The Best and Worst News of 2016

There was some genuinely good news in 2016, which is more than I can say for 2015 (my “best” development for that year was some polling data, followed by some small-ball tinkering).

Though the good news for 2016 was mostly overseas. Here are the four things from around the world that made me happy this year.

• Constitutional spending caps in Brazil – I’m a big believer that good fiscal policy is achieved when government spending grows slower than the private economy. So I was very happy when Brazil changed its constitution to limit spending to the rate of inflation. Brazil joins Hong Kong and Switzerland in an elite club of jurisdictions with constitutional provisions that focus on the real problem of excessive government rather than the symptom of red ink.
• The landslide vote against a government-guaranteed income in Switzerland – I’m rather worried that there’s a growing movement (including some libertarians!) in support of a minimum income provided by taxpayers. So I was gratified that the “Sensible Swiss,” in a referendum this past May, overwhelmingly rejected an initiative to impose such a policy. I even like to think that perhaps I played a (very minor) role in the outcome.
• The British vote for Brexit – The European Union started as a free-trade zone but in recent decades morphed into a pro-harmonization and pro-centralization bureaucracy, contrary to the principles that made Europe great. That shift, combined with the continent’s horrible demographics, means the European Union is a slowly sinking ship. I was delighted and amused (played Rule Britannia over and over again on my laptop) that Brits voted for independence and (hopefully) liberty.
• Abolition of the income tax in Antigua and Barbuda – It’s a terrible idea (as we know from America’s experience) to give politicians a new source of revenue. They’ll quickly use the new levy to finance a permanent expansion in the burden of government (which is why I’m willing to go halfway around the world to fight such schemes). With that in mind, the repeal of the income tax in the Caribbean nation of Antigua and Barbuda was a truly joyous development.

And while we didn’t have any major positive developments in the United States, there was a bit of good news. Yes, it’s “small-ball tinkering,” but I’m always glad for any progress.

• Reductions in food stamp dependency – There are many redistribution programs that contribute to America’s dependency crisis, so food stamps can’t take the entire blame for the economic damage of the welfare state. But the program is riddled with fraud and should be ended on the federal level. We haven’t seen any progress out of Washington (hardly a surprise since we have a “food stamp President“), but Kansas joined Maine and Wisconsin by taking steps to limit the program’s one-way handouts.

So those are the noteworthy good things that happened this year. Now let’s look at the other side of the ledger. What was the bad news of 2016?

Well, the good news (so to speak) is that there was not a lot of bad news. At least if we’re focusing on actual policy changes.

But there are three developments that cause me to worry about the future.

• Growing support for the value-added tax from Republicans – At the risk of hyperbole, I view the value-added tax as the single-greatest threat to the long-run viability of the United States. Simply stated, our ability to restrain the growth of spending will be terribly weakened if politicians get this new source of revenue. Why would they ever reform entitlements, for instance, if they had the ability boost the VAT rate by a point or two every few years? With that in mind, I’m perplexed and horrified that some otherwise sensible lawmakers (including Rand Paul and Ted Cruz) have embraced this money machine for big government. I don’t care if their plans are theoretically sensible. I worry about what will happen in the real world.
• An erosion of the pro-trade consensus – The economic damage caused by higher fiscal burdens since World War II has been offset by lower trade burdens thanks to various agreements to reduce tariffs and other protectionist barriers. So it’s very good news that there’s been a bipartisan consensus for freer trade. Unfortunately, the unexpected appeal of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders suggests that both parties have voters susceptible to the siren song of protectionism.
• A major political party almost nominated an out-of-the-closet socialist – It is rather troubling that Senator Bernie Sanders managed to attract considerable support while openly embracing a very strident form of statism. His voting record in the Senate may have been very similar to conventional Democrats (including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama), but his sympathy for totalitarian regimes such as Venezuela suggests he is genuinely radical.  It worries me that millions of my fellow citizens voted for someone with such deep hostility to individual liberty.

Tomorrow I will write about my hopes and fears for 2017.

Let’s close today’s column with a few special categories.

If there was an award for the most disgusting news of 2016, the NAACP would be the clear winner for their decision to sacrifice black children in order to collect blood money from teacher unions.

And if we also had a prize for most moronic leftist in 2016, there would be another easy winner. Trevor Noah inadvertently showed why gun control doesn’t work even though he wanted to make the opposite point.

Last but not least, if there was a category for surprising news in 2016, there’s no question that Paul Krugman would win that prize for writing something sensible about tax policy.

P.S. My most popular post in 2016 (which also set the all-time record) was the very clever image showing that the enemies of liberty are looters, regardless of their economic status.

P.P.S. My most surreal moment in 2016 was getting attacked on the front page of the Washington Post. I must be doing something right.

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Montreal Learned the Wrong Lesson from Ayn Rand

I’ve always viewed Ayn Rand’s most famous novel, Atlas Shrugged, as a warning about the dangers of over-regulation, over-taxation, and excessive redistribution.

I won’t spoil the plot for those who haven’t yet read the book, but it’s basically a story about what happens to a society when the people pulling the wagon decide that’s no longer how they want to spend their lives.

And as these highly productive people begin to opt out, politicians come up with ever-crazier ideas of keeping the economy going.

The most absurd example, something that could only happen in a dystopian work of fiction rather than real life, was “Directive 10-289,” an edict from the government to prevent continued contraction by requiring everybody in the economy to do exactly the same thing next year that they did this year. This meant no changing jobs. No starting new companies. No closing down existing companies. No changes in pay. Or employment. No changes in anything. Freeze the economy at current levels.

In other words, take Nixon-style wage and price controls and apply them to every bit of economic activity.

Unfortunately, some politicians think Atlas Shrugged is a direction manual rather than a warning. In Montreal, they’ve come up with a crazy idea to apply a version of Directive 10-289 to the restaurant industry. I’m not joking. In a column for Reason, Baylen Linnekin explains this surreal new policy.

…lawmakers in Montreal have moved to crack down on new restaurants, in an odious attempt to protect existing ones. “Montreal has one of the highest restaurant per-capita ratios in North America and the amount of places to eat is worrying local politicians,” reads a Canadian Press piece from earlier this week. …Data shows Montreal trails only New York City in terms of restaurants per capita in North America. As in New York City, that competition is great for Montreal’s consumers. But it puts pressure on incumbent restaurateurs. So lawmakers have decided to side with the latter.

The new law isn’t quite as bad as Directive 10-289, but it’s guided by the same attitude: Everything that exists now should be preserved and what’s new is bad.

…a ban on new restaurants from opening within 25 meters of an existing one along the city’s Rue Notre Dame… Notably, the action comes as “a number of commercial and retail properties remain empty” in this same part of Montreal. The law “risk[s] turning the city’s restaurant scene into a heavily bureaucratized nightmare like the province’s construction industry,” says the head of Quebec’s restaurant association

So who could possibly support such an initiative?

Unsurprisingly, the greatest enemies of genuine capitalism aren’t just politicians, but also incumbent firms that don’t want competition.

…some protectionist restaurateurs support the measure. “In Montreal you can apply for a restaurant permit and get it immediately—that’s a problem for me” says David McMillan, a supporter of the restrictions, whose high-end restaurant, Joe Beef, is an intended beneficiary of the ban. He’s not alone. “I don’t believe in the free market anymore,” says restaurateur Carlos Ferreira. “We have to protect the good restaurants.”

Gee, I thought consumers were the ones who were supposed to determine which restaurants are good. But Mr. Ferreira wants politicians and bureaucrats to now have the power.

Though we shouldn’t mock the Canadians too much. After all, Barack Obama imposed a version of Directive 10-289 in the United States.

Heck, he must be a big fan of Atlas Shrugged because he also mimicked another part of the book.

Of course, there are some cities, and even entire nations, that apparently want to replicate everything in Ayn Rand’s classic novel.

And the results in these real-world experiments are similar to what happens in the book. Except the book actually has a happy ending, whereas there’s little reason to be optimistic for a rebirth of freedom in places such as Greece and Venezuela.

P.S. John Stossel and Charles Murray have interesting things to say about Atlas Shrugged.

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Trump, Entitlements, and America’s Potential Greek Future

At the risk of sounding like a broken record (or like Donald Sutherland in Animal House), I’m going to repeat myself for the umpteenth time and state that the United States has a big long-run problem.

To be specific, the burden of government spending will inexorably climb in the absence of big reforms. This isn’t just my speculation. It’s a built-in mathematical result of poorly designed entitlement programs combined with demographic changes.

I wrote about these issues in a column for The Hill.

…there is a big reason to worry about the slowdown in population growth in the U.S. Many of our entitlement programs were created based on the assumption that we would always have an expanding population, as represented by a population pyramid. …however, we’ve seen major changes in demographic trends, including longer lifespans and falling birthrates. The combination of these two factors means that our population pyramid is slowly, but surely, turning into a population cylinder. …this looming shift in America’s population profile means massive amounts of red ink as the baby boom generation moves into full retirement.

To back up my claim, I then cited grim numbers from the Congressional Budget Office, and also linked to very sobering data about America’s long-run fiscal position from the Bank for International Settlements, the International Monetary Fund, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Simply stated, the United States will become a failed welfare state if we don’t make changes in the near future.

But I point out that we can save ourselves from that fate. And it’s not complicated. Just make sure government spending grows slower than the private economy, which will only be possible in the long run if lawmakers reform entitlements, particularly Medicare and Medicaid.

…it’s also possible that Washington will get serious about genuine entitlement reform. …if Congress adopted the structural reforms that have been in House budgets in recent years, much of our long-run spending problem would disappear. …the real goal is to make sure that government spending grows slower than the private sector.

That’s the good news.

But here’s the bad news. Based on his campaign rhetoric, Donald Trump isn’t a fan of entitlement reform.

And if he says no, it isn’t going to happen. Writing for National Review, Michael Barone explains that Trump’s opposition is a death knell.

The election of Donald Trump has put the kibosh on…the entitlement reform sought by conservative elites… Trump…has made plain that he’s opposed to significant changes in entitlements… It’s hard to see how Republicans in Congress will go to the trouble of addressing entitlements if their efforts can’t succeed.

As a matter of political prognostication, I agree. Republicans on Capitol Hill are not going to push reform without a receptive White House.

It doesn’t matter that they’re right.

Conservative elites’ concern about entitlements is based on solider numbers… There’s a strong case for making adjustments now… The longer we wait, the more expensive and painful adjustments will be. …Conservative…elites may have superior long-range vision. But they’re not going to get the policies they want for the next four years.

But this doesn’t mean reform is a lost cause.

I explained last month that there are three reasons why Trump might push for good policy (even though he said “I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid”).

• First, politicians oftentimes say things they don’t mean (remember Obama’s pledge that people could keep their doctors and their health plans if Obamacare was enacted?).
• Second, the plans to fix Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid don’t involve any cuts. Instead, reformers are proposing changes that will slow the growth of outlays.
• Third, if Trump is even slightly serious about pushing through his big tax cut, he’ll need to have some plan to restrain overall spending to make his agenda politically viable.

And maybe Trump has reached the same conclusion. At least to some degree.

Here’s what is being reported by The Hill.

Medicaid has grown in size in recent years, with ObamaCare extending coverage to millions of low-income people who hadn’t qualified before. But Republicans warn of the program’s growing costs and have pushed to provide that money to states in the form of block grants — an idea President-elect Donald Trump endorsed during the campaign. Vice President-elect Mike Pence signaled in an interview with ABC this month that the incoming administration planned to keep Medicare as it is, while looking at ways to change Medicaid. …Block grants would mean limiting federal Medicaid funds to a set amount given to the states, rather than the current federal commitment, which is more open-ended. …Gail Wilensky, who was head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services…argued that…If federal money for the program were fixed, “states would have much greater incentives to use it as efficiently as possible,” she said.

The policy argument for Medicaid reform is very strong.

The real question is whether Trump ultimately decides to expend political capital on a much-needed reform. Because he would need to do some heavy lifting. If GOPers push for block grants, well-heeled medical providers such as hospitals will lobby fiercely to maintain the status quo (after all what’s is waste and fraud to us is money in the bank for them). Trump would have to be willing to push back and make a populist argument for federalism and fiscal responsibility rather than a populist argument for dependency.

I guess we’ll see what happens.

P.S. For what it’s worth, if Trump is going to fix just one entitlement program, Medicaid is a good choice.

P.P.S. In an ideal world, Medicare and Social Security also should be fixed.

P.P.P.S. That being said, if the major fiscal change of a Trump Administration is Medicaid reform, I’ll be relatively happy. I’ve been operating on the assumption (based in part of what he said during the campaign) that Trump is a big-government Republican. Sort of like Bush. I will be very happy if it turns out I was wrong.

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The Sensible Way to Help the Poor and Reduce Poverty

If there was an award for the most dramatic political development of 2016, it would presumably be the election of Donald Trump.

If there was an award for the best policy reform of 2016, my vote would be the constitutional spending cap in Brazil.

If there was an award for the greatest outburst of sensibility in 2016, it would be the landslide vote in Switzerland against a government-guaranteed income.

But what about an award for the most compelling article of 2016? Well, we still have a few days left in the year, so it’s theoretically possible that I’ll change my mind, but as of today the award would go to my friend Deirdre McCloskey for her December 23 column in the New York Times.

She addresses the fundamental issue of whether policy should be designed to reduce poverty or increase equality. Here’s some of what she wrote.

Eliminating poverty is obviously good. And, happily, it is already happening on a global scale. …We need to finish the job. But will we really help the poor by focusing on inequality? …The Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt put it this way: “Economic equality is not, as such, of particular moral importance.” Instead we should lift up the poor… Another eminent philosopher, John Rawls of Harvard, articulated what he called the Difference Principle: If the entrepreneurship of a rich person made the poorest better off, then the higher income of the entrepreneur was justified.

But Deirdre doesn’t limit herself to philosophical arguments.

She looks at the practical issues, such as whether governments have the ability (or motives!) to correctly re-slice the economic pie.

A practical objection to focusing on economic equality is that we cannot actually achieve it, not in a big society, not in a just and sensible way. …Cutting down the tall poppies uses violence for the cut. And you need to know exactly which poppies to cut. Trusting a government of self-interested people to know how to redistribute ethically is naïve. Another problem is that the cutting reduces the size of the crop. We need to allow for rewards that tell the economy to increase the activity earning them. …An all-wise central plan could force the right people into the right jobs. But such a solution, like much of the case for a compelled equality, is violent and magical. The magic has been tried, in Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China. So has the violence.

Deirdre notes that people sometimes are drawn to socialism, in part because of how we interact with family and friends.

But you can’t extrapolate those experiences to broader society.

Many of us share socialism in sentiment, if only because we grew up in loving families with Mom as the central planner. Sharing works just fine in a loving household. But it is not how grown-ups get stuff.

When redistributionist principles are imposed on broader society, bad things happen.

As a matter of arithmetic, expropriating the rich to give to the poor does not uplift the poor very much. …And redistribution works only once. You can’t expect the expropriated rich to show up for a second cutting. In a free society, they can move to Ireland or the Cayman Islands. And the wretched millionaires can hardly re-earn their millions next year if the state has taken most of the money.

In other words, you get a shrinking pie rather than a growing pie. As Tom Sowell also has observed, people don’t produce as much when the government seizes the fruits of their labor.

And in that kind of world, it’s theoretically possible that poor people will have a greater share, but they still wind up a smaller amount (moreover, in practice the government elite wind up with all the wealth).

So what’s the bottom line?

Deirdre cites South Korea as an example of a nation where poor people now enjoy much better lives thanks to growth, and she then asks readers the key question: Will the poor benefit more from the classical liberal principles of rule of law and free markets, or will they benefit more from coercive redistribution?

Her explanation is magnificent.

It is growth from exchange-tested betterment, not compelled or voluntary charity, that solves the problem of poverty. …Which do we want, a small one-time (though envy-and-anger-satisfying) extraction from the rich, or a free society of betterment, one that lifts up the poor by gigantic amounts? We had better focus directly on the equality that we actually want and can achieve, which is equality of social dignity and equality before the law. Liberal equality, as against the socialist equality of enforced redistribution, eliminates the worst of poverty. …To borrow from the heroes of my youth, Marx and Engels: Working people of all countries unite! You have nothing to lose but stagnation! Demand exchange-tested betterment in a liberal society. Some dare call it capitalism.

Glorious!

I’ve also addressed this issue, on multiple occasions, and I think the resolution of this growth-vs-redistribution debate may very well determine the future of our nation. So I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say Deirdre’s column is the most important article of 2016.

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The Local Government Extortion Racket

What do Andy Johnson, Anthony Smelley, the Hammond family, Charlie Engle, Tammy Cooper, Nancy Black, Russ Caswell, Jacques Wajsfelner, Jeff Councelller, Eric Garner, Martha Boneta, James Slatic, Carole Hinders, Salvatore Culosi, and James Lieto, as well as the Sierra Pacific Company and the entire Meitev family have in common?

They are all victims of brutal, unfair, capricious, and evil government actions. And I challenge anyone to read their stories and not feel at least some degree of outrage at their mistreatment.

And now we’re going to add Corey Statham to the list. The New York Times has an all-too-typical report of government greed and callousness.

Corey Statham had $46 in his pockets when he was arrested in Ramsey County, Minn., and charged with disorderly conduct. He was released two days later, and the charges were dismissed. But the county kept $25 of Mr. Statham’s money as a “booking fee.” …He did get a debit card for the remaining $21. But there was no practical way to extract his cash without paying some kind of fee. Among them: $1.50 a week for “maintenance” of the unwanted card, starting after 36 hours; $2.75 for using an A.T.M. to withdraw money; $3 for transferring the balance to a bank account; and $1.50 for checking the balance. …Mr. Statham is represented by Michael A. Carvin, a prominent conservative lawyer who…said the county’s motives were not rooted in solicitude for the people it had arrested. “Revenue-starved local governments are increasingly turning toward fees like Ramsey County’s in order to bridge their budgetary gaps,” he wrote in a Supreme Court brief. …“Providing a profit motive to make arrests,” he said, “gives officers an incentive to make improper arrests.” …$25 is not a lot of money — unless you are poor. It represents almost half a day’s work at the federal minimum wage, a federal judge wrote in a dissent in another case on booking fees.

I have no idea whether Mr. Statham is a sympathetic victim. But even if he’s a total jerk, that doesn’t change the fact that people who interact with the legal system should not be subject to fines or fees without a conviction.

This is yet another example of innocent people victimized by “policing for profit,” which notoriously happens with civil asset forfeiture.

And at the risk of sounding like a closet leftist, it bothers me when poor people and rich people face the same fines. I don’t know Statham’s situation, but there are plenty of low-income people who can suffer severe financial consequences when they have an unfortunate encounter with local law enforcement. Maybe we should be like Switzerland and proportionately adjust fines based on wealth. I don’t suggest that because I want local governments to have more money. Instead, I’m thinking such a policy would both make the law more equal and give the rest of us a strong incentive to fight against thuggish revenue-raising tactics.

P.S. I’m obviously on the side of Statham’s lawyer, but I can’t resist correcting something said by Michael Carvin. I’ve never looked at the numbers for Ramsey County, but, based on nationwide fiscal data for state and local governments, I will say with 99 percent confidence that Ramsey County is not “revenue-starved.” In the interests of accuracy, Mr. Carvin in the future should refer to local politicians as being “revenue-hungry.”

P.P.S. On a separate topic, here’s a nice reminder of the difference between the private sector and the government.

A man in Pomona was upset after a postal carrier was seen on surveillance video throwing a small package on his doorstep, but a surprise hero was also captured on footage. Brian Mundy sent the video to our sister station in Los Angeles using #abc7eyewitness. In it, you see the U.S. Postal Service carrier carelessly tossing the package. Much to Mundy’s surprise, moments later, a FedEx driver – wearing a reindeer hat – is seen gently putting down two packages. That driver even picks up the small box from the USPS carrier and gently puts it on top of the rest.

It’s all on video if you click on the story link. Yes, this is just an anecdote. And, yes, I’m sure there are plenty of bad FedEx employees and wonderful Postal Service employees. I’m mostly sharing the story for amusement value.

But I suspect John Stossel was right when he explained that, as a general rule, the private sector will do a better job.

 

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The Flat Tax, Now More then Ever

On December 24, I wrote that all I wanted for Christmas is a spending cap.

Alas, Santa did not manage to stuff that long-overdue policy down my chimney.

But I’m not surprised. For years, the flat tax was on my Christmas list and that never happened either. I guess I must have been bad. Or maybe Santa is a leftist or socialist.

So instead of simple and fair tax system under the tree, I kept getting lumps of coal in my stocking, which are cleverly disguised as new provisions of a metastasizing internal revenue code.

I’m still allowed to dream, however, so I want to share a new video about the flat tax from Prager University. It’s narrated by Steve Forbes, who (along with Dick Armey) helped popularize the flat tax in the 1990s.

Very compelling. Perhaps even more so than my video on the flat tax.

So what are the chances that we’ll ever get this type of reform?

In a column she wrote last year for Time, Amity Shlaes was somewhat optimistic that a flat tax has untapped support. She cited the fact that most GOP candidates either endorsed some form of flat tax or proposed changes that would move us closer to a flat tax.

The simple levy hasn’t been this popular since 1996, when Steve Forbes campaigned with the promise of a universal 17% income tax rate. Several of this campaign’s flat taxers are actually out-Forbesing Forbes. Ted Cruz is calling for a flat 10%. Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee and Rand Paul also propose some kind of flat rate. Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Donald Trump pay their respects with plans that reduce the number of tax brackets.

She explains why the current approach is arbitrary and unfair.

…tinkering is the great weakness of a progressive structure. For if one authority wins license to tinker, so may another. Eventually every interest group convinces others that it is only fair to introduce its ornaments, its exceptions, or its doodads to a tax code. A progressive structure grows organically and disproportionately, becoming a monument to…crony capitalism.

And even though people get tricked when they equate “progressivity” and “progress,” there’s an underlying belief in equal treatment that pushes them in the direction of a flat tax.

In a paper recently presented at the American Accounting Association, scholars Michael and Theresa Roberts report that nearly 8 in 10 business students they polled believe a progressive income tax to be fairer than a flat tax. Still, when asked to actually ascertain a fair amount for a tax payment, the vast majority of the same pollees, even self-identified liberals, picked an amount that correlated to a flat, or even a regressive, rate. This suggests that while Americans like the sound of the word “progressive,” even educated citizens don’t necessarily love progressivity’s effect. Whatever they say at a party, people may quietly prefer proportionality to disproportionality… The Roberts-Roberts paper concludes that “a majority of both liberal and conservative Americans may view a flat income tax rate as fairer than progressive income tax rates.”

Amity’s point about “self-identified liberals” is a natural segue to a Forbes column by Rick Ungar. He approaches the topic from a left-of-center perspective and has considerable sympathy for the flat tax. Not because he likes proportionality, per se, but because he recognizes that the current system has been perverted by special interests.

I’ve long been open to the possibility of trying something new… How can a progressive come to the conclusion that the flat tax might be a better way to go? …American progressives have long had an allergic reaction to the very notion of a flat tax…and with good reason. On it’s face, a flat tax (and the many variations of policy included under the name flat tax) is, indeed, a regressive system more likely than not to benefit the wealthy at the expense of the less wealthy. …However, you have to ask whether or not our current progressive system is truly progressive or, in reality, a system that has been so perverted by special interest tax breaks and benefits as to no longer be legitimately described as progressive. …what do you think is contained in all of those 74,000 plus pages in the United States tax code? …When the higher earner is, in reality, paying at a lower tax rate than her employees who earn far less, thanks to all the special interest perversions built into the tax code, that is very much a regressive tax system. …maybe the time has come to try something new.

Though Ungar isn’t quite willing to embrace the flat tax.

There are, however, some conditions to my willingness to get on board—two to be exact. First, I worry about how the flat tax would impact on those who do not earn much money and have to support their families on a salary that makes both feeding and housing that family a constant, painful challenge. …my second concern…what assurances do we have that this new system will not be corrupted just as the present system was corrupted?

The first concern is easy to address. Every flat tax plan has a generous allowance for all households based on family size. This “zero-bracket amount” would be more generous than the combined standard deduction and personal exemptions in the current tax system. Indeed, because of my concerns about people viewing government as being free, I actually think the amount of tax-free income people would be able to earn is too large. So Mr. Ungar probably can relax on that point.

The second concern, though, is much harder to solve. The risk of a flat tax is that the system somehow will get compromised and degenerate back to the mess we have now. I like to think the American people, after finally being freed from today’s awful system, would vigorously fight to preserve the flat tax. But I also confess there are no guarantees. But here’s the deal. The worst thing that happens is that the current system re-emerges. That obviously would be a big disappointment, but that downside risk is rather tame compared to the downside risk of a national sales tax or value-added tax, which is that politicians would pull a bait and switch, never get rid of the income tax, and then we wind up with a French-style tax system (and the bloated government it finances).

Let’s close by considering a new argument for the flat tax.

Preston Cooper of E21 explains that a single rate protects people in expensive parts of the country from disproportionately harsh taxation.

…data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) show that in states such as Arkansas and Mississippi, $100 can buy $115 worth of goods, while in New York and Hawaii, the same dollar value will only get you $86 worth. …This provides yet another argument for a flat tax. …areas with higher prices also tend to have higher incomes, because employers must compensate for their employees’ reduced purchasing power. Therefore, people earning $44,000 in West Virginia can afford the same standard of living as someone earning $58,000 in Hawaii, despite the gap in nominal income. But the federal government does not account for these regional price disparities when setting tax policy. The progressive federal income tax means that those who earn a higher income in nominal terms will pay a higher tax rate. However, the varying cost of living across the United States means that those who earn a higher nominal income may not actually be any richer, yet will still have to pay the taxes for it. This violates an important goal of tax policy known as horizontal equity: people with the same income ought to pay the same amount in taxes.

Using the example of a single adult, Cooper shows that people living in high-cost-of-living states can pay hundreds of dollars in extra tax compared to people with similar levels of purchasing power in low-cost-of-living states.

Looking at this data, I’m temped to say “serves them right” since the list is dominated by blue states that routinely elect politicians who support class-warfare tax policies and lots of redistribution.

But that knee-jerk reaction is misguided. A fundamental libertarian principle is that the law should treat everyone equally.

So how can this work?

A potential solution is to adjust federal tax brackets in different states for differences in purchasing power. But price disparities do not end at the state level: prices also differ by metropolitan area. People in New York City pay higher prices than people in Buffalo. This phenomenon exists even within cities, as anyone who has compared apartment prices in Manhattan and Queens can attest. There are far too many jurisdictions to effectively adjust tax brackets for cost-of-living differences. A better remedy is to apply a flat income tax at the federal level. Under such a tax everyone would pay the same proportion of their income to the federal government, eliminating the interregional redistribution that comes with progressive taxation.

This makes sense.

When I argue for the flat tax, I tend to focus on the economic benefits (low rate, no double taxation, and no loopholes) and the moral benefits (less corruption, more fairness, and better compliance).

Now I can augment that fairness argument because the government shouldn’t arbitrarily penalize people based on where they live.

So, yes, we should have a flat tax. Other nations shouldn’t have all the fun.

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Libertarian Christmas vs Socialist Christmas

Back in 2014, I looked at the vitally important battle over whether Santa Claus is a liberal or conservative.

Let’s now broaden that debate and contemplate the difference between libertarian Christmas and socialist Christmas.

We’ll start with this much-deserved jab at socialists, the people who continue to believe in coerced equality even though such systems always produce misery for ordinary people (though insiders often manage to get rich).

Sort of reminds me of this Chuck Asay cartoon.

And just in case anyone thinks libertarians don’t get into the Christmas spirit, here’s a new video from Reason TV showing the various gifts you can get for libertarians.

And if you like libertarian-themed Christmas videos, here’s another Reason production showing Santa Claus getting harassed by the TSA.

So what about the socialists?

Well, they definitely believe that government should be Santa Claus. Indeed, I’ve shared Christmas-themed cartoons making this point on many occasions (see here and here, for example).

But here’s something from the pro-socialist perspective. The goal is obviously to equate goodness with statism.

I like the Charlie Brown humor. That’s a nice touch. But there’s a too-big-to-ignore problem with the central message of this poster.

None of the examples involve government-coerced redistribution, which is the defining characteristic of the American left. Instead, we have five examples of voluntary goodness, a characteristic that is more commonly found where capitalism flourishes.

Indeed, it’s worth noting that supposedly selfish capitalists in America give far more to charity than supposedly compassionate Europeans. And you won’t be surprised to learn that people is red states are far more generous than people in blue states.

In other words, leftists are Scrooges with their own money who then try to mitigate their guilt by using coercive government to redistribute other people’s money.

Sounds like they should heed the words of Libertarian Jesus.

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All I Want for Christmas Is…a Spending Cap

What could be more fun than to spend the day before Christmas reading about fiscal policy?

I realize there are probably endless ways to answer that question, particularly since normal people are probably more concerned about the rumor that the feds are going to arrest Santa Claus.

But America’s fiscal future is very grim, so hopefully some of you will be interested in some relevant new research on spending caps.

My buddy Sven Larson has a scholarly article about deficits and the Swiss Debt Brake that has just been published by the Journal of Governance and Regulation.

The first half of his article is a review of the academic debate on whether deficits are good (the Keynesians) or bad (the austerity crowd). This literature review is necessary for that sort of article, though I think it’s a distraction because deficits are merely a symptom. The real problem is excessive government.

Sven then gets to the meat of his article, which considers whether the Swiss Debt Brake (which imposes a cap on annual spending increases) is a better approach because it isn’t focused on annual budget deficits (which are susceptible to big swings because income tax revenues can dramatically increase or decline based on the economy’s performance).

…the Swiss Debt Brake…focuses primarily on the non-cyclical, i.e., structural part of the deficit in Switzerland (Geier 2011). By focusing on the long-term debt outlook rather than the short-term or annual ebbs and flows, the debt brake allows the economy to move through a business cycle without disruptive fiscal-policy incursions. …Since it was introduced in 2003 it appears to have worked as intended. Beljean and Geier (2013) present evidence suggesting that the brake has ended a long period of sustained government deficits.

Sven then cites my Wall Street Journal column on the Debt Brake, which is nice, and he then shares some new evidence about the economic benefits of the Swiss spending cap.

The Swiss economy grew faster in the first decade after the brake went into effect than in the decade immediately preceding its enactment.

And, in his conclusion, he speculates that the United States could reap similar economic benefits with a spending cap.

Should Congress manage to pass and comply with an adapted version of the Swiss debt brake, it is reasonable to expect…stronger economic growth. As an indication of the potential macroeconomic gains, a real growth rate of three percent as opposed to two percent over a period of ten years would add more than $2.3 trillion in annual economic activity to the U.S. GDP.

The degree of additional growth that would be triggered by a spending cap is an open question, of course, but if we could get even half of that additional growth, it would be a boon for American living standards.

Let’s now shift to an article with a much more hostile view of spending caps.

I wrote very recently about the adoption of a spending cap in Brazil. This new system will limit government spending so that it can’t grow faster than inflation. Sounds very reasonable to me, but Zeeshan Aleem has a Vox column that is apoplectic about the supposed horrible consequences.

Americans worried that Donald Trump will try to shred the nation’s social welfare programs can take some grim comfort by looking south: No matter what Republicans do, it will pale in comparison with the changes that are about to ravage Brazil. On Thursday, a new constitutional amendment goes into effect in Brazil that effectively freezes federal government spending for two decades. Since the spending cap can only increase by the rate of inflation in the previous year, that means that spending on government programs like education, health care, pensions, infrastructure, and defense will, in real terms, remain paused at 2016 levels until the year 2037.

Since the burden of government spending in Brazil has been rising far faster than the growth of the private sector (thus violating fiscal policy’s Golden Rule), I view the spending cap as a long-overdue correction.

Interesting, Aleem admits that the policy is being welcomed by financial markets.

As far as inspiring faith from investors, the amendment appears to be working. Brazil’s currency and stocks rose during December in part because of the passage of the measure.

But the author is upset that there won’t be as much redistribution spending.

…the spending cap…places the burden of reining in government spending entirely on beneficiaries of government spending — all Brazilians, but especially the poor and the vulnerable.

Instead, Aleem wants big tax increases.

…the amendment does a great deal to limit the expenditure of government funds, it doesn’t do anything to directly address how to generate them directly: taxes. “The major cause of our fiscal crisis is falling revenues,” Carvalho says… Carvalho says taking an ax to spending is coming at the expense of discussing “taxing the very rich, who do not pay very much in taxes, or eliminating tax cuts that have been given to big corporations.”

Wow, methinks Professor Carvalho and I don’t quite see things the same way.

I would point out that falling revenues in a deep recession is not a surprise. But that’s an argument for policies that boost growth, not for big tax hikes.

Especially since the long-run fiscal problem in Brazil is a growing burden of government spending.

And it’s worth noting that overall impact of the spending cap, even after 10 years, will be to bring the size of the public sector back to where it was in about 2008.

Let’s close by reviewing an article by Charles Blahous of the Mercatus Center. Chuck starts by noting that we have a spending problem. More specifically, the burden of government is expanding faster than the private economy.

…to say we have a problem with deficits and debt is an oversimplification. What we have instead is an overspending problem, and the federal debt is essentially a symptom of that problem. …federal spending has grown and will grow (under current projections) faster than our Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

The solution, he explains, is a procedural version of a spending cap.

To solve this, future federal budgets in which spending grows as a percentage of GDP from one year to the next should require a congressional supermajority (e.g., three-fifths or two-thirds) to pass. Only if spending in the budget does not rise as a percentage of GDP from one year to the next could it be passed with a simple majority.

Chuck explains why there should be a limit on spending increases.

…we cannot permanently continue to allow federal spending to grow faster than America’s production. …as government spending growth exceeds GDP growth, we all lose more control over our economic lives. As individuals we will have less of a say over the disposition of each dollar we earn, because the government will claim a perpetually-growing share.

And higher taxes are never a solution to a spending problem.

…this problem cannot be solved by raising taxes. Raising taxes…does not avoid the necessity of keeping spending from rising faster than our productive output. Raising taxes may even have the downside of deferring the necessary solutions on the spending side.

The last sentence in that abstract is key. I’ve written about why – in theory – I could accept some tax increases in order to obtain some permanent spending reforms. In the real world of Washington, however, politicians will never adopt meaningful spending restraint if there’s even the slightest rumor that higher taxes may be an option.

He concludes that current budget rules need to be updated.

…budget rules apply no procedural barriers to continuing unsustainable spending growth rates, while legislative points of order protect baseline fiscal practices in which both federal spending and revenues grow faster than the economy’s ability to keep pace.

I certainly agree, though it would be nice to see something much stronger than just changes in congressional procedures.

Perhaps something akin to the constitutional spending caps in Hong Kong and Switzerland?

Now that would be a nice Christmas present for American taxpayers.

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The Illinois Death Spiral

There’s a somewhat famous quote from Adam Smith (“there is a great deal of ruin in a nation“) about the ability of a country to survive and withstand lots of bad public policy. I’ve tried to get across the same point by explaining that you don’t need perfect policy, or even good policy. A nation can enjoy a bit of growth so long as policy is merely adequate. Just give the private sector some “breathing room,” I’ve argued.

Growth will be weaker with bad policy, of course, but if a nation already is relatively rich, then perhaps voters don’t really care.

But there’s a catch. If you add demographic change to the equation, then bad policy can be a recipe for crisis rather than slow growth. This is one of the reasons why I’m worried about the long-run outlook for Europe, with particular concern about Eastern Europe (by the way, we also have to worry in America).

Simply stated, you have to pay attention to the ratio of producers to consumers. And that’s why demographics is important. Falling birthrates and increasing lifespans will wreak havoc with Europe’s tax-and-transfer welfare states.

But there’s another form of demographic change that also can have a big impact. Migration patterns can alter the economic vitality of a jurisdiction. I’ve written about the exodus of French entrepreneurs who move to other countries with better tax systems, and the same thing happens with migration between American states.

And you probably won’t be surprised to learn that Illinois is usually on the losing end.

The Wall Street Journal opines on the state’s grim outlook.

…taxpayers are fleeing the Land of Lincoln in record numbers. According to the Census Bureau, Illinois now leads the nation for the steepest population decline. Between July 2015 and July 2016, Illinois lost some 114,000 people in net migration to other states, with total population decline of 37,508 (including births and deaths). For the third year in a row it was the only state to have lost population among the nine in its Great Lakes and Mid-America region.

But what’s really important, the WSJ explains, is that Illinois is losing people who are net producers and contributors.

…the average person moving out of the state earns some $20,000 more than the average person moving in. According to IRS data for tax year 2014 (filed in 2015), the average income of the taxpayer leaving Illinois was $76,824 while the average income of the new arrival was $56,689. That gap is widening and the differential can be traced to policy decisions as the state staggers under pension debt and an entrenched Democratic-public union machine in Springfield. In an effort to cover growing debt, in January 2011 state lawmakers raised the personal income tax rate to 5% from 3% and the corporate income tax to 9.5% from 7.3%. …The exodus accelerated to 73,500 from July 2011 to July 2012, 67,300 in 2012-2013, 95,000 in 2013-2014, 105,000 in 2014-2015 and 114,000 this year.

The class-warfare tax hike in 2011 was a terrible signal to investors and entrepreneurs.

Illinois already was losing both taxpayers and taxable income during the first decade of the century and the tax increase accelerated the process.

And keep in mind that the state also has a gigantic unfunded liability because of absurd promises of lavish pensions and fringe benefits for state and local government employees.

It’s almost as if the politicians in Springfield want to make the state unattractive.

Though the situation isn’t totally hopeless. Voters elected an anti-tax governor in 2014 and there’s a possibility that the destructive tax increase of 2011 won’t be renewed.

The Wall Street Journal makes a very wise recommendation to the Governor.

Democrats are trying to shake Mr. Rauner down for a repeat. He needs to hold firm to stop the state’s population exodus.

Needless to say, it would be a good idea to let the tax hike expire. That being said, that simply gets the state back to where it was in 2010, which wasn’t exactly a strong position.

The bottom line is that Illinois may have passed the tipping point and entered a death spiral. Sort of akin to being the Greece of America.

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Wonderful Things Happen When the Private Sector Has Breathing Room to Function

In the spirit of the Christmas season, I’m going to be uncharacteristically happy and upbeat today by pointing out that we don’t need perfection to have more prosperity. We don’t even need very good policy to enjoy growth.

All that’s really necessary is adequate policy. Just allow the private sector a bit of freedom (I’ve referred to this as giving the economy breathing room) and living standards will improve.

We should still strive for perfection, of course, and at least hope for good or very good policy. After all, there’s a big difference in the long run between an economy that grows 5 percent per year versus an economy that grows 3 percent annually, just as there is a big difference over time between an economy 3 percent each year compared to one that grows 1 percent annually.

But my main point is that lives all over the world have dramatically improved over time because, on average, we’ve had decent-enough policy.

Just consider the United States. We’ve never been a laissez-faire paradise. But there’s been enough economic freedom that, over time, we’ve enjoyed amazing improvements in living standards.

And the same is true for the world.

I’ve previously shared powerful videos from Deirdre McCloskey and Don Boudreaux that show the world has become much richer over time, and my colleague Marian Tupy has a website, Human Progress, that provides a wealth of data (including a calculator that allows you to see how things have improved since the year you were born).

Today, I want to share some very upbeat data from Our World in Data. Here’s Max Roser’s cheerful assessment of how life has gotten better over the past 200 years.

The reduction is extreme poverty is probably the most important chart, and presumably helps to drive the big improvements in other factors such as literacy, education, and child mortality.

And what’s driven the drop in extreme poverty, I would argue, is economic liberty. Not the full explanation, to be sure, but people all over the world generally have more freedom than ever before to engage in voluntary exchange.

Yes, the state’s footprint is still far too large. Yes, all nations could grow faster with better policy. But let’s be happy about the fact that even weak growth, over time, can make a meaningful difference in the lives of ordinary people. So cheer up.

P.S. I can’t resist adding a depressing footnote. The traditional cost of bad policy is weak growth, which means living standards increase at a much slower pace. But there’s something else happening in the world that we have to add to the mix. The global change in demographics, combined with the tax-and-transfer welfare states that exist in most nations, are a very dangerous recipe. My fear is that we may move from a world where the “traditional cost” of “weak growth” may be replaced by a world with a “new cost” of “macro instability.” In other words, in the absence of reform, more and more countries are going to face Greek-style fiscal and economic chaos. Moreover, the magnitude of the mess will be so large that the International Monetary Fund and other entities won’t be able to provide bailouts (which is how Greece is being propped up).

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Help Veterans by Abolishing the Veterans Administration

With Christmas approaching, people are putting together their lists for Santa Claus.

I’m not sure I’ll find any of these things under my tree, but here’s what I want.

• Get rid of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
• Shut down the Department of Agriculture.
• Eliminate the Department of Transportation.
• Abolish the Department of Education.
• Pull the plug on the Department of Energy.

In the joyous spirit of the season, now let’s add to this collection by targeting the Department of Veterans Affairs.

The is the agency that put veterans on secret waiting lists, leading to needless and tragic deaths. And then the bureaucrats awarded themselves big bonuses (nice work if you can get it!).

And the shoddy treatment of America’s former warriors continues. Here are some excerpts from a story in the Daily Caller.

…almost 600 veterans who received dental care may have been infected with HIV or hepatitis. …the VA is notifying 592 veterans who had dental procedures from a particular dental provider… If any veterans test positive for HIV or hepatitis, they can receive free treatment.

Gee, that’s a great deal. You may get a life-altering illness, but the bureaucracy that enabled the illness will give you additional treatments.

Oh, and you’ll be glad to know that the VA dentist who potentially exposed the veterans is continuing to draw a government paycheck.

Instead of being fired, that dentist has been reassigned to an administrative role, despite potentially exposing almost 600 veterans to HIV or hepatitis.

Like I said, nice work if you can get it.

The VA’s penchant for secrecy wasn’t limited to waiting lists. The bureaucracy also has tried to cover up poor performance at dozens of local medical facilities.

Stars and Stripes has revealed the unseemly details.

A veterans group has blasted the Department of Veterans Affairs over leaked internal documents showing dozens of medical facilities performing at below-average levels. USA Today obtained the documents and published them Wednesday, revealing the secret system. The VA had previously refused to make the ratings public, claiming the system is for internal use only. It rates each of the VA’s medical centers on a scale of one to five, with one being the worst. …The worst performing centers are in Dallas and El Paso, Texas, and in Nashville, Memphis and Murfreesboro, Tenn. The documents also show that some medical centers have not improved despite scandals and scrutiny from Congress. The Phoenix VA still sits at a one-star rating despite a 2014 scandal revealing veterans died while waiting for care and that staff manipulated wait-time data there and at other VA hospitals across the country.

You’ll be happy to learn, however, that there were some consequences for the Phoenix division.

In response the malfeasance, neglect, and mistreatment of veterans, the leaders of the VA in Washington decided to punish the local bureaucracy by…well, take a wild guess.

The VA announced last October it plans to allocate $28 million to the Phoenix center in addition to its annual budget.

While these scandals are maddening, they are a distraction from the bigger problem. Simply stated, the core structure of the VA is misguided and the entire bureaucracy should be shut down.

Two of my colleagues, Michael Cannon and Chris Preble, explained the problem in a column for the New York Times.

Even when the department works exactly as intended, it helps inflict great harm on veterans, active-duty military personnel and civilians. Here’s how. Veterans’ health and disability benefits are some of the largest costs involved in any military conflict, but they are delayed costs, typically reaching their peak 40 or 50 years after the conflict ends. …when Congress debates whether to authorize and fund military action, it can act as if those costs don’t exist. But concealing those costs makes military conflicts appear less burdensome and therefore increases their likelihood. It’s as if Congress deliberately structured veterans’ benefits to make it easier to start wars. …The scandal isn’t at the Department of Veterans Affairs. The scandal is the Department of Veterans Affairs.

They proposed an idea which would lead to honest budgeting and make the Department of Veterans Affairs superfluous.

We propose a system of veterans’ benefits that would be funded by Congress in advance. It would allow veterans to purchase life, disability and health insurance from private insurers. Those policies would cover losses related to their term of service, and would pay benefits when they left active duty through the remainder of their lives. To cover the cost, military personnel would receive additional pay sufficient to purchase a statutorily defined package of benefits at actuarially fair rates. …Insurers and providers would be more responsive because veterans could fire them — something they cannot do to the Department of Veterans Affairs. Veterans’ insurance premiums would also reveal, and enable recruits and active-duty personnel to compare, the risks posed by various military jobs and career paths. Most important, under this system, when a military conflict increases the risk to life and limb, insurers would adjust veterans’ insurance premiums upward, and Congress would have to increase military pay immediately to enable military personnel to cover those added costs.

Jonah Goldberg of National Review takes a different approach, but reaches the same conclusion.

He starts by pointing out more bad behavior by the VA.

There is only one guaranteed way to get fired from the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. Falsifying records won’t do it. Prescribing obsolete drugs won’t do it. Cutting all manner of corners on health and safety is, at worst, going to get you a reprimand. No, the only sure-fire way to get canned at the VA is to report any of these matters to authorities who might do something about it. …“Our concern is really about the pattern that we’re seeing, where whistleblowers who disclose wrongdoing are facing trumped-up punishment, but the employees who put veterans’ health at risk are going unpunished,” Special Counsel Carolyn Lerner recently told National Public Radio.

And he then says the only real solution is to eliminate the bureaucracy.

The real fix is to get rid of the VA entirely. The United States has an absolute obligation to do right by veterans. It does not have an absolute obligation to run a lousy, wasteful, unaccountable, corrupt, and inefficient bureaucracy out of Washington. …Imagine that the federal government simply gave all of the VA hospitals to the states they’re in. Instead of the VA budget, Congress just cut checks to states to spend on their veterans. You’d still have problems, of course. But what you would also have are local elected officials — city councilmen, state legislators, mayors, governors, etc. — whom voters could hold directly accountable. …this process would allow everyone to learn from both mistakes and successes in a way that a centralized bureaucracy cannot or will not. Personally, I’d rather see the money spent on veterans go straight to the veterans themselves, in the form of cash payments or vouchers to be used for health care in the private sector.

Amen.

National defense is a legitimate function of the federal government, so that means fairly compensating the people who give service to the country. Especially if they suffer wounds that require short-run or long-run care.

But as both my colleagues and Jonah Goldberg have explained, none of that means we need a cumbersome and blundering (and sometimes venal) bureaucracy.

Donald Trump shouldn’t be figuring out who to pick to head the VA, he should be putting together a plan to get rid of it.

To conclude, I found a nice chart that shows when various departments were created, which I have helpfully augmented by crossing out the ones that I’ve explained should be abolished. As you can see, there is still some low-hanging fruit to go after.

By the way, the White House website says the Small Business Administration has “the status of Cabinet-rank,” whatever that means. I guess it’s sort of like a participation trophy for the SBA.

In any event, I’ve also explained why that useless bureaucracy should be wiped out.

And I guess it’s good news that the Postal Service is no longer part of the cabinet, though that’s secondary to the more important issue of getting the government out of the business of delivering mail.

P.S. The VA also is capable of wasting money in ways that don’t involve premature deaths for veterans, so it’s a full-service bureaucracy!

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Creative Destruction, Job Losses, Technological Change, and Human Progress

There’s a meme on Facebook and Twitter that asks people to “confess your unpopular opinions.”

I suppose I could play that game by saying that I’d rather eat fast food than patronize most fancy restaurants (especially if I have to pay the bill!). And I’ve unintentionally played that game already by admitting that politicians aren’t always sinister and evil.

But I have something even more astounding to confess: My leftist friends are right when they assert that the free market destroys jobs.

Not only are they right, they probably underestimate the number of jobs that are destroyed by capitalism. Over time, millions of jobs vanish because of the greedy pursuit of profits.

Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute shares some very sobering data on how almost all of the big companies of the 1950s have faded over the past 60 years.

Comparing the Fortune 500 companies in 1955 to the Fortune 500 in 2014, there are only 61 companies that appear in both lists. In other words, only 12.2% of the Fortune 500 companies in 1955 were still on the list 59 years later in 2014, and almost 88% of the companies from 1955 have either gone bankrupt, merged, or still exist but have fallen from the top Fortune 500 companies (ranked by total revenues). Most of the companies on the list in 1955 are unrecognizable, forgotten companies today (e.g. Armstrong Rubber, Cone Mills, Hines Lumber, Pacific Vegetable Oil, and Riegel Textile). …That’s a lot of churning and creative destruction, and it’s probably safe to say that almost all of today’s Fortune 500 companies will be replaced by new companies in new industries over the next 59 years.

And why did these companies disappear or shrink in size, thus leading to major job losses?

Mostly because capitalists, seeking profits, invested money in ways that displaced old technologies, hurt old competitors, and made old products less attractive.

Sounds terrible, right? Jobs are lost because of greedy rich people trying to increase their wealth.

And if you’re one of the people in the unemployment line, it is terrible.

But keep in mind that this process of creative destruction led to new technologies, new competitors and new products. And the net effect of all these changes is that – on average – we are much richer.

Mark elaborates.

…for that we should be thankful. The constant turnover in the Fortune 500 is a positive sign of the dynamism and innovation that characterizes a vibrant consumer-oriented market economy… In the end, the creative destruction that results in a constantly changing group of Fortune 500 companies is driven by the endless pursuit of sales and profits that can only come from serving customers with low prices, high quality and great service.

Indeed, this system is what has given us the “hockey stick” of human progress.

All this disruption and change is what enables our society, over time, to grow faster and produce more goods and services and lower prices.

At least when the market is allowed to operate with the right set of policies – what I call the recipe for growth and prosperity.

In my speeches, I sometimes make similar points by using historical examples.

• I ask audiences to think about how personal computers have made our lives more enjoyable and productive, but I then ask them to ponder what happened to the people who had jobs making, selling, and servicing typewriters.
• I ask audiences to think about how the automobile boosted productivity and increased mobility, but I then ask them to consider the lost jobs of people in the horse and buggy industry.
• I ask audiences to think about how electrification and the light bulb improved the economy in countless ways, but I then ask them to speculate on the number of jobs that were destroyed in the candle-making sector.

The sad reality is that progress has a price tag. Yes, we are far richer because of great inventions that boosted productivity and improved lives. But that doesn’t change the fact that real workers with real families often experienced genuine anguish when jobs in some sectors disappeared. And that’s still happening today.

And workers are largely blameless when job losses occur. All they did was exchange honest work for honest pay. It was the capitalists who made mistakes by not managing companies effectively and not allocating capital efficiently (or, to be more charitable, they simply failed to anticipate major changes that were about to occur).

By the way, this isn’t an argument for government intervention. We would be much poorer today if politicians tried to save jobs every time there was creative destruction in the economy. Perhaps most important, every job that they “saved” would be offset by the jobs (and prosperity) that weren’t created or didn’t materialize because the clumsy foot of government replaced the invisible hand of the market.

What Bastiat taught the world in the 1800s is still true today. We have to consider both the seen (the jobs that are saved) and the unseen (the greater number of jobs that don’t get created) when contemplating the impact of government.

This is why I want the economy to be as dynamic and innovative as possible so that displaced workers can find new positions as quickly as possible, hopefully earning even more money.

Here’s a short video from Learn Liberty that teaches about this process of creative destruction.

P.S. There’s also another Learn Liberty video that teaches about creative destruction. I’m a big fan of all their videos, including the ones on the Great Depression, central banking, government spending, and the Drug War. And the videos on myths of capitalism, the miracle of modern prosperity, and the legality of Obamacare also should be shared widely. You also should watch their videos on job creation, the price system, public choice, and the Food and Drug Administration.

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More Tax Dollars for Government Schools ≠ Better Education

While I have great fondness for some of the visuals I’ve created over the years (especially “two wagons” and “apple harvesting“), I confess that none of my creations have ever been as clear and convincing as the iconic graph on education spending and education outcomes created by the late Andrew Coulson.

I can’t imagine anyone looking at his chart and not immediately realizing that you don’t get better results by pouring more money into the government’s education monopoly.

But the edu-crat lobby acts as if evidence doesn’t matter. At the national level, the state level, and the local level, the drumbeat is the same: Give us more money if you care about kids.

So let’s build on Coulson’s chart to show why teachers’ unions and other special interests are wrong.

Gerard Robinson of the American Enterprise Institute and Professor Benjamin Scafidi from Kennesaw State University take a close look at this issue.

…education is important to the economic and social well-being of our nation, which is why it is the No. 1 line item in 41 state budgets. …Schools need extra money to help struggling students, or so goes the long-standing thinking of traditional education reformers who believe a lack of resources – teachers, counselors, social workers, technology, books, school supplies – is the problem. …a look back at the progress we’ve made under reformers’ traditional response to fixing low-performing schools – simply showering them with more money – makes it clear that this approach has been a costly failure.

And when the authors say it’s been a “costly failure,” they’re not exaggerating.

Since World War II, inflation-adjusted spending per student in American public schools has increased by 663 percent. Where did all of that money go? One place it went was to hire more personnel. Between 1950 and 2009, American public schools experienced a 96 percent increase in student population. During that time, public schools increased their staff by 386 percent – four times the increase in students. The number of teachers increased by 252 percent, over 2.5 times the increase in students. The number of administrators and other staff increased by over seven times the increase in students. …This staffing surge still exists today. From 1992 to 2014 – the most recent year of available data – American public schools saw a 19 percent increase in their student population and a staffing increase of 36 percent. This decades-long staffing surge in American public schools has been tremendously expensive for taxpayers, yet it has not led to significant changes in student achievement. For example, public school national math scores have been flat (and national reading scores declined slightly) for 17-year-olds since 1992.

By the way, the failure of government schools doesn’t affect everyone equally.

Parents with economic resources (such as high-profile politicians) can either send their kids to private schools or move to communities where government schools still maintain some standards.

But for lower-income households, their options are very limited.

Minorities disproportionately suffer, as explained by Juan Williams in the Wall Street Journal.

While 40% of white Americans age 25-29 held bachelor’s degrees in 2013, that distinction belonged to only 15% of Hispanics, and 20% of blacks. …The root of this problem: Millions of black and Hispanic students in U.S. schools simply aren’t taught to read well enough to flourish academically.  …according to a March report by Child Trends, based on 2015 data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), only 21% of Hispanic fourth-grade students were deemed “proficient” in reading. This is bad news. A fourth-grader’s reading level is a key indicator of whether he or she will graduate from high school. The situation is worse for African-Americans: A mere 18% were considered “proficient” in reading by fourth grade.

But Juan points out that the problems aren’t confined to minority communities. The United States has a national education problem.

The problem isn’t limited to minority students. Only 46% of white fourth-graders—and 35% of fourth-graders of all races—were judged “proficient” in reading in 2015. In general, American students are outperformed by students abroad. According to the most recent Program for International Student Assessment, a series of math, science and reading tests given to 15-year-olds around the world, the U.S. placed 17th among the 34 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries in reading.

This is very grim news, especially when you consider that the United States spends more on education – on a per-pupil basis – than any other country.

Here’s a table confirming Juan’s argument. It lacks the simple clarity of Andrew Coulson’s graph, but if you look at these numbers, it’s difficult to reach any conclusion other than we spend a lot in America and get very mediocre results.

Juan concludes his column with a plea for diversity, innovation, and competition.

For black and Hispanic students falling behind at an early age, their best hope is for every state, no matter its minority-student poverty rate, to take full responsibility for all students who aren’t making the grade—and get those students help now. That means adopting an attitude of urgency when it comes to saving a child’s education. Specifically, it requires cities and states to push past any union rules that protect underperforming schools and bad teachers. Urgency also means increasing options for parents, from magnet to charter schools. Embracing competition among schools is essential to heading off complacency based on a few positive signs. American K-12 education is in trouble, especially for minority children, and its continuing neglect is a scandal.

He’s right, but he should focus his ire on his leftist friends and colleagues. They’re the ones (including the NAACP!) standing in the proverbial schoolhouse door and blocking the right kind of education reform.

P.S. This is a depressing post, so let’s close with a bit of humor showing the evolution of math lessons in government schools.

P.P.S. If you want some unintentional humor, the New York Times thinks that education spending has been reduced.

P.P.P.S. Shifting to a different topic, another great visual (which also happens to be the most popular item I’ve ever shared on International Liberty) is the simple image properly defining the enemies of liberty and progress.

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End Food Stamps as Part of a Federalist Agenda to Decentralize Redistribution Programs

Learning from the tremendous success of welfare reform during the Clinton Administration, the entire Washington-based welfare state should be junked.

It’s a complicated and costly mess that traps poor people in dependency while ripping off taxpayers and creating very comfortable lives for “poverty pimps.”

It would be much simpler (and more effective) to simply take all the money that’s now being spent on these programs and send it to the states as part of a “block grant” and let them figure out how best to help poor people without some of the negative consequences caused by the current plethora of programs.

I’ve previously written about how this would be a very desirable reform of Medicaid. Today, let’s build upon some previous analysis and explain why it would be good to get Washington out of the business of Food Stamps.

Let’s start with the fact that the program subsidizes purchases that have nothing to do with avoiding genuine hunger and deprivation. Indeed, as documented in a story in The Federalist, Food Stamps subsidize a considerable amount of unhealthy food.

New data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture reveals food stamp recipients spent more money on sweetened beverages than they did on fruits, vegetables, bread, cereal, or milk. The USDA analyzed transactional data from a leading grocery store in 2011 and found that Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) households spent a greater percentage of money on unhealthier foods than those who didn’t use taxpayer funds to pay for their groceries. …The recent USDA study only looked at data from one grocery store retailer. It did not examine how SNAP funds were spent at convenience stores, which presumably would have significantly increased the amount of unhealthy foods purchased with taxpayer dollars.

Here are some of the details.

…The second largest expenditure for SNAP households was sweetened beverages, whereas the second largest expenditure for non-SNAP households was vegetables. …SNAP households spent 7.2 percent of their money on vegetables, while non-SNAP households spent 9.1 percent of their grocery money on this category of food. When comparing fruit purchases, the gap widens slightly: SNAP households spent 4.7 percent on fruits, and non-SNAP households spent an averages of 7.2 percent in the same category.

Here’s the comparison of purchases from those with food stamps and those using their own money.

As one might suspect, the problem has gotten worse during the profligate Bush-Obama era.

During President Obama’s tenure, the numbers and percentages of Americans using taxpayer’s money to buy their groceries has drastically increased. SNAP participation has increased 78 percent in the past ten years and remains near its all-time high… Food stamp usage also dramatically increased during President George W. Bush’s tenure… That’s because Bush signed a dramatic expansion of food welfare inside a farm bill. This expansion, among other things, made it easier to sign up and made non-citizens eligible to use U.S. taxpayers’ funds to fund grocery excursions.

By the way, I think poor people (indeed, all people) should be able to eat anything they want. That being said, there’s something perverse about subsidizing and encouraging unhealthy patterns.

Particularly when obesity is one of the biggest health problems in low-income communities.

The program also has always had major problems with fraud, as illustrated by a recent scandal in Florida.

The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida announced the largest food stamp fraud bust in U.S. history Wednesday afternoon. …500 people had their identities stolen in Palm Beach County to be used to get fake Electronic Benefit Transfer cards which were then exchanged for cash… Federal charges were filed against 22 retail store owners or operators in connection with schemes to illegally redeem food stamp benefits for cash, the Justice Department said. Indictments allege the retailers received more than $13 million in federal payments.

Even millionaires bilk the system.

A Geauga County millionaire—who comes from royalty—has been indicted on charges he illegally received food stamps and medicaid assistance. Ali Pascal Mahvi is facing four felony counts which could put him behind bars for more than four years if convicted. …Meyer informed Mahvi of the indictment at Mahvi’s 8,000 square foot home. …Prosecutors say Mahvi defrauded Medicaid out of $45,000 and about $8,400 in food stamps. Mahvi, who is the son of an Iranian prince, estimates his worth at about $120 million. His $800,000 home features five bedrooms and five bathrooms, an in-ground swimming pool, and stable with horses. Mahvi, who says he owns 70 percent of a resort in St. Lucia, says he’s played by the rules.

And some scammers become millionaires from the other end of the system.

Convenience store owner Vida Ofori Causey out of Worcester, Mass. was charged in federal court Monday after pleading guilty to $3.6 million worth of food stamp fraud. …“Causey purchased the benefits at a discounted value of approximately fifty cents for every SNAP dollar,” a press release from Department of Justice stated. “By so doing, Causey caused the USDA to electronically deposit into a bank account controlled by her the full face value of the SNAP benefits fraudulently obtained.” As a result, recipients had cash on hand to buy restricted items. The restricted items could include alcohol, cigarettes and even drugs.

Stories like this reinforce the argument that states should be in charge of the program, if for no other reason than there will be fiscal pressure not to waste so much money.

Moreover, there’s considerable evidence that states are more sensible in their approach. I’ve already written about good reforms in Maine and Wisconsin. Well, the Daily Caller has encouraging news that the good news in those states is part of a national trend.

The number of people receiving food stamps has declined sharply due in part to the reinstatement of work requirements earlier this year, according to a report Wednesday. …“Caseloads fell sharply in April, especially in states reinstating a three-month time limit for unemployed childless adults without disabilities, new Agriculture Department data show,” CBPP detailed in its report. “The data, covering the first month in which most of the roughly 20 states that imposed the time limit in January began cutting people off.” The USDA has required food stamp work requirements since an overhaul of the program in 1996. Able-bodied adults without children are required to work at least 20 hours a week or else lose their benefits after three months. …Work requirements have now been restored in a total of 40 states compared to 44 states this past June that had either a waiver or a partial waiver.

And let’s look specifically at some positive developments in Kansas.

…before Kansas instituted a work requirement, 93 percent of food stamp recipients were in poverty, with 84 percent in severe poverty. Few of the food stamp recipients claimed any income. Only 21 percent were working at all, and two-fifths of those working were working fewer than 20 hours per week. Once work requirements were established, thousands of food stamp recipients moved into the workforce, promoting income gains and a decrease in poverty. Forty percent of the individuals who left the food stamp ranks found employment within three months, and about 60 percent found employment within a year. They saw an average income increase of 127 percent. Half of those who left the rolls and are working have earnings above the poverty level. Even many of those who stayed on food stamps saw their income increase significantly. …Furthermore, with the implementation of the work requirement in Kansas, the caseload dropped by 75 percent. Previously, Kansas was spending $5.5 million per month on food stamp benefits for able-bodied adults; it now spends $1.2 million.

P.S. In the long run, the block grant should be phased out so the federal government isn’t involved at all in the business of income redistribution. If we care about the limits on federal power in Article 1, Section 8, then states should be responsible for choosing how much to raise in addition to choosing how to spend.

P.P.S. Just in case you think fraud and waste is a rare problem in the program, here are some other examples.

• 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.P.P.S. While I periodically mock California, folks in the Golden State deserve praise for being the least likely to use Food Stamps. Their neighbors in Oregon, by contrast, are very proficient at mooching.

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Shut Down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and Unleash the Free Market

Remember the financial crisis and market meltdown from late last decade? That wasn’t a fun time, and we’re still dealing with some of the fallout.

Let’s specifically look at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two privately owned but government-created housing finance institutions (also known as government-sponsored enterprises, or GSEs). Fannie and Freddie received giant bailouts during the crisis, but they weren’t shut down. Instead, they have continued to operate, continued to benefit from implicit government subsidies, and continued to dominate housing finance because of their government-protected status.

Under the conditions of the bailouts, however, the excess cash generated by this government-subsidized duopoly have gone to the Treasury rather than to shareholders (incidentally, I wrote “excess cash” rather than “profit” because I think of the latter as money that is fairly earned in a competitive marketplace, whereas the earnings of the GSE’s are the result of an artificial, subsidized, and protected system).

In any event, the bailout will have been repaid at some point in the near future, so the government has to decide the next step. Should Fannie and Freddie be allowed to simply go back to their old model?

As you might expect, Cato’s expert on the issue, Mark Calabria, has a lot to say about the issue. In a column co-authored with Alex Pollock of the American Enterprise Institute, he proposes a set of reforms.

Nobody wants the old Fannie and Freddie back; nobody wants them to stay on indefinitely in conservatorship. What is required are practical steps forward.

Mark and Alex identify specific requirements that should be met before allowing Fannie and Freddie off the leash, starting with basic capital requirements and other reforms so the GSEs are less likely to create instability and excessive risk.

Take away Fannie and Freddie’s capital arbitrage and set their equity capital requirements in line with other financial institutions of similar size. Equity of at least 5 percent of total assets should be their required leverage capital ratio. …Given their undiversified business, something more might be prudent. In any case, the hyper-leverage which allowed Fannie and Freddie to put the whole financial system at risk needs to be permanently ended. …Designate them as the Systemically Important Financial Institutions (SIFIs) they indubitably are. Fannie and Freddie…have conclusively demonstrated their ability to generate huge systemic risk.

They also say Fannie and Freddie should no longer have special privileges. If these GSEs want to act like private companies, the should be subjected to all the laws and rules that apply to private companies.

End all their securities law exemptions. …End all their preferences in banking law and regulation. …End their exemption from state and local income taxes. …End all their exemptions from consumer protection rules. …Open up their charters to competition just like banking charters.

In a column for the Wall Street Journal, the former heads of the FDIC and Wells Fargo, William Isaac and Richard Kovacevich, point out that President-Elect Trump wants to do the right thing and shrink the risky role of government.

…the president-elect want[s] to privatize the home-mortgage market and “will get it done reasonably fast.” That’s good news for American homeowners, the economy and taxpayers who were forced to foot the bill after the 2008 subprime mortgage meltdown. …this is not a radical proposal. The private sector provides mortgages in most major countries, and there is little difference in the share of homeownership between the U.S. and other developed countries. No other country has the equivalent of the private-public model of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—crony capitalism at its best.

Isaac and Kovacevich explain why the old approach is unacceptable.

…many politicians and industry participants believe that housing cannot prosper without government support. We disagree. The U.S. cannot afford to go through another financial crisis, which started with subprime mortgages and would never have been so large if the residential mortgage industry had been market-based. Subprime mortgages have existed for decades. But they were a small percentage of the mortgage market until Fannie and Freddie reduced credit standards to increase their market share and meet low-income homeownership targets mandated by Congress. By 2007 nearly 50% of mortgages originated in the U.S. were subprime and “alt-A” types with government agencies guaranteeing about 70% of those… Without these government guarantees, the subprime bubble and financial crisis would have never happened. Bank regulators and industry experts warned Congress for decades about Fannie and Freddie and their increasingly large and risky portfolios, but Congress failed to act.

They then point out how we can move to a system based instead on market, and that any subsidies and handouts should be limited and transparent.

The solution is straightforward: The public-private hybrid of Fannie and Freddie—“government-sponsored entities”—should be abolished, their existing business sold or liquidated, and the mortgage market privatized. …The current $686,000 cap on new mortgages guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie should be reduced by $100,000 a year. This would put the companies out of originating new mortgages within seven years. …if the government still wants to subsidize mortgages for low-income families and minorities, the cost should be on budget and transparent. The Federal Housing Administration already does this.

By the way, a private system wouldn’t mean an end to conventional mortgages.

Others speculate that, without Fannie and Freddie, mortgage rates would skyrocket and the 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage would vanish. We disagree. Nonconventional or “jumbo” 30-year mortgages not guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie have existed for decades. In the decade preceding the financial crisis, the interest rate on these jumbo mortgages averaged only about 0.25% higher than similar guaranteed mortgages, a difference of a little over $40 a month on a $200,000 mortgage. Shouldn’t Americans, like homeowners throughout the world, pay a tax-deductible $40 extra a month so taxpayers aren’t on the hook for hundreds of billions to bail out Fannie and Freddie?

Amen. Fannie and Freddie never should have been created in the first place.

And today, with the memory of their disastrous impact still fresh in our minds, we should do everything possible to shut down these corrupt GSEs. I’ve argued for this position over and over and over again.

Sadly (but not surprisingly), there are many people who want to move policy in the wrong direction. The Obama Administration has pushed for more risky housing handouts, often aided and abetted by Republicans who care more about pleasing lobbyists rather than protecting taxpayers.

And it goes without saying that Fannie and Freddie are proposing more handouts in order to create a bigger constituency that will advocate for their preservation.

Kevin Williamson of National Review looks at a crazy idea to create more risk from Fannie Mae.

…government-sponsored mortgage giant Fannie Mae roll[ed] out a daft new mortgage proposal that would allow borrowers without enough income to qualify for a mortgage to count income that isn’t theirs on their mortgage application. …Claiming that the money you are using for a down payment is yours when it has been lent to you by a family member or a friend was a crime… Fannie Mae, the organized-crime syndicate masquerading as a quasi-governmental entity, has other ideas. Under its new and cynically misnamed “HomeReady” program, borrowers with subprime credit don’t need to show that they have enough income to qualify for the mortgage they’re after — they simply have to show that all the people residing in their household put together have enough income to qualify for that mortgage. We’re not talking just about husbands and wives here, but any group of people who happen to share a roof and a mailing address. …That would be one thing if all these people were applying for a mortgage together, and were jointly on the hook for the mortgage payments. But that isn’t the case. HomeReady will permit borrowers to claim other people’s income for the purpose for qualifying for a mortgage, but will not give mortgage lenders any actual claim against that additional income. This is madness.

Madness is certainly an accurate description. If you want to be more circumspect, economic illiteracy is another option.

The bottom line is that government-subsidized risk is not a good idea.

And also keep in mind that shutting down Fannie and Freddie is just part of the solution. So long as deposit insurance exists, we’re going to have some instability in the financial system. And so long as government wants to subsidize housing for people with poor credit, taxpayers will be on the hook for losses. And so long as there are biases in the tax code for debt over equity and residential real estate over business investment, the economy won’t grow as fast.

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The Lavish Life of Overcompensated Bureaucrats

Yesterday I shared some very good news about Brazil adopting a spending cap.

Today, I also want to share some good news, though it’s not nearly as momentous.

Indeed, it’s not even good news. Instead, it’s just that some bad news isn’t as bad as it used to be.

I’m referring to the fact that the nation’s capital region used to be home to 10 of the nation’s 15-richest counties.

That was back in 2012, and I viewed it as a terrible sign that the DC area was packed with overpaid bureaucrats, oleaginous rent seekers, and government cronies, all of whom were enjoying undeserved wealth financed by hard-working taxpayers from the rest of America.

Well, now for the “good news.”

Terry Jeffrey has a column for CNS News about the current concentration of wealth in the national capital area.

The four richest counties in the United States, when measured by median household income, are all suburbs of Washington, D.C., according to newly released data from the Census Bureau. …Of the Top 20 richest counties in the nation, nine are suburbs of the city that serves as the seat of a federal government that in fiscal 2016 taxed away $3,266,774,000,000 from the American people, spent $3,854,100,000,000, and ran a $587,326,000,000 deficit.

The reason this awful data is good news (relatively speaking) is that the DC region is now home to “only” nine out of the 20-richest counties rather than 10 out of the 15-richest counties.

Here’s Terry’s list, which I’ve augmented by highlighting the jurisdictions that are home to many of the bureaucrats, lobbyists, and other insiders that are living on Easy Street thanks to the federal leviathan.

I also awarded a star to Los Alamos County in New Mexico since that’s another jurisdiction that has above-average income because of Uncle Sam.

To be sure, not every private-sector worker in these rich counties is a cronyist, lobbyist, or rent seeker, so it’s difficult to accurately say what share of the income and wealth in these various counties is earned and how much is a transfer from government.

But we can say with confidence that the bureaucrats who are over-represented in these jurisdictions get a lot more compensation than their counterparts in the private sector. Chris Edwards has been relentless in his efforts to document excessive pay for bureaucrats.

Since we’re on this topic, let’s enjoy some additional bits of data about the cushy life of our bureaucratic overlords.

In addition to lavish pay, federal employees also receive gold-plated benefits. Most of the money goes for pensions and healthcare, but you’ll be happy to know the feds have also figured out more creative ways of pampering the protected class.

…a variety of federal agencies in a number of locations provide “free” yoga classes to employees. But these classes are not free; since 2013, they have cost taxpayers over $150,000. The State Department spends $15,000 for yoga in the nation’s capital. A yoga instructor in from Berkeley, California is paid $4,000 a year from the Department of Agriculture’s Research Service. Of course, the Department of Energy…has gotten in on taxpayer financed yoga; but for $11,000 annually they also offer pilates at a California location. …The Railroad Retirement Board spends $11,000 annually for yoga classes for office workers at its Chicago headquarters.

And many federal bureaucrats have figured out how to enjoy another fringe benefit of federal employment.

The federal government is full of people pulling in six-figure compensation packages who spend their days…watching porn on government computers… One compulsive porno-phile over at the EPA was watching so much porn that it caught the attention of the Office of the Inspector General — i.e., he was watching so much porn that a federal official noticed — and when the OIG investigator showed up to see what the deal was, you know what that EPA guy did? He kept right on watching porn, with the OIG inspector in his office. At the FCC, bureaucratic home of the people who enforce such obscenity laws as we have, employees routinely spend the equivalent of a full workday each week watching porn. Treasury, General Service Administration, Commerce — porn, porn, and more porn. Of course nobody gets fired. Nobody ever gets fired. …Federal employees, according to OIG reports, also spend a great deal of time browsing online-dating sites (apparently without much success) and shopping.

By the way, the jab about “nobody gets fired” isn’t 100 percent accurate.

But if you want lots of job security, then latch on to the federal teat.

Federal workers are far more likely to be audited by the IRS or get arrested for drunk driving than they are to be fired from the civil service payroll for poor performance or misconduct. The odds are one-in-175 for the IRS audit and one-in-200 for the drunk driving arrest, while the odds for a fed to be fired in a given year are one-in-500, according to the Government Accountability Office. …Private sector workers face just the opposite situation. They have a roughly one-in-77 chance of being involuntarily terminated — the Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t distinguish between fires and layoffs — in a given month.

By the way, bureaucrats are sometimes forced into early retirement as “punishment” for misbehavior.

All things considered, though, we serfs shouldn’t complain too much.

After all, would it be proper to grouse about a group that does superlative work?

In the ranks of the federal government, 99 percent are really good at their jobs — and almost two-thirds exceed expectations or do outstanding work. That’s the conclusion of a new report by the Government Accountability Office, which also found that 78 percent of high-level civil servants — those in GS grades 13 through 15 — were given top performance scores of outstanding or fully successful….The glowing picture of everyone in calendar year 2013, the most recent data available to auditors, is…good news for federal agencies.

In reality, of course, these glowing performance reviews are highly suspect.

…a more likely reality to many in and outside of government. Rather than so many federal workers being exceptional, the system for rating them isn’t working right. …Federal workers themselves have long complained in annual surveys that their agencies do not deal with poor performers, hurting morale and efficiency. Lawmakers complain that it is nearly impossible to fire these employees, but bills to take away some of their their rights to appeal bad reviews have languished in Congress. …“Apparently the federal bureaucrats grading one another think virtually everyone who works for the government is doing a fantastic job,” Rep. Jeff Miller (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, said in a statement. “But given the dysfunction we’ve seen throughout the federal government over the last several years, that can’t possibly be true,” Miller said.

Of course it’s not true.

Misbehavior and malfeasance at bureaucracies such as the IRS and VA doesn’t prevent high ratings and generous bonuses. Instead, it’s almost as if doing the wrong thing is a job requirement.

Isn’t big government wonderful?

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A Big Fiscal Victory: Constitutional Spending Caps for Brazil!

The good thing about being a libertarian (above and beyond respecting the rights and liberties of other people) is that you can always say “I told you so” when government intervention leads to bad results. Obamacare is a very good (albeit very painful) example.

The bad thing about being a libertarian is that you don’t win many victories. No matter how much evidence is on your side, politicians usually do the wrong thing. Not because they are necessarily evil. They’re simply responding to “public choice” incentives.

Indeed, the only big victory that I’ve had in recent years was the sequester. And even that victory has been tarnished by the 2013 and 2015 deals that weakened the caps on discretionary outlays.

So I’m delighted to report that Brazil has actually amended its constitution to impose a spending cap. I was somewhat hopeful that this might happen when I wrote about the issue back in October, but never allowed myself to think it would actually happen.

The Wall Street Journal reports on this remarkable development.

Brazil’s Senate approved a measure capping public spending, delivering a victory to embattled President Michel Temer, who is struggling to close a massive budget deficit and revive the nation’s moribund economy. In an unusually rapid session with little discussion, lawmakers on Tuesday voted 53 to 16 to approve a constitutional amendment limiting the country’s annual spending growth to the previous year’s inflation rate. The move was a drastic shot of discipline for Brazil’s government, whose public debt and deficits have expanded at rates so worrisome that three major credit agencies have downgraded the nation’s credit rating to junk status. Several economists and analysts praised the constitutionally enforced limits as the only way for Brazil’s government to live within its means and restore investor confidence.

It’s remarkable that Brazil’s politicians were willing to tie their own hands, but they presumably had no choice because the nation’s finances deteriorated to the point that drastic measures were necessary.

The spending cap applies to the federal budget starting in 2017, except for education and health costs, which will be subject to the limits starting in 2018. It was the centerpiece of austerity measures proposed by Mr. Temer to shore up Brazil’s shaky public finances. Brazil’s budget deficit was a hefty 8.3% of gross domestic product in October, after growing almost steadily from 1.8% of GDP in July 2011. Gross debt was 70.3% of GDP in October, up from its more recent low of 51% of GDP in December 2012.

As you might expect, there was opposition.

..the measure drew the ire of opposition politicians, labor unions and citizens concerned that spending limits could harm Brazil’s troubled health-care and education systems.

So it is impressive that the this constitutional reform received supermajority support for two votes in the Brazilian House, followed by supermajority support for two votes in the Brazilian Senate.

I would like to think I played at least a tiny role in this development. I’ve crunched numbers showing that nations get very good results when spending is restrained for multi-year periods.

I’ve written extensively on the successful spending caps in Switzerland and Hong Kong, both of which are part of those nations’ constitutions.

And I’ve highlighted the fact that international bureaucracies, when they investigate the efficacy of various fiscal rules, always conclude that spending caps are the only effective approach.

I also wrote an article for the Brazilian media back in October.

But even if I had no impact on the debate, I’m still very happy about the outcome.

Assuming, of course, that Brazil doesn’t have a Supreme Court Justice like John Roberts who will somehow make a politicized decision and sabotage the new spending cap!

P.S. I seem to have more success overseas than in the United States. I did help defeat the income tax in the Cayman Islands a few years ago, and I also hope that my recent trip to Vanuatu will lead to a similar outcome.

But since I’m a patriot (in the proper sense) who wants the United States to be a beacon of liberty for the world, it sure would be nice to win a few battles here at home.

P.P.S. Brazil may be on the cusp of other pro-market reforms, in part because of a vibrant libertarian movement in the country.

Here’s a video from Reason on this positive development.

Jeff Tucker of the Foundation for Economic Education has a very upbeat assessment.

I went on a three-city speaking tour in Brazil. …I found an amazingly well-educated crowd of students, young professionals, professors, media personalities, and digital activists, all dedicated to using the upheaval to the advantage of freedom itself. Organizations like Mises Brazil, and many others that have spun off from Students for Liberty and other organizations, have spent years translating and distributing books and articles, holding seminars, and cultivating young people for a life of activism. …The libertarians in Brazil seem to understand that ideological slogans and promises for change mean nothing so long as states are huge, invasive, and offer a bounty to anyone who gains power.

Let’s hope this is right and Brazil becomes a star reformer. Chile (and, in recent years, Peru) have been lonely outposts of good policy in South America.

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The Insane World of Agriculture Subsidies

I’ve argued before that the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) should be the top target of those seeking to shut down useless and counterproductive parts of the federal government.

And if President-Elect Trump’s choice for HUD Secretary, Ben Carson, is as sound on housing issues as he is on tax issues, presumably he will work to close down the bureaucracy that he’ll soon be overseeing.

But I just read a Wall Street Journal column about agriculture subsidies that has me so agitated, that I may change my mind and make the Department of Agriculture my top target for elimination. Here’s some of what Jim Bovard wrote.

President-elect Donald Trump’s vow to “drain the swamp” in Washington could begin with the Agriculture Department. …Farmers will receive twice as much of their income from handouts (25%) this year as they did in 2013, according to the USDA. …big farmers snare the vast majority of federal handouts. According to a report released this year by the Environmental Working Group, …“the top 1 percent of farm subsidy recipients received 26 percent of subsidy payments between 1995 and 2014.” The group’s analysis of government farm-subsidy data also found that the “top 20 percent of subsidy recipients received 91 percent of all subsidy payments.” Fifty members of the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans have received farm subsidies, according to the group, including David Rockefeller Sr. and Charles Schwab.

Indeed, agriculture subsidies are basically a huge transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.

…in 2015 the median farm household had a net worth of $827,307. That includes a great many residential, gentlemen and hobby farmers. The largest class of farmers—those who produce most farm products and harvest the largest share of the subsidies—have a median net worth of $2,586,000. By contrast, the median net worth for American households in 2013 was $81,200, according to the Federal Reserve.

In his column, Jim also explains some of the bizarre consequences of various specific handout programs, including the fact that American taxpayers have forked over $750 million to Brazil in order to continue huge (and impermissible, according to our trade commitments) subsidies to American cotton producers.

But the sugar subsidies are probably the most economically insane.

The U.S. maintains a regime of import quotas and price supports that drive U.S. sugar prices to double or triple the world price. Since 1997 Washington’s sugar policy has zapped more than 120,000 U.S. jobs in food manufacturing, according to a 2013 study by Agralytica. More than 10 jobs have been lost in manufacturing for every remaining sugar grower in the U.S.

Let’s look at some more evidence, this time dealing with dairy subsidies.

Charles Lane of the Washington Post wrote earlier this year about America’s government-caused cheese problem.

…as of March 31, 1.19 billion pounds had accumulated in commercial cold-storage freezers across the United States, the largest stockpile ever. …each American would have to eat an extra 3 pounds of cheese this year, on top of the 36 pounds we already consume per capita, to eliminate the big yellow mountain.

Why is there something as silly as a giant stockpile of cheese?

If you’re guessing it’s the result of a foolish government policy, you’d be right.

… the U.S. government has a long-standing pro-cheese-eating policy, which grew out of the need to do something with the subsidized excess of milk products generated by federal pro-production dairy policy… Two decades ago, in fact, the Clinton administration’s Agriculture Department helped form a promotional organization, Dairy Management Inc., funded by a congressionally authorized, federally collected dues requirement for dairy producers. Its $140 million annual budget has helped develop such fast-food items as Pizza Hut’s cheese-topped crust and Taco Bell’s double steak quesadillas, as well as cheesy pizzas for the federal school lunch program. …dairy farms are protected by a subsidized insurance program in the 2014 Farm Bill.

What’s the answer to this mess?

Well, even an editorial writer for the leftist Washington Post recognizes that markets, rather than subsidies, should determine cheese production.

In the long run, everyone — consumers, producers, middlemen, grocers — would probably be better off if governments just left the dairy market to its own devices. And a lot of other markets, too.

By the way, since we’re on the topic of subsidies to the dairy industry, a Bloomberg column exposes some of the perverse consequences of government intervention.

…some farmers tried to limit the supply of milk by killing off their own cows. No, you read that correctly. This mysterious state of affairs was revealed in a nationwide class-action lawsuit against dairy cooperatives, groups of farmers who pool their supplies but, as a whole, serve as middlemen between the farmers and dairy processors. …The “herd retirement program,” as it was called, was led by Cooperatives Working Together, run by the lobbying group National Milk Producers Federation, and supported by farms producing almost 70 percent of America’s milk. …The path that leads to killing perfectly good dairy cows begins with a 1922 law, the Capper-Volstead Act. The statute was designed to protect both dairy farmers and consumers from profiteering middlemen.

This story actually is a perfect storm of government stupidity. The federal government has programs that subsidize the dairy industry. That then leads to overproduction. Producers respond to overproduction with a plan to kill cows, which somehow triggers antitrust intervention by the government.

Heaven forbid we actually get the government out of the business and simply allow markets to work!

And if antitrust laws and agriculture subsidies are a bad combination, then you won’t be surprised to learn that foreign aid and agriculture subsidies are another bad combination. In other words, two negatives don’t make a positive, as explained by Jim Bovard earlier this year in another column for the Wall Street Journal.

The Obama administration’s plan to dump a million pounds of surplus peanuts into Haiti at no cost has sparked a firestorm from humanitarian groups… Haiti has about 150,000 peanut farmers. The industry is “a huge source of livelihood” for up to 500,000 people, Claire Gilbert of Grassroots International told NPR, “especially women, if you include the supply chains that process the peanuts.” …the Peasant Movement of Papaye, denounced the peanut donation as “a plan of death” for the country’s farmers. …American aid has a sordid record. In 1979 a development consultant told a congressional committee: “Farmers in Haiti are known to not even bring their crops to market the week that [food aid] is distributed since they are unable to get a fair price while whole bags of U.S. food are being sold.” …After the 2010 earthquake, Haiti’s president, René Préval, pleaded with the U.S. to “stop sending food aid so that our economy can recover and create jobs.” Former President Bill Clintonpublicly apologized the same year for the devastating impact of subsidized U.S. rice imports: “I have to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people, because of what I did.”

The peanut program may be even more inanely destructive than the sugar program.

The real culprit here are federal peanut programs with an almost 80-year record as one of Washington’s most flagrant boondoggles. Subsidies have encouraged farmers to overproduce and then dump surplus peanuts on the USDA, which winds up stuck with hundreds of millions of pounds. That food has to go somewhere, and the department sees Haiti as the ticket. Food-aid policies have long been driven not by altruism, but by bureaucratic desperation to dispose of the evidence of failed farm policies. …The cost of peanut subsidies is predicted to rise 10-fold between 2015 and next year, reaching $870 million—which approaches the total farm value of the whole U.S. peanut crop itself. The USDA expects to spend up to $50 million a year to store and handle surplus peanuts, and industry experts are warning that federally-licensed warehouses might not have enough space to hold the next crop.

Though this humorous image reminds me that ethanol handouts also may be the most counterproductive and wasteful agriculture subsidy.

Agriculture subsidies are bad for taxpayer and bad for consumers. They are a corrupt transfer of unearned wealth to special interest groups.

P.J. O’Rourke came up with the only appropriate solution to this mess.

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The Deadly Impact of Government Regulations on Organ Transplants

Economists are sometimes considered to be a bit odd, and the same thing is sometimes said about libertarians.

And since I’m a libertarian economist, I realize that makes me doubly suspect.

So when I’ve written about the desirability of market-based organ transplants (see here, here, and here), I realize some people will instinctively object because selling one’s organs is somehow distasteful and icky.

Or it makes people subject to exploitation. For instance, writing for the Washington Post, Scott Carney argues that organ sales would take advantage of the poor.

What would happen if the United States legalized the sale of human organs? …Whether we like it or not, we live in the era of globalization, and if the U.S. legalizes the market for body parts, there is no reason to think that international economies won’t play a role in how a patient decides to procure transplant organs. …According to the National Foundation for Transplants, a kidney transplant costs about $260,000. In the illegal organ markets in India, Egypt and Pakistan, the same procedure rings in at just shy of $20,000 — certified organ included. …The only thing stopping the typical American transplant patient from going abroad and buying an organ is the difficulty of making contact with a broker and the threat of what might happen if they get caught. …the market for human body parts is a lot like the one for used cars: They’re only worth what someone is willing to sell them for. …hundreds of thousands of people are available and willing to sell their flesh for pennies on the dollar.

My view, for what it’s worth, is that I shouldn’t be allowed (and the government shouldn’t be allowed) to block a willing seller and a willing buyer from engaging in a mutually beneficial exchange.

But folks like Mr. Carney think that poor people will get exploited.

…it’s helpful to review what happened in the market for human surrogate babies. In the United States, it is legal to pay a woman to carry a child… Once the market was clearly defined in the United States, other countries, with looser definitions of human rights, fought for their share of the market. In 2002, India became the go-to destination for procuring a budget surrogate womb. To the surprise of no one, the Indian industry soon began to cut corners. Women were housed under lock and key in houses known to the press as “baby factories.” …Late last year, India finally outlawed surrogacy tourism after non-stop incidents and official inquiries into the surrogates’ well-being. Now the commercial surrogacy boom seems to be moving to Cambodia where regulations are still loose.

So what’s his bottom line?

We cannot solve our own organ shortage by exploiting the poor and helpless people on the other side of the world.

I don’t doubt that there are shady people willing to exploit the poor by not giving them relevant information and/or not fully compensating them, though that’s not an argument against organ sales (just as similar periodic bad behavior by car salesmen and insurance brokers isn’t an argument against markets for automobiles and life insurance).

Instead, it’s an argument for governments in places such as India to do a better job at protecting and upholding the rule of law, which is one of the few proper and legitimate functions of a state.

A Wall Street Journal column by two attorneys from the Institute for Justice approaches the issue more dispassionately, noting that a market for bone marrow could save many lives.

Hemeos is aimed at one of the most pressing problems in medicine: the shortage of bone-marrow donors to combat deadly blood diseases. Thousands of Americans are waiting for a lifesaving donor, and thousands more have died waiting. Marrow donors provide blood stem cells, which reproduce continuously in the patient and restore the ability to make healthy blood. …Blood is drawn from one arm, the blood stem cells are skimmed out, and the blood is returned through the other arm. Donated marrow cells regenerate quickly and fully. Despite the ease of donating, thousands of patients with leukemia or other blood-related disorders are desperately searching for donors because a specific genetic match is required. …Hemeos plans to revolutionize donor recruitment by taking one simple step: compensating donors with a check for around $2,000. As with every other valuable thing in the world, we will get more marrow cells when we pay for them. It’s Econ 101.

Sounds great, right? A classic example of a win-win situation!

Except, well, government.

In 1984 the National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA) made it a federal crime to pay donors. Unlike plasma, sperm and egg donation—for which compensation is legal and common—paying marrow donors remains illegal. The result? Shortages, waiting lists and unnecessary suffering.

Fortunately, the courts have stepped in.

Ms. Flynn has three girls with Fanconi anemia, a genetic disorder that causes marrow failure. Wanting to do everything to save her girls and others, Ms. Flynn, along with several cancer patients in need of bone marrow, sued the Justice Department to end the ban on compensating marrow donors. A federal appeals court ruled in 2011 that because Congress expressly said that NOTA wouldn’t affect compensation for blood donation, …Congress couldn’t have intended the law to restrict compensation for marrow donations using modern, nonsurgical techniques.

But, still, government is government.

But a year after Ms. Flynn won her case, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it might enact a regulation effectively nullifying the court’s ruling—and thus Ms. Flynn’s victory. …And while HHS fiddles, patients die. Thousands of Americans have died awaiting a marrow transplant since HHS embarked on this needless diversion. How many could have been saved? And of those still alive, how many could have received a transplant faster and with a better-quality donor? This is a lesson in how a faceless, lumbering bureaucracy smothers innovation and optimism.

Here’s a very powerful video from IJ on this issue.

It’s hard to watch that video and think about what you would do if your children faced the risk of death.

Sally Satel of the American Enterprise Institute adds her two cents, writing on kidney sales from the unique perspective of being someone who has received two kidneys solely because of human kindness.

I am almost obscenely lucky. Within a 10-year period, two glorious women rescued me from years of grueling dialysis and a guarantee of premature death. …tremendous generosity allowed me to live many years in peace instead of constant worry. …I understood the general reluctance to donate. After all, giving a kidney is by no means risk-free (roughly a 0.02 percent, or 2 in 10,000 mortality rate, a 3–5 percent rate of serious complications, and perhaps a 25 percent chance of minor complications). Also, some people want to “save” their kidney lest, say, their own child needs it. Then, too, a lot of people are simply put off by surgery, and some handful—no one knows the extent of this group—can’t afford time off and lost wages. Of the 120,000 people waiting for organs, 101,000 are waiting for kidneys.

And for those who aren’t as lucky, Sally points out that current policy puts them in a very difficult position.

My transplants were a matter of private policy. My friends saved me—out of empathy, out of principle, out of affection. I’m beyond fortunate for them, because our public policy is failing far too many people who need organs. Twenty-two people die each day because they cannot survive the wait for an organ; 12 of those die from lack of a kidney in particular. The core of the problem is that prospective donors are legally required to relinquish an organ in the spirit of “altruism.” Despite the risk they take on, they are not allowed to benefit materially in any way. This mandate is part of the 1984 National Organ Transplant Act, the law that established the national system of organ procurement and distribution. Any exchange of an organ for any sort of “valuable consideration,” is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison and/or a $50,000 fine.

Indeed, current policy is causing people to needlessly die.

The original law was intended in good faith. The point was to prevent a classic free market where only wealthier patients could afford to buy organs; it also sought to avert the scenario where poor donors were the “suppliers” for the well-off. …But more than enough time has now elapsed to conclude with certainty that an altruism-only system is sorely inadequate. And as in so many realms, it is the poor (especially poor minorities) that have suffered the most because of the deficit. They are less likely to be referred for transplant, more likely to die on dialysis, and less likely to receive an organ from the national pool even when they are referred.

One lawmaker is trying to push policy in the right direction.

In May, Pennsylvania Rep. Matt Cartwright introduced a bill called the Organ Donor Clarification Act of 2016. Its goal is to permit study of the effect of rewarding people who are willing to save the life of a stranger through living donation: Not through a free market with direct cash payments… Rather than large sums of cash, potential rewards could include a contribution to the donor’s retirement fund, an income tax credit or a tuition voucher, lifetime health insurance, a contribution to a charity of the donor’s choice, or loan forgiveness. Only the government, or a government-designated charity, would be allowed to distribute these benefits. (The funds could potentially come from the savings of stopping dialysis, which costs roughly $80,000 a year per person.) In other words, needy patients would receive kidneys regardless of their ability to reward donors out of their own pockets. …The donors’ kidneys would be distributed to people on the waiting list according to the rules now in place.

Congressman Cartwright’s proposal obviously wouldn’t create a genuine free market. But it would allow compensation to become part of the equation. So his proposal presumably would save lives compared to the current system.

Oh, by the way, it’s worth noting that criminalization of organ sales doesn’t fully stop the practice. Other nations step in, often with policies that are disgusting.

…one of the most horrific markets operating today: Communist China’s selling of organs harvested from prisoners of conscience. Ten thousand “transplant tourists” travel annually to communist China, where they pay top dollar to get organs transplanted on demand. …Free countries may not be able to stop this horrific practice, but they could reduce the demand for these organs by allowing free people to exercise the choice to sell their organs. Currently, free countries rely only on altruism, which has resulted in severe shortages of organs and black markets.

In other words, the policies advocated by Mr. Carney (the first story cited at the start of this column) would enhance the profitability of the Chinese organ-harvesting system. That doesn’t seem like a good outcome.

Here’s a map showing how the kidney trade works right now, with the underground economy playing a big role.

My bottom line is that poor people would get more money and have more legal protections if the system was fully legalized and operating above ground.

P.S. When I wasn’t busy causing trouble in college, I would sell my plasma twice weekly. The $15 I received from the medical company was sufficient to cover my food budget. They exploited me and I exploited them.

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The “Austerity” Debate: More Academic Evidence against Big Government

In the world of fiscal policy, there are actually two big debates.

1. One debate revolves around the appropriate size of government in the long run. Folks on the left argue that government spending generates a lot of value and that bigger government is a recipe for more prosperity. Libertarians and their allies, by contrast, point out that most forms of government spending are counterproductive and that large public sectors (and the accompanying taxes) undermine economic performance.
2. The other debate is focused on short-run economic effects, and revolves around the “Keynesian” argument that more government spending is a “stimulus” to a weak economy and that budget-cutting “austerity” hurts growth. Libertarians and other critics are generally skeptical that government spending boosts short-run growth and instead argue that the right kind of austerity (i.e., a lower burden of government spending) is the appropriate approach.

Back in 2009 and 2010, I wrote a lot about the Keynesian stimulus fight. In more recent years, however, I have focused more on the debate over the growth-maximizing size of government.

But it’s time to revisit the stimulus/austerity debate. The National Bureau of Economic Research last month released a new study by five economists (two from Harvard, one from NYU, and two from Italian universities) reviewing the real-world evidence on fiscal consolidation (i.e., reducing red ink) over the past several decades.

This paper studies whether what matters most is the “when” (whether an adjustment is carried out during an expansion, or a recession) or the “how” (i.e. the composition of the adjustment, whether it is mostly based on tax increases, or on spending cuts). …We estimate a model which allows for both sources of non-linearity: “when” and “how”.

Here’s a bit more about the methodology.

The fiscal consolidations we study are those implemented by 16 OECD countries (Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, United States) between 1981 and 2014. …We also decompose each adjustment in its two components: changes in taxes and in spending. …we use a specification in which the economy, following the shift in fiscal policy, can move from one state to another. We also allow multipliers to vary depending on the type of consolidation, tax-based vs expenditure-based. …Our government expenditure variable is total government spending net of interest payments on the debt: that is we do not distinguish between government consumption, government investment, transfers (social security benefits etc) and other government outlays. …In total we have 170 plans and 216 episodes, of which about two-thirds are EB and one-third are TB.

By the way, “EB” refers to “expenditure based” fiscal consolidations and “TB” refers to “tax based” consolidations.

And you can see from Table 5 that some countries focused more on tax increases and others were more focused on trying to restrain spending.

Congratulations to Canada and Sweden for mostly or totally eschewing tax hikes.

Though I wonder how many of the 113 “EB” plans involved genuine spending reforms (probably very few based on this data) and how many were based on the fake-spending-cuts approach that is common in the United States.

But I’m digressing.

Let’s now look at some findings from the NBER study, starting with the fact that most consolidations took place during downturns, which certainly wouldn’t please Keynesians, but shouldn’t be too surprising since red ink tend to rise during such periods.

…there is a relation between the timing and the type of fiscal adjustment and the state of the economy. Overall, adjustment plans are much more likely to be introduced during a recession. There was a consolidation in 62 out of 99 years of recession…, while we record a consolidation in only 13 over 94 years of expansion. …it is somewhat surprising that a majority of the shifts in fiscal policy devoted to reducing deficits are implemented during recessions.

And here are the results that really matter. The economists crunched the numbers and found that tax increases impose considerable damage, whereas spending cuts cause very little harm to short-run performance.

We find that the composition of fiscal adjustments is more important than the state of the cycle in determining their effect on output. Fiscal adjustments based upon spending cuts are much less costly in terms of short run output losses – such losses are in fact on average close to zero – than those based upon tax increases which are associated with large and prolonged recessions regardless of whether the adjustment starts in a recession or not. …what matters for the short run output cost of fiscal consolidations is the composition of the adjustment. Tax-based adjustments are costly in terms of output losses. Expenditure-based ones have on average very low costs.

These findings are remarkable. Even I’m willing to accept that spending cuts may be painful in the short run (not because of Keynesian reasons, but simply because resources don’t instantaneously get reallocated to more productive uses).

So if the economists who wrote this comprehensive study find that there is very little short-run dislocation associated with spending cuts, that’s powerful evidence.

And when you then consider all the data and research showing the positive long-run effects of smaller government, this certainly suggests that the top fiscal priority should be shrinking the size and scope of government.

P.S. I mentioned above that Keynesians doubtlessly get agitated that governments engage in fiscal consolidation during downturns. This is why I’m trying to get them to support spending caps. The good news, from their perspective, is that the government’s budget would be allowed to grow when there’s a recession, albeit not very rapidly. The tradeoff that they must accept, however, is that spending would be limited to that modest growth rate even during years when there’s strong growth and the private sector is generating lots of tax revenue.

Honest Keynesians presumably should yes to this deal since Keynes wanted restraint during growth years to offset “stimulus” during recession years. And economists at left-leaning international bureaucracies seem sympathetic to this tradeoff. I don’t think there are many honest Keynesians in the political world, however, so I’m not expecting to get a lot of support from my leftist friends in Washington.

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Venezuela and Santa Claus vs Thomas Sowell and the Little Red Hen

Earlier this year, I borrowed from Dante’s Inferno and created the Five Circles of Statist Hell. At the time, I suggested that Venezuela was on the cusp of moving from the third circle (“widespread poverty and economic misery”) to the fourth circle (“systematic and grinding poverty and deprivation”).

Since we now know that children in the country are suffering from hunger and malnutrition, I think we can safely confirm that Venezuela has made that crossing, joining the dystopian hell of North Korea (though you can make a good argument that the savage regime based in Pyongyang actually belongs in the fifth circle).

And just in case you need another piece of evidence about Venezuela, consider these excerpts from a surreal BBC report.

Venezuelan authorities have arrested two toy company executives and seized almost four million toys, which they say they will distribute to the poor. Officials accused the company of hoarding toys and hiking prices in the run-up to Christmas. Last week, the government issued an order to retailers to reduce prices on a range of goods by 30%. …Venezuela…said…”Our children are sacred, we will not let them rob you of Christmas,” it said in a tweet, along with photos and video of thousands of boxes of toys. …The agency also posted photos of the two executives being marched from the premises by a squad of heavily armed soldiers.

Here’s some additional background on the economic situation in the country.

This is not the first time Venezuela has ordered price cuts on retailers, or mobilised armed units to enforce it. In late 2013, the country introduced laws allowing the government to fix prices and dictate profit margins. …The same measures have been used to fix the prices of basic products such as flour, meat and bread – but supply is limited in a country where many people go hungry.

Before continuing, I can’t help commenting that BBC journalists apparently can’t put 2 and 2 together. The reason supply is limited and people are suffering is because of the price controls and intervention.

Sigh.

Anyhow, here are some final passages from the article.

The Venezuelan government is becoming increasingly unpopular as the country’s economic crisis grows. …The International Monetary Fund estimates that inflation – the rate at which prices go up – will hit 2,000% next year.

Yup, Venezuela is a regular Shangri La. No wonder Bernie Sanders is so infatuated with the place.

But let’s focus today on the Venezuelan government’s attempt to play Santa Claus by seizing toys and selling them at below-market rates.

I don’t know if this move will be politically popular since that depends on whether ordinary people have some degree of economic sophistication.

But we can say with great confidence that it represents terrible economic policy. That’s because, as Thomas Sowell has wisely noted, it’s very difficult for a government to steal wealth more than one time.

The victims (both the ones who already have been looted and the ones who might be targeted in the future) quickly learn that it’s not a smart idea to accumulate assets that can be stolen by the state. In effect, the productive people of the country learn to behave like the Little Red Hen.

In the short run, though, the Venezuelan government gets to play Santa Claus. At least for 2016.

But it won’t have that option in 2017. And because the nation’s kleptocratic government is running out of victims, it’s just a matter of time before the system collapses, at which point the government either gives up power or launches a brutal crackdown.

Hopefully the former.

Though it would remain to be seen whether the leftist thugs who currently hold power are able to escape the country with all the loot they’ve stolen, or whether they get the Ceausescu treatment.

They deserve the latter.

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Defending the World Bank

To be blunt, I don’t think the World Bank should exist. We don’t need an international bureaucracy to promote economic development in poor nations. Particularly since the policies that we know will work – free markets and small government – oftentimes are hindered by intervention from multilateral institutions such as the World Bank.

For example, I’ve spent the past few days in Vanuatu, where I’ve been fighting against the adoption of an income tax, and I’ve been repeatedly told that the World Bank is one of the groups (along with the Australian Tax Office) urging the adoption of this anti-growth levy. It is both depressing and upsetting that outsiders are seeking to hinder growth in this poor nation, but what really galls me is that World Bank bureaucrats (like their colleagues at other international bureaucracies) are exempt from paying any income tax.

All this being said, my general philosophical hostility (and, in Vanuatu, targeted genuine anger) toward the World Bank doesn’t preclude me from admitting when the bureaucracy does good work. It has played a positive role in helping some nations set up private retirement systems, and it has produced research warning about the link between corruption and complicated tax systems.

Perhaps most laudable, the World Bank every year publishes Doing Business, an index that dispassionately measures the degree to which government policy imposes costs on those who create and operate companies. Indeed, it was just two months ago that I wrote about the most recent issue (mostly to grouse that America is falling in the rankings, so thanks Obama).

All of which puts me in a strange position, because although I have written that the World Bank is my “least despised international bureaucracy,” I never thought I would dedicate an entire column to defending its work.

But a friend formerly known as the Princess of the Levant sent me an article by José Antonio Ocampo and Edmund Fitzgerald, which attacks Doing Business for…gasp…encouraging tax competition.

Since I’m a knee-jerk defender of tax competition (and bearing in mind that the enemy of your enemy is sometimes your friend), I feel obliged to jump into the debate and defend the World Bank’s report.

Here’s the basic argument of Ocampo and Fitzgerald.

…there is a serious flaw in the report’s formula: the way it treats corporate taxation. …The problem is that “regulatory burden,” according to Doing Business, includes…promoting budget-straining tax competition among countries… This may sound like an argument for overhauling Doing Business’ “paying taxes” indicator. But what is really needed is for Doing Business to drop that indicator altogether…when it comes to the paying taxes indicator, the report has things all wrong. Indeed, it runs counter to the global consensus on the need for effective international cooperation to ensure equitable collection of tax revenues, including measures to limit tax avoidance by multinationals and other private firms. A race to the bottom in corporate taxation will only hurt poor people and poor countries. If Doing Business is to live up to its own slogan, “equal opportunity for all,” it should abandon the tax indicator altogether.

Wow. I find it remarkable that leftists openly argue in favor of suppressing information on tax policy because of their ideological hostility to tax competition.

For all intents and purposes, they’re admitting that taxes do matter.

The article also makes some other assertions that deserve a bit of attention. Most notably, the authors repeat the silly claim by some leftists that the way to get more growth is with a bigger government financed by higher taxes.

…taxes that are necessary to fund public infrastructure and basic social services – both of which are critical to enhance growth and employment. Even the report recognizes that, for most economies, taxes are the main source of the government revenues needed to fund “projects related to health care, education, public transport, and unemployment benefits, among others.”

Yet if it’s true that big government stimulates growth, why did the world’s richest nations become rich when government was very small and taxes were largely nonexistent?

Ocampo and Fitzgerald somehow want people to believe that if a little bit of government spending is associated with good economic results, then this somehow means a lot of government must be associated with better economic results.

Maybe somebody should introduce them to the concepts of diminishing returns and negative returns. And once they master those concepts, they’ll be ready to learn about the Rahn Curve. Heck, there’s even a World Bank study I can recommend for them.

Though the authors do raise one semi-decent point. Some of the taxes paid by companies actually are borne by workers. Ocampo and Fitzgerald don’t seem to understand how this works since they jumble together some taxes that are borne by labor with other that are borne by capital, but there is a kernel of truth in their argument.

Doing Business exaggerates the tax burden on companies. For one thing, it considers all the kinds of taxes firms might pay – not just corporate income tax. Specifically, the report’s estimates for “total tax rate as a proportion of profits” include taxes for employees’ health insurance and pensions; property and property transfers; dividends, capital gains, and financial transactions; and public services like waste collection and infrastructure. Those are taxes that should be categorized as social contributions or service charges.

Having bent over backwards to say something nice about their article, let’s now close by highlighting the most preposterous assertion in their piece.

They basically reject the entire field of microeconomics and the underlying principles of price theory – not to mention reams of academic evidence – by denying that tax rates have any impact on behavior.

…the assumption underpinning it – that low corporate taxation promotes growth – does not withstand scrutiny. Research conducted by the International Monetary Fund and others indicates that tax competition does not promote productive investment worldwide.

Remarkable. They even think citing the IMF somehow strengthens their case, when that’s actually more akin to citing Dr. Kevorkian.

P.S. Just in case anyone is worried that this pro-Doing Business column means I’m getting soft on the World Bank, rest assured that I will never be a fan of a bureaucracy that equates higher taxes with a good report card. But I’ll always be the first to admit when an international bureaucracy does good work.

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A Libertarian Quandary: Should Federal Bureaucracies Be Moved to the Hinterland?

I’m not a fan of federal bureaucracies and I don’t like the undeserved wealth of the Washington, DC metro region.

So I’m very open to ideas that would address these problems.

Paul Kupiec of the American Enterprise Institute suggests, in a thought-provoking column in the Wall Street Journal, that one possible solution would be to move federal bureaucracies out of Washington.

Donald Trump pledged to rebuild America’s troubled inner cities, “drain the swamp,” and restore Americans’ confidence in their government. The president-elect can deliver on these promises by moving federal government agencies out of the nation’s capital and closer to the citizens they serve in cities like Detroit, Cleveland or Milwaukee.

He points out that two bureaucracies are currently looking to build new headquarters.

The FBI’s current headquarters, the J. Edgar Hoover Building, was built in 1975. It is now too small to meet the FBI’s needs, and it requires major repairs. The specifications for a new FBI headquarters include 2.1 million square feet of office space with access to adequate transportation. The construction budget alone is about $2.5 billion. …The Labor Department is also looking for a new headquarters… The new building could be as large as 1.4 million square feet and, if costs are similar to those proposed by the FBI, the building budget alone would exceed $1 billion.

So why, he asks, don’t we locate those headquarters in places that would benefit from federal redistribution?

…consider what relocating the FBI headquarters to Detroit would do. Moving 11,000 FBI employees would hardly make a dent in the D.C. economy. Over 275,000 people—over 14% of the workforce—are federal-government employees, according to the Office of Personnel Management. In contrast, 11,000 well-paid federal government jobs and $2.5 billion in construction spending would provide a significant boost to the Detroit economy, where less than 2% of the workforce are federal employees.

Here’s the basic argument.

With modern communications technology, there is no reason that the FBI’s new headquarters, or the headquarters of other federal government agencies, must be located in the nation’s capital. The concentration of federal agencies in a single area increases the potential for a breakdown of government services in the event of a terrorist attack… Reducing risk is but one benefit. It would also be healthy for the country to more broadly distribute the wealth and power of federal-government agencies across the nation.

And Kupiec points out that it’s not fair that the DC-metro region gains such disproportionate benefits from overpaid bureaucrats and fat-cat consultants.

According to the 2010 U.S. Census, 11 of the 20 richest U.S. counties—including the three richest counties—are in the Washington, D.C., metro area. Incomes near the national capital are bloated not only by generous federal-government payrolls, but also by “Beltway bandit” consultancy firms that provide contract services to federal agencies. It is little wonder that many Americans view the federal government as a money machine for bureaucrats and political insiders.

Here’s the most persuasive argument for moving government departments to other spots in America.

Taxpayers would save money if bureaucracies were built and operated outside of DC.

Many towns and cities across America would welcome the economic development and stability that accompanies a well-paid federal-agency workforce like the FBI or the Labor Department. The expense of managing the federal government should be used to spread wealth beyond the nation’s capital and revitalize the economies of America’s ailing cities. Moving agencies out of Washington will also save millions of dollars because the costs of acquisition, building maintenance and housing for federal employees will shrink outside of the Washington bubble. In 2016 federal employees in the D.C. area receive a 24.78% premium over the base federal pay scale because they work in a high-cost region, according to the Office of Personnel Management.

Part of me likes this idea, especially since the burden on taxpayers presumably would decrease.

But I confess to being conflicted on the issue. Here are my concerns.

• Shouldn’t we focus on shutting down counterproductive bureaucracies rather than moving them? Whether based in Detroit or DC, departments such as HUD, Agriculture, Energy, Education, and Transportation shouldn’t exist.
• If we move bureaucracies (whether they are necessary ones or useless ones), does that create the risk of giving other parts of the nation a “public-choice” incentive to lobby for big government since they’ll be recipients of federal largesse?
• Will we simply get duplication, meaning a new bureaucracy somewhere in America without ever really getting rid of the original bureaucracy in Washington, DC?

Though maybe if I was in charge of the process, it wouldn’t be a bad idea.

I could locate some bureaucracies in the dodgy parts of cities such as Detroit. Especially departments such as HUD and HHS since they helped cause the economic misery in inner cities.

And the Department of Education could be placed somewhere like Newark where government-run schools are such awful failures.

As for other federal bureaucracies, I’m wondering whether seasonal switches would be possible? Maybe stick them in North Dakota in the winter and Brownsville, Texas, in the summer?

Any ideas from readers on this libertarian quandary?

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Great Moments in Pentagon Incompetence and Waste

Last month, I explained that America’s fiscal problems are almost entirely the result of domestic spending programs, particularly entitlements.

Some critics immediately decided this meant I favored a blank check for the Pentagon, even though I specifically stated that “I’m very sympathetic to the proposition that trillions of dollars that have been misspent on foreign adventurism this century.”

Moreover, if they bothered to do any research, they would have found numerous columns on Pentagon waste, including here, here, here, here, and here.

Indeed, I get especially upset about military boondoggles precisely because national defense is a legitimate function of government.

I want money being spent in ways that will minimize the threat of an attack on the United States, not on the basis of padding jobs in a particular politician’s hometown or in response to clever lobbying by a defense contractor.

Unfortunately, wasting money is what government does best. And it happens at the Pentagon just as often as elsewhere in the federal behemoth.

Let’s look at a recent exposé about Pentagon profligacy in the Washington Post.

The Pentagon has buried an internal study that exposed $125 billion in administrative waste in its business operations amid fears Congress would use the findings as an excuse to slash the defense budget… Pentagon leaders had requested the study to help make their enormous back-office bureaucracy more efficient and reinvest any savings in combat power. But after the project documented far more wasteful spending than expected, senior defense officials moved swiftly to kill it by discrediting and suppressing the results. …Based on reams of personnel and cost data, their report revealed for the first time that the Pentagon was spending almost a quarter of its $580 billion budget on overhead and core business operations such as accounting, human resources, logistics and property management. …the Defense Department was paying a staggering number of people — 1,014,000 contractors, civilians and uniformed personnel — to fill back-office jobs far from the front lines. That workforce supports 1.3 million troops on active duty, the fewest since 1940.

Here’s a rather sobering chart from the story.

Predictably, bureaucrats in the military tried to cover up evidence of waste and inefficiency.

…some Pentagon leaders said they fretted that by spotlighting so much waste, the study would undermine their repeated public assertions that years of budget austerity had left the armed forces starved of funds. Instead of providing more money, they said, they worried Congress and the White House might decide to cut deeper. So the plan was killed. The Pentagon imposed secrecy restrictions on the data making up the study, which ensured no one could replicate the findings. A 77-page summary report that had been made public was removed from a Pentagon website.

Here’s a final excerpt from the story. The “no one REALLY knows” quote is rather revealing.

“We will never be as efficient as a commercial organization,” Work said. “We’re the largest bureaucracy in the world. There’s going to be some inherent inefficiencies in that.” …while the Defense Department was “the world’s largest corporate enterprise,” it had never “rigorously measured” the “cost-effectiveness, speed, agility or quality” of its business operations. Nor did the Pentagon have even a remotely accurate idea of what it was paying for those operations… McKinsey hazarded a guess: anywhere between $75 billion and $100 billion a year, or between 15 and 20 percent of the Pentagon’s annual expenses. “No one REALLY knows,” the memo added. …the average administrative job at the Pentagon was costing taxpayers more than $200,000, including salary and benefits.

Let’s close with some blurbs from other stories.

Starting with some specific examples of waste from a recent story by U.S. News & World Report.

The Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction has uncovered scandal after scandal involving U.S. aid to that country, including the creation of private villas for a small number of personnel working for a Pentagon economic development initiative and a series of costly facilities that were never or barely used. An analysis by ProPublica puts the price tag for wasteful and misguided expenditures in Afghanistan at $17 billion, a figure that is higher than the GDP of 80 nations. …A Politico report on the Pentagon’s $44 billion Defense Logistics Agency notes that it spent over $7 billion on unneeded equipment. …overspending on routine items – such as the Army’s recent expenditure of $8,000 on a gear worth $500 – continues.

Let’s also not forget that the Pentagon is quite capable of being just as incompetent as other bureaucracies.

Such as forgetting to change the oil on a ship.

The USS Fort Worth, a Navy littoral combat ship, has suffered extensive gear damage while docked at a port in Singapore. …According to reports, the crew failed to use sufficient lube oil, leading to excessively high temperatures on the gears. Debris also found its way into the lubrication system, which also contributed to failure, Defense News reports. The crew did not follow standard operating procedures.

And accidentally allowing a missile to get shipped to the hellhole of communist Cuba.

An inert U.S. Hellfire missile sent to Europe for training purposes was wrongly shipped from there to Cuba in 2014, said people familiar with the matter, a loss of sensitive military technology that ranks among the worst-known incidents of its kind. …officials worry that Cuba could share the sensors and targeting technology inside it with nations like China, North Korea or Russia. …“Did someone take a bribe to send it somewhere else? Was it an intelligence operation, or just a series of mistakes? That’s what we’ve been trying to figure out,” said one U.S. official. …At some point, officials loading the first flight realized the missile it expected to be loading onto the aircraft wasn’t among the cargo, the government official said. After tracing the cargo, officials realized that the missile had been loaded onto a truck operated by Air France, which took the missile to Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. There, it was loaded onto a “mixed pallet” of cargo and placed on an Air France flight. By the time the freight-forwarding firm in Madrid tracked down the missile, it was on the Air France flight, headed to Havana.

And let’s not forget about the jaw-dropping absurdity of an intelligence chief who isn’t allowed to…um…see intelligence.

For more than two years, the Navy’s intelligence chief has been stuck with a major handicap: He’s not allowed to know any secrets. Vice Adm. Ted “Twig” Branch has been barred from reading, seeing or hearing classified information since November 2013, when the Navy learned from the Justice Department that his name had surfaced in a giant corruption investigation involving a foreign defense contractor and scores of Navy personnel. …More than 800 days later, neither Branch nor Loveless has been charged. But neither has been cleared, either. Their access to classified information remains blocked. Although the Navy transferred Loveless to a slightly less sensitive post, it kept Branch in charge of its intelligence division. That has resulted in an awkward arrangement, akin to sending a warship into battle with its skipper stuck onshore. …Some critics have questioned how smart it is for the Navy to retain an intelligence chief with such limitations, for so long, especially at a time when the Pentagon is confronted by crises in the Middle East, the South China Sea, the Korean Peninsula and other hotspots.

The bottom line is that any bureaucracy is going to waste money. And the bureaucrats in any department will always be tempted to care first and foremost about their salaries and benefits rather than the underlying mission.

So I’m not expecting or demanding perfection, regardless of whether the department has a worthwhile mission or (in most cases) shouldn’t even exist. But I do want constant vigilance, criticism, and budgetary pressure so that there’s at least a slightly greater chance that money won’t be squandered.

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Government, Cronyism, and the Gambling Industry

I have a very consistent view of victimless crimes.

• I don’t approve of drugs and I’ve never used drugs, but I think the social harm of prohibition is greater than the social harm of legalization.
• I don’t particularly like alcohol and I am almost a teetotaler, but I’m glad there’s now a consensus that the social harm of prohibition was greater than the social harm of legalization.
• I don’t approve of prostitution and I’ve never consorted with a prostitute (other than the political ones in DC), but I think the social harm of prohibition is greater than the social harm of legalization.

Given these views, you won’t be surprised to also learn that I don’t care for gambling, but I think the social harm of prohibition is greater than the social harm of legalization.

The good news is that the nation is slowly but surely moving in the direction of legalization.

The bad news is that politicians doing the right thing in the worst possible way. Let’s look at three examples.

Our first wretched example is government-run lotteries, which are rip-off operations. In a genuine market, competition forces casinos to have reasonably decent odds. Yes, it’s set up so “the house” wins more often than it loses, but a casino probably pays out $90 for every $100 of bets. With lotteries, by contrast, governments rig the rules so that they pay out closer to $50 for every $100 of bets. Mafioso loansharks must be envious.

A second example is that politicians seem to view legalization merely as an opportunity for taxes, graft, featherbedding, and cronyism. Consider the case of Atlantic City, as explained by the Wall Street Journal.

In 1976 New Jersey voters approved a referendum that legalized gambling in Atlantic City. The constitutional amendment required casino revenues to fund programs for senior citizens and disabled residents, but politicians have instead funneled the cash to favored projects and businesses under the guise of promoting development. Guess how that’s turned out? A 1984 law required casinos to pay 2.5% of gaming revenues to the state or “reinvest” 1.25% in tax-exempt bonds issued by the state Casino Reinvestment Development Authority for state and community “projects that would not attract capital in normal market conditions.” Investment recipients have included Best of Bass Pro shop, Margaritaville and Healthplex. A decade later, state lawmakers imposed a $1.50 fee (which has since doubled) on casino parking spots to fund Atlantic City transportation, casino construction and a convention center. In 2004 lawmakers added a $3 surcharge for casino hotel stays to finance new hotel rooms and retail establishments, which had the effect of promoting unsustainable commercial and casino development. …Employment in Atlantic City has declined by about 10% over the last decade. Since 2010 the city’s property tax base has shrunk by two thirds. Local politicians raised property taxes by 50% between 2013 and 2014 to compensate for the dwindling tax base, but this has merely deterred new business investment and propelled flight. Meantime, local politicians have continued to spend… Between 2010 and 2014, expenditures increased by 10% while government debt doubled. The city government spends about $6,600 a year per resident—more than any other city in the state including Newark ($2,344). …Labor costs constitute about 70% of the budget. Earlier this year, the city emergency manager projected a $393 million cumulative deficit over the next five years absent reforms. …Democratic legislators and Governor Chris Christie passed a bailout that allows the city to squeeze an additional $120 million out of casinos in revenues annually to compensate for lower property-tax revenue. To sum up: New Jersey…plundered Atlantic City casinos, redistributed the spoils and loaded up the city with unaffordable levels of debt. The gambling mecca is a five-star example of failed liberal policies.

In other words, gambling did lead to addiction. Politicians got hooked on wasteful spending and haven’t been able to kick the habit.

Our final example is how politicians and established casinos are getting in bed together to prohibit competition from online gaming.

Andy Quinlan of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity is not impressed by this bit of cronyism.

Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson has long sought federal legislation that would override the ability of state governments to set their own online gambling rules. Given his business activities, Adelson clearly has no moral objections to gambling itself. His goal is simply to undermine market competition and put alternatives to his Vegas casinos out of business, and he has spent millions on lobbyists to help make that happen. Adelson’s allies in Congress have tried repeatedly to pass the Restoration of America’s Wire Act (RAWA), which would prevent states from authorizing online gambling within their own borders… Outside groups strongly warned against the consequences of undermining the 10th Amendment in the pursuit of crony capitalism. RAWA represents both a direct attack on personal liberty and a potential slippery slope in its erosion of federalist principles.

Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center also is disappointed with this odious bit of special-interest favoritism.

Adelson hates online gambling, as it competes with his bricks-and-mortar Las Vegas casinos for customers. More than five years ago, on what has become known to the poker world as Black Friday, the federal government unleashed a legal jihad against online poker companies and their top executives. Online poker is not itself illegal—a fact clarified by the DOJ’s reinterpretation of the Wire Act—but the 2006 Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act made it illegal for payment processors to transfer funds to and from gambling sites. The problem for Adelson and his allies is that the UIGEA and other federal statutes apply only when state borders are crossed. The 10th Amendment and the principles of federalism mean that federal lawmakers should have no say regarding activities that take place entirely within one state’s borders. So if state governments wish to authorize online gambling for their citizens, they are and should remain free to do so.

Time for my two cents on the issue. Ideally, no government should have the power to tell gamblers whether they can engage in consensual transactions across state lines or even national borders.

But not only has that already happened, but we now have politicians and a cronyist conspiring to have the federal government interfere with states that want to allow online gambling inside state borders.

It will be interesting to see whether Republicans, now that they’re about to control Washington, will choose cronyism or competition, centralization or federalism (the Export-Import Bank is another test of GOP principles…or lack thereof).

Let’s put all this in context. Today’s topic is gambling and the cancerous effect of government intervention and favoritism in that sector. But the lesson we should learn is that cronyism is a bad idea, period. Cronyism is also bad in agriculture. It’s bad in finance. It’s bad in the tax code. It’s bad in energy. It’s bad everywhere.

To conclude, here’s an excellent video from Lean Liberty about the dangers of letting big business and big government rig the rules for the benefit of powerful insiders.

The moral of the story is that consumers should be in charge of which companies succeed and which ones fail.

The free enterprise system – when it’s allowed to operate – produces great wealth and prosperity. Cronyism, by contrast, undermines growth by politicizing the allocation of resources. Even worse, it reduces public support for limited government since many people mistakenly assume that big business and capitalism are synonymous.

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Decision Time in the South Pacific: Income Tax or Mitchell’s Golden Rule?

Can you identify the nation with the world’s 7th-friendliest tax system according to the Index of Economic Freedom?

Don’t know the answer? Well, here’s a hint. If you don’t count Middle Eastern nations that finance their governments with oil money, this is the nation that is in second place, behind only the Bahamas.

Still don’t know?

Well, don’t be embarrassed because most people have never heard of the place. This tax paradise is an obscure nation in the South Pacific called Vanuatu. Comprised of dozens of islands, Vanuatu is one of the few places in the world that doesn’t have an income tax. No personal income tax (I’m jealous). No corporate income tax (I’m jealous). No capital gains tax (I’m jealous). No death tax (I’m jealous).

Nada. Zero. Zilch.

But the absence of an income tax bothers some outsiders. Nations such as Australia and international bureaucracies such as the World Bank are pressuring politicians in Vanuatu to adopt an income tax. And they’re playing dirty, trying to bribe and extort lawmakers with promises to provide more aid or threats to withdraw existing aid.

Faced with this threat, members of the Vanuatu business community asked me if I would make a big sacrifice and come to their nation so I could explain to politicians and the public why an income tax would be a terrible mistake. Being a noble person and nice guy, I said yes, even though it means I’m having to miss some of the wonderful December weather in Washington, DC.

This is only my second day in Vanuatu, but I’ve already given one speech, done some local media, and met with a bunch of people. Combined with the research I did before arriving, there are two lessons that we can learn from what’s happening.

First, the absence of an income tax does not necessarily mean a country a role model for free markets. If you look at the latest edition of the Index of Economic Freedom, Vanuatu is ranked #89 out of 178 nations, barely qualifying for the “Moderately Free” club of countries. To give you an idea what this means, Vanuatu ranks below Italy and France.

The moral of the story is that it’s good to have a low tax burden and no income tax, but that’s just one piece of the puzzle. Vanuatu gets very low scores in other areas, particularly regulatory efficiency and rule of law.

This is one of the reasons why Vanuatu is still a poor country.

The Bahamas has no income tax, but it also gets decent scores in other areas, so it ranks #31 out of 178 nations. Unsurprisingly, the people of the Bahamas are much more prosperous than their counterparts in Vanuatu.

And if you look at jurisdictions such as Bermuda, Monaco, and the Cayman Islands, they don’t get ranked by the Index of Economic Freedom, but they presumably would be in the top 10 because of their systemic commitment to free markets. And all of those jurisdictions are among the wealthiest places on the planet.

So the bottom line is that Vanuatu has only one good policy, and that’s the absence of an income tax. I’m telling them they need to engage in further economic liberalization. Other outside forces, however, are telling policy makers to get rid of their only attractive economic policy. Go figure.

Second, the reason why the income tax is a threat is that Vanuatu politicians have increased the burden of government spending. There are several source of data, including the IMF’s massive database, and they all show that government spending since 2000 has grown by an average of about 6 percent annually.

In other words, they’ve been violating my Golden Rule. And when that happens, it just a matter of time before there’s pressure for big tax increases.

So in my big public speech last night, I obviously explained why an income tax would be a horrid mistake for Vanuatu, but I also explained that bad tax policy will be inevitable unless there is an effective policy to control the growth of government. And that’s why the last half of my speech was about the merits of a spending cap.

I cited the positive results in nations that have enjoyed multi-year periods of spending restraint, and I specifically highlighted the very effective spending caps in Hong Kong and Switzerland. I even pointed out that international bureaucracies such as the OECD and IMF have admitted that spending caps are the only effective fiscal rule.

The challenge, of course, is that politicians very rarely are willing to tie their own hands. From their perspective, a spending cap is a threat to their ability to play Santa Claus. They’d much prefer, based on “public choice” incentives, to impose a new form of taxation.

But this doesn’t mean the fight against the income tax is hopeless. As I’ve explained when writing about American politicians, lawmakers are often tempted to do the wrong thing. They may frequently surrender to temptation and choose to do the wrong thing. But they’re also capable of doing the right thing.

My job is to be the angel on one shoulder, offering good advice to counter the malignant pressure being imposed by the devil (especially the Australian Tax Office) on the other shoulder.

The United States made a very big mistake back in 1913. Vanuatu should learn from our error.

P.S. This isn’t the first time I’ve waded into a battle over whether a zero-income-tax jurisdiction should impose an income tax. A few years ago, I helped thwart a scheme to impose an income tax in the Cayman Islands. I hope to be similarly successful in helping the people of Vanuatu.

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Shut Down the Department of Energy, Yesterday if Possible

President-Elect Trump has picked Ben Carson as his Secretary for the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which immediately produced two thoughts.

First, since he had the best tax plan of all the 2016 candidates, too bad he wasn’t named Secretary of Treasury.

Second, I hope his job at HUD is to shut down the department, raze the building, and get the federal government out of the housing business.

Then I realized I was thinking too narrowly. Shouldn’t all Trump appointees start with the assumption that their department, agency, or program is an unconstitutional waste of money? I’ve already written columns explaining why some cabinet-level bureaucracies should be abolished.

• Department of Agriculture
• Department of Housing and Urban Development
• Department of Education
• Department of Transportation

Now let’s expand this list by taking  a look at the Department of Energy.

And our job will be easy since William O’Keefe has a very persuasive column for E21. Let’s look at some of the highlights, starting with the observation that the bureaucracy was created based on the assumption that the world was running out of energy and that somehow politicians and bureaucrats could fix that supposed problem.

The Department of Energy (DOE) traces its roots to the energy crisis of 1973, which was made worse by misguided government policy.  …there was, at the time, a firm belief that the world was going to run out of oil by the end of the century. Not only does the world have plenty of oil, but the United States is now a net exporter of natural gas–and would be exporting more if DOE was faster with its approvals. …Prior to DOE, the federal government played a very limited role in energy policy and development.  Presumed scarcity, excessive dependence on OPEC nations, distrust in markets, and the search for energy independence became the foundation for what is now a $32.5 billion bureaucracy in search for relevance.

In other words, the ostensible problem that led to the creation of the department was preposterously misdiagnosed.

The market produced lots of energy once the shackles of government intervention (including those from the Energy Department) were sufficiently loosened.

So what, then, does the department do?

What DOE has done is squander money on the search for alternative energy sources. In the process, it enabled Bootlegger and Baptist schemes that enriched crony capitalists who are all too willing to support the flawed notion that government can pick winners and losers.  For 2017, a large chunk of DOE spending–$12.6 billion, or 39 percent—is earmarked to “support the President’s strategy to combat climate change.” This is not a justifiable use of taxpayer dollars. Over 36 years, DOE’s mission has morphed from energy security to industrial policy, disguised as advanced energy research and innovation.  There is a long and failed history of industrial policy by the federal government.

Here’s the bottom line.

DOE has become the Department of Pork. …Energy firms do not need government subsidies to innovate and develop new technologies.  Horizontal drilling and fracking came from the private sector because the incentives to develop shale oil and gas were stronger than the illusions driving alternative energy sources. …Abolishing DOE would punish only the crony capitalists who have become addicted to its support.

Amen.

By the way, Mr. O’Keefe’s argument is primarily based on the fact that DOE doesn’t produce value.

Since I’m a fiscal wonk, I’ll add another arrow to the quiver. We also should abolish the department so that we can save a lot of money.

My colleague Chris Edwards has an entire website filled with information about the uselessness of the department. You can – and should – spend hours perusing all of the information he has accumulated.

But here’s the part that jumped out to me. Over the years, the federal government has squandered hundreds of billions of dollars on a department that is most famous for wasteful Solyndra-style scams.

By the way, there are a small handful of activities at DOE that should be shifted to other departments (such as transferring nuclear weapons responsibilities to the Department of Defense).

But the vast majority of DOE activities never should have been created and produce zero value, so the sooner the bureaucracy is eliminated, the better.

P.S. We can have tons of evidence about the desirability of shutting down the Department of Energy, but it doesn’t matter if there aren’t politicians who think it is more important to protect taxpayers rather than to funnel money to cronyists and interest groups. We’ll have to wait and see whether Trump chooses wisely, though I’m not holding my breath. We certainly didn’t get any pro-taxpayer shift of policy the last time GOPers were in charge of the White House. And Trump’s commitment to the notion of smaller government doesn’t seem overly robust, though I very much hope I’m wrong.

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OECD Overlooks Amazing Success of Low-Tax Singapore, Urges Higher Taxes in Asia

I wrote a rather favorable column a few days ago about a new study from economists at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Their research showed how larger levels of government spending are associated with weaker economic performance, and the results were worth sharing even though the study’s methodology almost certainly led to numbers that understated the case against big government.

Regardless, saying anything positive about research from the OECD was an unusual experience since I’m normally writing critical articles about the statist agenda of the international bureaucracy’s political appointees.

That being said, I feel on more familiar ground today since I’m going to write something negative about the antics of the Paris-based bureaucracy.

The OECD just published Revenue Statistics in Asian Countries, which covers Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines for the 1990-2014 period. Much of the data is useful and interesting, but some of the analysis is utterly bizarre and preposterous, starting with the completely unsubstantiated assertion that there’s a need for more tax revenue in the region.

…the need to mobilise government revenue in developing countries to fund public goods and services is increasing. …In the Philippines and Indonesia, the governments are endeavoring to strengthen their tax revenues and have established tax-to-GDP targets. The Philippines aims to increase their tax-to-GDP ratio to 17% (excluding Social Security contributions) by 2016…and Indonesia aims to reach the same level by 2019.

Needless to say, there’s not even an iota of evidence in the report to justify the assertion that there’s a need for more tax revenue. Not a shred of data to suggest that higher taxes would lead to more economic development or more public goods. The OECD simply makes a claim and offers no backup or support.

But here’s the most amazing part. The OECD report argues that a nation isn’t developed unless taxes consume at least 25 percent of GDP.

These targets will contribute to increasing financial capacity toward the minimum tax-to-GDP ratio of 25% deemed essential to become a developed country.

This is a jaw-dropping assertion in part because most of the world’s rich nations became prosperous back in the 1800s and early 1900s when government spending consumed only about 10 percent of economic output.

And not only were taxes a concomitantly minor burden during that period, but many nations didn’t have any income taxes at all.

At this point, you may be thinking the OECD bureaucrats are merely guilty of not knowing history.

That certainly would be a charitable explanation of their gross oversight/mistake.

But there’s something else in the study that makes this benign interpretation implausible. The study explicitly notes that Singapore is a super-prosperous developed nation with a very low tax burden – way below the supposed minimum requirement identified by the OECD.

Singapore has the highest GDP per-capita of the six countries and one of the lowest tax-to-GDP ratios. …The low tax-to-GDP ratio is explained by lower income tax rates (particularly on corporate income) and VAT rates, compared to other Asian countries. …The tax-to-GDP ratio in Singapore is lower in 2014 relative to 2000, driven by the decrease of individual income tax rates and corporate income tax rates.

Here’s a chart from the report showing that taxes consume less than 14 percent of economic output in Singapore.

Needless to say, there’s nothing in the report to square the circle and justify the claim about the supposed link between higher taxes and economic development. Nothing to explain why Singapore manages to be so rich with such a small burden of government. It’s as if the bureaucrats hoped that nobody would notice that numbers in the study undermined their ideologically driven claim that tax burdens should climb in Asia.

Indeed, I wonder if Hong Kong was omitted from the study simply because that would have further undermined the OECD’s preposterous assertion that higher taxes are a route to economic development.

P.S. Having low taxes and a modest burden of government certainly is part of what can make a nation rich and successful, but the real goal should be to have a good mix of free markets and small government. Singapore does that, ranking #2 in Economic Freedom of the World.

Other Asian nations, by contrast, may have modest fiscal burdens, but the potential economic benefit is undermined by statist policies in areas such as trade, regulation, monetary policy, and property rights. This certainly helps to explain why countries such as Indonesia (#79), Malaysia (#62), and the Philippines (#80) have much lower scores for overall economic liberty.

P.P.S. I’m not sure why the OECD would produce such sloppy research. If they simply wanted to create a false narrative, why didn’t the bureaucrats omit Singapore and simply hope nobody knew the numbers from that country (or the historical numbers for North America and Western Europe)? My suspicion is that the senior political types at the OECD wanted to produce a study that would be helpful for certain politicians  in the region (i.e., allow them to justify higher tax burdens) and they figured a lot of people would only pay attention to the press release.

P.P.P.S. The OECD certainly has a track record of dishonest research.

• Deceptively manipulating data to make preposterous claims that differing income levels somehow dampen economic growth.
• Falsely asserting that there is more poverty in the United States than in poor nations such as Greece, Portugal, Turkey, and Hungary.
• Cherry picking years to create a false narrative about trends in personal income tax revenue and corporate income tax revenue.
• Peddling dishonest gender wage data, numbers so misleading that they’ve been disavowed by a member of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers.

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Everything You Need to Know about Libertarianism, in a Venn Diagram

I wrote a couple of days ago about a global ranking showing which nations enjoy the most personal and economic freedom.

Surprisingly, European nations dominated the top 20, which suggests (given the depressing amount of statism in Europe) that libertarians have a lot of work to do if we want good liberty-oriented role models for the world.

Heck, even the top three jurisdictions (Hong Kong, Switzerland, and New Zealand), while very admirable compared to most other nations, still have too much government.

In the fight for libertarian policy, we face several obstacles, including the “public choice” pressure for ever-growing government, as well as the fact that we simply need to learn how to be more persuasive.

And if we want to be more persuasive, we need to somehow convince people to apply sensible principles in a consistent manner. And this is why this Venn Diagram from Mark Perry’s collection is so valuable. It’s addressed to leftists and it challenges them to consistently apply their beliefs about the liberty of consenting adults.

Mark obviously hopes that the people who think there should be freedom for personal relationships will realize that it is inconsistent to simultaneously want to restrict freedom in economic relationships (in this case, the freedom to accept a job that doesn’t pay as much as some politicians would prefer).

But the Venn Diagram also could apply to conservatives by changing a few words. Folks on the right generally understand that consenting adults should be free to engage in voluntary economic exchange, but they sometimes want to limit consenting adults in the personal sphere.

By the way, a belief in freedom doesn’t imply that people have to be happy about the choices others make. You can think that it’s wrong and sad and unfortunate that some people have very limited skills and are able to earn only $5 per hour in the marketplace. And you can you personally disapprove of certain relationships between consenting adults.

Libertarianism is simply the principle and theory that you don’t support government coercion to prevent other adults from engaging in behaviors that you don’t like. Assuming, of course, that other people’s actions don’t conflict with your rights to life, liberty, and property.

P.S. You can enjoy other Mark Perry Venn Diagrams here, here, here, and here (newly added).

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John Stossel, Paul Krugman, and the Washington Swamp

If you ask what worries me about the incoming Trump Administration, I’ll immediately point to a bunch of policy issues.

• Will Trump be too timid to deal with the huge entitlement problem?
• Will Trump do a business-as-usual pork-filled infrastructure deal?
• Will Trump’s tax cut be feasible without concomitant spending discipline?

Others, though, are more focused on whether Trump’s business empire will distort decisions in the White House.

Here’s what Paul Krugman recently wrote about Trump and potential corruption.

…he’s already giving us an object lesson in what real conflicts of interest look like, as authoritarian governments around the world shower favors on his business empire. Of course, Donald Trump could be rejecting these favors and separating himself and his family from his hotels and so on. But he isn’t. In fact, he’s openly using his position to drum up business. …The question you need to ask is why this matters. …America is a very rich country, whose government spends more than $4 trillion a year, so even large-scale looting amounts to rounding error. What’s important is not the money that sticks to the fingers of the inner circle, but what they do to get that money, and the bad policy that results. …what’s truly scary is the potential impact of corruption on foreign policy. …someplace like Vladimir Putin’s Russia can easily funnel vast sums to the man at the top… So how bad will the effects of Trump-era corruption be? The best guess is, worse than you can possibly imagine.

I’m tempted to ask why Krugman wasn’t similarly worried about corruption over the past eight years. Was he fretting about Solyndra-type scams? About the pay-to-play antics at the Clinton Foundation? About Operation Choke Point and arbitrary denial of financial services to law-abiding citizens?

He seems to think that the problem of malfeasance only exists when his team isn’t in power. But that’s totally backwards. As I wrote back in 2010, people should be especially concerned and vigilant when their party holds power. It’s not just common sense. It should be a moral obligation.

But even if Krugman is a hypocrite, that doesn’t mean he’s wrong. At least not in this case. He is absolutely on the mark when he frets about the “incentives” for massive looting by Trump and his allies.

But what frustrates me is that he doesn’t draw the obvious conclusion, which is that the incentive to loot mostly exists because there’s an ability to loot. And the ability to loot mostly exists because the federal government is so big and has so much power.

And as Lord Acton famously warned, power is very tempting and very corrupting.

Which is why I’m hoping that Krugman will read John Stossel’s new column for Reason. In the piece, John correctly points out that the only way to “drain the swamp” is to shrink the size and scope of government.

…today’s complex government allows the politically connected to corrupt… most everything. …In the swamp, no one but taxpayers pays for their mistakes. …it’s well worth it for companies to invest in lobbyists and fixers who dive into the swamp to extract subsidies.For taxpayers? Not so much. While the benefits to lobbyists are concentrated, taxpayer costs are diffuse. …Draining the swamp would mean not just taking freebies away from corporations—or needy citizens—but eliminating complex handouts like Obamacare. Candidate Trump said he would repeal Obamacare. Will he? He’s already backed off of that promise, saying he likes two parts of the law—the most expensive parts.

As you can see, Stossel understands “public choice” and recognizes that making government smaller is the only sure-fire way of reducing public corruption.

Which is music to my ears, for obvious reasons.

By the way, the same problem exists in many other countries and this connects to the controversies about Trump and his business dealings. Many of the stories about potential misbehavior during a Trump Administration focus on whether the President will adjust American policy in exchange for permits and other favors from foreign governments.

But that temptation wouldn’t exist if entrepreneurs didn’t need to get permission from bureaucrats before building things such as hotels and golf courses. In other words, if more nations copied Singapore and New Zealand, there wouldn’t be much reason to worry whether the new president was willing to swap policy for permits.

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