Bill Clinton and the Retroactive Application of Mitchell’s Golden Rule

It’s amazingly simple to reduce the burden of government spending. Policy makers simply need to impose some modest spending restraint so that government doesn’t grow faster than the economy’s productive sector.

In a display of humility that can only be found in Washington, DC, I call this Mitchell’s Golden Rule.

And, amazingly, even the International Monetary Fund agrees that spending caps are the most effective strategy for good fiscal policy.

Since I’m not a fan of the IMF, this is definitely a case of strange bedfellows!

Let’s look at some case studies of what happens when there are limits on the growth of government.

A review of data for 16 nations reveals that multi-year periods of spending restraint lead to lower fiscal burdens and less red ink.

Between 2009 and 2014, a de facto spending freeze at the federal level dramatically reduced burden of spending in the United States.

Thanks to a spending cap, Switzerland has shrunk the public sector, balanced its budget and reduced government debt .

These real-world examples provide compelling evidence on the value of long-run spending restraint.

By the way, when I challenge my leftist friends to provide similar examples of nations that have achieved good results by raising taxes, they become uncharacteristically quiet. Just like you can hear crickets chirping when I present them with my two-question challenge to identify statist nations that are good role models.

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

In addition to the data cited above, there are also hypothetical examples showing why it is important to have government grow slower than the private sector.

A column published by Investor’s Business Daily reveals that the United States would have avoided the multi-trillion dollar deficits of the Obama years had a Swiss-style spending cap been in effect.

The oil-rich Canadian province of Alberta would have avoided its current fiscal crisis had it followed my Golden Rule over the past 10 years.

Now let’s add to our list of hypothetical examples. Writing for Real Clear Markets, Professor Jeffrey Dorfman of the University of Georgia cleverly suggests that Republicans simply take Bill Clinton’s last budget and then adjust it for inflation and population growth.

…a Clinton is ready to show them a path to nearly everything a dream Republican budget might have. …President Bill Clinton’s last budget was for fiscal year 2001, which began just before the 2000 election. That budget spent $1.86 trillion, less than half of what President Obama is proposing. If this final Clinton budget is adjusted upwards for subsequent inflation (32 percent) and population growth (12 percent), we arrive at a figure of $2.76 trillion, still only 69 percent as much as President Obama wants to spend. This difference is what Republicans should exploit.

And since federal revenues for next year are projected to be $3.46 trillion, that means not only a smaller burden of government spending, but also a huge budget surplus.

Professor Dorfman then proposes that this gives Republicans leeway to show that they can compromise.

… appropriate spending for each agency equal to a minimum of the population and inflation adjusted amount in President Bill Clinton’s final budget plus 50 percent of the additional growth between President Obama’s proposal and the adjusted Clinton budget. That is, Republicans would not even try to roll federal spending back to when we last had a balanced budget, but only move to reverse half of the enormous spending increases that have occurred under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Such a budget would spend $3.25 trillion and would come with an estimated budget surplus of $220 billion based on the latest Congressional Budget Office projections of 2016 federal revenue.

Dorfman hypothesizes that this rhetorical approach will give advocates of smaller government the upper hand.

After all, the statists presumably wouldn’t want to say Bill Clinton’s last budget was somehow draconian or heartless. And if Republicans are proposing to take that Clinton budget, adjust it for inflation and population, and then add even more money, it should be equally improbably to characterize their proposals as being draconian and heartless.

At a time when Hillary Clinton certainly appears set to run for president, Republicans can stake their claim to reduced spending in many areas by pointing out that they are being 50 percent more generous in inflation and population adjusted spending than President Clinton was. Will Democrats in Congress, or even President Obama, want to claim that President Clinton was insufficiently generous with the poor and working classes? Will they really want to take a stand in opposition to the Clintons at this point in time? I doubt it. Certainly Hillary Clinton is unlikely to want to criticize a Clinton budget. That will make other Democrats hesitate and likely bite their tongues. Using the Clintons against the rest of the Democrats offers the Republicans in Congress a clear path to almost all their budgetary wishes.

I agree that this is an astute strategy. I particularly like it because it puts the focus on how much government has grown since Bill Clinton left office.

And the notion of letting the budget grow as fast as population plus inflation is very similar to Colorado’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights, which is the best spending cap in America.

That being said, I’m far less optimistic than Professor Dorfman that this approach will produce a victory in the short run. Simply stated, President Obama is too ideologically committed to big government. Moreover, I doubt that he will feel any special pressure to accept Bill Clinton’s last budget as some sort of baseline.

But having this debate would still be useful and could pay dividends in 2017 and beyond.

P.S. Speaking of President Obama, let’s close with some political humor that showed up in my inbox yesterday.

P.S. If you want more Obama humor, check out this t-shirt, this Pennsylvania joke, this Reagan-Obama comparison, this Wyoming joke, this Bush-Obama comparison, this video satire, this bumper sticker, and this very timely bit of Bowe Bergdahl humor.

And sometime there’s even humor that makes me sympathize with the President.

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Why the VAT May Seem Good in Theory, but Is Bad in Reality

I warned just last week about the dangers of letting politicians impose a value-added tax.

Simply stated, unless the 16th Amendment is repealed and replaced with a new provision forever barring the re-imposition of any taxes on income, a VAT inevitably would be a new source of revenue and become a money machine to finance ever-larger government.

Just look at the evidence from Europe if you’re not convinced.

That’s why the VAT is bad in reality.

Now let’s talk about why the VAT (sometimes called a “business transfer tax”) is theoretically appealing.

First and foremost, the VAT doesn’t do nearly as much damage, per dollar raised, as our current income tax. That’s because the VAT is a single-rate tax (i.e., no class warfare) with no double taxation of income that is saved and invested.

In some sense, it’s a version of the national sales tax, except the revenue is collected on the “value added” at each stage of the production process rather than in one fell swoop when consumers make their purchases.

And it’s also conceptually similar to the flat tax. Both have one rate. Both have no double taxation. And both (at least in theory) have no special preferences and loopholes. The difference between a flat tax and the VAT is that the former taxes your income (only one time) when you earn it and the latter taxes your income (only one time) when you spend it.

In other words, the bottom line is that it is good (or, to be more accurate, less bad) to have a tax system with a low rate and no double taxation. And in the strange world of public finance economists, a system with no double taxation is called a “consumption-base tax.” And the flat tax, sales tax, and VAT all fit in that category.

So why, then, if supporters of limited government prefer a consumption-base tax over the internal revenue code, is there so much hostility to a VAT?

The answer is simple. We don’t trust politicians and we’re afraid that a VAT would be an add-on tax rather than a replacement tax.

Which explains why it’s better to simply turn the existing tax code into a consumption-base tax. After all, the worst thing that could happen is that you degenerate back to the current system.

But if you go with a VAT, the downside risk is that America becomes France.

There’s a story in today’s Wall Street Journal that illustrates why consumption-base taxation is both a threat and opportunity. Here are some introductory excerpts.

U.S. lawmakers on both sides of the aisle increasingly are finding appeal in an ambitious concept for overhauling the nation’s income-tax system: a tax based on consumption, a tool long used around the world. …As the name implies, consumption-style taxes hit the money taxpayers spend, rather than income they receive. One prominent feature of consumption systems is that they generally tax savings and investment lightly or not at all. That, in turn, encourages more investment and innovation, and ultimately more growth, many economists contend.

The reporter is wrong about consumption systems, by the way. Income that is saved and invested is taxed. It’s just not taxed over and over again, which can happen with the current system.

But he’s right that there is bipartisan interest. And he correctly points out that some politicians want an add-on tax while others want to fix the current system.

The tax-writing Senate Finance Committee is giving new consideration to the consumption-tax idea with the hope that its promised boost to economic growth would ease the way to a revamp. …Some of these proposals would have consumers pay another tax in addition to existing state and local sales taxes, while others would merely reshape the current system to tilt it more toward consumption. …Enactment of a broad-based federal consumption tax would align the U.S. with a global trend.

A Democratic Senator from Maryland wants to augment the current tax code by imposing the VAT.

Mr. Cardin introduced legislation last year to create a type of consumption tax known as a value-added tax and at the same time lower business taxes and scrap income taxes completely for lower-income Americans.

While some GOP Senators want to modify the current system to get rid of most double taxation.

Republicans on the working group also are interested in the concept, including a proposal put forward recently by GOP Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Mike Lee of Utah. That plan would make several changes to the tax code that would move the nation closer to a consumption-based system. …Many GOP members “believe that there are economic benefits to moving away from taxation of income and toward taxation of consumption,” a Senate aide said.

And the story also notes the objections on the left to consumption-base taxation, as well as objections on the right to the VAT.

Some liberals are concerned that consumption taxes affect poor people disproportionately, while unduly benefiting the rich, unless adjustments are made. For their part, conservatives fear that some types of consumption tax—particularly value-added taxes—would make it too easy to dial up government revenue collection.

So what’s the bottom line? Is it true, as the headline of the story says, that “Proposals for a consumption tax gain traction in both parties”?

Yes, that’s correct. But that’s not the same as saying that there is much chance of bipartisan consensus.

There’s a huge gap between those who want a VAT as an add-on tax and those who want to reform the current system to get rid of double taxation.

This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t worry about the prospect of an add-on VAT. As I warned last year, there are some otherwise sensible people who are sympathetic to this pernicious levy.

Which is why I repeatedly share this video about the downside risk of a VAT.

And you get the same message from these amusing VAT cartoons (here, here, and here).

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Who Reads International Liberty?

This is the 6th Anniversary of my first post on International Liberty.

In honor of this moment (or at least to recognize a modest amount of endurance), let’s review some data on readership.

According to WordPress, there have been more than 8.7 million page views in that six-year period.

I don’t know if that’s good or bad, so let’s look at some data that’s more interesting.

There’s a site called Flag Counter that monitors the location of readers. I didn’t add it until the end of 2010, and it counts daily viewers rather than total page views, but that’s still plenty of data to see the degree to which people in various states and nations are interested (or disinterested) in my writings.

Far and away, the highest share of readers, relative to the population, can be found in Washington, DC.

I guess that’s no surprise with all the Capitol Hill staff, journalists, and policy wonks in town. And I bet, based on where many DC people live, that partially explains why Virginia is in 2nd place and Maryland in 7th place.

So maybe the most appropriate conclusion is that libertarians and small-government conservatives are most likely to be found in Colorado, Washington, New Hampshire, and Alaska, with honorable mention for New Mexico, Arizona, and Vermont (though the good people in the Green Mountain State are heavily out-numbered by moochers).

Now let’s look at states where I’m relatively unpopular. Southern states don’t seem to like me, though I wonder if that’s because of lower-than-average levels of Internet access (that being said, Georgia is in 15th place, perhaps out of Bulldawg loyalty).

Shifting to other parts of the nation, Hawaiians don’t seem to be big fans. Neither are people from the Dakotas, or folks in Rhode Island and Delaware.

What about if we look at viewership by nations?

You might think that I’m most widely read in the United States because that’s where I live and work, and the majority of my columns focus on American public policy.

But it turns out that people in the Cayman Islands and Anguilla are actually the most likely to read International Liberty.

I imagine that’s because folks in those places have a keen interest in some of the tax competition issues that I write about. And that also explains why Bermuda, Monaco, BVI, Jersey, and many other so-called tax havens rank so highly for readership.

I’m not quite sure why the U.S. Virgin Islands rank near the top, and I’m similarly perplexed that there are high levels of readership in Guam and the Northern Marianas Islands. Maybe readers from the military?

The high rankings for Canada and the United Kingdom are understandable, if for no other reason than common language.

If I had to pick nations with relatively high proportions of libertarian-leaning readers, then it’s worth noting that Iceland, Slovenia, the Faroe Islands, and Estonia are in the top 20 even though English is a second language.

Of course, just as there are nations that are likely to read International Liberty, there are also places where people don’t seem overly anxious to read my analysis.

By the way, I’ve been told that the Chinese government blocks my blog, perhaps because of this post.

Though China still ranks higher than North Korea. I’ve never had a single visitor from that horribly oppressed nation, or from 13 other jurisdictions.

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If Poor Nations Want Economic Convergence and Capital Accumulation, They Need Good Policy

There’s a “convergence” theory in economics that suggests, over time, that “poor nations should catch up with rich nations.”

But in the real world, that seems to be the exception rather than the rule.

There’s an interesting and informative article at the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank which explores this question. It asks why most low-income and middle-income nations are not “converging” with countries from the developed world.

…only a few countries have been able to catch up with the high per capita income levels of the developed world and stay there. By American living standards (as representative of the developed world), most developing countries since 1960 have remained or been “trapped” at a constant low-income level relative to the U.S. This “low- or middle-income trap” phenomenon raises concern about the validity of the neoclassical growth theory, which predicts global economic convergence. Specifically, the Solow growth model suggests that income levels in poor economies will grow relatively faster than developed nations and eventually converge or catch up to these economies through capital accumulation… But, with just a few exceptions, that is not happening.

Here’s a chart showing examples of nations that are – and aren’t – converging with the United States.

The authors analyze this data.

The figure above shows the rapid and persistent relative income growth (convergence) seen in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Ireland beginning in the late 1960s all through the early 2000s to catch up or converge to the higher level of per capita income in the U.S. …In sharp contrast, per capita income relative to the U.S. remained constant and stagnant at 10 percent to 30 percent of U.S. income in the group of Latin American countries, which remained stuck in the middle-income trap and showed no sign of convergence to higher income levels… The lack of convergence is even more striking among low-income countries. Countries such as Bangladesh, El Salvador, Mozambique and Niger are stuck in a poverty trap, where their relative per capita income is constant and stagnant at or below 5 percent of the U.S. level.

The article concludes by asking why some nations converge and others don’t.

Why do some countries remain stagnant in relative income levels while some others are able to continue growing faster than the frontier nations to achieve convergence? Is it caused by institutions, geographic locations or smart industrial policies?

I’ll offer my answer to this question, though it doesn’t require any special insight.

Simply stated, Solow’s Growth Theory is correct, but needs to be augmented. Yes, nations should converge, but that won’t happen unless they have similar economic policies.

And if relatively poor nations want to converge in the right direction, that means they should liberalize their economies by shrinking government and reducing intervention.

Take a second look at the above chart above and ask whether there’s a commonality for the jurisdictions that are converging with the United States?

Why have Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and Ireland converged, while nations such as Mexico and Brazil remained flat?

The obvious answer is that the former group of jurisdictions have pursued, at least to some extent, pro-market policies.

Heck, they all rank among the world’s top-18 nations for economic freedom.

Hong Kong and Singapore have been role models for economic liberty for several decades, so it’s no surprise that their living standards have enjoyed the most impressive increase.

But if you dig into the data, you’ll also see that Taiwan’s jump began when it boosted economic freedom beginning in the late 1970s. And Ireland’s golden years began when it increased economic freedom beginning in the late 1980s.

The moral of the story is – or at least should be – very clear. Free markets and small government are the route to convergence.

Here’s a video tutorial.

And if you want some real-world examples of how nations with good policy “de-converge” from nations with bad policy, here’s a partial list.

* Chile vs. Argentina vs. Venezuela

* Hong Kong vs. Cuba

* North Korea vs. South Korea

* Cuba vs. Chile

* Ukraine vs. Poland

* Hong Kong vs. Argentina

* Singapore vs. Jamaica

* United States vs. Hong Kong and Singapore

* Botswana vs. other African nations

Gee, it’s almost enough to make you think there’s a relationship between good long-run growth and economic freedom!

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Learning the Right Lesson from Corruption in the EB-5 Visa Program

As an economist, my primary objection to excessive government is – or at least should be – based on foregone growth. After all, government spending (whether it is financed by taxes or borrowing) diverts resources from the productive sector of society and results in the misallocation of labor and capital.

Based on my blood pressure, though, I get even more upset about the perverse unfairness of Washington. It galls me that well-connected insiders obtain undeserved wealth by using the coercive power of government.

And I get especially agitated when I think about ordinary Americans, most of modest means, who have less income and lower living standards because of DC’s corrupt profligacy.

So when I write about shutting down the Export-Import Bank, closing the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and reforming the tax code, I make the standard economic arguments for smaller government. But I also explain that reform is a way of dealing with political sleaze.

Heck, insider corruption is so pervasive that it even causes problems in those rare instances when government is doing sensible.

Let’s look at the example of the EB-5 program that was set up to attract wealthy foreigners to America if they create jobs.

This should be a feel-good story. After all, everyone presumably agrees that these are best type of immigrants since there’s no danger that they’ll wind up on the welfare rolls.

In theory, the program is very simple. As explained by Wikipedia, “individuals must invest $1,000,000…, creating or preserving at least 10 jobs for U.S. workers.”

In reality, though, the program is a bureaucratic mess because…well, simply because that’s the way government operates.

And that means plenty of opportunities for corrupt insiders to work the system.

Here are some of the unseemly details of one example. As reported by the Washington Post, it involves an Obama appointee, the Governor of Virginia, and the brother of Hillary Clinton.

The now-No. 2 official at the Department of Homeland Security intervened on behalf of politically connected favor seekers — including Democrat Terry McAuliffe not long before he was elected Virginia governor, a new report from the department’s inspector general has found. The intervention, on behalf of McAuliffe’s GreenTech Automotive company, “was unprecedented,” according to the report… The long-anticipated report reviewed Mayorkas’s management of the EB-5 program, which allows foreign nationals who create jobs in the United States to obtain green cards. The report concluded that Mayorkas’ actions “created an appearance of favoritism and special access.’’ …McAuliffe’s company was working Gulf Coast Funds Management, a firm that specializes in obtaining EB-5 visas for investors. Gulf Coast was led by Anthony Rodham, brother of then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. …In addition to the case involving McAuliffe’s car company, the inspector general focused on actions Mayorkas took on behalf of a film project in Los Angeles and construction of a casino in Las Vegas, the latter supported by Nevada Democrat Harry Reid, who was Senate majority leader at the time.

Speaking of Senator Reid, the Washington Free Beacon exposes his sordid – and extended – efforts to use the power of his office to get special treatment for donors…and to line the  pockets of his son.

The Senate’s top Democrat was more deeply involved than previously known in an effort to secure U.S. visas for Chinese investors in a Las Vegas casino despite the concerns of career federal officials, according to an inspector general report released on Tuesday. …Executives at the casino’s parent company, a client of Reid’s son Rory, donated thousands of dollars to Reid’s campaign after he helped speed consideration of its applications for visas for its Chinese investors. That expedited consideration came despite warnings from career USCIS officials that applicants had forged paperwork, tried to conceal the sources of their investment, and, in one case, had ties to a child pornography business. …new details in the inspector general’s report reveal that his involvement was deeper and more prolonged. Reid requested and received regular updates from then-USCIS director Alejandro Mayorkas on the status of SLS’ EB-5 applications, agency employees told the IG. The IG report criticized Mayorkas for creating an “appearance of favoritism” in the EB-5 application process. …the senator also had connections to Stockbridge/SBE Holdings, the company behind the SLS project. His son Rory, then an attorney at Lionel Sawyer & Collins, a Nevada law firm, represented SBE Entertainment, one of its parent companies. …USCIS employees interviewed for the IG report described the process as unfair and overly political.

By the way, notice how both examples feature a relative of a powerful politician. Why is that? Because if you’re related to a DC bigwig, donors and special interest groups figure you have inside access to the favor factory in Washington.

A very odious form of nepotism, I think you’ll agree.

Ugh, I feel like I need to shower after writing about this topic.

But now let’s step back and consider the big picture. In most cases, eliminating an agency or shutting down a program is the simple way to deal with DC corruption.

What’s the right approach, though, when government is actually doing something that’s theoretically useful.

Remember, the underlying theory of the EB-5 program is very admirable. Indeed, many nations have similar “economic citizenship” programs because it makes sense to attract successful investors to your country.

Big nations such as the United Kingdom, Australia, and Spain have policies similar to America’s EB-5 program, as do little countries such as Latvia, St. Kitts and Nevis, Cyprus, Dominica, Malta, and Antigua and Barbuda.

So why is America’s system a mess? In part, the answer is that it’s not a simple system. Unlike other nations, where a simple cash payment or property purchase qualifies an investor for residency, the U.S. system requires the creation of 10 jobs. As you can imagine, it’s not necessarily a simple matter to measure job creation, particularly if an investor is putting money into a business that’s already in operation.

And this means the bureaucrats who oversee the program have a reason to drag their feet. Which means an opportunity for well-connected insiders to manipulate the system to the advantage of their friends, cronies, donors, and clients.

Moreover, all nations require some form of background check to weed out criminals. That’s a good thing, of course, but it also gives bureaucrats another excuse to avoid quick approvals. And this creates an opportunity for lobbyists and other members of the political class to use their political pull to get their clients quick and favorable treatment.

All of which means the rule of law is eroded and replaced by discretionary and arbitrary enforcement.

By the way, I spoke at an economic citizenship conference earlier this month in Dubai. My role was to warn that greedy governments would try to hinder the mobility of investors and entrepreneurs, particularly as the welfare state gets closer to collapse.

But it was also very interesting to hear reports from various nations about the operation of their programs. Most of them have shortcomings, to be sure, but it does appear that politicians in America have made our system one of the least effective.

For further background on the seemingly unbreakable link between big government and corruption, here’s a video I narrated for the Center for Freedom and Prosperity.

P.S. Government corruption is also a problem at the state level.

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Restoring the Old-Fashioned Budget Virtue of…FDR and Truman?!?

This is a column I never expected to write. That’s because I’m going to applaud Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman.

This won’t be unconstrained applause, to be sure. Roosevelt, after all, pursued awful policies that lengthened and deepened the economic misery of the 1930s. And, as you can see from this video, the “economic bill of rights” that he wanted after WWII was downright malicious.

Truman, meanwhile, was a less consequential figure, but it’s worth noting that he wanted a restoration of the New Deal after WWII, which almost certainly would have hindered and perhaps even sabotaged the recovery.

But just as very few policy makers are completely good, it’s also true that very few policy makers are totally bad. And a review of fiscal history reveals that FDR and Truman both deserve credit for restraining domestic spending during wartime.

Here’s some of what I wrote for The Hill. I was specifically responding to the cranky notion, pursued by Bernie Sanders, the openly socialist Senator from Vermont, that there should be tax hikes on the rich to finance military operations overseas.

The idea has a certain perverse appeal to libertarians. We don’t like nation-building and we don’t like punitive tax policy, so perhaps mixing them together would encourage Republicans to think twice (or thrice) before trying to remake the world.

But “perverse appeal” isn’t the same as “good policy.”

That’s why I suggest another approach, one that used to exist in our nation.

…lawmakers would be well served to instead look on the spending side of the budget. …This may seem like a foreign concept in today’s Washington, but it actually was standard procedure at times in our history.

Consider, for instance, what happened to domestic spending when the nation entered World War II.

As you see from this chart, these outlays fell significantly as a share of GDP. And this was while Roosevelt was in the White House!

I note in the article that much of this improvement was the result of rising GDP, but the raw numbers from the OMB Historical Tables also show that nominal spending was constrained.

The same thing happened during the Korean War. Once the conflict began and policy makers began funding the troops, they also put the brakes on domestic spending.

Unfortunately, restraining domestic spending when military spending is rising is no longer the standard practice in Washington.

I point out in the article that we got across-the-board profligacy under President Johnson.

Reagan, by contrast, did reduce the burden of domestic spending when he boosted defense outlays to win the Cold War.

But then we had a return to guns-and-butter spending last decade during the Bush years.

Which led me to write this surreal passage.

…we have two odd collections of bedfellows, with Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Truman and Reagan in one camp vs. LBJ and Bush in the other camp.

Though there’s only one good president mentioned in that excerpt if we’re grading overall records.

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Replicate the Success of Welfare Reform by Putting States in Charge of Fraud-Riddled Food Stamp Program

As shown by this graphic, why are so many people in Maine taking advantage of the food stamp program? As shown by this map, why does Oregon have such a high level of food stamp dependency?

These are just rhetorical questions since I don’t have the answers. But if we can come up with good answers, that could lead to better public policy.

After all, if we want a self-reliant citizenry, it would be better if people were more like those in Nevada and less like the folks in Vermont, at least based on the infamous Moocher Index.

But one thing we can say with certainty is that the food stamp program has morphed into a very expensive form of dependency.

Jason Riley of the Wall Street Journal opines on the importance of reforming this costly entitlement.

Officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, the food-stamp program has become the country’s fastest-growing means-tested social-welfare program. …Between 2000 and 2013, SNAP caseloads grew to 47.6 million from 17.2 million, and spending grew to $80 billion from $20.6 billion… SNAP participation fell slightly last year, to 46.5 million individuals, as the economy improved, but that still leaves a population the size of Spain’s living in the U.S. on food stamps. …The unprecedented jump in food-stamp use over the past six years has mostly been driven by manufactured demand. The Obama administration has attempted to turn SNAP into a middle-class entitlement by easing eligibility rules and recruiting new food-stamp recipients. …Democrats tend to consider greater government dependence an achievement and use handouts to increase voter support. The president considers European-style welfare states a model for America.

Making America more like Greece, however, is not good news for taxpayers.

But the program also has negative effects on recipients. Contrary to the left’s narrative, we don’t have millions of starving people in America.

…it now operates more like an open-ended income-supplement program that discourages work. Some 56% of SNAP users are in the program for longer than five years, which suggests that the assistance is being used by most recipients as a permanent source of income, not as a temporary safety net. …“Today, instead of hunger, the central nutritional problem facing the poor, indeed all Americans, is not too little food but rather too much—or at least too many calories,” Douglas Besharov, who teaches courses on poverty alleviation at the University of Maryland, told the House Agriculture Committee last month. “Despite this massive increase in overweight and obesity among the poor, federal feeding programs still operate under their nearly half-century-old objective of increasing food consumption.

So why don’t we try to help both taxpayers and low-income Americans by reforming the program, specifically by “block-granting” it to the states?

Uncle Sam picks up almost all of the bill. That means states have little incentive to control costs. Republicans argue that shifting to block grants would not only save money but also encourage states to increase the labor-participation rate of low-income populations. A state that has only so much money to work with is more likely to promote self-sufficiency in the form of employment, job-search and job-training requirements for able-bodied adults on the dole.

Decentralization, Riley explains, worked very well in the 1990s with welfare reform.

…1996 reforms…imposed more stringent time limits and work requirements on welfare recipients enrolled in programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF. Welfare rolls subsequently plunged. By 2004, caseloads had fallen by 60% overall and by at least 30% in nearly every state. Child poverty, black child poverty and child hunger also decreased, while employment among single mothers rose. This was a welcome outcome for taxpayers, poor people and everyone else—except those politicians with a vested interest in putting government dependence ahead of self-sufficiency to get elected and re-elected.

So kudos to Republicans on Capitol Hill for proposing to put the states in charge of food stamps.

Just like they also deserve applause for working to block-grant the Medicaid program.

This is something that should happen to all mean-tested programs. Once they’re all back at the state level, we’ll get innovation, experimentation, and diversity, all of which will help teach policy makers which approaches are genuinely in the best interests of both taxpayers and poor people (at least the ones seeking to escape dependency).

Though I can’t resist adding one caveat. The ultimate goal should be to phase out the block grants so that states are responsible for both raising and spending the money.

Let’s close with a few real-world horror stories of what we’re getting in exchange for the tens of billions of dollars that are being spent each year for food stamps.

• Using food stamps to buy luxury coffee at Starbucks.
• Buying steaks and lobster with food stamps.
• The Obama Administration rewarding states that sign up more food stamp recipients.
• Proposals to make it easier to use food stamps at fast food restaurants.
• College kids scamming the program for handouts.
• New York City giving food stamps to newly released prisoners and running foreign-language ads encouraging more people to sign up for the program.
• The Octo-Mom mooching off the food stamp program.
• The Agriculture Department running radio ads to lure more people into food stamp dependency.

With stories like this, I’m surprised my head didn’t explode during this debate I did on Larry Kudlow’s show.

P.S. Shifting to another example of government waste, let’s look at the latest example of overspending and mismanagement by the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Nothing, of course, can compare with the horrible outrage of bureaucrats awarding themselves bonuses after putting veterans on secret waiting lists and denying them care.

But having taxpayers pay nearly $300,000 just so a bureaucrat can move from one highly paid job in DC to another highly paid job in Philadelphia should get every American upset. Here are some of the sordid details from a local news report.

Rep. Jeff Miller (R., Fla.), who chairs the House Veterans Affairs Committee, has also raised questions about the salary and “relocation payments” to the new director of the Philadelphia office, Diana Rubens. Rubens, who was a senior executive in the D.C. office when she was tapped in June to take over the troubled Philadelphia branch, received more than $288,000 in relocation expenses. “The government shouldn’t be in the business of doling out hundreds of thousands in cash to extremely well-compensated executives just to move less than three hours down the road,” Miller said. …Under federal regulations, an agency can pay a variety of costs associated with reassigning an employee, including moving, closing costs, and a per-diem allowance for meals and temporary lodging for the employee’s household.

I’m baffled at how somebody could run up such a big bill. Did she use the space shuttle as a moving van?

Did she have to stay six months at a 5-star resort while waiting for her new house to be ready?

Does a per-diem allowance allow three meals a day at the most expensive restaurant in town?

This is either a case of fraud, which is outrageous, or it’s legal, which means it’s an outrageous example of government run amok.

Regardless, it underscores what I wrote back in 2011.

I will never relent in my opposition to tax increases so long as the crowd in Washington is spending money on things that are not appropriate functions of the federal government. …I will also be dogmatic in my fight against higher taxes so long as there is massive waste, fraud, and abuse in federal programs.

Not to mention that we should never allow tax hikes when it’s so simple to balance the budget with modest spending restraint.

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A Fair – but Ultimately Misleading – Critique of GOP Budgets

Last week, I applauded the Chairmen of the House and Senate Budget Committees for proposing budgets that complied with my Golden Rule, which means the burden of government would grow slower than the private sector.

But my praise was limited because neither budget is ideal from the perspective of libertarians and small-government conservatives.

Even though the two proposals satisfy my Golden Rule, that’s simply a minimum threshold. In reality, there’s far too much spending in both plans, and neither Chairman proposes to get rid of a single Department. Not HUD, not Education, not Transportation, and not Agriculture.

Heck, the budgets don’t even go after low-hanging fruit such as the Small Business Administration, National Endowment for the Arts, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, or Legal Services Corporation.

And it turns out that there’s another reason to be semi-disappointed with the GOP budgets.

Stephen Ohlemacher of the Associated Press has a story on the Republican plans and he looks at one of the GOP’s most prominent claims.

The new House and Senate Republican budgets make a big boast: They both balance the federal budget within 10 years, without raising taxes.

But there are two problems with this assertion.

First, the GOPers are assuming that certain “temporary” tax breaks will expire. And this means more money for the government.

…millions of American families and businesses would have to pay more in taxes to make the math work…current law assumes that more than 50 temporary tax breaks that expired at the start of the year will not be renewed. …All together, the tax breaks add up to $898 billion over the next decade, according to CBO. …Most Republicans in Congress have voted numerous times to temporarily extend them. And over the past year, the Republican-controlled House has voted to make some of the more popular ones permanent.

Second, Republicans say they want to repeal Obamacare, but they want to keep all the revenue currently associated with the Obamacare tax hikes.

…they rely on more than $1 trillion in tax revenue from the health law that would supposedly be repealed. …In 2012, CBO said repealing the president’s health law would reduce tax revenues by $1 trillion over the following decade. That number has certainly gone up as more of the law’s tax increases have come into effect. But despite calling for the health law to be repealed, both budget resolutions include all the revenue that would come from the law’s taxes.

Both of these criticisms are valid.

Regardless of what you think about temporary tax provisions (some of them are good and some are special interest junk), letting these “extenders” expire is a way to boost the long-run revenue haul of the federal government. In an ideal world, by contrast, the good provisions would be made permanent and the bad ones would be repealed and the money used to finance good tax changes.

Similarly, while Republicans say they want to repeal the specific Obamacare tax hikes, that they don’t plan on letting go of the money. Which is just a way of saying that they are letting Obamacare boost the long-run revenue stream going to Washington.

By the way, this doesn’t mean that the GOP budgets are bad compared to current law. It simply means that they could – and should – be better. Specifically, they could incorporate lower tax levels and lower spending levels.

Which brings me to the part of the AP article that rubs me the wrong way. The headline, at least the one picked by Business Insider, says that eliminating red ink without a higher tax burden is “probably not possible.” And the language in the report is similar.

Balancing the federal budget is hard. Doing it without more tax revenue is even harder.

So why am I irked by this passage? Well, balancing the budget without new money for DC may be “harder” in the sense that it would require more spending restraint. And someone might be correct if they predicted that achieving balance is “probably not possible” because politicians are reluctant to exercise fiscal discipline.

But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.

Earlier this year, I shared this chart showing how modest spending restraint can quickly balance the budget. As you can see, it’s actually very simple to get rid of red ink if politicians simply exercise a modest bit of fiscal discipline.

But I’ll admit that I used the Congressional Budget Office’s January projections of revenue, which assumed (like the GOP budgets) that the government would get revenues from the Obamacare tax hikes, as well as revenues from expiring provisions.

So does that mean that it’s impractical to balance the budget without all this added money going to DC?

Nonsense.

Let’s look at the numbers (and we now have new revenue projections from CBO, but they haven’t changed much) and see what happens if you remove the $2 trillion of revenues (over 10 years) associated with Obamacare and the extenders.

Since the revenue numbers climb over time, let’s assume that this means revenues will be $250 billion lower in 2025.

Does that cripple any hope of balancing the budget?

Hardly. It simply means that spending over the next 10 years could grow only about 2.7 percent per year rather than (as assumed in the House and Senate budgets) 3.3 percent per year.

So the bottom line is that we don’t need more revenue in Washington. We simply need more spending restraint.

P.S. By the way, this video explains why our goal should be smaller government, not fiscal balance.

That being said, there’s overwhelming evidence from nations all over the world that spending restraint is the best way to quickly reduce red ink.

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The Biggest Tax Scam Is the Internal Revenue Code and the IRS

With tax day fast approaching, it’s time to write about our good friends at the Internal Revenue Service.

One of the new traditions at the IRS is an annual release of tax scams. It’s know as the “dirty dozen” list, and while it may exist mostly as a publicity stunt, it does contain some useful advice.

And that’s true of this year’s version. But I worry that the IRS is looking at a few trees and missing the forest.

The Washington Examiner was kind enough to let me write a cover story on the “dirty dozen” list. Here’s my effort to add some context to the discussion.

…our friends at the Internal Revenue Service have a relatively new tradition of providing an annual list of 12 “tax scams” that taxpayers should avoid. It’s an odd collection, comprised of both recommendations that taxpayers protect themselves from fraud, as well as admonitions that taxpayers should be fully obedient to all IRS demands. Unsurprisingly, the list contains no warnings about the needless complexity and punitive nature of the tax code. Nor does the IRS say anything about how taxpayers lose the presumption of innocence if there’s any sort of conflict with the tax agency. Perhaps most important, there’s no acknowledgement from the IRS that many of the dirty dozen scams only exist because of bad tax policy.

In the article, I list each scam and make a few observations.

But I think my most useful comments came at the end of my piece.

…maybe the tax system wouldn’t engender so much hostility and disrespect if it was simple, transparent, fair, and conducive to growth. And that may be the big-picture lesson to learn as we conclude our analysis. When the income tax was first imposed back in 1913, the top tax rate was only 7 percent, the tax form was only two pages, and the tax code was easily understandable. But now that 100 years have gone by, the tax system has become a mess, like a ship encrusted with so many barnacles that it can no longer function. …the bottom line is that the biggest scam is the entire internal revenue code. The winners are the lobbyists, politicians, bureaucrats and insiders. The losers are America’s workers, investors, and consumers.

In other words, if we actually want a humane and sensible system, we should throw the current tax code in the garbage and replace it with a simple and fair flat tax.

And that’s exactly the message I shared in this interview with C-Span.

Here are a few of the points from the discussion that are worth emphasizing.

The current tax code benefits Washington insiders, not the American people.

But I’m not optimistic about fixing the tax code, in part because the crowd in DC would lose some power.

We’ll never get good tax reform unless there’s genuine entitlement reform to restrain the growing burden of government spending.

The flat tax and national sales tax are basically different sides of the same coin.

If you want class-warfare tax rates on the rich, keep in mind that high rates don’t necessarily translate into more revenue.

The no-tax-hike pledge is a vital and necessary component of a strategy to restrain government.

Itemized deductions benefit the rich, not the poor.

If you care about poor people, focus on growth rather than inequality.

We should mimic Hong Kong and Singapore, not France and Greece.

P.S. I wrote last week that the Senate GOP put together a budget that is surprisingly good, both in content and presentation. A reader since reminded me that the Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee was a sponsor of the “Penny Plan,” which would lower non-interest outlays by 1 percent per year.

Since Mitchell’s Golden Rule simply requires that spending grow by less than the private sector, Senator Enzi’s Penny Plan obviously passes with flying colors.

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Hypocrisy Alert: International Bureaucracy with Tax-Free Employees Is Pushing a Big Energy Tax on American Consumers

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is a Paris-based international bureaucracy with the self-proclaimed mission to “promote policies that will improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world.”

But if there was a truth-in-advertizing requirement, the OECD would instead say that its mission is to “promote policies that will increase the size, scope and power of government.”

Here are just a few examples of statist policies that are directly contrary to the interests of the American people.

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

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

The OECD is pushing a “Multilateral Convention” that is designed to become something akin to a World Tax Organization, with the power to persecute nations with free-market tax policy.

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

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

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

And, most recently, the OECD published a report suggesting numerous schemes to increase national tax burdens.

And here’s the insult on top of injury. You’re paying for this nonsense. American taxpayers finance the biggest share of the OECD’s budget.

And I’m sure you’ll be happy to know that the OECD is now pushing for a massive energy tax.

Here are some relevant passages from an article in the OECD Observer.

…it’s prime time to introduce a tax on carbon… “Every government will need to explain how their policy settings are consistent with a pathway to eliminate emissions from fossil fuel combustion in the second half of the century,” says OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría. This means looking at all policy measures to assess if they are effective in reducing CO2 emissions and in line with governments’ climate change objectives. An OECD report, Climate and Carbon: Aligning Prices and Policies outlines specific actions.

By the way, you can access the Climate and Carbon report by clicking here. But since I assume few if any people will want to read a turgid 57-page paper, let’s stick with excerpts from the short article in the OECD Observer.

All you really need to know is that the OECD (like the IMF) wants governments to boost energy prices, both explicitly and implicitly.

Explicit carbon pricing mechanisms, such as carbon taxes… other policies affect a country’s CO2 emissions and can effectively place an implicit price on carbon. …It’s time for governments to ramp up the development of alternative energies and to nail a price onto every tonne of CO2 emitted.

The article also includes other recommendations that are very worrisome. It suggests other fiscal changes that would boost taxes on the energy sector.

Needless to say, this means higher costs on energy consumers.

…carbon pricing should also include a review of the country’s fiscal policy to ensure that budgetary transfers and tax expenditures do not, directly or indirectly, encourage the production and use of fossil fuels.

By the way, when the OECD talks about “budgetary transfers” and “tax expenditures,” that’s basically bureaucrat-speak for back-door tax hikes such as changes to depreciation rules in order to force companies to overstate their income.

And since we’re deciphering bureaucrat-speak, check out this passage from the article.

…compensatory or other measures to mitigate the regressive impacts of reforms without losing the incentive to reduce emissions.

What the OECD is basically saying is that an energy tax will be very painful for the poor. But rather than conclude that the tax is therefore undesirable, they instead are urging that the new tax be accompanied by new spending.

Maybe this means higher welfare payments to offset increased energy prices. Maybe it means some sort of energy stamp program.

The details aren’t important at this point, particularly since the OECD isn’t making a specific proposal.

But what is important is that the OECD is using our tax dollars to advocate bigger government. So maybe the moral of the story is that we should stop subsidizing the OECD.

P.S. On a related topic, and in the interest of fairness, I have to give the OECD credit for being willing to publish an article on tax competition by my Australian friend, Professor Sinclair Davidson.

Sinclair points out that the OECD’s anti-tax competition campaign is based on the premise that bad things happen if labor and capital have some ability to migrate from high-tax nations to low-tax jurisdictions.

Yet the OECD has never been able to put forth any evidence for this assertion.

High income economies have tended to follow irresponsible fiscal policies over an extended period of time. …governments have been trying to access new sources of revenue. …The OECD has been campaigning on “harmful tax practices” since the late 1990s. …The report itself was a somewhat wordy affair that actually failed to define what ‘harmful tax practices’ constitute. …Most damning of all, however, is that the OECD was unable to produce any actual evidence of these dire consequences, arguing instead: “A regime can be harmful even where it is difficult to quantify the adverse economic impact it poses”. The dog had eaten their homework.

What’s really going on, as Sinclair explains, is that politicians want a tax cartel to enable bigger government.

It turns out that governments and politicians, like business, don’t always appreciate having to work at improving themselves and offering a more attractive mix of services and taxation in order to attract business. …It is perfectly understandable why governments would want to establish a tax cartel. …countries, rather than respond to such competition by competing themselves, have chosen instead to engage in fiscal imperialism – bullying and cajoling sovereign nations to change their domestic policies.

Again, kudos to the OECD for allowing a contrary viewpoint.

I guess the bureaucrats are more relaxed now than they were back in 2001, when the OECD threatened to cancel an entire conference simply because I was present, or in 2008, when the OECD threatened to have me thrown in jail for giving advice to low-tax jurisdictions at another conference.

P.P.S. For additional information on why American taxpayers shouldn’t be subsidizing a left-wing bureaucracy in France, here’s my video on the OECD.

Now you can understand why eliminating handouts for the OECD should be a gimme for congressional Republicans.

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The Case against the Value-Added Tax

Even though I fret about a growing burden of government and have little faith in the ability (or desire) of politicians to make wise decisions, I somehow convince myself that good things will happen.

Here’s some of what I wrote two years ago, when asked whether I thought America could be saved from a Greek-style fiscal collapse.

I think there’s a genuine opportunity to save the country. …we can at least hold the line and prevent government from becoming bigger than it is today. Sort of a watered-down version of Mitchell’s Golden Rule. The key is the right kind of entitlement reform.

But in that same article, I also issued this warning.

I may decide to give up if something really horrible happens, such as adoption of a value-added tax. Giving politicians a big new source of revenue, after all, would cripple any incentive for fiscal restraint.

To be blunt, imposing a big national sales tax – in addition to the income tax – would be a horrible defeat for advocates of limited government. A VAT would lead to more spending and more debt.

And that’s when folks might consider looking for escape options because America’s future will be very grim.

Here’s a video I narrated on why the value-added tax is awful public policy.

Thankfully, I’m not the only one raising the alarm.

In a recent editorial, the Wall Street Journal wisely opined on the huge downside risk of a value-added tax.

It’s the hottest trend among tax collectors, raising a gusher of revenue for spendthrift governments worldwide. …a new report from accounting firm Ernst & Young says that VAT “systems are spreading” around the world and “rates are rising.”

By the way, the comment about “rates are rising” is an understatement, as illustrated by the table prepared by the Heritage Foundation.

Politicians love VATs both because they generate huge amounts of revenue and because the tax is hidden in the price of products and thus can be increased surreptitiously.

The WSJ explains.

The VAT is a sort of turbo-charged national sales tax on goods and services… Politicians love it because it is the most efficient revenue-raiser known to man, and its rates can be raised gradually to finance new entitlements or fill budget holes. The VAT is typically introduced with a low rate but then moves up over time until it swallows huge chunks of national economies. …Because VATs are embedded in the price of products, they can often rise unnoticed by the consumer, which is why liberals love them as a vehicle for periodic stealth tax hikes.

And in this case, “periodic” is just another way of saying “whenever politician want more money.”

And if recent history is any indication, “whenever” is “all the time.”

E&Y says standard VAT rates now average a knee-buckling 21.6% in the European Union, up from 19.4% in 2008. Average standard rates in the industrial countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have climbed to 19.2% from 17.8% in 2009. Japan is another example of the VAT upward ratchet. The Liberal Democratic Party tried to introduce the tax for years and finally succeeded with a 3% rate in 1989. Eight years later the shoguns raised it to 5%. Last year it climbed to 8%, whacking consumption and sending the economy back to negative growth.

The Japanese experience is especially educational since the VAT is a relatively new tax in that nation.

And here’s a chart showing what’s happened in the past few years to the average VAT rate in the European Union.

Now let’s look at another chart that is far more worrisome.

It shows that the burden of government spending in Europe, before VATs were adopted, wasn’t that much different than the fiscal burden of the public sector in the United States.

But once the VAT gave politicians a new source of revenue, spending exploded.

By the way, you won’t be surprised to learn that politicians increased spending even more  than they increased taxes.

So not only did VATs lead to more spending, they also led to more debt. I guess that’s a win-win from the perspective of statists.

Let’s now return to the WSJ editorial. Proponents sometimes claim that VATs are neutral and efficient. That may be somewhat true in theory (just as an income tax, in theory, might be clean and simple), but in the real world, VATs simply make it possible for politicians to auction off a new source of loopholes.

…while VAT systems are often presented as models of simplicity that theoretically treat all goods and services alike, politicians can’t resist picking winners and losers, creating higher or lower rates for industries at their whim. “The politicians always start running with exemptions,” says E&Y’s Gijsbert Bulk.

Here’s the bottom line.

Americans, be warned. …don’t think it can’t happen here. Liberals campaign on soaking the rich, but they know there’s only so many rich to soak. To finance the growing entitlement state, they need a new broad-based tax that hits the middle class, where the big money is. That means either a VAT or a new energy tax, like the BTU tax Bill and Hillary Clinton proposed in 1993 or the cap-and-tax scheme that President Obama wanted.

The WSJ is correct. We need to be vigilant in the fight against the VAT.

But what makes this battle difficult is that some putative allies are on the wrong side.

Tom Dolan, Greg Mankiw, and Paul Ryan have all expressed pro-VAT sympathies. The same is true of Kevin Williamson, Josh Barro, and Andrew Stuttaford.

And I’ve written that Mitch Daniels, Herman Cain, and Mitt Romney were not overly attractive presidential candidates because they expressed openness to the VAT.

P.S. Some of you may be asking why leftists are so anxious for a VAT since they traditionally prefer class-warfare based tax hikes that extract revenue from the rich.

But here’s one of the dirty secrets of Washington. They may not admit it in public, but sensible leftists understand that there are Laffer-Curve constraints on extracting more revenue from upper-income taxpayers.

They’re familiar with the evidence from the 1980s about the sometimes-inverse link between tax rates and tax revenue and they are aware that “rich” people have substantial control over the timing, level, and composition of their income.

So if you want to collect more money, you have to go over lower-income and middle-income taxpayer.

Which is exactly what the IMF inadvertently revealed in a study showing that VATs are the “effective” way of financing bigger government.

P.P.S. I should have written that leftists generally don’t admit that they want higher taxes on the general population. Because every so often, some of them confess that their goal is to rape and pillage the middle class.

P.P.P.S. You can enjoy some good VAT cartoons by clicking here, here, and here.

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Greece, Marxism, and Paul Krugman

I don’t know which group is more despicable, Greek politicians or the voters who elected them. In both cases, they think they’re entitled to other people’s money.

But since the “other people” in this case happen to live in nations such as Germany and Finland, and those folks don’t want to write blank checks to a bunch of moochers and looters, Greece faces a difficult choice.

Either the Greeks behave like adults and rein in their bloated public sector. Or they throw a tantrum, which presumably means both a default on payments to bondholders and a return to the unstable drachma currency.

My guess is they’ll eventually go with the latter option.

But maybe there’s hope for Greece. One of the Prime Minister’s chief economic advisers, an out-of-the-closet communist, has announced his resignation. Here are a few of the details from a story in the EU Observer.

Giannis Milios, a member of Syriza’s central committee and long time economic advisor to Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras, resigned Wednesday… A professor of economic policy who defines himself as a Marxist, Milios is considered one of the most loyal members of the left-wing party.

So does this signal a shift to more mature and sensible policy?

Perhaps not. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, the problem in Greece isn’t really the communists. It’s the American leftists like Paul Krugman!

Germany, many other governments and senior policy makers in Brussels believe…that recklessness has been encouraged by misguided political and economic philosophies and bad advice from abroad. It isn’t so much that many in Mr. Tsipras’s Syriza party are Marxists—the eurozone can handle followers of the bearded 19th-century German philosopher. It is more that they are seen to be excessively influenced by a 20th-century British economist—John Maynard Keynes—and his living Anglo-Saxon disciples. At finance ministers’ meetings in Brussels, Mr. Varoufakis has been accompanied by American economists James Galbraith and Jeffrey Sachs. From across the Atlantic, the new government gets strong rhetorical backing from Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz and others.

Wow, this is remarkable. Who would have guessed that run-of-the-mill American leftists are more damaging to economic policy than communists!

I guess this is because the Marxists are probably harmless crazies who hang out in coffee houses and gripe about the capitalist class.

The American leftists like Krugman, by contrast, do real damage because they use discredited Keynesian theory to argue that politicians should be spending even more money to “stimulate” an economy that’s in a crisis because of previous bouts of government spending.

Sort of like trying to get out of a hole by digging even deeper.

What’s amazing is that Krugman and other American statists are pushing bad policy when there are successful examples of nations escaping fiscal crisis with genuine spending cuts.

John Dizard wrote an interesting article about Greece for the Financial Times. He began his article by quoting Krugman, who wrote that the plans of the crazy Greek government are “not radical enough.” Dizard also shared another quote from Krugman, which criticized proponents of lower spending because “the best the defenders of orthodoxy can do is point to a couple of small Baltic nations.”

So Dizard decided to compare Greece with those Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

There are…some practical lessons to learn from…the contrasting ways that Greece has dealt with the world after the global financial crisis compared with the relatively poor Baltic states. Greece took a path of gradual fiscal adjustments weighted towards tax increases, accompanied by a partial debt default. The Baltic states adopted rapid and deep cuts in their state expenditure and current account deficits.

And here’s a shocking bit of news, though it won’t be surprise to folks in the real world. The Baltics have done far better.

The big issue in the Baltic states is upward wage pressure from tight labour markets. That is what we call a high-class problem. This understates the Baltic countries’ achievements. …They also did this without much benefit from concessionary multilateral finance or international debt haircuts.

Dizard looks at some of the differences between the Baltic nations and Greece.

There were virtually no dismissals from the Greek civil service over this period. Salaries were cut, but public sector staffing was reduced with lay-offs of temporary contract workers and early retirements. This had the effect of reducing already low service levels and transferring costs from payrolls to pension obligations. Latvia fired one-third of its civil servants. …The tax burden [in Greece] on salaried workers, compliant domestic businesses and property owners was substantially increased. In contrast, the Baltic states have fairly flat and relatively low tax rates.

All this is music to my ears since I’ve already written about the successful spending cuts in the Baltic countries.

And I particularly enjoyed having the opportunity, back in 2012, to correct the record when Krugman tried to blame Estonia’s 2008 recession on spending cuts that occurred in 2009.

P.S. Since today’s column focused on the statist ideas of Paul Krugman and because he’s a leading voice for the notion that more government spending somehow “stimulates” growth, I can’t resist sharing an explanation of Keynesian economics I gave back in 2009 as part of some remarks to Colorado’s Steamboat Institute.

Feel free to watch the whole video, but fast forward to 3:30 if you’re pressed for time. I’m being snarky, of course, but I also think my debunking of so-called stimulus is spot on.

P.P.S. By the way, the above video is from the Q&A portion of my remarks. If you watch my my actual speech, and if you pay attention about the 1:35 mark, you’ll see I was talking about the importance of having government grow slower than the economy’s productive sector back in 2009 even though I didn’t unveil Mitchell’s Golden Rule until two years later.

P.P.P.S. Since we’re picking on Krugman, here’s something that’s making the rounds on Twitter.

Good ol’ Professor Krugman praised the European approach of bigger government back in 2010, and everything that’s happened since that point has made his assessment look foolish.

Sort of reminds me of the time he attacked me for my gloomy assessment of California and claimed that the Golden State’s job market was strong. But it turns out that California had the 5th-highest unemployment rate in the nation.

P.P.P.P.S. Let’s close with the observation that the mess in Greece shouldn’t be blamed on Krugman. Sure, he’s giving bad advice, but Greek politicians deserve the lion’s share of the blame. Moreover, to the extent that outside advisers get blamed, we should remember that economists like Joseph Stiglitz and Jeffrey Sachs also are involved, and in some cases exercising more influence than Krugman.

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America’s Government School System: Never Have so Many Paid so Much to Achieve so Little

No other nation in the world spends as much on education as the United States.

According to our leftist friends, who prefer to measure inputs rather than outputs, this is a cause for celebration. I guess it shows we have the best intentions. Or maybe we love our kids the most.

For those who prefer to focus on outputs, however, it’s very difficult to be happy about the results we’re getting compared to all the money that’s being spent. Heck, in some cases it’s almost as if we’re getting negative results when you compare inputs and outputs.

To paraphrase what Winston Churchill said about the Royal Air Force in World War II, never have so many paid so much to achieve so little.

Now we have more evidence that American taxpayers are paying a lot and getting a little (though I have to admit that non-teaching education bureaucrats have been big winners).

The Washington Post reports on some new research to see how America’s young adults rank compared to their peers in other nations.

The results aren’t encouraging.

This exam, given in 23 countries, assessed the thinking abilities and workplace skills of adults. It focused on literacy, math and technological problem-solving. The goal was to figure out how prepared people are to work in a complex, modern society. And U.S. millennials performed horribly. That might even be an understatement… No matter how you sliced the data – by class, by race, by education – young Americans were laggards compared to their international peers. In every subject, U.S. millennials ranked at the bottom or very close to it, according to a new study by testing company ETS.

There were three testing categories and Americans didn’t do well in any of them.

…in literacy, U.S. millennials scored higher than only three countries. In math, Americans ranked last. In technical problem-saving, they were second from the bottom. “Abysmal,” noted ETS researcher Madeline Goodman. “There was just no place where we performed well.”

Here’s the comparative data on literacy.

Here’s how Americans did on numeracy (which may explain why there’s considerable support for the minimum wage).

Last but not least, millennials didn’t exactly do well in problem solving, either (which may explain their bizarre answers to polling questions).

By the way, the researchers also sliced and diced the data to get apples-to-apples comparisons.

Yet even on this basis, there’s no good news for America.

U.S. millennials with master’s degrees and doctorates did better than their peers in only three countries, Ireland, Poland and Spain. …Top-scoring U.S. millennials – the 90th percentile on the PIAAC test – were at the bottom internationally, ranking higher only than their peers in Spain.  …ETS researchers tried looking for signs of promise – especially in math skills, which they considered a good sign of labor market success. They singled out native-born Americans. Nope.

At some point, we need to realize that decades of additional spending and decades of further centralization have not worked.

Maybe, just maybe, it’s time to shut down the Department of Education on the federal level and to encourage school choice on the state and local level.

After all, we already have good evidence that decentralization and competition produces better test scores. There’s also strong evidence for school choice from nations such as Sweden, Chile, and the Netherlands.

P.S. We’re never going to solve this problem by tinkering with the status quo. That’s like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. This is why Bush’s no-bureaucrat-left-behind scheme didn’t work. And it explains why Obama’s Common Core is flopping as well.

P.P.S. Moreover, it will probably require big reform to deal with the brainless types of political correctness that exist in government schools.

P.P.P.S. If you want more evidence that the problem isn’t money, check out this research on educational outcomes in various cities. Or look at this data from New York City and Washington, DC, both of which spend record amounts of money on education.

P.P.P.P.S. I can’t resist sharing this correction of some very shoddy education reporting by the New York Times.

P.P.P.P.P.S. On the bright side, the inadequacies of government-run schools helped give birth to the home-schooling movement, which then led to this humorous video. And the political correctness that infects government schools results in a bizarre infatuation with gender performance, which helped lead to this funny video. And this bit of satire on the evolution of math training in government schools also is quite amusing.

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Chairmen of House and Senate Budget Committees Propose Good Budgets, Particularly Compared to Obama’s Spendthrift Plan

Earlier this year, President Obama proposed a budget that would impose new taxes and add a couple of trillion dollars to the burden of government spending over the next 10 years.

The Republican Chairmen of the House and Senate Budget Committees have now weighed in. You can read the details of the House proposal by clicking here and the Senate proposal by clicking here, but the two plans are broadly similar (though the Senate is a bit vaguer on how to implement spending restraint, as I wrote a couple of days ago).

So are any of these plans good, or at least acceptable? Do any of them satisfy my Golden Rule?

Here’s a chart showing what will happen to spending over the next 10 years, based on the House and Senate GOP plans, as well as the budget proposed by President Obama.

Keep in mind, as you look at these numbers, that economy is projected to expand, in nominal terms, by an average of about 4.3 percent annually.

The most relevant data is that the Republican Chairmen want spending to climb by about $1.4 trillion over the next decade (annual spending increases averaging about 3.3 percent per year), while Obama wants spending to jump by about $2.4 trillion over the same period (with annual spending climbing by an average of almost 5.1 percent per year).

At this point, some of you may be wondering how to reconcile this data with news stories you may have read about GOP budgets that supposedly include multi-trillion spending cuts?!?

The very fist sentence in a report from The Hill, for instance, asserted that the Senate budget would “cut spending by $5.1 trillion.” And USA Today had a story headlined, “House GOP budget cuts $5.5 trillion in spending.”

But these histrionic claims are based on dishonest math. The “cuts” only exist if you compare the GOP budget numbers to the “baseline,” which is basically an artificial estimate of how fast spending would grow if government was left on auto-pilot.

Which is sort of like a cad telling his wife that he reduced his misbehavior because he only added 4 new mistresses to his collection rather than the 5 that he wanted.

I explained this biased and deceptive budgetary scam in these John Stossel and Judge Napolitano interviews, and also nailed the New York Times for using this dishonest approach when reporting about sequestration.

Interestingly, the Senate plan tries to compensate for this budgetary bias by including a couple of charts that properly put the focus on year-to-year spending changes.

Here’s their chart on Obama’s profligate budget plan.

And here’s their chart looking at what happens to major spending categories based on the reforms in the Senate budget proposal.

So kudos to Chairman Enzi and his team for correctly trying to focus the discussion where it belongs.

By the way, in addition to a better use of rhetoric, the Senate GOP plan actually is more fiscally responsible than the House plan. Under Senator Enzi’s proposal, government spending would increase by an average of 3.25 percent per year over the next 10 years, which is better than Chairman Price’s plan, which would allow government spending to rise by an average of 3.36 percent annually.

Though both Chairman deserve applause for having more spending restraint than there was in the last two Ryan budgets.

But this doesn’t mean I’m entirely happy with the Republican fiscal plans.

Even though the two proposals satisfy my Golden Rule, that’s simply a minimum threshold. In reality, there’s far too much spending in both plans, and neither Chairman proposes to get rid of a single Department. Not HUD, not Education, not Transportation, and not Agriculture.

But the one thing that got me the most agitated is that the House and Senate proposals both indirectly embrace very bad economic analysis by the Congressional Budget Office.

Here’s some language that was included with the House plan (the Senate proposal has similar verbiage).

CBO’s analysis…estimates that reducing budget deficits, thereby bending the curve on debt levels, would be a net positive for economic growth. …The analysis concludes that deficit reduction creates long-term economic benefits because it increases the pool of national savings and boosts investment, thereby raising economic growth and job creation.

But here’s the giant problem. The CBO would say – and has said – the same thing about budget plans with giant tax increases.

To elaborate, CBO has a very bizarre view of how fiscal policy impacts the economy. The bureaucrats think that deficits are very important for long-run economic performance, while also believing that the overall burden of government spending and the punitive structure of the tax code are relatively unimportant.

And this leads them to make bizarre claims about tax increases being good for growth.

Moreover, the bureaucrats not only think deficits are the dominant driver of long-run growth, they also use Keynesian analysis when measuring the impact of fiscal policy on short-run growth. Just in case you think I’m exaggerating, or somehow mischaracterizing CBO’s position, check out page 12 of the Senate GOP plan and page 37 of the House GOP plan. You’ll see the “macroeconomic” effects of the plans cause higher deficits in 2016 and 2017, based on the silly theory that lower levels of government spending will harm short-run growth.

So hopefully you can understand why GOPers, for the sake of intellectual credibility, should not be citing bad analysis from the CBO.

But even more important, they should stop CBO from producing bad analysis is the future. The Republicans did recently replace a Democrat-appointed CBO Director, so it will be interesting to see whether their new appointee has a better understanding of how fiscal policy works.

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Lessons from Sweden about Welfare and Immigration

Sweden is an odd country, at least from the perspective of public policy.

On the positive side, it has private Social Security accounts. It has an admirable school choice system. And it was a good role model of spending restraint back in the 1990s.

But on the negative side, Sweden has one of the world’s biggest welfare states. Even after the spending restraint of the 1990s, the public sector consumes about 50 percent of economic output. And that necessitates a punitive tax code.

There’s also a truly perverse fixation on equality. And you won’t be surprised to learn that the government-run healthcare system produces some unpleasant outcomes.

Today, let’s build on our understanding of Sweden by looking at how the country’s welfare state interacts with the immigration system.

Writing for CapX, Nima Sanandaji discusses these issues in his adopted country of Sweden.

Sweden has had an unusually open policy towards refugee and family immigrants. The Swedish Migration Agency estimates that around 105,000 individuals will apply for asylum only this year, corresponding to over one percent of Sweden’s entire population.

This openness is admirable, but is it successful? Are immigrants assimilating and contributing to Sweden’s economy?

Unfortunately, the answer in many cases is no.

…the open attitude towards granting immigrants asylum is not matched by good opportunities on the labor market. An in-depth study by the daily paper Dagens Nyheter shows that many migrants struggle to find decent work even ten years after entering the country. …The median income for the refugees in the group was found to be as low as £880 a month. The family immigrants of refugees earned even less. Ten years after arriving in the country, their median income was merely £360 a month. These very low figures suggest that a large segment of the group is still relying on welfare payments. Dagens Nyheter can show that at least four out of ten refugees ten years after arrival are supported by welfare. The paper acknowledges that this is likely an underestimation.

So what’s the problem? Why are immigrants failing to prosper?

Nima suggests that government policies are the problem, creating perverse incentives for long-term dependency.

To be more specific, the country’s extravagant welfare state acts as flypaper, preventing people from climbing in the ladder of opportunity.

The combination of generous benefits, high taxes and rigid labour regulations reduce the incentives and possibilities to find work. Entrapment in welfare dependency is therefore extensive, in particular amongst immigrants. Studies have previously shown that even highly educated groups of foreign descent struggle to become self-dependent in countries such as Norway and Sweden. …The high-spending model is simply not fit to cope with the challenges of integration.

The part about “highly educated groups” is particularly important since it shows that the welfare trap doesn’t just affect low-skilled immigrants (particularly when high tax rates make productive activity relatively unattractive).

So what’s the moral of the story? Well, the one obvious lesson is that a welfare state is harmful to human progress. It hurts taxpayers, of course, but it also has a harmful impact on recipients.

And when the recipients are immigrants, redistribution is especially perverse since it makes it far less likely that newcomers will be net contributors to a nation.

And that then causes native populations to be less sympathetic to immigration, which in unfortunate since new blood – in the absence of bad government policy – can help boost national prosperity.

Though let’s at least give Sweden credit. I’m not aware that its welfare programs are subsidizing terrorism, which can’t be said for the United Kingdom, Australia, France, or the United States.

P.S. Here’s my favorite factoid about Sweden.

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Are Congressional Republicans Big-Spending Bushies or Fiscally-Responsible Reaganites?

I feel a bit schizophrenic when people ask me my opinion of Republicans on Capitol Hill.

When I’m in a good mood (or being naively optimistic, some might argue), I applaud them for blocking Obama’s spending agenda. The fights over sequestration, debt limits, and government shutdowns have made a real difference. The burden of government spending has dropped significantly since 2009.

But when I’m in a bad mood (or being too demanding, some might say), I get very agitated that Republicans seem unable to achieve easy victories, such as doing nothing and letting the corrupt Export-Import Bank disappear. And it makes me think they’re a bunch of big-government hacks.

The bottom line is that GOPers are both good and bad. Here’s what I wrote back in 2011 and it still applies today.

It’s almost like they have an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other. They usually have some underlying principles, and they would like to do the right thing and make America a better place. Yet they also want to get reelected and accumulate power, and this lures them into casting votes that they know are bad for the country. Sometimes the devil has the most influence. During the Bush years, for instance, most Republicans on Capitol Hill went along with Bush’s bad proposals… Yet every so often the angel gets control. All Republicans, including the ones who were in office and doing the wrong thing during the Bush years, …vote for…budget[s]…which would limit the growth of federal spending and fundamentally reform Medicare and Medicaid.

So are the angels or devils winning?

That’s a judgement call, but here’s a slide I’ve shared in some of my speeches. It shows three issues that will get decided in 2015 and asks whether Congress will make the right choices.

The jury is still out on all three of these tests, but there are many reasons to worry.

I’ve already written about GOP flirtation with the gas tax, which is very disturbing since a decision not to raise the tax automatically reduces federal transportation spending, so it should be a win-win situation (assuming, of course, that Republicans believe in federalism and a smaller central government).

Now let’s look at the other two items on my list.

Republicans achieved a big victory with the sequester in 2013, but then gave Obama a big win by cancelling the sequester for 2014 and 2015.

Well, now they have to decide what to do for the 2016 fiscal year, which starts October 1. And there’s already pressure from the White House, as you can see from this news report, to replace real spending restraint with gimmicks and back-door tax hikes.

White House Budget Director Shaun Donovan said Thursday he sees a “hopeful possibility” that Congress and the White House will agree later this year to update the Ryan-Murray budget agreement of 2013 which increased the discretionary spending ceilings set in the Budget Control Act. …Donovan declined to say if any preliminary talks have begun to renew Ryan-Murray, but declared that President Barack Obama will insist the sequestration process be “reversed.” “We will not accept a budget that locks in sequestration,” Donovan said. …The White House budget calls for FY 2016 discretionary spending that is about $75 billion above the spending ceiling set by the 2011 law after the sequester was triggered.

You may be asking yourself why Republicans would consider – even for a nanosecond – giving Obama all that new spending?

Well, the problem is that some GOPers are big defense hawks and they complain, accurately, that Defense is less than one-fourth of the budget yet is has to absorb one-half of the sequester.

But considering that the United States and its allies still account for the overwhelming share of global defense outlays, I nonetheless think sequestration is a far better outcome than giving Obama carte blanche to squander and extra $75 billion.

But it remains to be seen what will happen.

Now let’s contemplate the third test for the GOP.

Will the Senate commit to entitlement reform? The answer is…not really, but maybe.

Here’s what The Hill has reported.

Senate Republicans will not include detailed plans to overhaul entitlement programs when they unveil their first budget in nearly a decade this week, according to GOP sources. The decision would break from Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) House budgets from recent years, which Democrats used to pound Republican candidates in the 2012 and 2014 elections. …The GOP budget would balance in 10 years, according to GOP lawmakers familiar with the document, but it will only propose savings to be achieved in Medicare and Medicaid, without spelling out specific reforms as Ryan and House Republicans did in recent budgets.

In other words, the bad news is that Senate GOPers are not going to embrace the specific Medicare and Medicaid reforms that have been included in House-passed Republican budgets.

But the good (or hopeful, to be more accurate) news is that the Senate budget will call for a somewhat similar level of spending restraint. So that means the possibility of good entitlement reform will still exist.

By the way, the reason this is so important is that we may have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to actually enact desperately needed fiscal reforms in 2017. This is why it’s so critical that GOPers not get wobbly and regress into being Bush-type big-government conservatives.

I explain further in this interview I had with the Institute of Economic Affairs on my most recent trip to London.

Incidentally, I’m not exaggerating in the interview when I warn that the United States may turn into Greece if we don’t seize the opportunity to make reforms and slow the growth of government. If you don’t believe me, check out these sobering estimates of long-run fiscal chaos from  the IMF, BIS, and OECD.

P.S. I’m sometimes asked whether the GOP leadership is part of the problem or part of the solution. That’s not my area of expertise, but I will say that Boehner and McConnell basically represent the consensus of their respective members, so it’s unrealistic to expect them to vote or behave like Justin Amash and Rand Paul. Sure, I wish they would be more aggressive on certain issues, such as killing the Export-Import Bank or ending subsidized terrorism insurance. And I wish they weren’t so timid about confrontations with Obama since there’s a strong argument to be made that they wound up as winners from the 2013 shutdown battle. That being said, what really matters if what they would do in 2017 if there was a President who wanted real reform. And on that score, I have confidence that Boehner and McConnell would do the right thing, twisting arms and knocking heads if necessary to get their colleagues to save America from becoming Greece.

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To Control Leviathan, even the IMF Agrees that Spending Caps Are Far More Effective than Balanced Budget Requirements

It’s not very often that I applaud research from the International Monetary Fund.

That international bureaucracy has a bad track record of pushing for tax hikes and other policies to augment the size and power of government (which shouldn’t surprise us since the IMF’s lavishly compensated bureaucrats owe their sinecures to government and it wouldn’t make sense for them to bite the hands that feed them).

But every so often a blind squirrel finds an acorn. And that’s a good analogy to keep in mind as we review a new IMF report on the efficacy of “expenditure rules.”

The study is very neutral in its language. It describes expenditure rules and then looks at their impact. But the conclusions, at least for those of us who want to constrain government, show that these policies are very valuable.

In effect, this study confirms the desirability of my Golden Rule! Which is not why I expect from IMF research, to put it mildly.

Here are some excerpts from the IMF’s new Working Paper on expenditure rules.

In practice, expenditure rules typically take the form of a cap on nominal or real spending growth over the medium term (Figure 1). Expenditure rules are currently in place in 23 countries (11 in advanced and 12 in emerging economies).

Such rules vary, of course, is their scope and effectiveness.

Many of them apply only to parts of the budget. In some cases, governments don’t follow through on their commitments. And in other cases, the rules only apply for a few years.

Out of the 31 expenditure rules that have been introduced since 1985, 10 have already been abandoned either because the country has never complied with the rule or because fiscal consolidation was so successful that the government did not want to be restricted by the rule in good economic times. … In six of the 10 cases, the country did not comply with the rule in the year before giving it up. …In some countries, there was the perception that expenditure rules fulfilled their purpose. Following successful consolidations in Belgium, Canada, and the United States in the 1990s, these countries did not see the need to follow their national expenditure rules anymore.

But even though expenditure limits are less than perfect, they’re still effective – in part because they correctly put the focus on the disease of government spending rather than symptom of red ink.

Countries have complied with expenditure rules for more than two-third of the time. …expenditure rules have a better compliance record than budget balance and debt rules. …The higher compliance rate with expenditure rules is consistent with the fact that these rules are easy to monitor and that they immediately map into an enforceable mechanism—the annual budget itself. Besides, expenditure rules are most directly connected to instruments that the policymakers effectively control. By contrast, the budget balance, and even more so public debt, is more exposed to shocks, both positive and negative, out of the government’s control.

One of the main advantages of a spending cap is that politicians can’t go on a spending binge when the economy is growing and generating a lot of tax revenue.

One of the desirable features of expenditure rules compared to other rules is that they are not only binding in bad but also in good economic times. The compliance rate in good economic times, defined as years with a negative change in the output gap, is at 72 percent almost the same as in bad economic times at 68 percent. In contrast to other fiscal rules, countries also have incentives to break an expenditure rule in periods of high economic growth with increasing spending pressures. … two design features are in particular associated with higher compliance rates. …compliance is higher if the government directly controls the expenditure target. …Specific ceilings have the best performance record.

And the most important result is that expenditure limits are associated with a lower burden of government spending.

The results illustrate that countries with expenditure rules, in addition to other rules, exhibit on average higher primary balances (Table 2). Similarly, countries with expenditure rules also exhibit lower primary spending. …The data provide some evidence of possible implications for government size and efficiency. Event studies illustrate that the introduction of expenditure rules is indeed followed by smaller governments both in advanced and emerging countries (Figure 11a).

Here’s the relevant chart from the study.

And it’s also worth noting that expenditure rules lead to greater efficiency in spending.

…the public investment efficiency index of DablaNorris and others (2012) is higher in countries that do have expenditure rules in place compared to those that do not (Figure 11b). This could be due to investment projects being prioritized more carefully relative to the case where there is no binding constraint on spending

Needless to say, these results confirm the research from the European Central Bank showing that nations with smaller public sectors are more efficient and competent, with Singapore being a very powerful example.

One rather puzzling aspect of the IMF report is that there was virtually no mention of Switzerland’s spending cap, which is a role model of success.

Perhaps the researchers got confused because the policy is called a “debt brake,” but the practical effect of the Swiss rule is that there are annual expenditures limits.

So to augment the IMF analysis, here are some excerpts from a report prepared by the Swiss Federal Finance Administration.

The Swiss “debt brake” or “debt containment rule”…combines the stabilizing properties of an expenditure rule (because of the cyclical adjustment) with the effective debt-controlling properties of a balanced budget rule. …The amount of annual federal government expenditures has a cap, which is calculated as a function of revenues and the position of the economy in the business cycle. It is thus aimed at keeping total federal government expenditures relatively independent of cyclical variations.

Here’s a chart from the report.

And here are some of the real-world results.

The debt-to-GDP ratio of the Swiss federal Government has decreased since the implementation of the debt brake in 2003. …In the past, economic booms tended to contribute to an increase in spending. …This has not been the case since the implementation of the fiscal rule, and budget surpluses have become commonplace. … The introduction of the debt brake has changed the budget process in such a way that the target for expenditures is defined at the beginning of the process, which must not exceed the ceiling provided by the fiscal rule. It has thus become a top-down process.

The most important part of this excerpt is that the debt brake prevented big spending increases during the “boom” years when the economy was generating lots of revenue.

In effect, the grey-colored area of the graph isn’t just an “ideal representation.” It actually happened in the real world.

Though the most important and beneficial real-world consequence, which I shared back in 2013, is that the burden of government spending has declined relative to the economy’s productive sector.

This is a big reason why Switzerland is in such strong shape compared to most of its European neighbors.

And such a policy in the United States would have prevented the trillion-dollar deficits of Obama’s first term.

By the way, if you want to know why deficit numbers have been lower in recent years, it’s because we actually have been following my Golden Rule for a few years.

So maybe it’s time to add the United States to this list of nations that have made progress with spending restraint.

But the real issue, as noted in the IMF research, is sustainability. Yes, it’s good to have a few years of spending discipline, but the real key is some sort of permanent spending cap.

Which is why advocates of fiscal responsibility should focus on expenditure limits rather than balanced budget requirements.

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Destroying Jobs with Innumerate Compassion

A few days ago, we used supply-and-demand curves to illustrate how taxes reduce economic output.

Supply-and-demand curves also can be used to examine the impact of minimum wage laws on the labor market.

Workers understandably will be willing to supply more labor at higher wages.

Employers are just the opposite. They demand more labor when wages are low.

In an unfettered market, the interplay of supply and demand will result in an “equilibrium wage.”

But as you can see from the chart, if politicians impose a minimum-wage mandate above the equilibrium level, there will be unemployment.

Some folks, though, may not be overly impressed by theory. So how about empirical research.

Other folks, though, may prefer real-world examples rather than academic studies.

We’ve already looked at the bad results when the minimum wage was increased in Michigan.

Now we have some more unfortunate evidence from the state of Washington. Seattle Magazine has a story about a bunch of restaurants closing because of an increase in the minimum wage.

The article starts by noting a bunch of eateries are being shut down.

Last month—and particularly last week— Seattle foodies were downcast as the blows kept coming: Queen Anne’s Grub closed February 15. Pioneer Square’s Little Uncle shut down February 25. Shanik’s Meeru Dhalwala announced that it will close March 21. Renée Erickson’s Boat Street Café will shutter May 30… What the #*%&$* is going on?

Hmmm…so what’s changed. It’s not higher food prices. It’s not a change in dining preferences of consumers.

Instead, government intervention is having a predictable effect.

…for Seattle restaurateurs recently, …the impending minimum wage hike to $15 per hour. Starting April 1, all businesses must begin to phase in the wage increase: Small employers have seven years to pay all employees at least $15 hourly; large employers (with 500 or more employees) have three. Since the legislation was announced last summer, The Seattle Times and Eater have reported extensively on restaurant owners’ many concerns about how to compensate for the extra funds that will now be required for labor: They may need to raise menu prices, source poorer ingredients, reduce operating hours, reduce their labor and/or more.

An industry expert tries to explain the new reality of coping with higher costs.

Washington Restaurant Association’s Anton puts it this way: “It’s not a political problem; it’s a math problem.” …he says that if restaurant owners made no changes, the labor cost in quick service restaurants would rise to 42 percent and in full service restaurants to 47 percent. “Everyone is looking at the model right now, asking how do we do math?” he says. “Every operator I’m talking to is in panic mode, trying to figure out what the new world will look like.”

Well, we know what “the new world will look like” for many workers. They’ll be unemployed.

So you can understand why this issue is so frustrating. Politicians posture about helping workers, but they wind up displaying their economic ignorance and real-world innumeracy.

And innocent people pay the price, as shown in the Branco cartoon.

P.S. Walter Williams explains the racist impact of minimum-wage laws.

P.P.S. On a lighter note, here are a couple of additional clever cartoons illustrating the negative impact of minimum-wage mandates.

P.P.P.S. And this video is a must-watch on the issue.

P.P.P.P.S. Shifting to a different topic, I’m not quite sure this guy deserves to be in the Moocher Hall of Fame, but I’m glad he’s going to jail.

Champion golfer Alan Bannister, who played off a handicap of seven, was convicted of benefits fraud after being caught on camera walking around the course on his daily game. He even had a taxpayer-funded mobility car by claiming he was in too much pain to walk. …Inspectors discovered he used his mobility car – intended for people “virtually unable to walk” – to drive to the golf club to play with the “Sunday Swingers” and “The Crazy Gang” players, despite claiming he could barely walk 50 metres at a time. …The court was told Bannister dishonestly claimed £26,090.55 from 2007 until 2012 in Disability Living Allowance.

And while he’s only a borderline case for the Moocher Hall of Fame, he’s a perfect example of eroding social capital.

He’s a dirtbag who decided that it is perfectly okay to scam off taxpayers. When enough of his fellow citizens make the same choice, a society is in deep trouble.

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Hillary Humor

Looking through my archives, Hillary Clinton rarely has been the target of political humor. I did share a quiz last year that definitely had a snarky tone, but the main goal was to expose her extremist views.

Similarly, I mocked both her and her husband that same year for plotting to minimize their tax burden, but I was simply calling attention to their gross hypocrisy.

The only pure Hillary-focused humor I could find was from 2012 and it wasn’t exactly hard hitting.

Well, it’s time to correct this oversight. Thanks to the bubbling email scandal, we have lots of material to share.

Let’s start with a video from the clever folks at Reason TV.

Needless to say, cartoonists also have had lots of fun with the former Secretary of State’s dodgy behavior.

Here’s Steve Kelley’s contribution.

And here’s how Dana Summers assessed the situation.

And Ken Catalino reminds us that Email-gate is just the tip of the iceberg when looking at Hillary scandals.

And since we’re have some fun with Mrs. Clinton, here’s someone’s clever photoshop exercise, calling attention to her habit of extorting huge payments for platitude-filled speeches.

And here’s a bit of humor that has a PG-13 rating, so in keeping with my tradition, it’s minimized so only folks who enjoy such humor will go through the trouble of clicking on the icon. The rest of you can continue below.

P.S. Hillary Clinton is portrayed as the “establishment candidate” for the Democrats. Some people interpret that to mean she’s a moderate, particularly when compared to a fraudster like Elizabeth Warren. But if you check out these statements, you’ll see that she’s a hard-core statist on economic issues. Indeed, there’s every reason to think she’s as far to the left as Obama.

P.P.S. Bill Clinton, by contrast, did govern from the center.

Sure, his reasonable (and in some cases admirable) track record almost certainly was a result – at least in part – of having a GOP Congress, but you’ll notice that Obama hasn’t moderated since GOPers took control on Capitol Hill.

For more evidence, check out this interesting (albeit complex) graph put together by Professor Steve Hanke. You’ll notice that Bill Clinton’s pro-market record generated results similar to what Reagan achieved (and Michael Ramirez makes the same point in this cartoon).

Needless to say, I fear that Hillary Clinton would be more like Obama and less like her husband.

P.P.P.S. In addition to his decent performance in office, Bill Clinton also has been the source of lots of enjoyable humor. You can enjoy my favorites by clicking here, here, here, here, here, and here.

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Two Videos that Perfectly Capture the Feckless Arrogance and Stupidity of the Federal Government

Summarizing the federal government is not easy. There’s nearly $4 trillion of spending to disentangle. There’s a 75,000-page tax code to decipher. And there’s a regulatory morass that defies understanding.

So when people ask me questions about the cost of the federal government, there’s never a satisfactory answer.

I sometimes respond by pointing to sub-par growth rates during periods when the burden of government is expanding.

For what it’s worth, I think the best way of approaching such questions is to look at broad measures of statism vs. markets, such as you get with the Economic Freedom of the World rankings, and then compare nations with better scores and those with worse scores.

Though if I’m feeling snarky, I sometimes direct people to my collection of cartoons that simply portray government as a blundering, malicious, incompetent blob.

Today, though, I’m going with a different approach.

We’re going to try to capture the spirit of Washington. And we have a couple of videos, each of which deals with one tiny aspect of Leviathan, but they both do an excellent job of showing the perverse zeitgeist of this parasitical town.

Last year, I wrote about a grotesque example of waste at one of the new bureaucracies created by the Dodd-Frank bailout bill.

The head of that bureaucracy recently testified before a House Committee at was asked what steps were being taken to protect the interests of taxpayers. Here’s a video of the exchange.

Wow. Lots of taxpayer money flushed down a toilet and this Obama appointee cavalierly says “why does that matter to you?”

This is the fiscal equivalent to Hillary Clinton saying “what difference at this point does it make” about four butchered Americans.

And kudos to Congresswoman Wagner for saying it matters because it was the American people’s money (though I’ll wait to see how she votes on the Export-Import Bank to see whether she was posturing or if she actually cares about protecting other people’s money).

Now let’s look at our second video.

You probably didn’t realize that there was something called a Raisin Administrative Committee, but you probably won’t be surprised to learn that the federal government has Soviet-style rules that give this Committee cartel-like powers over raisin growers.

Check out this video from Reason TV to see an example of bizarre, stupid, and destructive government intervention.

Geesh. This re-confirms in my mind why we need to get rid of the Department of Agriculture. And it’s yet another piece of evidence that FDR was either incompetent of malicious on economic policy.

But the main lesson of this video is that it symbolizes the federal government. The well-connected insiders benefit and ordinary people suffer.

P.S. Remember the powerful graph showing that giant increases in education spending have had no positive impact on student performance?

Well, here’s the equivalent chart from the world of mass transit. Spending has skyrocketed but ridership is stagnant.

Yet another reminder that government is just a giant money pit of waste (and a reminder that we should also abolish the Department of Transportation).

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A Video Primer on How Taxes Reduce Economic Value and Cause Deadweight Loss

While I sometimes make moral arguments against the current tax system (because it is corrupt, because it doesn’t treat people equally, because it provides unearned wealth for insiders, etc), my main arguments are based on economics.

High tax rates on workers and entrepreneurs discourage productive behavior.

Double taxation on income that is saved and invested discourages capital formation.

Tax preferences and other loopholes bribe people to use resources inefficiently.

These are the principles that explain why I like tax reform, why I promote the Laffer Curve, and why I advocate for tax competition.

Maybe it’s time, however, for a back-to-basics primer on taxes and behavior. That’s why I’m very glad that Professors Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok of George Mason University (and the Marginal Revolution blog) are producing videos on various economic principles.

And I particularly like a video they produced which uses supply and demand curves to show how taxes reduce economic output.

But before we watch that video on taxes and “deadweight loss,” here’s a video on how supply and demand curves interact.

Feel free to skip this video if you feel confident in your understanding of these economic concepts (and also feel free to watch this video on the demand curve and this video on the supply curve if you don’t have any background knowledge and need to start at the beginning).

Now let’s look at their first-rate video on how taxes lead to less economic output and foregone value for both buyers and sellers.

Very well done. I particularly like the closing example showing how the so-called luxury tax backfired.

Here are a few of my thoughts to augment Professor Tabarrok’s analysis.

1. The video looks at how taxes affect the equilibrium level of output for an unspecified product. Keep in mind that this analysis applies to “products” such as labor and investment.

2. It should go without saying (but I’ll say it anyhow) that ever-higher tax rates impose ever-higher levels of deadweight loss.

3. The point about avoiding taxes on goods where there is high “elasticity” has important lessons for why it is foolish to impose class-warfare tax rates on people who have considerable control over the timing, level, and composition of their income.

4. This analysis does not imply that all taxes are bad. Or, to be more precise, the analysis does not lead to the conclusion that all taxes are counterproductive. If government uses money to provide valuable public goods, the overall effect on the economy may be positive.

P.S. I’ve shared a couple of tests that allow people to determine their philosophical/political leanings, including the libertarian/anarchist purity quiz, the circle test to see where you are on the spectrum from socialism to voluntarism, and a candidate affinity test.

I’m a sucker for these quizzes, even when they don’t make sense.

And if you like these tests (particularly one that does make sense), then you’ll enjoy this quiz from David Boaz’s new book, The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom.

You’ll be shocked to learn I got a perfect score. Which is probably a good thing since David is one of my bosses.

The Princess of the Levant will snicker at the thought of me being described as “cosmopolitan,” but I’ll tell her that even a rube can have a cosmopolitan vision of society.

And remember, libertarians also have the self confidence to enjoy self-deprecating humor, so we must be good folks.

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A Modest Proposal to Reduce Income Inequality

In 1729, Jonathan Swift authored a satirical essay with the unwieldy title of A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People From Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick. He suggested that the destitute Irish could improve their lot in life by selling their children as food for the rich.

I’m personally glad this was merely a tongue-in-cheek proposal since some of my ancestors immigrated to America from Ireland in the 1800s.

But maybe it’s time for a new “modest proposal” to make our leftist friends happy.

They’re constantly griping about the rich, asserting that the “top 1 percent” or “top 10 percent” are making too much money. Indeed, folks on the left want us to believe that “income inequality” is a big issue and a threat to the country.

So why not update Jonathan Swift’s idea and simply consume all the rich people? Indeed, P.J. O’Rourke actually wrote a book entitled Eat the Rich.

But we don’t really need to feed them to anyone. Just dump their bodies in a mass grave or bury them at sea.

In one fell swoop, income inequality could be dramatically reduced. Sure, those of us left would wind up being equally poor, like in Cuba or North Korea, but you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs!

But some of you probably think arbitrary executions of rich people is a step too far. After all, it would be unseemly to mimic France’s Reign of Terror or Stalin’s extermination of the Kulaks.

That’s why we should instead look at a watered-down “modest proposal” put forward by David Azerrad of the Heritage Foundation. Here’s some of what he wrote for Real Clear Politics.

…consider the following bold proposal to solve our inequality problem once and for all: exile the top 0.1% of income earners. Round up all 136,080 taxpayers who make more than $2.16 million a year and ship ’em off to whatever country will accept them. Presto. Problem solved. …The 0.1 percenters, whose growing incomes have been fueling the rise in inequality over the past several decades, will have vanished overnight.

Though Azerrad does point out that exile has many of the same economic downsides as execution.

..it will put a serious dent in the government’s finances. Almost one in every five tax dollars that the government collects comes from the 0.1 percent. To make up for the shortfall, we should probably also confiscate all their assets before exiling them. What about the jobs the 0.1 percenters create and the value they add to the economy? …we’d be losing all but twelve of the CEOs from the 300 largest companies in the country. The show business industry would collapse overnight with all the star talent in exile. Gone too would be the best investment bankers, financial consultants, surgeons and lawyers. One third of the NFL’s roster and well over half of the NBA’s roster would also be culled.

Heck, we’re already confiscating some of the assets of rich people who emigrate, so part of Azerrad’s satire is disturbingly close to reality.

But let’s stick with the more farcical parts of his column. To deal with potential loss of tax revenue, Azerrad proposes to have the government sell America’s rich people to other countries.

…we will need to generate more revenue. That could be done rather easily by auctioning off the top-earning Americans to the highest foreign bidder.

That makes sense. There are still a few places in the world – such as Switzerland, Cayman, Hong Kong, Bermuda, etc – where the political class actually understands it is good to have wealth creators.

By the way, Azerrad points out that there will be a tiny little downside to this proposal. Contrary to the fevered assertions of Elizabeth Warren and Paul Krugman, penalizing the rich won’t do anything to help the less fortunate.

Mind you, life prospects will not have improved for a single poor child born into a broken community with failing schools. Or for a single recent college grad crushed by debt and facing dim job prospects. Or for a single family struggling to make ends meet. …It won’t be any easier to start a business or to find a job. Four in 10 children will still be born out of wedlock. Our entitlements will still face unfunded liabilities of almost $50 trillion. …We will however be able to boldly proclaim that we have addressed “the defining challenge of our time.” Our country will in no way be better off. But we will have satiated our lust for equality.

Actually, our country will be far worse off. Jobs, investment, and growth will all collapse.

So while the poor may wind up with a larger share of the pie, the overall size of the pie will be much smaller.

And this is perhaps the moment to stop with the satire and take a more serious look at the issue of income inequality.

I’ve repeatedly argued that the focus should be growth, not redistribution. To cite just one example, it’s better to be a poor person in Singapore than in Jamaica.

But let’s look at what others are saying. Professor Don Boudreaux of George Mason University addresses the issue (or non issue, as he argues) in a column for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

I’ve never worried about income inequality. …Income inequality — like the color of my neighbor’s car or the question of the number of pigeons in Central Park — just never dawns on me as an issue worthy of a moment’s attention.

Don then speculates about why some people are fixated on inequality.

I wonder: What makes someone worry about income inequality? One personal characteristic that plausibly sparks obsession with inequality is envy. …Another characteristic…that likely gives rise to concerns over income inequality is a mistaken conviction that the amount of wealth in the world is fixed. …A third personal characteristic that prompts anxiety over income inequality is fear that the “have-nots” will rape and pillage society until and unless they get more from the “haves.” …This third characteristic is widespread today. The risk that the “have-nots” in modern First World economies will organize themselves using social media and then grab their electric carving knives to storm the wine bars and day spas of the “haves”.

I think all three hypotheses are correct, though people in the public policy world rarely admit that they’re motivated by envy.

But, for what it’s worth, I think many leftists genuinely think the economy is a fixed pie. And if you have that inaccurate mindset, then extra income or wealth for a rich person – by definition – means less income and wealth for the rest of us. This is why they support class-warfare tax policy.

The challenge, for those of us who believe in economic liberty, is to educate these people about how even small differences in growth can yield remarkable benefits to everyone in society within relatively short periods.

A lot of establishment Republicans, meanwhile, seem to implicitly believe that redistribution is desirable as a tactic to “buy off” the masses. They’ll privately admit the policies are destructive (both to the economy and to poor people), but they think there’s no choice.

When dealing with these people, our challenge is to educate them that big government undermines social capital and makes it far more likely to produce the kind of chaos and social disarray we’ve seen in Europe’s deteriorating welfare states.

P.S. For a humorous explanation of why the redistribution/class-warfare agenda is so destructive, here’s the politically correct version of the fable of the Little Red Hen.

And the socialism-in-the-classroom example, which may or may not be an urban legend, makes a similar point. As does the famous parable about taxes and beer.

P.P.S. I still think Margaret Thatcher has the best explanation of why the left is wrong on inequality. And if you want to see a truly disturbing video of a politician with a different perspective, click here.

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Why Are Republican Presidential Candidates Openly Stating a Desire to Violate 18 U.S. Code § 203 of the Criminal Law?

I’ve pointed out that Washington is a cesspool of legal corruption. But if you don’t believe me (and you have a strong stomach), feel free to peruse these posts, all of which highlight odious examples of government sleaze.

But occasionally elected officials cross the blurry line and get in trouble for illegal corruption.

For those of you who follow politics, you may have seen news reports suggesting that Robert Menendez, a Democratic Senator from New Jersey, will soon be indicted for the alleged quid pro quo of trying to line the pockets of a major donor.

Attorney General Eric Holder has signed off on prosecutors’ plans to charge Menendez, CNN reported on Friday. …A federal grand jury has been investigating whether Menendez improperly used his official office to advocate on Melgen’s behalf about the disputed Medicare regulations when he met with the agency’s acting administrator and with the secretary of Health and Human Services, according to a ruling by a federal appeals court that became public last week. The ruling also said the government was looking at efforts by Menendez’s office to assist a company Melgen partly owned that had a port security contract in the Dominican Republic.

I certainly have no interest in defending Senator Menendez, but I can’t help but wonder what’s the difference between his alleged misbehavior and the actions of almost every other politician in Washington.

Here’s what I assume to be the relevant part of the criminal code, which I downloaded from the Office of Government Ethics (yes, that’s a bit of an oxymoron).

Stripped of all the legalese, it basically says that if a politician does something that provides value to another person, and that person as a result also gives something of value to the politician, that quid-pro-quo swap is a criminal offense.

Now keep this language from the criminal code in mind as we look at some very disappointing behavior by Republican presidential candidates at a recent Iowa gathering.

As Wall Street Journal opined, GOPers at the Ag Summit basically competed to promise unearned benefits to the corporate-welfare crowd in exchange for political support (i.e., something of great value to politicians).

Iowa is…a bad place to start is because it’s the heartland of Republican corporate welfare. Witness this weekend’s pander fest known as the Ag Summit, in which the potential 2016 candidates competed to proclaim their devotion to the Renewable Fuel Standard and the 2.3-cent per kilowatt hour wind-production tax credit. The event was hosted by ethanol kingpin Bruce Rastetter… Two of the biggest enthusiasts were Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee… The fuel standard “creates jobs in small town and rural America, which is where people are hurting,” said Mr. Santorum, who must have missed the boom in farm incomes of recent years.

But it’s not just social conservatives who were promising to swap subsidies for political support.

Self-styled conservative reformers may be willing to take on government unions, which is laudable, but they get timid when dealing with moochers in Iowa.

Scott Walker, who in 2006 said he opposed the renewable fuel standard, did a switcheroo and now sounds like St. Augustine. He’s for ethanol chastity, but not yet. The Wisconsin Governor said his long-term goal is to reach a point when “eventually you didn’t need to have a standard,” but for now mandating ethanol is necessary to ensure “market access.”

And establishment candidates also tiptoed around the issue, suggesting at the very least a continuation of the quid pro quo of subsidies in exchange for political support.

Jeb Bush at least called for phasing out the wind credit, which was supposed to be temporary when it became law in 1992. But he danced around the renewable standard, which became law when his brother signed the energy bill passed by the Nancy Pelosi-Harry Reid Congress.

Geesh, maybe this is why Bush won’t promise to oppose tax hikes.

And there are more weak-kneed GOPers willing to trade our money to boost their careers.

Chris Christie wouldn’t repudiate the wind tax credit, perhaps because in 2010 the New Jersey Governor signed into law $100 million in state tax credits for offshore wind production. He also endorsed the RFS as the law of the land…, but what voters want to know is what Mr. Christie thinks the law should be. Former Texas Governor Rick Perry sounded somewhat contrite for supporting the wind tax credit, which has been a boon for Texas energy companies.

The only Republican who rejected corporate welfare (among those who participated) was Senator Ted Cruz.

The only Ag Summiteer who flat-out opposed the RFS was Texas Senator Ted Cruz , who has also sponsored a bill in Congress to repeal it. In response to Mr. Rastetter’s claim that oil companies were shutting ethanol out of the market, he noted “there are remedies in the antitrust laws to deal with that if you’re having market access blocked.”

Though even Cruz deviated from free-market principles by suggesting that anti-trust bureaucrats should use the coercive power of government to force oil companies to help peddle competing products.

Sigh.

By the way, I don’t mean to single out Republicans. Trading votes for campaign cash is a bipartisan problem in Washington.

But it is rather disappointing that the politicians who claim to support free markets and small government are so quick to reverse field when trolling for votes and money.

At least politicians like Obama don’t pretend to be a friend before stealing my money.

P.S. Normally I try to add an amusing postscript after writing about a depressing topic.

I’m not sure whether this story from the U.K.-based Times is funny, but it definitely has an ironic component.

Judge Juan Augustín Maragall, sitting in Barcelona, ruled that prostitutes should be given a contract by their employers, who should also pay their social security contributions. …In giving his verdict in the civil case, brought over a breach of labour regulations, the judge went further than expected, ruling that the women’s rights had been flouted by the management and forcing the company to pay the social security payments of three prostitutes backdated to 2012. Because of the ruling all brothels will be forced with immediate effect to issue contracts to staff and pay their social security contributions.

Now here’s the ironic part.

The ruling will generate tax revenue even though it’s actually illegal to employ prostitutes!

…it is against the law to make money from pimping, which carries a four-year jail term.

I guess the Judge could have ruled that the customers were the employers, but somehow I suspect it would have been difficult to extract employment taxes from those men.

Just like it would be difficult to extract employment taxes from the women.

Though the hookers won’t mind getting unemployment benefits so long as someone else is paying the taxes.

Conxha Borrell, of the Association of Sex Professionals, welcomed the ruling.

I guess we should add this to our great-moments-in-human-rights series.

Though maybe I should start a great-moments-in-economic-ignorance series since the prostitutes will be the ones who bear the burden of the tax even if the pimps are the ones writing the checks to the government (just as workers bear the burden of the “employer share” of the Social Security payroll tax).

P.P.S. Maybe Spanish hookers should reclassify themselves as porn artists who allow audience participation? That way, they can take advantage of Spain’s preferential tax rate for smut.

P.P.P.S. The Germans at least have figured out an efficient way to tax prostitutes.

P.P.P.P.S. Though maybe prostitutes should become politicians. The business model is quite similar, and I suspect you can “earn” more income selling access to other people’s money rather than selling sex to men who have to use their own money.

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Great Moments in Local, State, National, and Foreign Government

I periodically share this poster, in part because it’s funny, but mostly because it’s true.

After all, can you think of many “success stories” involving government?

When I pose this question to my statist friends, I usually get a blank stare in response. Though some of them will offer answers such as the GI Bill, interstate highways, and landing on the moon.

But even if you accept that those policies were successful, it’s rather revealing that folks on the left have a very hard time identifying any success stories from recent decades.

On the other hand, we have a never-ending and ever-growing list of government failures, boondoggles, and screw-ups.

And that’s our focus today. We’re going to look at all levels of government for new examples that confirm Bastiat was right.

Let’s start with Montgomery County in Maryland, where bureaucrats are waging a legal battle against parents who – gasp! – allow unsupervised play for their children.

Here are some troubling passages from a Washington Post report.

The Maryland parents investigated for letting their young children walk home by themselves from a park were found responsible for “unsubstantiated” child neglect…the finding of unsubstantiated child neglect means CPS will keep a file on the family for at least five years and leaves open the question of what would happen if the Meitiv children get reported again for walking without adult supervision. The parents say they will continue to allow their son, Rafi, 10, and daughter Dvora, 6, to play or walk together, and won’t be swayed by the CPS finding. …The case dates to Dec. 20, when police picked up the two Meitiv children walking in Silver Spring on a Saturday afternoon after someone reported them. …The Meitivs said they would not have allowed the one-mile outing from Woodside Park to their home if they did not feel their children were up to it. …The Meitivs, both scientists by training, embrace a “free-range” philosophy of parenting, believing that children learn self-reliance by being allowed to make choices, build independence and progressively experience the world on their own. …Danielle Meitiv said when she first read the decision, she felt numb. As she reread it, she recalled turning to her husband and saying: “Oh my God, they really believe we did something wrong.” …Danielle Meitiv said that in spite of the decision, her children played at a nearby park by themselves Monday, when schools were closed for the snow day.

I confess that I was more paranoid than the Meitivs when my kids were young, so I can’t claim to have followed the same “free-range” approach.

But I also tried to avoid being a “helicopter” parent.

Not that my decisions on child rearing matter. What’s important from the perspective of public policy is that the Montgomery County bureaucracy is trying to dictate how to raise kids. And there’s a very clear implicit threat that it will arrest the parents and/or confiscate the children if the Meitivs don’t acquiesce.

And if you think I’m exaggerating and governments don’t behave this way, check out the story of the mom who was jailed overnight because her kids played outside – while she was watching them!

All of us should be outraged, regardless of our parenting approach.

Now let’s look at an example of a state government in action.

As reported by the Washington Post, the Georgia State Patrol enjoyed a Keystone Cops moment when it raided an old man because…drum roll, please…he was growing okra.

Georgia police raided a retired Atlanta man’s garden last Wednesday after a helicopter crew with the Governor’s Task Force for Drug Suppression spotted suspicious-looking plants on the man’s property. A heavily-armed K9 unit arrived and discovered that the plants were, in fact, okra bushes. …Okra busts like these are good reason for taxpayers to be skeptical about the wisdom of sending guys up in helicopters to fly around aimlessly, looking for drugs in suburban gardens. And that’s not to mention the issue of whether we want a society where heavily-armed cops can burst into your property, with no grounds for suspicion beyond what somebody thought he saw from several hundred yards up in a helicopter.

In some sense, this is an amusing story of government incompetence.

But military-type raids, when the supposed offense involves a possible “crime” with no victims, are a recipe for disaster. Let’s be glad that the cops didn’t accidentally kill anybody in this raid.

By the way, this isn’t the first time cops have seized okra bushes. Or looked foolish because of an inability to identify marijuana leaves.

At the point, I don’t want to miss an opportunity to say that it’s time to end the foolish Drug War. People who abuse drugs may be stupid, but they’re not infringing on the rights of others. The War on Drugs, by contrast, has led to all sorts of policies that do infringe on our rights, from disgusting asset forfeiture policies to pointless snooping on our bank accounts. Or, as we just read, raids on okra growers.

Time now for a look at an example of federal government fecklessness.

But this story from the Washington Times won’t surprise anybody. Because anybody with a pulse already knows that there is a lot of waste in Washington.

Federal agencies across the board are continuing to waste tens of billions of taxpayer dollars on duplicative spending efforts, even after Congress‘ official watchdog has made hundreds of recommendations for cutting back. The spending issues, ranging from Medicare and Medicaid mismanagement to transportation programs to weapon systems acquisitions, cost taxpayers $125 billion in improper payments in 2014 alone, as highlighted in a new report from the Government Accountability Office. …GAO investigators noted in the report that the government can’t continue to sustain its wasteful spending habits… “The federal government faces an unsustainable long-term fiscal path. Changing this path will require difficult fiscal policy decisions to alter both long-term federal spending and revenue,” the GAO analysts concluded. …The GAO report targeted both the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Health and Human Services for mismanaging programs that saw rampant wasteful spending. …“These programs combined account for over 76 percent of the government-wide estimate. We have made numerous recommendations that if effectively implemented, could help improve program management, reduce improper payments in these programs, and achieve cost savings.”

Notice that HHS and the IRS win the prize for wasteful incompetence.

But don’t laugh. After all, those are the two bureaucracies that got lots of new power and authority as a result of the costly Obamacare boondoggle. So the joke’s on us.

By the way, the GAO’s definition of waste is very narrow. It merely applies to funds that are improperly disbursed.

If you also include monies that are squandered, then the amount of waste includes every penny at the Department of Agriculture, Department of Education, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Department of Transportation, etc.

Last but not least, let’s look at a great moment in foreign government.

I’ve written about the crazy Greek government on many occasions. And given that this collection of misfits does utterly bizarre things (such as giving handouts to pedophiles and requiring stool samples when setting up online companies), I’m never surprised to learn when they adopt foolish policies.

But even I was taken aback to learn about the latest gimmick they concocted to “solve” the nation’s fiscal crisis. Here are some excerpts from a report in the U.K.-based Guardian.

The Greek government has told its eurozone creditors it has a novel way of tackling the country’s chronic tax evasion culture – wiring students, tourists, and housewives for sound and video to spy on tax dodgers while posing as shoppers and customers. …Varoufakis’s plans for a new government-sponsored amateur snoopers’ charter…attracted most attention. …He said the prospects of successfully countering tax dodging were dismal because of the demoralised and understaffed state of the tax inspection service. Instead, he proposed recruiting large numbers of “non-professional inspectors” on short-term casual contracts of no longer than two months who would be paid by the hour. They would be “wired for sound and video”, trained to pose as “customers” and “will be hard to detect by offending tax dodgers.” …Varoufakis said the launch of the amateur snoopers would act as a deterrent, “engendering a new tax compliance culture” in Greece. He added that Athens would need to ask eurozone partners for help with the equipment and the training. Germany has previously offered to send 500 tax inspectors to Athens. …In Athens, news of the undercover tax agents was quick to spark ridicule and widespread disbelief.

Hmmm….so the Germans offered to send 500 tax inspectors? Sounds like a perfect job for ex-Stasi officials.

And there are some bureaucrats in Chicago who almost surely would want to help implement this snitch-on-your-neighbor scheme. And the governor of New York has related experience, though his police-state policy focused on guns rather than tax revenue. Let’s also not overlook the U.K. politicians who have a tax-enforcement-über-alles mentality.

Never mind that all the research shows that low rates are honest government are the best ways of getting high compliance.

So I’m not holding my breath expecting success from this latest Greek scheme.

But I can say it’s a perfect example of how governments operate. Screw up, grab for more money, screw up some more. Lather, rinse, repeat.

It’s almost a shame that there’s no life on Mars. We could make today’s list even longer if there was another layer of government.

Now you know why it’s almost always the right time to mock politicians.

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You Be the Judge: Traffic Enforcement, Predatory Government, and Legitimate Class Warfare

One of the most important bulwarks of a just society is equal justice under law.

That principle is even etched in stone above the entrance to the Supreme Court.

My belief in equal treatment is one of the reasons I support the flat tax. As an economist, I like the pro-growth impact of tax reform. But as someone who believes in justice, I also support the flat tax because I don’t like class-warfare policies that punish some taxpayers and corrupt loopholes that give preferential status to other taxpayers.

Indeed, my support for equality of law is so strong that I even object to policies that benefit me, such as special TSA lines in airports for frequent flyers.

But sometimes it’s not clear how a principle should be applied. So let’s revive the “you be the judge” series, which asks thorny questions about the workings of a free society, and explore the case of income-based traffic fines.

Check out these excerpts from a BBC story.

Finland’s speeding fines are linked to income, with penalties calculated on daily earnings, meaning high earners get hit with bigger penalties for breaking the law. So, when businessman Reima Kuisla was caught doing 103km/h (64mph) in an area where the speed limit is 80km/h (50mph), authorities turned to his 2013 tax return, the Iltalehti newspaper reports. He earned 6.5m euros (£4.72m) that year, so was told to hand over 54,000 euros. …Mr Kuisla might be grateful he doesn’t earn more. In 2002, an executive at Nokia was slapped with a 116,000-euro fine for speeding on his Harley Davidson motorbike. His penalty was based on a salary of 14m euros.

So is this a case of greedy government targeting people for the sin of success?

Well, I’m sure the government is greedy, but what about the morality of income-based fines?

The driver isn’t happy, but others argue that deterrence doesn’t work unless the actual impact of the fine is the same for rich and poor alike.

The scale of the fine hasn’t gone down well with Mr Kuisla. “Ten years ago I wouldn’t have believed that I would seriously consider moving abroad,” he says on his Facebook page. “Finland is impossible to live in for certain kinds of people who have high incomes and wealth.” There’s little sympathy from his fellow Finns on social media. …person says: “Small fines won’t deter the rich – fines have to ‘bite’ everyone the same way.”

At the risk of sounding like a soft-headed leftist, I’m not overly sympathetic to Mr. Kuisla’s position.

Simply stated, if the goal of traffic fines is deterrence, then the penalties should vary with income.

I remember when I was young, living on a paycheck-to-paycheck basis, a traffic fine sometimes would chew up a non-trivial part of my disposable income. That affected my behavior.

Now that I’m older and making more money (and especially since my kids are mostly done with their schooling!), a traffic fine is just a nuisance (though I still sometimes get very upset).

Though this discussion wouldn’t be complete without also considering the fact that traffic laws and enforcement oftentimes are motivated by revenue rather than safety.

The most compelling evidence comes from Ferguson, Missouri. It seems that what’s driving the mistreatment of black people is government greed.

Here’s some of what Ian Tuttle wrote on the topic for National Review.

The Department of Justice’s “Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department,” released this week…what the material in the report reveals is less a culture of racial animus than one of predatory government: “Ferguson’s law enforcement practices,” states the report, “are shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs.” …myriad municipal regulations that, rigorously enforced, nickel-and-dime the citizenry to the local government’s benefit. This is the injustice on which the Justice Department has stumbled, which helps to explain the city’s racial tensions — and which merits urgent correction.

I fully understand why many blacks in Ferguson are angry.

Imagine if you had a modest income and you were constantly being hit with $50 and $100 fines (oftentimes then made much larger thanks to the scam of “court fees”).

This can wreck a family’s budget when it doesn’t have much money. So wouldn’t you be upset?

Particularly since “predatory government” is a very good description of the Ferguson bureaucracy.

In 2010, the city’s finance director encouraged Ferguson police chief Thomas Jackson to “ramp up” ticket-writing to help mitigate an anticipated sales-tax shortfall. …One stop can yield six or eight citations, and officers have been known to compete to set single-stop records. Indeed, within Ferguson Police Department, because opportunities for promotion have been tied to “productivity” — that is, enthusiasm for ticket-writing — officers have perverse incentives to issue citations, and in concert with police and prosecutors, municipal courts regularly enforce the payment of fines in a way that compounds what a single defendant owes.

Now let’s connect Ferguson with Finland.

Our Finnish driver is upset by his giant fine, but at least he probably can relate to the poor people of Ferguson.

But the more successful people of Ferguson, to the extent that they are even targeted by the local cops, have almost nothing to worry about.

…this practice — of police and prosecutors and courts together — disproportionately affects black communities not because they are black, but because they are poor. They do not have the means to escape the justice apparatus, unlike the comparatively wealthy, who can pay a fine and be done with the matter — or hire an attorney, and inconvenience courts that prefer the ease of collecting fees to the challenge of arbitrating cases.

Here’s the bottom line.

If we want a just society, there should be few laws and they should be enforced on the basis of protecting public safety rather than enriching the bureaucracy.

In such a system, income-based fines and penalties are a reasonable way of making sure deterrence applies equally to rich and poor.

Unfortunately, we have far too many laws and they are used as back-door taxes on the citizenry.

So if we adopt income-based fines, the politicians will simply have more money to spend and even less incentive to scale back excessive and thuggish government.

Heck, just look at how asset-forfeiture laws and money-laundering laws have turned into revenue scams for Leviathan.

P.S. Since today’s post ended with a depressing conclusion, let’s share some a bit of offsetting good news.

As reported by The Hill, the spirit of civil disobedience lives even in Washington!

From sledding to snowball fights, dozens of children and their parents took to Capitol Hill Thursday afternoon to protest a controversial sledding ban. Capitol Police have refused to lift the sledding ban, but some parents organized a “sled in” on the west lawn of the Capitol to put a spotlight on the unpopular rule. …Capitol Police pointed out that more than 20,000 sledding injuries occur in the U.S. each year…, but officers on the ground also refused to enforce it. …It’s turning into a public relations nightmare for those who oppose sledding and support the ban.

You’ll doubtlessly be horrified to learn that illegal sledding is – gasp! – a gateway crime to other forms of misbehavior.

…the children were not only sledding but also climbing trees, building snowmen and throwing snowballs at one another.

Oh My God, unlicensed snowmen, unregistered tree climbing, and illegal snowballs! Freedom is obviously too dangerous.

Next thing you know, these kids will grow up to engage in other forms of civil disobedience, just like Arizona drivers and Connecticut gun owners.

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Time to Feel Sorry for the IRS and Give it More Money?

Like many taxpayers, I personally get upset with the Internal Revenue Service when I file my taxes.

But I probably get angrier than the average taxpayer. That’s because I have first-hand knowledge of the waste and fraud in the federal budget, so it galls me that so much of my income is being diverted to the open sewer of Washington.

But I also want to be fair. It’s politicians who have created our monstrous tax code. And it’s politicians who have created the bloated spending programs that undermine our prosperity.

So they deserve most of the blame.

That being said, we shouldn’t let the IRS off the hook.

Never forget, after all, that this is the bureaucracy that – in a disgusting display of bias – interfered with the electoral process by targeting the President’s opponents.

And then awarded bonuses to itself for this corrupt behavior!

So when Neil Cavuto asked me whether the IRS deserved a bigger budget, you can see I was not exactly sympathetic.

There are two points from the interview that deserve a bit of elaboration.

First, I pointed out that the IRS budget is far bigger than it was 30 years ago, even after adjusting for inflation.

So the notion that the tax collectors are suffering from “savage” budget cuts is utter nonsense.

Not surprisingly, the IRS and its defenders like to compare today’s budget with the amount that was spent right after the faux stimulus, when every bureaucracy was gorging on other people’s money.

But as I explained in the interview, that’s very misleading.

Second, we have the bigger issue of how to deal with an ever-more sclerotic tax code and and never-ending demands for more money out of Washington.

Assuming one thinks turning America into Greece is an acceptable or desirable outcome, the IRS will need more money.

But this is precisely why I said at the end of the interview that we should say no. Simply stated, giving the IRS a bigger budget almost certainly means a continuation of bad policy.

But maybe, just maybe, if the IRS budget is held in check, the politicians will conclude that we need tax reform and spending restraint. Remember, when all other options are exhausted, politicians sometimes do the right thing.

By the way, I’m not the only person who is upset. George Will also is irked with the Internal Revenue Service and wrote a powerful indictment of the corrupt bureaucracy for the Washington Post.

He starts by observing that the slimy and biased Lois Lerner will probably get away with her crimes thanks to Obama Administration stonewalling and obstruction of justice.

 Lois G. Lerner…, as head of the IRS tax-exempt organizations division, directed the suppression of conservative advocacy groups by delaying and denying them the exempt status that was swiftly given to comparable liberal groups. …through dilatory and incomplete responses to subpoenas, and unresponsive answers to congressional questions…Lerner’s name now has an indelible Nixonian stain, but there probably will be no prosecution. If the administration’s stonewalling continues as the statute of limitations clock ticks, Roskam says, “She will get away with it.” …Many thousands of Lerner’s e-mails that supposedly were irretrievably lost have been found, but not released. The Justice Department’s investigation, which was entrusted to a political appointee who was a generous contributor to Barack Obama’s campaign, is a stone in the stone wall.

It’s discouraging that Ms. Lerner won’t be held accountable for criminal actions, but Will points out that at least Congress has the ability to engage in real oversight to hopefully deter further misbehavior.

One place to begin is with the evidence — anecdotal but, in the context of proven IRS corruption, convincing — of other possibly punitive IRS behavior toward Republican contributors and other conservative activists. This justifies examining the IRS’s audit selection process.  …Next, there should be hearings into the illegal disclosure of taxpayer information about conservative individuals and groups to the media and to liberal officials and groups.

And just in case anyone is tempted to feel sorry for the IRS, don’t forget that the bureaucracy continues to disregard the law.

Or, in some cases, to arbitrarily change the law.

…the IRS’s lawlessness has extended to its role in implementing the Affordable Care Act. The act says that federal subsidies shall be distributed by the IRS to persons who buy insurance through exchanges “established by the State.” …The court probably will rule that the IRS acted contrary to law. If so, the IRS certainly will not have acted contrary to its pattern of corruption in the service of the current administration.

Yup, he nailed it. A corrupt agency serving the interests of a corrupt White House.

P.S. Since we’re talking about taxation today, here’s a video from the oldie-but-goodie collection.

I can’t vouch for the veracity, but I gather this fellow was very upset by high property taxes.

As you might guess, my sympathies are with the Marquis de Maussabre.

Just as I applaud French entrepreneurs, American companies, Italian boat owners, Spanish movie patrons (and porn aficionados), California citizens, Greek shop owners, Facebook millionaires, Norwegian butter buyers, New York taxpayers, Bulgarian smokers, foreign cab drivers, New Jersey residents, Australian film stars, and everyone else who does their part to limit the amount of tax revenue flowing to governments.

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Jihadi John (a.k.a, Mohammed Emwazi) Should also Be Known as Moocher Mohammed

Bad ideas definitely have the ability to cross borders.

The income tax first appeared in England, on a temporary basis during the Napoleanic wars and then permanently in 1842. It then spread like a cancer to other parts of the world, eventually reaching – and plaguing – the United States starting in 1913.

Government-run Social Security schemes were started by the Germans in 1889 under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Similar programs then were adopted elsewhere, including the United States as part of FDR’s misguided New Deal in 1935.

Now we have another example.

I wrote last month about how the State Department’s refugee program is a trainwreck because it is bringing Somalis (many of whom have an anti-Western ideology) to America and trapping them in government dependency with a plethora of handouts (and also creating a breeding ground for terrorists).

Well, our cousins in the United Kingdom also have a refugee program that is similarly counterproductive.

I don’t know which country was dumb enough to first create its program, but the Brits win the prize for subsidizing the most infamous terrorist (and new member of the Moocher Hall of Fame).

Here are some excerpts from a story in the U.K.-based Daily Mail.

Jihadi John and his asylum-seeking family have milked the British benefits system for 20 years, the Mail can reveal today. Housing the Islamic State executioner and his relatives in affluent parts of London has cost taxpayers up to £400,000. One landlord said Mohammed Emwazi’s family were ‘parasites’ and ‘tenants from hell’. Incredibly, they are still believed to be pocketing £40,000 a year in handouts despite there being no sign of them in Britain. …Westminster City Council is still paying the rent on the family’s £600,000 flat even though the rules say housing benefit should normally be stopped after 13 weeks.

So did all these handouts to the Emwazi family turn them into good citizens?

Hardly. One of the kids, Mohammed Emwazi has gone to the Middle East to fight for ISIS and is now infamous at “Jihadi John,” the psychopath that beheads innocent people.

MPs said they were horrified that the child of a family given refugee status, citizenship and benefits had returned the favour by orchestrating the murder of two of its citizens. …In sickening propaganda videos, his son led the beheadings of Britons Alan Henning and David Haines.

But even if Jihadi John hadn’t turned into a nutjob, British taxpayers still got a very bad deal from the Emwazi clan.

The family apparently is still on the dole, continuing an unbroken 20-year tradition of mooching off British taxpayers.

During their time in Britain, neither Jasem nor Ghaneya officially worked. …With a 12-year-old daughter, Hana, they are still believed to be claiming an estimated £7,821 a year in child benefits and child tax credits. That is on top of annual claims of about £23,400 in housing benefit, £678 in council tax support and £5,929 in jobseeker’s allowance.

Looking at this result, logical people might be tempted conclude that it’s time to rethink refugee programs.

Or, at the very least, change the rules that funnel these people into government dependency.

But since many politicians aren’t logical, there are probably British versions of Barack Obama who are urging job training programs or similar nonsense (for a humorous take on that topic, see the cartoons at the bottom of this post).

P.S. Jihadi John featured in one of the most effectively snarky anti-Obama cartoons I’ve ever seen, which is at the end of this post.

P.P.S. Switching to a different topic, I’ve written (some would say ad nauseam) about disproportionately generous pay and benefits for government bureaucrats. Particularly for the gilded class in Washington.

I think the evidence for excessive bureaucratic compensation is ironclad, particularly if you look at “quit rates” by sector.

But now we have yet another piece of evidence that the federal workforce is living on Easy Street. Check out this new polling data from Gallup.

Remember, this is polling data with federal workers describing their own status, not what taxpayers think.

So let’s give 44 percent of bureaucrats credit for honesty, which is ironic because bureaucrats in polls have acknowledged they’re more likely to be dishonest! And lazy as well.

Though the real moral of the story is not compensation. As I explain at the end of this video, the real problem is that many government jobs shouldn’t exist in the first place.

P.P.P.S. If you want to enjoy bureaucrat humor, click here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

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Now the White House Wants to Raise Taxes without Congressional Approval?!?

I’m not reflexively opposed to executive orders and other unilateral actions by the White House. A president and his appointees, after all, have a lot of regulatory authority.

This is because, for better or worse, many of the laws approved in Washington basically express a goal and identify some tools. It’s then up to the relevant agency or agencies to promulgate regulations to enforce and implement those tools in order to supposedly achieve those goals.

But here’s the catch. The executive branch has to make at least a semi-plausible case that any given action is consistent with the law.

And the problem with this White House is that it has been using regulations and executive orders to change laws, thwart laws, and ignore laws.

There have been several instances of the White House arbitrarily deciding to ignore or alter major parts of Obamacare.

The Obama Administration has decided a law giving the federal government authority over the “navigable waterways” of the United States also means the federal government can regulate ponds on private land.

President Obama’s Treasury Department not only used a regulation to force American banks to put foreign law above American law, it also dealt with the unworkability of FATCA by creating an intergovernmental agreement mechanism that isn’t even mentioned in the law.

And don’t forget, regardless of what you think about immigration, the President also unilaterally decided to grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens.

And that issue served as a springboard for a discussion with Fox News about a possible White House scheme to unilaterally impose big tax hikes on the business sector.

I’m surprised that I didn’t splutter with outrage during the interview. You don’t need to be a constitutional scholar, or even a lawyer, to be able to read Article 1, Section 7, of the Constitution.

And while Obama may not have a problem with the notion of America becoming a banana republic, we actually have co-equal branches of government, each with specific roles and powers.

Here’s the relevant text from the Constitution, as contained in the official repository at the National Archives.

All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills. Every Bill which shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate, shall, before it become a Law, be presented to the President of the United States.

Maybe I’m not very careful reader, but I don’t see anything in that passage about “unless President Obama feels otherwise” or “with the exception of unilateral tax hikes on companies.”

Though I imagine Ruth Bader Ginsburg could rationalize that such hidden clauses actually exist.

For additional background, here’s some of what The Hill has reported.

The Obama administration is not ruling out using executive powers to also address the tax code. With Senate Democrats openly pushing the administration to take its own action on the tax front, the White House is not shooting down the idea. …Earnest noted that the president has told lawmakers what he is interested in on taxes — closing loopholes for the wealthy and corporations… Earnest said he was not “ruling anything in or out,” when it came to specific executive steps. “This is related to the president’s ability to use his executive authority to do what he thinks is the right thing for the country,” he said.

By the way, my opposition to unilateral changes is based on principle.

So I’d be opposed even if a pro-freedom President wanted to suspend bad parts of the tax code or use “prosecutorial discretion” to provide de facto amnesty to taxpayers who refused to comply with an immoral part of the tax code, such as the death tax.

Though you won’t be surprised to learn that Obama isn’t contemplating any good unilateral changes. Instead, the policies being examined would exacerbate double taxation and extend worldwide taxation.

So we may get the worst of all worlds. Unilateral action on taxes that makes a mockery of our Constitution and rule of law while also making an already terrible business tax system even worse.

P.S. The United States only ranks #19 in an international comparison of what nations do a good job of upholding the rule of law. Makes you wonder where we’ll rank by the time Obama leaves office.

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Grading the Rubio-Lee Tax Reform Plan

In my 2012 primer on fundamental tax reform, I explained that the three biggest warts in the current system.

1. High tax rates that penalize productive behavior.

2. Pervasive double taxation that discourages saving and investment.

3. Corrupt loopholes and cronyism that bribe people to make less productive choices.

These problems all need to be addressed, but I also acknowledged additional concerns with the internal revenue code, such as worldwide taxation and erosion of constitutional freedoms an civil liberties.

In a perfect world, we would shrink government to such a small size that there was no need for any sort of broad-based tax (remember, the United States prospered greatly for most of our history when there was no income tax).

In a good world, we could at least replace the corrupt internal revenue code with a simple and fair flat tax.

In today’s Washington, the best we can hope for is incremental reform.

But some incremental reforms can be very positive, and that’s the best way of describing the “Economic Growth and Family Fairness Tax Reform Plan” unveiled today by Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and Senator Mike Lee of Utah.

The two GOP senators have a column in today’s Wall Street Journal, and you can read a more detailed description of their plan by clicking here.

But here are the relevant details.

What’s wrong with Rubio-Lee

In the interest of fairness, I’ll start with the most disappointing feature of the plan. The top tax rate will be 35 percent, only a few percentage points lower than the 39.6 percent top rate that Obama imposed as a result of the fiscal cliff.

Even more troubling, that 35 percent top tax rate will be imposed on any taxable income above $75,000 for single taxpayers and $150,000 for married taxpayers.

Since the 35 percent and 39.6 percent tax rates currently apply only when income climbs above $400,000, that means a significant number of taxpayers will face higher marginal tax rates.

That’s a very disappointing feature in any tax plan, but it’s especially unfortunate in a proposal put forth my lawmakers who wrote in their WSJ column that they want to “lower rates for families and individuals.”

What’s right with Rubio-Lee

This will be a much longer section because there are several very attractive features of the Rubio-Lee plan.

Some households, for instance, will enjoy lower marginal tax rates under the new bracket structure, particularly if those households have lots of children (there’s a very big child tax credit).

But the really attractive features of the Rubio-Lee plan are those that deal with business taxation, double taxation, and international competitiveness.

Here’s a list of the most pro-growth elements of the plan.

A 25 percent tax rate on all business income – This means that the corporate tax rate is being reduced from 35 percent (the highest in the world), but also that there will be a 25 percent maximum rate on all small businesses that file using Schedule C as part of a 1040 tax return.

Sweeping reductions in double taxation – The Rubio-Lee plans eliminates the capital gains tax, the double tax on dividends, and the second layer of tax on interest.

Full expensing of business investment – The proposal gets rid of punitive “depreciation” rules that force businesses to overstate their income in ways that discourage new business investment.

Territorial taxation – Businesses no longer will have to pay a second layer of tax on income that is earned – and already subject to tax – in other nations.

No death tax – Income should not be subject to yet another layer of tax simply because someone dies. The Rubio-Lee plan eliminates this morally offensive form of double taxation.

In addition, it’s worth noting that the Rubio-Lee plan eliminate the state and local tax deduction, which is a perverse part of the tax code that enables higher taxes in states like New York and California.

Many years ago, while working at the Heritage Foundation, I created a matrix to grade competing tax reform plans. I updated that matrix last year to assess the proposal put forth by Congressman Dave Camp, the former Chairman of the House Ways & Means Committee.

Here’s another version of that matrix, this time including the Rubio-Lee plan.

As you can see, the Rubio-Lee plan gets top scores for “saving and investment” and “international competitiveness.”

And since these components have big implications for growth, the proposal would – if enacted – generate big benefits. The economy would grow faster, more jobs would be created, workers would enjoy higher wages, and American companies would be far more competitive.

By the way, if there was (and there probably should be) a “tax burden” grade in my matrix, the Rubio-Lee plan almost surely would get an “A+” score because the overall proposal is a substantial tax cut based on static scoring.

And even with dynamic scoring, this plan will reduce the amount of money going to Washington in the near future.

Of course, faster future growth will lead to more taxable income, so there will be revenue feedback. So the size of the tax cut will shrink over time, but even a curmudgeon like me doesn’t get that upset if politicians get more revenue because more Americans are working and earning higher wages.

That simply means another opportunity to push for more tax relief!

What’s missing in Rubio-Lee

There are a few features of the tax code that aren’t addressed in the plan.

The health care exclusion is left untouched, largely because the two lawmakers understand that phasing out that preference is best handled as part of a combined tax reform/health reform proposal.

Some itemized deductions are left untouched, or simply tweaked.

And I’m not aware of any changes that would strengthen the legal rights of taxpayers when dealing with the IRS.

Let’s close with a reminder of what very good tax policy looks like.

To their credit, Rubio and Lee would move the tax code in the direction of a flat tax, though sometimes in a haphazard fashion.

P.S. There is a big debate on the degree to which the tax code should provide large child credits. As I wrote in the Wall Street Journal last year, I much prefer lower tax rates since faster growth is the most effective long-run way to bolster the economic status of families.

But even the flat tax has a generous family-based allowance, so it’s largely a political judgement on how much tax relief should be dedicated to kids and how much should be used to lower tax rates.

That being said, I think the so-called reform conservatives undermine their case when they argue child-oriented tax relief is good because it might subsidize the creation of future taxpayers to prop up entitlement programs. We need to reform those programs, not give them more money.

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The Potentially Big Downside Risks of Easy Money, QE, and Artificially Low Interest Rates

During periods of economic weakness, governments often respond with “loose” monetary policy, which generally means that central banks will take actions that increase liquidity and artificially lower interest rates.

I’m not a big fan of this approach.

If an economy is suffering from bad fiscal policy or bad regulatory policy, why expect that an easy-money policy will be effective?

What if politicians use an easy-money policy as an excuse to postpone or avoid structural reforms that are needed to restore growth?

And shouldn’t we worry that an easy-money policy will cause economic damage by triggering systemic price hikes or bubbles?

Defenders of central banks and easy money generally respond to such questions by assuring us that QE-type policies are not a substitute or replacement for other reforms.

And they tell us the downside risk is overstated because central bankers will have the wisdom to soak up excess liquidity at the right time and raise interest rates at the right moment.

I hope they’re right, but my gut instinct is to worry that central bankers are not sufficiently vigilant about the downside risks of easy-money policies.

But not all central bankers. While I was in London last week to give a presentation to the State of the Economy conference, I got to hear a speech by Kristin Forbes, a member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee.

She was refreshingly candid about the possible dangers of the easy-money approach, particularly with regards to artificially low interest rates.

Here is one of the charts from her presentation.

Those of us who are old enough to remember the 1970s will be concerned about her first point. And this is important. It would be terrible to let the inflation genie out of the bottle, particularly since there may not be a Ronald Reagan-type leader in the future who will do what’s needed to solve such a mess.

But today I want to focus on her second, fourth, and fifth points.

So here are some of the details from her speech, starting with some analysis of the risk of bubbles.

…when interest rates are low, investors may “search for yield” and shift funds to riskier investments that are expected to earn a higher return – from equity markets to high-yield debt markets to emerging markets. This could drive up prices in these other markets and potentially create “bubbles”. This can not only lead to an inefficient allocation of capital, but leave certain investors with more risk than they appreciate. An adjustment in asset prices can bring about losses that are difficult to manage, especially if investments were supported by higher leverage possible due to low rates. If these losses were widespread across an economy, or affected systemically-important institutions, they could create substantial economic disruption. This tendency to assume greater risk when interest rates are low for a sustained period not only occurs for investors, but also within banks, corporations, and broader credit markets. Studies have shown that during periods of monetary expansion, banks tend to soften lending standards and experience an increase in their assessed “riskiness”. There is evidence that the longer an expansion lasts, the greater these effects. Companies also take advantage of periods of low borrowing costs to increase debt issuance. If this occurs during a period of low default rates – as in the past few years – this can further compress borrowing spreads and lead to levels of debt issuance that may be difficult to support when interest rates normalize. There is a lengthy academic literature showing that low interest rates often foster credit booms, an inefficient allocation of capital, banking collapses, and financial crises. This series of risks to the financial system from a period of low interest rates should be taken seriously and carefully monitored.

Her fourth and fifth points are particularly important since they show she appreciates the Austrian-school insight that bad monetary policy can distort market signals and lead to malinvestment.

Here’s some of what she shared about the fourth point.

…is there a chance that a prolonged period of near-zero interest rates is allowing less efficient companies to survive and curtailing the “creative destruction” that is critical to support productivity growth? Or even within existing, profitable companies – could a prolonged period of low borrowing costs reduce their incentive to carefully assess and evaluate investment projects – leading to a less efficient allocation of capital within companies? …For further evidence on this capital misallocation, one could estimate the rate of “scrappage” during the crisis and the level of capital relative to its optimal, steady-state level. Recent BoE work has found tentative evidence of a “capital overhang”, an excess of capital above that judged optimal given current conditions. Usually any such capital overhang falls quickly during a recession as inefficient factories and plants are shut down and new investment slows. The slower reallocation of capital since the crisis could partly be due to low interest rates.

And here is some of what she said about the fifth point.

A fifth possible cost of low interest rates is that it could shift the sources of demand in ways which make underlying growth less balanced, less resilient, and less sustainable. This could occur through increases in consumption and debt, and decreases in savings and possibly the current account. …if these shifts are too large – or vulnerabilities related to overconsumption, overborrowing, insufficient savings, or large current account deficits continue for too long – they could create economic challenges.

In her speech, Ms. Forbes understandably focused on the current environment and speculated about possible future risks.

But the concerns about easy-money policies are not just theoretical.

Let’s look at some new research from economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, the University of California, and the University of Bonn.

In a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, they look at the connections between monetary policy and housing bubbles.

How do monetary and credit conditions affect housing booms and busts? Do low interest rates cause households to lever up on mortgages and bid up house prices, thus increasing the risk of financial crisis? And what, if anything, should central banks do about it? Can policy directed at housing and credit conditions, with monetary or macroprudential tools, lead a central bank astray and dangerously deflect it from single- or dual-mandate goals?

It appears the answer is yes.

This paper analyzes the link between monetary conditions, credit growth, and house prices using data spanning 140 years of modern economic history across 14 advanced economies. …We make three core contributions. First, we discuss long-run trends in mortgage lending, home ownership, and house prices and show that the 20th century has indeed been an era of increasing “bets on the house.” …Second, turning to the cyclical fluctuations of lending and house prices we use novel instrumental variable local projection methods to show that throughout history loose monetary conditions were closely associated with an upsurge in real estate lending and house prices. …Third, we also expose a close link between mortgage credit and house price booms on the one hand, and financial crises on the other. Over the past 140 years of modern macroeconomic history, mortgage booms and house price bubbles have been closely associated with a higher likelihood of a financial crisis. This association is more noticeable in the post-WW2 era, which was marked by the democratization of leverage through housing finance.

So what’s the bottom line?

The long-run historical evidence uncovered in this study clearly suggests that central banks have reasons to worry about the side-effects of loose monetary conditions. During the 20th century, real estate lending became the dominant business model of banks. As a result, the effects that low interest rates have on mortgage borrowing, house prices and ultimately financial instability risks have become considerably stronger. …these historical insights suggest that the potentially destabilizing byproducts of easy money must be taken seriously

In other words, we’re still dealing with some of the fallout of a housing bubble/financial crisis caused in part by the Fed’s easy-money policy last decade.

Yet we have people in Washington who haven’t learned a thing and want to repeat the mistakes that created that mess.

Even though we now have good evidence about the downside risk of easy money and bubbles!

Sort of makes you wonder whether the End-the-Fed people have a good point.

P.S. Central banks also can cause problems because of their regulatory powers.

P.P.S. Just as there are people in Washington who want to double down on failure, there are similar people in Europe who think a more-of-the-same approach is the right cure for the problems caused in part by a some-of-the-same approach.

P.P.P.S. For those interested in monetary policy, the good news is that the Cato Institute recently announced the formation of the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives, led by former UGA economics professor George Selgin, which will focus on development of policy recommendations that will create a more free-market monetary system.

P.P.P.P.S. If you watch this video, you’ll see that George doesn’t give the Federal Reserve a very high grade.

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