compare them to other nations. So Hong Kong gets the top spot. And that’s paying dividends. When you look at long-run comparisons with other nations, Hong Kong has grown faster and become more prosperous.

So what about China? This wasn’t my first visit to the country, but it was the first time I went to Shanghai, and it is a very impressive place. It’s obvious that China has enjoyed a lot of growth in the past few decades.

But just as you shouldn’t judge the United States by a visit to Wall Street, it would be a mistake to draw sweeping conclusions about China after a few days in Shanghai.

Indeed, average living standards for all of China are still far below American levels. Moreover, if you look at the Economic Freedom of the World rankings, China still has a lot of room for improvement. It ranks 123rd out of 152 nations, which is not only far below France (#40), but also Greece (#85), Haiti (#98), and Russia (#101).

That being said, China’s score is 6.22 out of 10, which is a vast improvement compared to where it was in 1980, when it had a score of only 4.00.

This has led to some wonderful outcomes. This chart (h/t: Mark Perry) shows the share of the world’s population living on less than $1 per day (blue line) and the share of East Asia’s population with the same level of deprivation (red line). A big reason the red line has fallen so dramatically is that severe poverty in China has largely disappeared.

The real question for China is the degree to which there will be ongoing improvement.

I think it would be good if China became more like Hong Kong and that this led to much higher living standards. Heck, I’d be happy if China became more like Taiwan or South Korea, both of which have become relatively rich nations by moving substantially in the direction of free markets and small government.

But I don’t think this will happen. In one of my speeches, I posed a series of questions, followed by some less-than-optimistic answers.

Is the financial system weak? (because of too much state control over capital flows and investment)

Is there too much cronyism? (with friends and relatives getting favorable access to business)

Will China’s demographics be a problem? (the one-child policy is not just tyrannical, but it also means China’s population is aging)

Is rapid growth sustainable? (in the absence of reforms to boost economic freedom)

Have stimulus plans led to malinvestment? (such as ghost cities and other boondoggles)

Since economists are lousy when they make predictions, it’s quite possible that I’m wrong and my pessimism is unwarranted. For the sake of the Chinese people, let’s hope so.

And what about Hong Kong? I suspect they’ll remain the freest economy in the world. After all, why wreck a good thing?

Then again, the United States was the world’s 3rd-freest economy as recently as 2001. Now, thanks to Bush-Obama statism, we’ve plummeted to 17 in the ranking.

But I doubt Hong Kong policy makers would be equally foolish.

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Mocking the IRS with Reason TV

In some sense, there’s nothing remotely funny about the IRS’s targeting of Tea Party organizations.

It is disgusting that a powerful arm of the government became a corrupt vehicle for illegal partisan politics.

But it’s better to laugh rather than cry, so let’s enjoy this new video from Remy at Reason TV.

And let’s not forget that the IRS rewarded itself with big bonuses after the scandal!

President Obama infamously claimed there wasn’t a “smidgen” of corruption at the IRS. This Glenn Foden cartoon is the only appropriate response.

P.S. Switching to another topic, I explained recently that the left was wrong about unemployment insurance. The statists told us that paying people to be unemployed wouldn’t increase joblessness, but virtually all the evidence is on the other side.

Now we have even more research emphasizing that point. Here’s a blurb from some new research published by the St. Louis Federal Reserve.

…we find that the extension of unemployment benefits affected the labor market status of long-term unemployed workers in late 2013. Without extended UI benefits, these unemployed workers would have been more likely to be employed, more likely to exit the labor force, and on average 1.9 percent less likely to remain unemployed in the following period. In short, our simulated early termination of the EUC program lowered the unemployment rate by 3 to 5 basis points, suggesting that the December 2013 expiration of the EUC program might have slightly lowered the unemployment rate in early 2014.

However, since most leftists are not very literate about economics, let’s simplify the issue. Maybe they can understand some cartoons. Here are some options from Michael Ramirez, Robert Gorrell, and Chuck Asay, as well as a great Wizard-of-Id parody.

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A Simple Solution to the Highway Trust Fund Deficit

I’m a big believer in federalism, both as a matter of policy and politics.

So you won’t be surprised that I’ve called for the abolition of the Department of Transportation. On more than one occasion.

But when you’re trying to convince politicians to give up power and money, it takes a lot repetition. So, to paraphrase what Ronald Reagan said to Jimmy Carter, here we go again.

I want to emphasize one part of the interview. I’m agnostic on the issue of whether America as a whole needs more infrastructure spending, but I’m sure some parts of the nation could use more roads.

But that doesn’t mean that Washington should be in charge of that spending.

My colleague at Cato, Chris Edwards, is an expert on these issues. Here’s what he recently wrote about the various schemes in DC to fund more transportation spending with higher taxes.

HTF spending on highways and urban transit adds up to $53 billion a year, while the HTF rakes in $39 billion in revenues, mainly from the federal gasoline tax. That leaves a gap of $14 billion. President Obama wants to fill the gap with corporate tax revenues, but that bad idea is dead on arrival in Congress. Senator Bob Corker (R., Tenn.) has a different idea. His bill, co-sponsored by Senator Chris Murphy (D., Conn.), would hike the federal gas tax by 12 cents per gallon. …Corker’s position is the opposite of conservative. If Tennessee needs more money for roads, it can raise its own gas tax any time it wants.

And here are some of the numbers that Chris put together showing that highway spending has been rising rather than falling.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown of Reason adds more context.

About 27 percent of highway and transit spending currently comes from the federal government, via the HTF, while states kicking in about 38 percent and 35 percent coming from municipalities. The HTF isn’t set to “run dry” in August, as many are reporting, but it did tell states to expect an average 28 percent reduction in aid at that point unless Congress acts. …there’s nothing stopping states from taking this matter into their own hands. Since 2013, seven states have raised fuel levies, reports Reuters… When left a little more to their own devices, it seems states get innovative. They develop localized solutions. They experiment.

Let’s close with one interesting piece of data. The International Institute for Management Development recently published its World Competitiveness Yearbook.

The good news is that the United States maintained its hold on first place. That’s a lot better than we’re doing in the Economic Freedom of the World rankings.

But what’s particularly relevant and fascinating is to see America’s scores in the various sub-components of the Yearbook. The United States may rank only 22 out of 60 nations for government effectiveness, but we beat every nation for infrastructure.

So if we have an “infrastructure crisis” in the United States, it certainly doesn’t show up in either the hard data or the business leader opinion survey that generate those rankings.

P.S. Back in 2011, I shared a couple of serious videos about bitcoin.

On a lighter note, here’s “bitcoin girl” encouraging more people to use this private money.

But since I don’t want anyone to accuse me of bias, fans of the Federal Reserve can enjoy this alleged film clip from Ben Bernanke’s childhood.

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Hillary Humor…or Hillary Horror

I haven’t paid much attention to Hillary Clinton. Looking through my archives, I found a few posts criticizing her statist inclinations on issues such as taxation, geography, economics, the War on Drugs, class warfare, and financial privacy.

Compared to other major political figures, that’s a pretty meager list.

Moreover, to the best of my recollection, other than a few cartoons, I’ve never shared any Hillary humor (whereas Bill is a never-ending source of material).

That needs to change, and thanks to a quiz that was showed up in my inbox, that change happens today.

The quiz provides a series of quotes and asks the reader to identify the author (unlike the quizzes I usually share, which allow readers to decide how they feel on various issues).

Anyhow, here’s the quiz, taken verbatim from my inbox.

=====================================

Answer all the questions (no cheating) before looking at the answers.

Who said it?

1) “We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.”

A. Karl Marx
B. Adolph Hitler
C. Joseph Stalin
D. Barack Obama
E. None of the above

2) “It’s time for a new beginning, for an end to government of the few, by
the few, and for the few……and to replace it with shared responsibility,
for shared prosperity.”

A. Lenin
B. Mussolini
C. Idi Amin
D. Barack Obama
E. None of the above

3) “(We)…..can’t just let business as usual go on, and that means
something has to be taken away from some people.”

A. Nikita Khrushev
B. Josef Goebbels
C. Boris Yeltsin
D. Barack Obama
E. None of the above

4) “We have to build a political consensus and that requires people to give
up a little bit of their own … in order to create this common ground.”

A. Mao Tse Dung
B. Hugo Chavez
C. Kim Jong Il
D. Barack Obama
E. None of the above

5) “I certainly think the free-market has failed.”

A. Karl Marx
B. Lenin
C. Molotov
D. Barack Obama
E. None of the above

6) “I think it’s time to send a clear message to what has become the most
profitable sector in (the) entire economy that they are being watched.”

A. Pinochet
B. Milosevic
C. Saddam Hussein
D. Barack Obama
E. None of the above

Scroll down for the answers

…

…

…

…

…

…

…

…

Answers
(1) E. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary Clinton – 6/29/2004
(2) E. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary Clinton – 5/29/2007
(3) E. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary Clinton – 6/4/2007
(4) E. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary Clinton – 6/4/2007
(5) E. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary Clinton – 6/4/2007
(6) E. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary Clinton – 9/2/2005

=====================================

Actually, this isn’t humor. It’s horror. The last thing America needs is another statist president. Bush and Obama already have done enough damage.

Though many of the quotes are taken out of context in order to make Hillary look radical. For what it’s worth, the leftists at Politifact rate the email quiz as a pants-on-fire lie. I think “significant exaggeration” would be more accurate.

Let’s not forget that she cavalierly dismissed the likely economic damage of her 1993 healthcare scheme, asserting that “”I can’t be responsible for every undercapitalized entrepreneur in America.”

P.S. This quiz is somewhat similar to the infamous Al Gore-Unabomber quiz. For what it’s worth, I flunked that quiz with a score of only 42 percent.

P.P.S. Speaking of Gore, I’m also surprised I have so little humor with him as the target. All I could find was this video and a couple of one-liners from Leno and Conan. He also played a cameo role in this joke featuring Monica Lewinsky.

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For State Policy Makers, the Simple (Anti) Tax Solution for Faster Growth

When people in other nations ask me for evidence in favor of low taxes, I often will ask them to compare the economic performance of a high-tax nation like France with the performance of a nation such as Switzerland with less onerous taxes.

If I’m asked by Americans, I generally suggest that they compare different states. For instance, I show them evidence that California has a much more punitive tax system than Texas. And when you look at all the available state rankings, it’s clear that there’s a big difference.

*Tax burdens as a share of state income.

*The State Tyranny Index.

*Mercatus State Fiscal Ranking.

*State Business Tax Climate Index.

*Tax Foundation’s Tax Freedom Day.

*State Freedom Index.

*Death Spiral states.

And I then ask folks to compare economic performance. There’s lots of evidence that Texas is growing much faster and creating far more jobs than California.

Heck, it’s almost as if California politicians want to drive successful people out of the Golden State (fortunately, the state’s politicians didn’t read Walter Williams’ satirical column about putting a barbed-wire fence at the border). And when upper-income taxpayers leave the state, that means taxable income and tax revenue also escape.

Though it’s worth pointing out that the case for low taxes isn’t based solely on comparisons of Texas and California. We know, for instance, that states with no income taxes generally outperform other states.

Moreover, we don’t need to rely on casual empiricism. Here are some of the results from a new study published by the Mercatus Center.

…this study uses the average tax rate as a practical approximation of the overall state tax burden. …The coefficient of average tax rate is negative and statistically significant in both models, suggesting that a higher tax burden as a share of income reduces state economic growth. …Elasticity of −2.6, for example, implies that a 1 percent increase in the tax rate decreases economic growth by 2.6 percent, not percentage points. …While the aforementioned income growth results are insightful, the impact of taxation on the level of income is also important. …income tax progressivity has a significant negative relationship with real GSP per capita. …An alternative way to measure economic activity is to look at the number of private firms that operate in each state. …The main conclusion from the two regression models is that only personal income tax progressivity seems to have a significant negative effect on the growth in the number of firms. … By voting with their feet, people send a clear signal about where they prefer to live and work. …an empirical analysis of migration may show, indirectly, how taxes affect the flow of economic activity across states. …state net immigration rate is negatively related to the personal income tax rate … The net immigration rate also seems to have a significantly negative correlation with the average tax rate and income tax progressivity.

These findings should not be a surprise.

It’s common sense that economic activity – and taxpayers – will flow to states that don’t punish people for creating wealth.

Let’s now circle back to the Texas-vs-California comparisons. Take a look at this remarkable chart put together by Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute.

As you can see, total employment in Texas has jumped almost 10 percent since 2008. In California, by contrast, total employment has increased by less than 2/10ths of 1 percent.

So you can see why this Lisa Benson cartoon is so appropriate.

Speaking of humor, this Chuck Asay cartoon speculates on how future archaeologists will view California. And this joke about Texas, California, and a coyote is among my most-viewed blog posts.

All jokes aside, none of this should be interpreted to suggest that Texas is perfect. There’s too much government in the Lone Star state. It’s only a success story when compared to California.

And even though California does worse than Texas in my Moocher Index, it’s worth pointing out that Californians are the least likely of all Americans to sign up for food stamps.

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Six Astounding Examples of Left-Wing Hypocrisy

Last month, I nailed Bill and Hillary Clinton for their gross hypocrisy on the death tax.

But that’s just one example. Today, we’re going to experience a festival of statist hypocrisy. We have six different nauseating examples of political elitists wanting to subject ordinary people to bad policy while self-exempting themselves from similar burdens.

Our first three examples are from the world of taxation.

Here are some excerpts from a Washington Times report about a billionaire donor who is bankrolling candidates who support higher taxes, even though he structured his hedge fund in low-tax jurisdictions specifically to minimize the fiscal burdens of his clients.

Tom Steyer, the billionaire environmental activist who is spending $100 million to help elect Democrats this fall, is rallying support for energy taxes that could impact everyday Americans. But when he ran his own hedge fund, Mr. Steyer sought to help wealthy clients legally avoid paying taxes, confidential investor memos show. Mr. Steyer’s strategy included establishing funds in tax havens like the Cayman Islands and Mauritius… Mr. Steyer boasted to investors such as major universities that his hedge fund, Farallon Capital Management LLC, had a “desire not to earn income which would be taxable to our tax-exempt investors,” one internal memo reviewed by The Washington Times showed. Mr. Steyer also helped his firm’s wealthy clientele avoid the highest of U.S. taxes and penalties by establishing arcane tax shelters… Mr. Steyer is pushing for a variety of new taxes on the energy sector. In California, Mr. Steyer supports an oil extraction tax, and he is funding politicians who support taxing carbon, including Sen. Mark Udall, Colorado Democrat.

By the way, Steyer did nothing wrong, just as Mitt Romney did nothing wrong when he utilized so-called tax havens to manage and protect his investments.

But at least Romney wasn’t overtly urging higher taxes on everyone else, so he’s not guilty of glaring hypocrisy.

Speaking of international taxation, how about the behavior of Senator Joe Machin’s daughter? She’s the head of an American drug-making company, a position that almost surely has something to do with her father being a senator.  Particularly since the company gets a big chunk of its revenues from sales to the federal government.

In any event, her company has decided that it’s okay to benefit from sales to big government, but that it’s not a good idea to pay taxes for big government. Here are some blurbs from a National Journal report.

…this column happens to be about a Democratic senator from West Virginia, Joe Manchin, and his daughter, Heather Bresch, the chief executive of Mylan, a giant maker of generic drugs based outside Pittsburgh. Her company’s profits come largely from Medicaid and Medicare, which means her nest is feathered by U.S. taxpayers. On Monday, Bresch announced that Mylan will renounce its United States citizenship and instead become incorporated in the Netherlands – leaving this country, in part, to pay less in taxes.

By the way, I’m a big fan of companies re-domiciling overseas.

So long as our corporate tax system has high rates and punitive worldwide taxation, corporate expatriation is the best way of protecting the interests of American workers, consumers, and shareholders.

But it’s a bit hypocritical when the expatriating company is run by a major Democrat donor.

Our third example of hypocrisy also deals with corporate expatriation, and it’s probably the most odious and extreme display of two-faced political behavior. Here’s some of what was reported in the L.A. Times about the Secretary of the Treasury’s attack on corporate inversions.

Calling for “a new sense of economic patriotism,” a top Obama administration official urged Congress to take immediate action to stop U.S. companies from reorganizing as foreign firms to avoid paying taxes. …”What we need as a nation is a new sense of economic patriotism, where we all rise or fall together,” Lew wrote to the top Democrats and Republicans on the congressional tax-writing committees. “We should not be providing support for corporations that seek to shift their profits overseas to avoid paying their fair share of taxes,” he said. …Lew said such moves were unfair to U.S. taxpayers. …”Congress should enact legislation immediately — and make it retroactive to May 2014 — to shut down this abuse of our tax system,” Lew wrote.

Gee, big words from Mr. Lew. But too bad he didn’t say those words to himself when he was a crony capitalist at Citigroup. Why? Because he had big money parked in the Cayman Islands!

So he inverted his own funds but doesn’t want other taxpayers to have the right to make the same sensible choices.

Now let’s look at three non-tax related examples of hypocrisy.

First, we have a pro-Obamacare politician running for Congress. One of his main talking points is that his wife is an OB/GYN and he also trumpets his support for expansion of Medicaid (the government’s money-hemorrhaging healthcare program for lower-income people).

Here’s some of what was reported by the Free Beacon (h/t: National Review).

John Foust has made his wife the face of his campaign for Virginia’s 10th District. Dr. Marilyn Jerome is an OBGYN… Foust attacks his Republican opponent Barbara Comstock for opposing Medicaid expansion. Failure to expand Medicaid to rural hospitals could be “devastating,” he says. Dr. Jerome has also written in support of the Affordable Care Act on the Foxhall website, citing the Medicaid expansion as beneficial to low-income women.

But it seems that Medicaid expansion is only a good idea when other doctors are dealing with the government.

It turns out, however, that not all women can receive “compassionate reproductive healthcare” from Foxhall. The practice doesn’t accept Medicaid. …in public, Dr. Jerome is preaching the Affordable Care Act and praising the Medicaid expansion while, in her practice, she doesn’t accept it.

The message is that sub-standard government-run healthcare is okay for us peasants, but doctors who cater to the political elite in Washington want nothing to do with the program.

Sort of like the politicians and IRS bureaucrats who want to be exempted from Obamacare.

Second, it turns out that global warming alarmists use above-average amounts of energy.

Here are some tidbits from a column in the UK-based Telegraph.

People who claim to worry about climate change use more electricity than those who do not, a Government study has found. Those who say they are concerned about the prospect of climate change consume more energy than those who say it is “too far into the future to worry about,” the study commissioned by the Department for Energy and Climate Change found. …The findings were based on the Household Electricity Survey.

Not that this surprises me. I’ve previously shared evidence that elitist environmentalists want to dictate the energy consumption of ordinary people while suffering no cutbacks in their own extravagant living standards.

Third, we have a remarkable bit of political jujitsu from Martin O’Malley, the governor of Maryland, on the issue of illegal aliens. Here’s an amazing excerpt from a story in Politco (h/t: National Review).

Martin O’Malley says that deporting the children detained at the border would be sending them to “certain death” — but he also urged the White House not to send them to a facility in his own state.

Wow. Regardless of what you think about open borders, amnesty, and other immigration issues, O’Malley comes across as a craven politician. This is NIMBY on steroids.

In conclusion, I should point out that hypocrisy is not limited to leftists. I’m even harder on faux conservatives who pretend to favor small government when talking to voters but then aid and abet statism behind closed doors in Washington.

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Thanks to Lobbying, Banks Obtain Unearned Wealth and Increase Systemic Risk

I periodically comment about government corruption, often in the context of trying to make the general point that shrinking the size and scope of the public sector is the most effective way of reducing sleaze in Washington.

Now let’s get specific. I’ve already cited Obamacare, the tax code, and the Export-Import Bank as facilitators of corruption. Let’s augment that list by looking at government intervention in the financial sector.

We’ll start with some findings on the effectiveness of lobbying. In some new research, two professors at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center found that being active in Washington is beneficial for top executives, but it doesn’t help a company’s bottom line.

Here’s how the Washington Examiner summarized the study.

What is the return on investment in lobbying? Does a PAC contribution actually pay for itself? There are so many cases of a lobbyist winning an earmark, or a PAC contribution immediately preceding a subsidy, that it’s hard not to see politics as a good investment. …But for every company that hits the jackpot after lobbying campaign, scores of others end up throwing away money on lobbyists — and scores of executives whose PAC contributions don’t help the company a bit. Business professors Russell Sobel and Rachel Graefe-Anderson of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University collected the data and dug into the bigger question: Do lobbying expenditures and PAC contributions increase corporate profits, on average? Their answer: No… When Sobel and Graefe-Anderson crunched numbers, conducted regressions, and controlled for firm size, industry and other factors, they arrived at data “suggesting that any benefits gained from corporate political activity are largely captured by firm executives.” In short, when a CEO and a lobbyist decide to get their company more involved in politics, the CEO and the lobbyist benefit, while not helping the company.

These findings at first struck me as counterintuitive. After all, there are plenty of companies, such as General Electric and Archer Daniels Midland, that seem to obtain lots of unearned profits thanks to their lobbying activities.

But don’t forget that government – at best – is a zero-sum game. So for every company, industry, or sector that “wins,” there will be lots of companies, industries, and sectors that suffer.

And speaking of industries that benefit, there was one exception to the Mercatus Center findings.

The only exception was the banking and financial sectors, where they found “positive and significant correlations between firm lobbying activity and three measures of firm financial performance,” including return on investment and return on equity.

At this stage, let’s be careful to specify that lobbying is not necessarily bad. If a handful of business owners want to join forces to fight against higher taxes or more regulation, I’m all in favor of that kind of lobbying. They’re fighting to be left alone.

But a big chunk of the lobbying in Washington is not about being left alone. It’s about seeking undeserved benefits by using the coercive power of government.

And this latter definition is a good description of what the financial industry has been doing in Washington. That’s bad for taxpayers, but it’s also bad for the financial sector and the overall economy. Here are some of the conclusions from a recent study published by the New York Federal Reserve Bank.

…there have been many concerns with banks deemed “too big to fail.” These concerns derive from the belief that the too-big-to-fail status gives large banks a competitive edge and incentives to take on additional risk. If investors believe the largest banks are too big to fail, they will be willing to offer them funding at a discount. Together with expectations of rescues, this discount gives the too-big-to-fail banks incentives to engage in riskier activities. …The debate around too-big-to-fail banks has given rise to a large literature. … we study whether banks that rating agencies classify as likely to receive government support increase their risk-taking. …The results of our investigation show that a greater likelihood of government support leads to a rise in bank risk-taking. Following an increase in government support, we see a larger volume of bank lending becoming impaired. Further, and in line with this finding, our results show that stronger government support translates into an increase in net charge-offs. Additionally, we find that the effect of government support on impaired loans is stronger for riskier banks than safer ones, as measured by their issuer default ratings. …the level of impaired loans in a bank loan portfolio increases directly with the level of government support. …riskier banks are more likely to take advantage of potential sovereign support.

Isn’t that wonderful. Our tax dollars have been used to increase systemic risk and undermine economic growth. Though none of us should be surprised.

Since this has been a depressing column, let’s enjoy some morbid TARP humor.

Here’s a cartoon from Robert Ariail about the cronies who got rich from the Bush-Obama bailouts.

Good to see Hank Paulson getting ripped. At the end of the Bush Administration, I attempted to convince the White House that “FDIC resolution” was a much better way of recapitalizing the banking system. I was repeatedly told, though, that Paulson was in charge and there was no way of stopping him from bailing out his former cronies on Wall Street.

Oh well, at least I tried.

Here’s another cartoon about the real victims of TARP. Like the first cartoon, it’s an oldie but goodie and it’s a good illustration of how government is a zero-sum scam.

But let me re-emphasize a point I made above. Taxpayers aren’t the only ones to lose. The entire economy suffers from bailouts and subsidies. Such policies distort the allocation of capital and lead to slower long-run growth.

That may not be easy to measure, but it matters a lot.

Here’s a video explaining how such policies create moral hazard.

This is a good time to recycle the famous poster about supposed government solutions.

P.S. Not all financial institutions are corrupted by government. The nation’s 10th-largest bank, BB&T, did not want and did not need a bailout. But as the bank’s former CEO (and, I’m proud to say, current Cato Institute president) explained in his book, thugs from Washington threatened to use regulatory coercion if BB&T didn’t participate.

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Obamacare’s Creepy Uncle Sam Strikes Again

Last September, I shared a disconcerting video showing an unfortunate young woman getting her OB/GYN exam from a very creepy version of Uncle Sam.

Well, you’ll be pleased to know that “Creepy Uncle Sam” does not discriminate. In this video, a young man faces the unpleasant experience of getting his prostate checked.

Kudos to Generation Opportunity for putting together such clever videos.

But I think their most recent video is a true masterpiece. It manages to showcase almost all the bad features of Obamacare in a short, amusing, pithy form.

And if you like videos that make fun of Obamacare, here are some other examples from the archives.

*The head of the National Socialist Workers Party finds out he can’t keep his health plan.

*Young people discover that they’re screwed by Obamacare.

*Remy of Reason TV sings about the joy of part-time work.

*A cartoon video imagines a world where buying coffee is like buying government-run healthcare.

*One of the biggest statists of the 20th century is angry that the Obamacare exchanges don’t work.

Let’s close with a good cartoon from Ken Catalino.

And whatever the government says Obamacare costs, you can feel confident (albeit depressed) that the real cost will be higher. Especially if you’re also counting non-fiscal costs such as fewer jobs.

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Obamacare, Cronyism, and Bailouts for Corrupt Health Insurance Companies

I thought TARP was the sleaziest-ever example of cronyism and corruption in Washington.

The Wall Street bailout rewarded politically well-connected companies, encouraged moral hazard, and ripped off taxpayers. Heck, it was so bad that it makes the sleaze at the Export-Import Bank seem almost angelic by comparison.

But I may have to reassess my views.

One of the provisions of Obamacare allows the White House to give bailouts to big health insurance companies. You’re probably wondering why these big firms would need bailouts. After all, didn’t Obamacare coerce millions of people into becoming involuntary customers of these companies? That should give them lots of unearned profits, right?

But here’s the catch. The President wasn’t being honest when he repeatedly promised that Obamacare would reduce premiums for health insurance. And since the Democrats don’t want consumers to get angry about rising costs (particularly before the 2014 elections), they want health insurance companies to under-charge.

Avik Roy of Forbes explains in greater detail how the White House is coercing health insurance companies to limit premium increases before the mid-term elections. Here are some excerpts.

Hidden in the midst of a 436 page regulatory update, and written in pure bureaucratese, the Department of Health and Human Services asked that insurance companies limit the looming premium increases for 2015 health plans. But don’t worry, HHS hinted: we’ll bail you out on the taxpayer’s dime if you lose money. …The White House is playing politics with Americans’ health care—and they’re bribing health insurance companies to play along. The administration’s intention is clear: Salvage the 2014 midterm elections. …Technically, the regulations don’t force health insurance companies to tamp down their premium spikes. But the White House isn’t asking nicely. …Under Obamacare, insurers are so heavily regulated that they have to play nice with the bureaucrats who call the shots. …If insurance companies don’t give in, regulators have powerful ways to make life hard for them. A shrewd CEO doesn’t need to look far to see what might happen if his company opts out.

But before you feel sorry for Big Insurance, remember that these corrupt companies supported Obamacare and fully expect to get bailed out by taxpayers. Here are some blurbs from an article last month in the Weekly Standard.

Most Americans don’t think it’s their job to bail out insurance companies who lose money under Obamacare, but that’s exactly what’s poised to happen. Obamacare’s risk-corridor program — which President Obama has been using as a slush fund to placate his insurance allies and keep them quiet about his lawlessness — shifts financial risk from insurers to taxpayers. According to the House Oversight Committee, health insurers expect Obamacare’s risk corridors to net them nearly $1 billion, at taxpayer expense, this year alone. …It was a win-win that would boost Obamacare in its early days — to the benefit of those who’ve gained extraordinary power at the expense of Americans’ liberty, and of those whose product has become mandatory for Americans to purchase.

In other words, we have a stereotypical example of Mitchell’s Law. Government screws up something, and then uses that mess as an excuse to impose more bad policy!

This Lisa Benson cartoon is a perfect summary of what’s happening.

P.S. If you’re in the mood for some dark humor, here’s the federal government’s satirical bailout application form.

P.P.S. Switching to a different topic, it’s time for me to rectify a mistake. When I first created the Moocher Hall of Fame last year, I didn’t include the “Octo-moocher” as a charter member. After all, having 14 kids while living on the dole didn’t seem particularly noteworthy.

But now we’ve discovered that she could afford her kids. She just wanted other people to pick up the tab.

Octomom Nadya Suleman pleaded no contest Monday to a single count of misdemeanor welfare fraud for failing to disclose income she was receiving from videos and personal appearances while collecting more than $26,000 in public assistance funds to care for her 14 children.

This may not be as impressive as the deadbeat who got handouts while living on a $1.2 million yacht, but still worthy of membership.

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An Under-Appreciated Victory over Obamacare

Let’s enjoy some semi-good news today.

We’ve discussed many times why Obamacare is bad news, whether we’re looking at it from the perspective of the healthcare system, taxpayers, or workers.

But it could be worse. Writing in the Washington Post, Robert Samuelson explains that two-dozen states have refused the lure of expanding Medicaid (the means-tested health care program) in exchange for “free” federal money.

From 1989 to 2013, the share of states’ general funds devoted to Medicaid has risen from 9 percent to 19 percent, reports the National Association of State Budget Officers. Under present law, the squeeze will worsen. The White House report doesn’t discuss this. …To the White House, the right-wing anti-Obamacare crusade is mean-spirited partisanship at its worst. The 24 non- participating states are sacrificing huge amounts of almost-free money… Under the ACA, the federal government pays all the cost of the Medicaid expansion through 2016 and, after that, the reimbursement rate drops gradually to a still-generous 90 percent in 2020.

But that “almost-free money” isn’t free, of course. It’s simply money that the federal government (rather than state governments) is diverting from the productive sector of the economy.

So the 24 states that have rejected Medicaid expansion have done a huge favor for America’s taxpayers. To be more specific, Nic Horton of Watchdog.org explains that these states have lowered the burden of federal spending (compared to what it would have been) by almost $90 billion over the next three years.

By not expanding Medicaid, 24 states are saving taxpayers $88 billion over the next three years. That is $88 billion that will not be added to the national debt — debt that will not be passed on to future generations of taxpayers. On the other hand, states that have expanded Medicaid through Obamacare are adding roughly $84 billion to the national debt through 2016.

Returning to Samuelson’s column, he would like a grand bargain between states and the federal government, with Washington agreeing to pay for all of Medicaid (currently, states pay a portion of the bill) in exchange for states taking over all spending for things such as roads and education.

We could minimize this process for states and localities by transferring all Medicaid costs to Washington (or at least the costs of the elderly and disabled). To pay for it, Washington would reduce transportation and education grants to states. Let Washington mediate among generations. Let states and localities concentrate on their traditional roles of education, public safety and roads. Spare them the swamp of escalating health costs. This is the bargain we need — and probably won’t get.

I like half of that deal. I want to transfer education, law enforcement, and roads back to the state level (or even the local level).

But I don’t want Washington taking full responsibility for Medicaid. Instead, that program also should be sent down to the states as well. This video explains why that reform is so desirable.

P.S. Since we’re on the topic of Obamacare, this Chip Bok cartoon perfectly captures the essence of the Hobby Lobby decision. The left wants the mandate that contraception and abortifacients be part of health insurance packages.

Rather than exacerbate the damage of using insurance to cover routine costs, wouldn’t it make more sense to have employers simply give their workers more cash compensation and then allow the workers to use their money as they see fit?

That way there’s no role for those evil, patriarchal, oppressive, and misogynistic bosses!

I realize this might upset Sandra Fluke, but at least she has the comfort of knowing that her narcissistic statism generated some good jokes (here, here, and here).

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Great Moments in Government Waste and Inefficiency

It’s difficult being a libertarian.

In addition to all the other challenges (such as trying to convince people stealing doesn’t become okay simply because the government is the middleman), I get conflicted about government waste.

You’re probably thinking I’m wandering off the libertarian reservation. After all, aren’t libertarians big opponents of boondoggles, government waste, and pork-barrel spending?

All true, but here’s my challenge: I also don’t want “efficient government.”

In other words, our goal should be to shrink government, not to make it “work better.” To understand the point I’m making, ponder these questions:

Do we want government to efficiently lure people into dependency?

Do we want government to efficiently socialize health care?

Do we want government to efficiently cartelize the agriculture sector?

I hope the answer to all these questions is “NO,” which is why I generally focus my work on structural changes to shrink the size and scope of government.

But every so often, notwithstanding everything I just wrote, I can’t resist pointing out really absurd examples of wasteful spending. And today we have two jaw-dropping examples.

We know that government bureaucracies like palatial buildings and that cost overruns are the rule rather than the exception. Well, one of the new bureaucracies created by the Dodd-Frank bailout bill is setting records for extravagance with its new headquarters.

The newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is renovating the Washington, D.C., headquarters it rents—at a cost per square foot that is more expensive than Trump World Tower in New York City. The CFPB project is estimated to cost taxpayers more than $215 million… Cost projections have increased $65 million in six months and $120 million since last year’s estimate. Some of the building’s extravagant features include a four-story glass staircase, two-story waterfall and a sunken garden.

But what’s really amazing is that all this money is being spent on a rented building and that the cost of renovating is far greater than what was spent on building (yes, building, not just renovating) some of the world’s most famous landmark structures.

Now for our second example.

We’ve all heard about how big chunks of education spending get wasted on bureaucracy and don’t get used for classroom instruction.

And we read about how welfare bureaucrats consume a lot of money that supposedly is targeted to help poor people.

This principle also applies to other forms of government spending.

CNN reports that the federal government’s program for emergency food aid around the world is such a cluster-you-know-what that barely a bit more than one-third of money is actually spent on food for crisis-stricken regions.

International typhoons, hurricanes, and earthquakes leave behind devastating scenes of poverty and need. If you had about a $1.5 billion every year to send food to such desperate areas, how would you do it? …The way the U.S. provides international food aid is an antiquated and bureaucratic tangle. Food largely has to be purchased here in the U.S., and then shipped on boats by U.S. cargo carriers to the trouble spots. The Government Accountability Office says that 65% of the money for this aid program is spent on shipping and business costs – not on food. … it’s a system that has helped shipping companies and unions win billions in government contracts, companies like Maersk. …There’s also the transport workers unions. …The two leading maritime unions gave more than “three quarters of a million dollars to members of the current House of Representatives in the 2012 election cycle,” according to the Center for Public Integrity.

Geesh, what a typical example of insider corruption.

This is yet another piece of evidence for my view that disaster relief is not a function of the federal government.

P.S. Regarding the theme of today’s column, Fred Smith, the founder and former President of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told me on more than one occasion that we should “be thankful we don’t get all the government we pay for.”

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Fascinating Polling Data on Misguided Millenials, Government Corruption, and “Unattractive” Leftists

I periodically share polling data. This is because public opinion research (if done honestly) provides insights on the degree to which people are either well informed, uninformed, or misinformed.

And that kind of information is useful for policy wonks like me since it shows where we need to re-double our efforts to educate the American people.

And some of the best polling data today comes from the periodic Reason-Rupe survey. They ask fair questions (i.e., they’re trying to discover what people actually think rather than doing “push polls” designed to produce pre-determined results) and they ask interesting questions.

But that doesn’t mean I always like the answers. Reason-Rupe just did a major survey of Americans between ages 18 and 29. Perhaps I’m being a glass-half-empty person, but I’m not overly encouraged by the answers from these so-called millenials.

Heck, I’m tempted to say that the voting age should be raised to 30.

Is this because of how they voted in the past two elections?

Young Americans (ages 18-29) have shifted markedly left in their voting behavior over the past decade. …by 2008, 66 percent voted for Barack Obama, as did 60 percent in 2012.

Nope, that’s not why I’m distressed about millenials. It’s hard to blame voters for turning against the GOP after eight years of Bush’s big-government paternalism. Moreover, both McCain and Romney held a lot of statist views, so I didn’t view the 2008 and 2012 elections as a rejection of libertarianism or small-government conservatism. The Reason-Rupe experts have a similar assessment.

The Republican Party—which rhetorically lays claim to free markets, limited government, and fiscal responsibility—found itself lacking credibility… The Republican Party’s policy mishandlings tainted not just its own brand, but those who share its rhetoric. Messengers selling free markets and limited government under the GOP banner have found it more difficult to reach a trusting audience.

At most, millenials were guilty of believing the nonsensical hype that Obama was some sort of post-partisan leader.

So why, then, am I distressed about the Reason-Rupe poll results? Mostly because millenials appear to be scatterbrained.

We’ll start with the good news. In some ways, they seem very sensible.

…millennials are not statists clamoring for government management of the economy. Quite the opposite. Millennials are still free marketeers—they like profit and competition, they prefer capitalism over socialism… There has been a surge in the share of millennials who think government is wasteful and inefficient… Most also think government agencies abuse their power… Millennials say hard work brings success, as older generations do. They also believe in self-determination and say that individuals are and should be primarily responsible for both their successes and failings, even if this leads to unequal outcomes. Millennials are concerned about growing income inequality, but they prefer a competitive, merit-based society that rewards personal achievement over one with little income inequality. …nearly three-fourths of millennials support “changing the Social Security program so younger workers can invest their Social Security taxes in private retirement accounts.”

But before you conclude millenials have their heads on straight, let’s look at these results.

A plurality of millennials says there is more government should be doing… the cohort still favors social welfare spending and a variety of government guarantees. …Millennials are more favorable toward socialism than they are to a government-managed economy, even though the latter is arguably less interventionist. …Millennials are far more likely than Americans over 30 to identify as liberal. While only 14 percent of Americans over 30 call themselves liberals, 25 percent of millennials do the same. …They support raising taxes to increase financial assistance to the poor, they think government should guarantee access to health care, and a slim majority favors guaranteeing access to college. …American millennials agree government should spend more to help the poor even if it leads to higher taxes. …Nearly seven in 10 say government should guarantee health insurance and a living wage. …The plurality of millennials (48 %) think people usually get rich at the expense of others, a zero-sum view of wealth in society.

So does this mean young voters are statists?

Perhaps, but the most accurate conclusion is that they simply don’t know enough to give consistent answers.

A 2010 CBS/New York Times survey found that when Americans were asked to use their own words to define the word “socialism” millennials were the least able to do so. Accord to the survey, only 16 percent of millennials could define socialism as government ownership, or some variation thereof, compared to 30 percent of Americans over 30 (and 57% of tea partiers, incidentally).

So maybe we should raise the voting age to 30.

Or at least have a rule that says you can’t vote until you have a job and are paying taxes (that might be a good rule for all ages!).

Now that we’ve tried to figure out how millenials are thinking, let’s look at the entire population.

And let’s focus on just one issue: How many Americans think corruption is widespread in government.

The good news is that Gallup found that a record number of Americans recognize that the public sector is a sleazy racket for the benefit of bureaucrats, lobbyists, contractors, politicians, cronies, interest groups, and other insiders.

By the way, I like these results, but they don’t necessarily mean that people want to shrink government. As we saw with the data on millenials, it’s possible for people to favor more government even though they think that it is corrupt, wasteful, and inefficient.

But at least (I hope) this means that they are susceptible to the common-sense message that shrinking government is the most effective way of reducing corruption.

Last but not least, I’m not sure this qualifies as an opinion poll, but it does deal with responses to questions.

It turns out that “unattractive” people are most likely to donate to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

A new series of studies from Stanford researchers has found that people who feel “unattractive” are more likely to donate to the Occupy movement. …participants were then asked to rate their own attractiveness… Finally, after watching a short video about the Occupy Movement, participants were asked if they would like to donate their compensatory $50 lottery ticket to the movement. Researchers found that those who perceived themselves to be less attractive were almost twice as likely to donate to Occupy.

And while we don’t have any research on this issue, I’m going out on a limb and asserting that folks who donate to America’s best think tank are beautiful, charming, debonair, suave, virile, and popular.

P.S. But as you can see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, the Occupy protesters did generate some good political humor, so they’re not all bad.

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Piketty’s Class-Warfare Tome: Bad Numbers, Bad Analysis

Why do statists make so many mistakes with data? Paul Krugman, for instance, has butchered numbers when writing about fiscal policy in nations such as France, Estonia, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

But Krugman isn’t alone. We also have Thomas Piketty, who was lionized by the left after publication of Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

Ever since his book was published, various experts have called into question the veracity of Piketty’s numbers. Most recently, here’s some of what Alan Reynolds, my colleague at the Cato Institute, wrote about his data for the Wall Street Journal.

Thomas Piketty…remains a hero on the left, but the honeymoon may be drawing to a sour close as evidence mounts that his numbers don’t add up. …data are so misleading as to be worthless. They attempt to estimate top U.S. wealth shares on the basis of that portion of capital income reported on individual income tax returns—interest, dividends, rent and capital gains. This won’t work because federal tax laws in 1981, 1986, 1997 and 2003 momentously changed (1) the rules about which sorts of capital income have to be reported, (2) the tax incentives to report business income on individual rather than corporate tax forms, and (3) the tax incentives for high-income taxpayers to respond to lower tax rates on capital gains and dividends by realizing more capital gains and holding more dividend-paying stocks.

Alan lists some of specific problems that exist when you try to make sweeping assertions based on tax return data.

For example, interest income from tax-exempt municipal bonds was unreported before 1987—so the subsequent reporting of income created an illusory increase in top incomes and wealth. Since 1997, by contrast, most capital gains on home sales have disappeared from the tax returns of middle-income couples, thanks to a $500,000 tax exemption. …since the mid-1980s, most capital income and capital gains of middle-income savers began to vanish from tax returns by migrating into IRAs, 401(k)s and other retirement and college savings plans. Balances in private retirement plans rose to $12.4 trillion in 2012 from $875 billion in 1984. …When individual tax rates dropped from 70% in 1980 to 28% in 1988, this provoked a massive shift: from retaining private business income inside C-corporations to letting earnings pass through to the owners’ individual tax returns via partnerships, LLCs and Subchapter S corporations. …Although more frequent asset sales showed up as an increase in capital income, realized gains are no more valuable than unrealized gains so realization of gains tells us almost nothing about wealth. Similarly, a portfolio shift from municipal bonds, coins or cash into dividend-paying stocks after the tax on dividends fell to 15% in 2003 might look like more capital income when it was merely swapping an untaxed asset for a taxable one.

So what’s the bottom line?

Mr. Piketty’s premonition of soaring U.S. wealth shares for the top 1% finds no credible support in his book or elsewhere.

But let’s now conduct a thought experiment. What if Piketty’s data was right? Would that justify punitive class-warfare tax rates?

I’ve already explained that this would be the wrong approach.

And Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the Manhattan Institute cites some new academic research to make a similar point.

Meltzer and Richard show that using redistribution to ameliorate income inequality is not only ineffective, but worsens the problem that policy makers seek to cure. …Since workers’ productivity levels increase with the more they produce, and because higher taxes create disincentives to working, taxes lead to lower economic growth. …Higher tax rates that fund transfer payments hamper economic growth. That’s because they increase the number of people who depend on these payments and find it preferable not to work. There also is less learning-by-doing among those who work. …As taxes and transfers rise, hours of work and acquired skills decline, reducing economic growth. …it is this decline in hours worked for low-productivity workers that leads to more economic inequality — not the growth of technology nor the rent-seeking privileges of the rich, two causes cited by Piketty. Reduced effort by the rich in reaction to higher taxes comes at the expense of economic growth, which has the potential to raise everyone’s living standards and increase economic opportunity. …Meltzer and Richard show that the growth of government is the true driver behind inequality.

In other words, the supposed solution of ever-higher tax rates from folks such as Piketty (and Obama) would be harmful to the overall economy and be especially damaging to those with lower incomes.

If we want to help the poor, the goal should be to achieve faster economic growth by enabling capitalism and entrepreneurship.

In other words, copy Hong Kong and Singapore, not France.

Here’s the video I narrated for the Center for Freedom and Prosperity explaining why class-warfare tax policy is so misguided.

P.S. This isn’t the first time that Alan Reynolds has debunked Piketty.

P.P.S. These two pizzas tell you everything you need to know about how the left would define success.

P.P.P.S. And Margaret Thatcher exposed why their definition of success is absurd.

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European Politicians Love the Underground Economy…When It Means They Can Spend More Money

Libertarians tend to like – or at least have a grudging respect for – the underground economy.

For instance, even if we’re personally very straight-laced, we don’t like government prohibitions against gambling, drugs, and prostitution. This is why we’re not upset when these things happen in spite of the laws enacted by the political class.

But this isn’t just about victimless crimes. We also dislike high taxes, so you won’t find libertarians shedding many tears when we read about tax avoidance and tax evasion in nations (such as France and Greece) with punitive tax systems.

Politicians tend to have a different perspective. They generally get very upset if we’re not following their societal diktats and acquiescing to their fiscal demands.

But now we’re suddenly seeing that some politicians have a new-found appreciation for the underground economy.

The New York Times reports that European nations want to add these activities to their estimates of GDP.

As of September, all European Union countries will be required to take fuller accounting of trade in sex, drugs and other underground businesses as part of an overhaul of economic measurements by Eurostat, the European statistics agency. The point of counting everything, including the wages of sin, is to get a more accurate reading of each country’s gross domestic product.

Sounds reasonable, right? Who objects, after all, to more accurate numbers?

But it’s always good to be suspicious of governments.

And why is suspicion warranted in this case? Well, it appears that this effort to re-measure GDP may give politicians more ability to spend.

With European Union governments obliged to reduce debt as a percentage of their economies, the changes are also expected to make growth rates from Spain to Sweden look better, possibly also making debt ratios seem rosier. …In Italy, Ireland, Portugal and Spain, …G.D.P. could increase by as much as 2 percent, Eurostat estimates, while Germany and France could see expansions of as much as 3 percent. Britain might show a gain of 3 to 4 percent, Eurostat said.

To elaborate, there are “Maastricht rules” in the European Union that (at least in theory) obligate governments to keep deficits from rising about 3 percent of GDP and to keep debt from climbing above 60 percent of GDP.

So if politicians and bureaucrats can figure out ways to make GDP appear bigger, that means they can have more red ink. Which means, of course, that they can spend more money.

So now it should be abundantly clear why governments have an incentive to add the underground economy to their GDP estimates.

But there’s one little problem with this approach. The whole purpose of the Maastricht rules was to keep nations from spending themselves into a fiscal crisis. The rules obviously didn’t work very well (perhaps because they focused on the symptom of red ink rather than the underlying disease of too much government spending), but there presumably would have been even more profligacy if they didn’t exist.

So what’s the point of adding the underground economy to GDP when that simply gives politicians more leeway to spend?

Indeed, the NYT article notes that some of the bean-counting bureaucracies in Europe are concerned that this new approach won’t work because there won’t be any new tax revenue to accompany the new spending.

Statistics agencies, though, say that whatever the improved ratios, debt will not be easier to service, because governments cannot collect taxes from illegal underground activity.

And just in case you don’t trust the New York Times, here’s a blurb from Money News making the same point.

No country is supposed to let their annual deficits exceed 3 percent of GDP or accumulated debt exceed 60 percent of GDP. Countries that don’t comply with the debt limits are to be penalized — 0.2 percent of GDP, plus a “variable component” that can range up to 0.5 percent of GDP annually as long as the breach continues. Boosting GDP helps lower the debt ratio.

The bottom line is that these changes will enable Europe’s politicians to postpone much-needed fiscal discipline.

In other words, they’ll have the ability to spend themselves deeper into a hole.

And as you can see from these sobering IMF, OECD, and BIS estimates, the hole is already enormous.

Not that America is any different. Our economy may be doing better (or less worse) today, but our future fiscal outlook is worse than many other nations thanks to a combination of poorly designed entitlement programs and changing demographics.

And just as is the case for Europe, counting our underground economy would not be a substitute for the reforms needed to save the nation.

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Immorality and the Redistributive State

Back in 2012, I shared a sadly amusing image about how the modern political process has degenerated into two wolves and a sheep voting what to have for lunch.

I was making an argument in that column against majoritarianism (and that is a critical issue, as explained in this video), but there’s also a very important moral component to this debate.

Walter Williams addresses this issue in his latest column. He starts by asking a hypothetical question.

Suppose I saw a homeless, hungry elderly woman huddled on a heating grate in the dead of winter. To help the woman, I ask somebody for a $200 donation to help her out. If the person refuses, I then use intimidation, threats and coercion to take the person’s money. I then purchase food and shelter for the needy woman. My question to you: Have I committed a crime? I hope that most people would answer yes. It’s theft to take the property of one person to give to another.

In other words, it doesn’t matter how Person A wants to spend money, it’s wrong for Person A to steal from Person B.

Walter than asks some critical follow-up questions, all of which are designed to make readers realize that theft doesn’t magically become acceptable simply because several people want to take Person B’s money.

Would it be theft if I managed to get three people to agree that I should take the person’s money to help the woman? What if I got 100, 1 million or 300 million people to agree to take the person’s $200? Would it be theft then? What if instead of personally taking the person’s $200, I got together with other Americans and asked Congress to use Internal Revenue Service agents to take the person’s $200? The bottom-line question is: Does an act that’s clearly immoral when done privately become moral when it is done collectively and under the color of law? Put another way, does legality establish morality?

Amen. Walter is exactly right.

And this is a point I need to internalize.

I’m often writing about the economic evidence for smaller government, but I suspect advocates of economic liberty and smaller government won’t win the debate unless we augment our arguments by also making the moral case against government-sanctioned theft.

And perhaps one way of getting this point across is to educate people about the fact that we used to have a very small federal government with little or no redistribution. Walter elaborates.

For most of our history, Congress did a far better job of limiting its activities to what was both moral and constitutional. As a result, federal spending was only 3 to 5 percent of the gross domestic product from our founding until the 1920s… James Madison, the acknowledged father of our Constitution, said, “Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.” In 1794, when Congress appropriated $15,000 to assist some French refugees, Madison stood on the floor of the House of Representatives to object, saying, “I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.”

Here’s the bottom line according to Professor Williams.

We’ve become an immoral people demanding that Congress forcibly use one American to serve the purposes of another. Deficits and runaway national debt are merely symptoms of that larger problem.

Though I would slightly disagree with the way Walter phrased it.

I would argue that a bloated government is the symptom of growing immorality. Deficits and debt are then symptoms of that problem.

P.S. I want to quickly address another issue.

When I quote Art Laffer, I’m almost always going to be in agreement with what he says.

But, as I wrote last year, we’re in disagreement on the issue of whether states should be allowed to tax sales that take place outside their borders.

And now Art has a short video that rubbed me the wrong way.

He endorses legislation that would create a sales tax cartel and says – right at the start of this video – that this is because “states should have the right to be able to tax whatever they want to within their state.”

I agree, but this is why I’m against the so-called Marketplace Fairness Act. That legislation would allow state governments to tax outside their borders.

Simply stated, a merchant in one state should not be forced to collect taxes for a government in another state.

P.P.S. This also explains why FATCA is such horrible legislation. It is an effort by the U.S. government to coerce banks in other nations to enforce bad IRS law.

If we care about liberty, we should make sure the power of government is constrained by borders.

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Obamacare is Bad News for Your Wallet Today and Worse News for Your Wallet Tomorrow

I wrote a few weeks ago about the hidden economic damage of Obamacare, particularly the harm to the job market.

Today, let’s get further depressed by looking at the ever-worsening fiscal damage of the law.

Here’s some of what Chuck Blahous of Mercatus wrote about this costly new entitlement.

The ACA was enacted in 2010 with the promise of reducing the federal budget deficit while expanding health insurance coverage. Nearly lost amid the recent press cheerleading over ACA enrollment figures is that this promise has disintegrated, and now no one…can say how much fiscal damage the ACA will ultimately cause. …CBO currently estimates that the ACA’s coverage provisions will cost the federal government $92 billion a year by FY2015. This is roughly 0.5 percent of projected U.S. economic output for 2015, well exceeding the relative costs of Social Security and Medicaid at similar points in their histories. (The amount falls just short of the proportion of GDP absorbed by all of early Medicare.) Worse, the federal fiscal position was far weaker when the ACA was passed than when Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid were created.

That’s bad news, but things will get even worse in coming years.

Troubling though the ACA’s startup costs are, they represent only the tip of the fiscal iceberg that will be the fully phased-in law. CBO projects that its annual costs will hit $200 billion by FY2020, or nearly 0.9 percent of GDP. Yet this assumes that lawmakers will be content to allow the ACA’s health insurance subsidies to grow more slowly than low-income beneficiaries’ health care costs, as the law now stipulates. Thus there is every reason to believe that the ACA’s eventual costs will far exceed initial estimates, as happened with Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. …Also unclear is whether the ACA’s reinsurance and “risk corridor” provisions will produce unexpected federal budget costs; these provisions were included in the ACA to protect insurers… the Obama administration continues to promise both participating health insurers and taxpayers that they will each be protected from loss under the risk corridor provisions.

The potential bailout for insurance companies is bad news for taxpayers, but it’s even more upsetting for moral and practical reasons.

The big insurance companies got into bed with the White House, figuring it was a good idea for the federal government to coerce Americans into buying their product. As far as I’m concerned, they should swallow heavy losses.

But in Washington, there’s rarely a downside for doing the wrong thing. Instead, this could be like TARP. A reward for bad behavior.

By the way, it’s not just policy wonks who are concerned about the fiscal burden of Obamacare. According to Roll Call, the Congressional Budget Office has – for all intents and purposes – given up trying to estimate the fiscal burden of the legislation.

For Democratic lawmakers who were hesitant to sign onto the sweeping 2010 health care law, one of the most powerful selling points was that the Affordable Care Act would actually reduce the federal budget deficit…the answer to that question has become something of a mystery. In its latest report on the law, the Congressional Budget Office said it is no longer possible to assess the overall fiscal impact of the law. That conclusion came as a surprise to some fiscal experts in Washington and is drawing concern. …In a little-noticed footnote to a report issued in April, “Updated Estimates of the Effects of the Insurance Coverage Provisions of the Affordable Care Act,” the CBO wrote that it and the Joint Committee on Taxation “can no longer determine exactly how the provisions of the ACA that are not related to the expansion of health insurance coverage have affected their projections of direct spending and revenues.”

Translated into plain English, Obamacare is a budgetary black hole.

If only somebody could have predicted that this would happen. But actually, many people did. The history of entitlement programs is that they are bad news in theory and even worse news in reality.

Indeed, even I warned that Obamacare was going to be a bigger fiscal nightmare than originally predicted, as seen in this video.

This Eric Allie cartoon doesn’t focus on the fiscal problems of Obamacare, but it’s worth sharing because the entire law is a mess.

Too bad the American people are the guinea pigs for this experiment in statism.

Wouldn’t it be nice if instead we had the freedom to experiment with market-based healthcare?

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Scholarly Evidence Shows that Discretionary Spending Undermines Economic Growth

I’ve shared lots of data and evidence about the harmful economic impact of government spending.

Simply stated, budgetary outlays divert resources from more productive uses. And this results in labor and capital being misallocated, leading to less economic output.

The damage is even more pronounced when you look at how politicians finance the budget. Whether they use taxes or borrowing (or even printing money), there are additional distortions that hinder the private sector.

Today, we’re going to look at the economic impact of a particular type of government spending. A new working paper by two academics at the University of Miami has revealed a negative relationship between government consumption spending and economic growth.

But before digging into the details, what do public finance economists mean when they talk about “consumption spending”? At the risk of over-simplifying, it’s the part of the budget used to purchase goods and services. Everything from soldiers to housing and from jails to education.

It’s basically the so-called discretionary portion of the federal budget, minus “investment spending” (which would be things like roads).

Anyhow, here are some of the key findings.

This paper tests the Mundellian hypothesis that too much government spending reduces economic growth… In this paper, we analyze annual panel data from 1999 to 2011 for 31 OECD countries to examine the role of government spending in determining economic growth. In particular, we will focus our attention on government consumption spending on non-market goods such as defense and justice for collective consumption and its effect on growth in real GDP growth. …We find that government consumption spending on non-market goods significantly reduces economic growth. A one percentage point increase in government consumption of non-market goods as a percent of GDP is associated with a 0.86 percentage lower growth rate in GDP. …This result is compatible with Barro (1990)’s finding for the Summers and Heston database, but suggests a stronger negative effect of government consumption on economic growth.

That’s a big number, which implies that we’re definitely on the downward-sloping portion of the Rahn Curve.

By the way, just in case you’re wondering why Obama’s “stimulus” was such a flop, the study also notes that “the 2009 American Reinvestment and Recovery Act envisaged less than 5% spending on public investment, and over 95% on consumption.”

In other words, Obama increased the type of government spending with the worst impact on the economy. Something to keep in mind when politicians, lobbyists, interest groups, and other insiders argue that there’s no need to cut back on discretionary spending.

But it’s also important to note that the study has some findings that may distress libertarians and small-government conservatives. It finds, for instance, that “government investment spending is positively related to growth.”

Also, it’s important to realize that the study is limited to only certain forms of discretionary spending. As the authors explain, they examine, “the impact of government consumption spending net of health, education and housing service.”

But even with those caveats, we have another strong piece of evidence that our economy would grow much faster if we reduced the burden of government spending.

And if you need more evidence on the harmful effect of government spending (either generally or specific types of outlays), allow me to call your attention to research even from normally left-leaning international bureaucracies such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and European Central Bank.

And you can find similar findings in the work of scholars from all over the world, including the United States, Finland, Australia, Sweden, Italy, Portugal, and the United Kingdom.

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The Left Was Wrong about Unemployment Insurance…Plus a Message from 1948 about Markets vs. Statism

Over the past several years, I’ve repeatedly argued that you get more unemployment when the government pays people to be unemployed. But I’m not just relying on theory. I’ve cited both anecdotes and empirical research to bolster my case.

You won’t be surprised to learn that many politicians have a different perspective. They say it is compassionate to provide unemployment insurance benefits. And they say it is cruel and heartless to put a time limit on those payments.

And if you believe Nancy Pelosi, unemployment handouts actually are good for the economy!

You might think this is one of these never-to-be-resolved Washington debates, but we actually have two natural experiments over the past year that show one side was right and the other side was wrong.

Writing for the Wall Street Journal, John Hood of the North Carolina-based John Locke Foundation describes what happened when his state decided to limit unemployment benefits.

Here are the changes that were made.

A year ago, North Carolina became the first state in the nation to exit the federal government’s extended-benefits program for the unemployed. …Gov. Pat McCrory and the state legislature…reduced the amount and duration of unemployment-insurance benefits, which had been higher in North Carolina than in most states. As a result the state lost its eligibility to participate in the extended-benefits program on July 1, 2013. …liberal activists pounced. …media outlets excoriated North Carolina for ending extended benefits. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman called it a “war on the unemployed.”

And here are the results.

North Carolina didn’t descend into the Dickensian nightmare critics predicted. For the last six months of 2013, it was the only state where jobless recipients weren’t eligible for extended benefits. Yet during that period North Carolina had one of the nation’s largest improvements in labor-market performance and overall economic growth. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of payroll jobs in North Carolina rose by 1.5% in the second half of 2013, compared with a 0.8% rise for the nation as a whole. Total unemployment in the state dropped by 17%, compared with the national average drop of 12%. The state’s official unemployment rate fell to 6.9% in December 2013 from 8.3% in June, while the nationwide rate fell by eight-tenths of a point to 6.7%.

But we didn’t just have a state-based experiment. Hood explains that the same thing happened on the national level six months later. Congress rejected Obama’s call for another extension of benefits.

So what happened?

Still not convinced that leaving the extended-benefits program encouraged both job creation and job acceptance? As of Jan. 1, 2014, the extended-benefits program expired nationwide. Yet there has been no sudden exodus of discouraged workers to the fringes of the national economy. Both job creation and household employment are up. The nation’s employment-population ratio was 58.9% in May, up from 58.6% in December.

This is a powerful point.

We may not have a strong job market, but the numbers definitely have improved since the start of the year.

There’s actually an important lesson here. You don’t need perfect policy to get better performance. The private economy will generate growth so long as it has some breathing room.

Heck, sometimes the absence of bad policy is enough to boost economic performance. The post-2010 gridlock didn’t lead to a lot of good policies, but it did end the threat of major new statist initiatives from the Obama White House. And that was enough, in my humble opinion, to give us better numbers.

But better numbers are not the same as impressive numbers. This is still the weakest economic recovery since the Great Depression. So while it’s good to have a bit of improvement, we should be dissatisfied until we at least get back on the long-run trendline for 3 percent average real growth.

And what needs to happen to give us that kind of growth? The answer is simple: Free markets and small government.

P.S.  Since the main point of today’s column is unemployment insurance, let’s close with some great cartoons on that topic from Michael Ramirez, Robert Gorrell, and Chuck Asay, as well as a superb Wizard-of-Id parody.

P.P.S. On a separate topic, here’s a superb video of a 1948 cartoon comparing free markets to the poisonous ideology of “isms” such as communism, fascism, and socialism.

Very well done, particularly considering that it’s almost 70 years old. And if you want to see how economic growth can make a huge difference over that amount of time, check out this comparison of Argentina and Hong Kong.

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Is FATCA the Worst Part of the Internal Revenue Code?

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

But what if we did the same exercise on the tax side of the fiscal ledger. What’s the most damaging provision of the tax code?

In a TV interview earlier this year, I said I was most upset by all the corruption in Washington that is made possible by a Byzantine tax code. But that’s an overall observation, not a specific feature.

Today’s question deals with the part of the tax system is most harmful to the economy, on a per-dollar-collected basis.

If you asked me to make that choice five years ago, I probably would have picked the death tax, though I’ve had some experts tell me that “depreciation” is even worse.

But I think today we have a new champion (so to speak). A little-known law called the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act almost surely wins the prize. And it’s not just cranky libertarians such as myself that think the law is bad news.

The U.K.-based Economist is one of the most establishment publications in the world, yet even that magazine has concluded that the law “is doing more harm than good.”

Here are some excerpts from the article, starting with a basic description of the law.

Basil Zirinis of Sullivan & Cromwell, a law firm, began his presentation with a discussion of events in Iraq, where Islamist fighters were advancing on Baghdad. Barack Obama, he claimed, was drawing a red line around the city and, if necessary, would “drop FATCA on them”. …The analogy was tasteless, but also telling. FATCA stands for Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, an American law passed in 2010 to crack down on the use of offshore banks… It is feared and loathed by moneymen because of its complexity, its global reach and the high cost of compliance. One senior banker denounces it as “breathtakingly extraterritorial”. …FATCA turns foreign banks and other financial institutions into enforcement arms of America’s Internal Revenue Service (IRS). They must choose between turning over information on clients who are “US persons” or handing 30% of all payments they receive from America to Uncle Sam.

The law has a wide range of victims.

Financial institutions obviously are seriously impacted, and the damage isn’t limited to banks in places such as Switzerland.

The financial industry is struggling to work out which funds, trusts and other non-bank entities count as “financial institutions” under the law. There is also confusion over who is a “US person”. The definition is broad and includes not only citizens but current and former green-card holders and non-Americans with various personal and economic ties to the United States. Some Canadian “snowbirds” who travel to America for part of each year could be caught in the net, says Allison Christians, a tax professor at McGill University. As the complexities of implementation have grown apparent, the American authorities have had to extend several deadlines.

Americans who live in foreign countries are being adversely affected as well (and I’ve shared some of their horror stories).

FATCA has already sent a chill through the 7m Americans who live abroad. Thousands have been told by their local banks and investment advisers that they no longer want their custom because it is too much hassle. Many others will now have to spend thousands of dollars to straighten out their paperwork with the IRS, even if they owe no tax (and most do not, since they will have paid a greater amount abroad, which counts as a credit against tax owed in America). A record 2,999 of these exasperated expats renounced their citizenship or green cards in 2013. More than 1,000 did so in the first quarter of 2014. (Before FATCA the number was a few hundred a year.)

And keep in mind that for every American who officially gives up his or her citizenship, many more are doing it without informing the IRS.

The law is even victimizing organizations that don’t deserve the slightest hint of sympathy.

FATCA also places a burden on the IRS, by generating an unwieldy amount of information. The agency is being given far more to do with far fewer people (thanks to budget cuts), leaving it “on the verge of collapse”, according to a former senior official.

As an aside, don’t believe the nonsense about the IRS budget being inadequate.

Returning to our topic, one of the big problems is that FATCA was approved without even the tiniest shred of cost-benefit analysis.

The government, for all intents and purposes, is willing to impose immense damage on the private sector in hopes of collecting a tiny amount of tax revenue.

The law was passed without any formal cost-benefit analysis… However, the overall costs of complying, borne mostly by non-American banks, are likely to far exceed the extra tax receipts. FATCA is about “putting private-sector assets on a bonfire so that government can collect the ashes,” complains Richard Hay of Stikeman Elliott, a law firm. Mark Matthews, a former deputy commissioner of the IRS now with Caplin & Drysdale, another law firm, argues that the effort put into hunting offshore tax evaders is disproportionate.

And it’s worth pointing out the projected revenue from FATCA – about $870 million per year – is just a tiny fraction of the $100 billion that Obama was claiming on the campaign trail.

But here’s the part that has me most worried.

The OECD wants to use FATCA as a stepping stone to its Dystopian dream of global information sharing between governments.

Another question is whether FATCA might be subsumed into a scheme being promoted by the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, whereby signatories would share data on financial accounts annually.

And that could be bad news for one of the world’s biggest tax havens. Yes, I’m referring to the United States.

As more countries are pushed to share tax information systematically, the focus will turn to America’s willingness (or lack of it) to reciprocate. Latin Americans, for instance, are big users of banks in Florida, but America remains choosy about which governments it will share data with, and how much. It also has only limited information to give on the owners of shell companies because it does not collect their names itself. In some respects, America is less upright than the tax havens it deplores.

It would be very bad for our economy if we started sending confidential financial information to corrupt governments such as Mexico. Foreigners would pull their money out of American financial institutions and move it to other havens.

With all this background, you can understand why I was so critical of FATCA in this interview with a Chinese TV station.

P.S. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that Rand Paul is leading the fight against FATCA and other schemes to give governments more extra-territorial tax powers. As you can see, he’s even getting left-wing cartoonists upset.

Other lawmakers also now understand that the statist campaign against tax competition is bad news for America. Marco Rubio, for instance, deserves credit for trying to stop the Obama Administration from coercing American banks into obeying foreign tax law.

Policy makers should repeal FATCA, of course, but the real problem is that the tax code is biased against capital formation and also has a punitive policy of worldwide taxation.

That’s why the long-run answer is tax reform. All pro-growth tax reform plans, such as the flat tax and national sales tax, get rid of double taxation and they’re also based on the common-sense principle of territorial taxation. With such systems, the government doesn’t need to know about your personal financial affairs, regardless of whether you have accounts in Geneva, Illinois, or Geneva, Switzerland.

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Libertarianism and the Proper Meaning of Patriotism

Since we’re enjoying a long holiday weekend to celebrate the 4th of July, let’s take a moment to ponder patriotism.

I’ve always been inspired (in more ways than one) by this t-shirt. My patriotism is for American principles, not the federal government.

Indeed, I’m very proud that a Clinton Administration official once accused me of being unpatriotic for helping foreign jurisdiction oppose some bad policies from Washington.

But I’m a libertarian, and we’re different than most people (some would even say needlessly ornery).

So what about the average American? How do regular people define patriotism?

Well, we have a new poll that asks people whether they think various behaviors are patriotic. Let’s ponder some of the answers.

The latest Fox News national poll finds 83 percent of voters consider serving on a jury an “act of patriotism.”

I don’t agree. I would say jury duty is at most a civic obligation. Though even that doesn’t capture my thoughts since my gut instinct is that we would be best served by having professional jurors.

Though I am willing to say that individual jurors can demonstrate patriotism by engaging in nullification and refusing to convict people of breaking unjust laws.

But that’s a separate issue. Let’s look at more of the findings from the poll.

…other actions rank even higher:  94 percent say flying an American flag shows patriotism, 93 percent say voting in elections counts, and 90 percent consider joining the military an act of patriotism.

I’ll agree on the flag and joining the military, but voting hardly seems patriotic – particularly if you’re looking for handouts and voting for candidates who have nothing but disdain for America’s founding principles (as illustrated by this Glenn McCoy cartoon).

And don’t forget that voting is inherently illogical.

Let’s look at other results.

About eight voters in 10 believe staying informed on the news (79 percent) and paying taxes (78 percent) are ways to show national loyalty. …there is agreement across party lines on the patriotic merits of paying taxes: 80 percent of Democrats, Republicans and Tea Partiers say paying taxes shows patriotism.

I disagree. I have no objection to staying informed, but is it really patriotic to watch the news instead of a game show? What about the people who are so disgusted by Washington that they’ve tuned out? I suspect they’re very patriotic.

I also don’t think paying taxes is patriotic. Heck, our Founding Fathers rebelled against paying taxes.

This doesn’t mean we necessarily should evade taxes. Context is very important. If you live in a jurisdiction with tolerable taxation and reasonably honest and effective government (Singapore or Switzerland are reasonable examples), then I think tax evasion is wrong.

But if you live in an oppressive totalitarian nation (think Venezuela) or a nation with confiscatory taxation (such as France), then paying taxes is a sign of stupidity rather than patriotism.

Let’s look at one final set of results.

…the most significant differences are on the act of owning a gun.  Some 79 percent of Tea Party activists consider owning a gun an act of patriotism, as do 69 percent of Republicans.  Democrats (35 percent) and independents (40 percent) are much less likely to feel that way.   Men (60 percent) say being a gun owner shows patriotism, while over half of women feel it does not (56 percent).

Needless to say, I’m very sympathetic to gun ownership. Though I think someone can be a strong patriot (in the proper sense) without owning a gun.

Now let’s review some new data from the Pew Research Center, as reported by Byron York of the Washington Examiner. Pew found that ideology affects patriotism.

They divided the electorate into seven groups and found that six of the groups were at least somewhat patriotic.

Pew asked all whether they “often feel proud to be American.” The conservatives are most proud — 81 percent of the business conservatives and 72 percent of the steadfast conservatives say they often feel U.S. pride. There’s a dropoff after that, but still, majorities of other groups express pride. Fifty-nine percent of the faith and family left say they often feel pride; 56 percent of both the next generation left and young outsiders feel pride; and 51 percent of the hard-pressed skeptics, despite their skepticism, still often feel proud to be Americans.

So who isn’t patriotic?

Only among the solid liberals does the number fall below a majority, with just 40 percent saying they often feel proud. Why do they feel the way they do? …They are the most loyal Democrats of all groups and “unflagging supporters of Barack Obama.” Solid liberals are more urban than other groups, more likely to use public transportation, more likely to recycle. They’re the most likely to say they want to live close to museums and theaters, and the least likely to hunt or fish. …Today they give the president a job approval rating of 84 percent — 40 points higher than the public at large. They identify with the Democratic Party more than any of the conservative groups identify with the GOP. …Solid liberals are more likely to say that compassion and helping others are their core values.

And based on some previous research, you can safely assume that you won’t find these “solid liberals” at any July 4th parades.

Let’s close with a very good video released last year by Reason TV.

And here are a couple of cartoons with a 4th-of-July theme, staring with this gem from Glenn McCoy.

Reminds me of this Sandra Fluke cartoon.

And here’s one from Henry Payne.

Excellent job. Captures the humor of this Chip Bok cartoon and this Michael Ramirez cartoon.

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Everything You Need to Know about Greece…Plus Remarkably Bad Poll Numbers for Obama

We’re going to touch on two topics today.

I realize that not that many readers care about Greek economic policy, but sometimes other nations can teach us very important lessons. For better or worse.

And in the case of Greece, the lesson is that government intervention and bureaucracy is an enemy of entrepreneurship.

Probably the most amazing – and weird – example is that the Greek government wanted stool samples from entrepreneurs seeking to set up an online company (and, just to be clear, I’m not talking about furniture).

We now have another example, but it’s seems more tragic than bizarre. Here are some really sad passages from a column in the New York Times by a woman who tried set up a business in Greece.

I managed to master the perfect macaron. I was ready to sell them. I invested every penny I earned in high-quality photographs, a superbly designed website and tasteful packaging. “Le macaron grec” was born and the little olive green boxes of treats I was selling were, I thought, my chance to regain control of my life. “Le macaron grec” became a huge success, as I was in demand to cater parties and weddings. …I felt like I was on my way.

Until the visible foot of government interfered with the invisible hand of the market.

…as happens so often in Greece, the bureaucrats had other plans. In a country where you are viewed favorably when you spend money but are considered a criminal when you make it, starting a business is a nightmare. The demands are outrageous, and include a requirement that the business pay taxes in advance equal to 50 percent of estimated profit in the first two years. And the taxes are collected even if the business suffers a loss. I needed only 20 square meters for my baking business, but inspectors told me they could not give me permission for less than 150 square meters. I was obliged to have a separate toilet for customers even though I would not have any customers visit. The fire department wanted a security exit in the same place where the municipality demanded a wall be built.

So what happened? Was she able to satisfy the costly requirements of big government?

Alas, we don’t have a happy ending.

I, like thousands of others trying to start businesses, learned that I would be at the mercy of public employees who interpreted the laws so they could profit themselves. And so in the winter of 2013, my business was finished before it had a chance to take off. The website and a couple of empty boxes in the top of my closet are now the only evidence of the inglorious end of a dream.

Stories like this get me angry. Heck, I’m outraged that taxpayers from around the world have bailed out the Greek government so that bad policy can continue.

Having gotten ourselves all agitated, let’s now enjoy some good news.

It appears that the American people have figured out that our statist president is not doing a very good job. Indeed, they actually have decided he’s the worst president of the past 70 years according to new polling data.

Ironically, even though Obama is probably the most ideologically left-wing president since World War II, I wouldn’t put him in last place. I think Nixon actually did more damage, and Bush II definitely was a bigger spender.

But it’s still good that voters have soured on Obama. As he becomes more and more unpopular, that probably increases support for pro-market policies – such as genuine entitlement reform and real tax reform.

Sort of the way Jimmy Carter paved the way for Reaganomics.

And speaking of Reagan, I’m very happy that he is the runaway winner as America’s best post-WWII president.

P.S. So with Obama now considered the worst and Reagan considered the best, I wonder what the results would be if someone updated this Reagan vs. Obama poll.

P.S.S. Returning to the issue of Greece, that nation’s crazy politicians actually give disability payments to pedophiles.

P.S.S.S. Which is yet another reason why I’m incredulous that so many American politicians want us to mimic Greece’s profligacy (as illustrated by this Henry Payne cartoon).

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Is the IRS Suffering from “Fewer Resources”?

The internal revenue service has allowed itself to become a tool of the White House. To be more specific, bureaucrats at the tax-collection agency sought to undermine a free and fair political process by stifling political speech. And now the IRS is lying about its activities and trying to cover its tracks.

This should be deeply horrifying to all Americans, regardless of political affiliation or philosophy.

Particularly since the partisan Democrat appointed by Obama to head the IRS refuses to even apologize for the agency’s rogue behavior.

There are several appropriate responses to the IRS scandal, including some genuine budget cuts. But you probably won’t be surprised to learn that some people think the IRS instead should be rewarded with even more money.

Here are some excerpts from a column in today’s Washington Post.

…this is an especially strange time to stick up for the agency, given the suspicious disappearance of a few thousand key e-mails that Congress wants to see. But right now, the IRS desperately needs a champion. …the IRS has been laboring…with fewer resources. Since 2010, when Congress first began hacking away at discretionary spending, the bureau’s funding has fallen 14 percent, in inflation-adjusted terms… These cuts have come even though the agency’s responsibilities and workload have increased, thanks to new laws such as the Affordable Care Act and the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act… Now House Republicans want to hobble it even more. Last week, the House Appropriations Committee voted to slash the bureau’s budget by another $340 million.

It’s true that both Obamacare and FATCA grant new powers and obligations to the IRS, but we can solve that problem by repealing those misguided laws.

But since that won’t happen while Obama is in the White House, let’s consider whether “fewer resources,” “hobble,” and “hacking away” are accurate ways of describing what’s been happening to the IRS’s budget.

The Office of Management and Budget has detailed tables showing spending by agency. And if you look at the administrative portions of IRS spending (culled from lines 2491-2533 of this massive database), it turns out that spending has increased dramatically over time.

Yes, it’s true that IRS spending has declined slightly since 2010, but the agency’s budget is still about twice as big as it was 30 years ago. And these numbers are adjusted for inflation!

In other words, it’s very misleading to focus merely on the post-2010 budgetary data (just as Krugman was being deceptive when he looked only at post-2007 data when writing about Estonia’s economic performance).

Looking at the historical data reveals that the IRS budget is much bigger than it’s been in the past.

There are a couple of additional points in the column that deserve some attention. The author argues that people who care about the budget deficit should be delighted to give more money to the IRS because it produces a “darn good return on investment.”

If you care about narrowing the budget deficit — as Republicans generally say they do — gutting your chief revenue- collection agency makes little sense. …The IRS generates way more money than it spends, after all. For every dollar appropriated to the IRS in the 2013 fiscal year, the agency collected $255, according to the national taxpayer advocate’s office. That’s a darn good return on investment.

Wow, what a scary mindset. Based on this thinking, why don’t we simply give the government carte blanche to seize our bank accounts? After all, they could probably collect hundreds of thousands of dollars for every dollar spent. That would be an even better “return on investment.”

As an aside, this is an example of why I get so agitated when supposed fiscal conservatives focus on deficits and debt. It creates an opening for people who want to push bad policy. But if you focus on the real problem of government spending, that problem disappears.

But I’m digressing. Let’s get back to the column. There’s one other point that cries out for correction. The author claims that a bigger IRS budget will reduce tax evasion and that this will keep tax rates from going higher.

Some of that money comes from going after tax cheats, and…rampant tax evasion has a tendency to drive statutory tax rates higher so that the government can extract more money from those poor saps still obeying the law.

The only problem with this assertion is that it is grossly inconsistent with the facts.

We have very powerful evidence that politicians lowered tax rates during periods when there were substantial flows of money to so-called tax havens.

Why? Because they felt competitive pressure to implement less onerous tax rates in order to keep even more money from escaping.

And now we have strong evidence that tax rates are going up as opportunities to escape bad tax policy have decreased.

Why? Because the politicians now feel that taxpayers have fewer escape options.

To summarize this post, the IRS needs and deserves more money in the same way that Charles Manson needs and deserves a group hug.

Here’s one last bit of humor to augment the cartoons I’ve already included. It’s PG-13, so don’t read too closely if you get easily offended.

P.S. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could junk the tax code and replace it with a simple and fair flat tax? That would eliminate almost every possible conflict with the IRS and also take away the agency’s discretionary power.

Not a bad fantasy to have, at least for a policy wonk.

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