From Bad to Worse: The Ongoing Implosion of Venezuelan Statism

As far as I’m concerned, everything you need to know about capitalism vs. statism is captured in this chart comparing per-capita economic output in Chile and Venezuela.

Ask yourself which country offers more opportunity, especially for the poor? The obvious answer is Chile, where poverty has rapidly declined ever since the country shifted to free enterprise. In Venezuela, by contrast, poor children die of malnutrition thanks to pervasive interventionism.

Indeed, having shared several horrifying stories of human suffering and government venality from Venezuela (including 28 separate examples in April 2017 and 28 different separate examples in December 2017), I’ve reached the point where nothing shocks me.

So now I mostly wonder whether leftist apologists feel any shame when they see grim news from that statist hellhole.

For instance, what does Joe Stiglitz think about this report from the Miami Herald?

At 16, Liliana has become the mother figure for a gang of Venezuelan children and young adults called the Chacao, named after the neighborhood they’ve claimed as their territory. The 15 members, ranging in age from 10 to 23, work together to survive vicious fights for “quality” garbage in crumbling, shortage-plagued Venezuela. Their weapons are knives and sticks and machetes. The prize? Garbage that contains food good enough to eat. …A year ago, the gang was “stationed” around a supermarket at a mall called Centro Comercial Ciudad Tamanaco that generates tons of garbage. But a feared rival gang from the neighborhood Las Mercedes also wanted the garbage.

And what does Bernie Sanders think about this story from NPR?

The Pharmaceutical Federation of Venezuela estimates the country is suffering from an 85 percent shortage of medicine amid an economic crisis… The entire Venezuelan health care system is on the verge of collapse, says Francisco Valencia, head of the public health advocacy group Codevida. Some hospitals lack electricity, and more than 13,000 doctors have left Venezuela in the past four years in search of better opportunities. “They don’t give food to the patients in the hospital…” Government data shows infant mortality rose by 30 percent in 2016… The International Monetary Fund predicts inflation will soar to 13,000 percent this year and the economy will shrink by 15 percent. …The monthly minimum wage for many Venezuelans is now equal to $3, according to the AP. …Maduro blames the country’s growing crisis on…the U.S…leading an effort to wipe out socialism in Venezuela.

I’d be curious to know what Michael Moore thinks about this news from CNN?

Venezuela’s devastating food crisis means wheat flour has become a rare commodity in the country. Some churches have run out of the ingredient needed to make the sacramental bread that is central to celebrating the Holy Eucharist… So, members of the Catholic diocese of Cúcuta, Colombia, braved heavy rain this week to deliver the wafers over a bridge that connects the two countries… Venezuela’s economic crisis, fueled by a decline in oil production, shows no signs of improvement.People are starving because of routine food shortages. They are dying in hospitals because basic medicine and equipment aren’t available.

And what does Jeremy Corbyn think about this Bloomberg report?

Ruiz’s weekly salary of 110,000 bolivares — about 50 cents at the black-market exchange rate — buys him less than a kilo of corn meal or rice. His only protein comes from 170 grams of canned tuna included in a food box the government provides to low-income families. It shows up every 45 days or so. “I haven’t eaten meat for two months,” he said. …Hunger is hastening the ruin of Venezuelan’s oil industry as workers grow too weak and hungry for heavy labor. With children dying of malnutrition and adults sifting garbage for table scraps, food has become more important than employment, and thousands are walking off the job. …Venezuela, a socialist autocracy that once was South America’s most prosperous nation, is suffering a collapse almost without precedent.

Or how about getting Sean Penn‘s reaction to this story from the New York Times?

For the past three weeks, Wilya Hernández, her husband and their daughter, 2, have been sleeping on the garbage-strewn streets of Cúcuta, a sprawling and chaotic city on Colombia’s side of the border with Venezuela. Though Antonela, the toddler, often misses meals, Ms. Hernández has no desire to return home to Venezuela. …“I sold my hair to feed my girl,” Ms. Hernández said, pulling back her locks to reveal a shaved head underneath, adding that wigmakers now walk the plazas of Cúcuta where many Venezuelans congregate, wearing signs advertising that they give cash for hair. …“If I can’t afford to go the bathroom, I’ll go on the street,” Ms. Hernández added. “That’s when guys walking by say creepy things.”

I wonder if Noam Chomsky has any comments about this Washington Post story?

A friend recently sent me a photograph…, just a blurry cellphone shot of trash… And yet I can’t stop thinking about it, because strewn about in the trash are at least a dozen 20-bolivar bills, small-denomination currency now so worthless even looters didn’t think it was worth their time to stop and pick them up. …according to the “official” exchange rate, …each of those bills is worth $2. In fact, as Venezuela sinks deeper…into…hyperinflation…, bolivar banknotes have come to be worth basically nothing: Each bill is worth about $0.0001 at the current exchange rate… It’s easy to see why the thieves left them behind.

Last but not least, I wonder what Jesse Jackson thinks about this news from the U.K.-based Guardian?

More than half of young Venezuelans want to move abroad permanently, after food shortages, violence and a political crisis escalated to new extremes in 2017, according to a new survey. Once Latin America’s richest country, Venezuela’s economy is now collapsing… One of the most painful effects of the current crisis has been widespread hunger. In 2015, when inflation and food shortages were well below current levels, nearly 45% of Venezuelans said there were times when they were unable to afford food; in the latest study, that figure had risen to 79% – one of the highest rates in the world. …Norma Gutiérrez, a radiologist in eastern Caracas, is one of those…would-be migrants. Acute shortages in the hospital where she works depress her, and she says the idea of emigrating crosses her mind at least once a week.

By the way, in an example of unintended humor, the Socialist Party of Great Britain has a ready-made answer to all those questions. The misery is the fault of capitalism. I’m not kidding.

And folks on the establishment left occasionally try to imply that it’s all the result of falling oil prices.

Two years ago, I concocted a visual showing the “Five Circles of Statist Hell” and speculated that Venezuela was getting close to the fourth level. Though I still don’t think it’s nearly as bad as North Korea.

P.S. Since I mentioned unintentional humor, you’ll be amused to know a “Happy Planet Index” created by radical environmentalists places Venezuela above the United States.

P.P.S. And here’s some intentional dark humor about hunger in Venezuela.

Read Full Post »

The Bill of Rights, Gun Ownership, and the Constitution

I don’t own an AR-15. I’m not a “gun person,” whatever that means. I hardly ever shoot. And I never hunt.

But I’m nonetheless a big supporter of private gun ownership. In part, this is because I have a libertarian belief in civil liberties. In other words, my default assumption is that people should have freedom (the notion of “negative liberty“), whereas many folks on the left have a default assumption for that the state should determine what’s allowed.

I also support private gun ownership because I want a safer society. Criminals and other bad people are less likely to engage in mayhem if they know potential victims can defend themselves. And I also think that there’s a greater-than-zero chance that bad government policy eventually will lead to periodic breakdowns of civil society, in which case gun owners will be the last line of defense for law and order.

I’m sometimes asked, though, whether supporters of the 2nd Amendment are too rigid. Shouldn’t the NRA and other groups support proposals for “common-sense gun safety”?

Some of these gun-control ideas may even sound reasonable, but they all suffer from a common flaw. None of them would disarm criminals or reduce gun crime. And I’ve detected a very troubling pattern, namely that when you explain why these schemes won’t work, the knee-jerk response from the anti-gun crowd is that we then need greater levels of control. Indeed, if you press them on the issue, they’ll often admit that their real goal is gun confiscation.

Though most folks in leadership positions on the left are crafty enough that they try to hide this extreme view.

So that’s why – in a perverse way – I want to applaud John Paul Stevens, the former Supreme Court Justice, for his column in the New York Times that openly and explicitly argues for the repeal of the 2nd Amendment.

…demonstrators should…demand a repeal of the Second Amendment. …that amendment…is a relic of the 18th century. …to get rid of the Second Amendment would be simple and would do more to weaken the N.R.A.’s ability to stymie legislative debate and block constructive gun control legislation than any other available option. …That simple but dramatic action would…eliminate the only legal rule that protects sellers of firearms in the United States.

The reason I’m semi-applauding Stevens is that he’s an honest leftist. He’s bluntly urging that we jettison part of the Bill of Rights.

Many – if not most – people on the left want that outcome. And a growing number of the are coming out of the pro-confiscation closet. In an article for Commentary, Noah Rothman links to several articles urging repeal of the 2nd Amendment.

They’re talking about repealing the Second Amendment. It started with former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens and George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley. …Turley and Stevens were joined this week by op-ed writers in the pages of Esquire and the Seattle Times. Democratic candidates for federal office have even enlisted in the ranksvvvvvvvv of those calling for an amendment to curtail the freedoms in the Bill of Rights. …anti-Second Amendment themes…have been expressed unashamedly for years, from liberal activists like Michael Moore to conservative opinion writers at the New York Times.  Those calling for the repeal of the right to bear arms today are only echoing similar calls made years ago in venues ranging from Rolling Stone, MSNBC, and Vanity Fair to the Jesuit publication America Magazine.

But others on the left prefer to hide their views on the issue.

Indeed, they even want to hide the views of their fellow travelers. Chris Cuomo, who has a show on MSNBC, preposterously asserted that nobody supports repeal of the 2nd Amendment.

this is a lot of bunk. no one calling for 2A repeal. stop with the bogeymen. we need to stop the shootings and have a rational conversation about what can be done. https://t.co/P2MYoY4EtO

— Christopher C. Cuomo (@ChrisCuomo) March 28, 2018

It’s also worth noting that Justice Stevens got scolded by a gun-control advocate at the Washington Post.

One of the biggest threats to the recovery of the Democratic Party these days is overreach. …But rarely do we see such an unhelpful, untimely and fanciful idea as the one put forward by retired Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens. …Stevens calls for a repeal of the Second Amendment. The move might as well be considered an in-kind contribution to the National Rifle Association, to Republicans’ efforts to keep the House and Senate in 2018, and to President Trump’s 2020 reelection bid. In one fell swoop, Stevens has lent credence to the talking point that the left really just wants to get rid of gun ownership. …This is exactly the kind of thing that motivates the right and signals to working-class swing voters that perhaps the Democratic Party and the political left doesn’t really get them.

The bottom line is that the left’s ultimate goal is gutting the 2nd Amendment. Not much doubt of that, even if some leftists are politically savvy enough to understand that their extremist policy is politically suicidal.

But let’s set aside the politics and look at the legal issues. There’s another reason why I’m perversely happy about the Stevens oped. Even though he was on the wrong side of the case, he effectively admits that the 2008 Heller decision enshrined and upheld the individual right to own firearms.

And the five Justices who out-voted Stevens made the right decision. I’m not a legal expert, so I’ll simply cite some people who are very competent to discuss the issue. Starting with what Damon Root wrote for Reason.

One problem with Stevens’ position is that he is dead wrong about the legal history. …For example, consider how the Second Amendment was treated in St. George Tucker’s 1803 View of the Constitution of the United States, which was the first extended analysis and commentary published about the Constitution. For generations of law students, lawyers, and judges, Tucker’s View served as a go-to con-law textbook. …He observed the debates over the ratification of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as they happened. And he had no doubt that the Second Amendment secured an individual right of the “nonmilitary” type. “This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty,” Tucker wrote of the Second Amendment. “The right of self-defense is the first law of nature.” In other words, the Heller majority’s view of the Second Amendment is as old and venerable as the amendment itself.

Well stated.

Though the real hero of this story is probably Joyce Lee Malcolm, the scholar whose work was instrumental in producing the Heller decision. John Miller explains for National Review.

Malcolm looks nothing like a hardened veteran of the gun-control wars. Small, slender, and bookish, she’s a wisp of a woman who enjoys plunging into archives and sitting through panel discussions at academic conferences. Her favorite topic is 17th- and 18th-century Anglo-American history… She doesn’t belong to the National Rifle Association, nor does she hunt. …She is also the lady who saved the Second Amendment — a scholar whose work helped make possible the Supreme Court’s landmark Heller decision, which in 2008 recognized an individual right to possess a firearm.

Ms. Malcolm started as a traditional academic.

For her dissertation, she moved to Oxford and Cambridge, with children in tow. …Malcolm’s doctoral dissertation focused on King Charles I and the problem of loyalty in the 1640s… The Royal Historical Society published her first book.

But her subsequent research uncovered some fascinating insights about the right to keep and bear arms.

At a time when armies were marching around England, ordinary people became anxious about surrendering guns. Then, in 1689, the English Bill of Rights responded by granting Protestants the right to “have Arms for their Defence.” Malcolm wasn’t the first person to notice this, of course, but as an American who had studied political loyalty in England, she approached the topic from a fresh angle. “The English felt a need to put this in writing because the king had been disarming his political opponents,” she says. “This is the origin of our Second Amendment. It’s an individual right.” …Fellowships allowed her to pursue her interest in how the right to bear arms migrated across the ocean and took root in colonial America. “The subject hadn’t been done from the English side because it’s an American question, and American constitutional scholars didn’t know the English material very well,” she says. …The Second Amendment, she insisted, recognizes an individual right to gun ownership as an essential feature of limited government. In her book’s preface, she called this the “least understood of those liberties secured by Englishmen and bequeathed to their American colonists.”

And it turns out that careful scholarship can produce profound results.

…in 2008, came Heller, arguably the most important gun-rights case in U.S. history. A 5–4 decision written by Scalia and citing Malcolm three times, it swept away the claims of gun-control theorists and declared that Americans enjoy an individual right to gun ownership. “…it gave us this substantial right.” She remembers a thought from the day the Court ruled: “If I have done nothing else my whole life, I have accomplished something important.” …the right to bear arms will not be infringed — thanks in part to the pioneering scholarship of Joyce Lee Malcolm.

Let’s close with a video from Prager University, narrated by Eugene Volokh, a law professor at UCLA. He explains the legal and historical meaning of the 2nd Amendment.

In other words, the bottom line is that the Justice Stevens and other honest leftists are right. The 2nd Amendment would need to be repealed in order to impose meaningful gun control.

And I suppose it’s also worth mentioning that it won’t be easy to ban and confiscate guns if they ever succeeded in weakening the Bill of Rights. But hopefully we’ll never get to that stage.

Read Full Post »

Economic Policy Matters: The Example of Botswana vs. South Africa vs. Zimbabwe

What’s the best argument against statism?

As a libertarian, my answer is that freedom is preferable to coercion. Freedom also ranks higher than prosperity. For instance, the government might be able to boost economic output by requiring people to work seven days a week, but such a policy would be odious and indefensible.

As an economist, I have a more utilitarian perspective. The best argument against statism is that it simply doesn’t work. Nations with bigger government and more intervention routinely under-perform compared to otherwise-similar countries with small government and free markets.

That’s why I often present my leftist friends with my two-question challenge. I ask them to name a country, anywhere on the planet and at any point in history, that either become rich with statist policies or has experienced superior levels of growth with statist policies.

They never have an answer. Or, to be more specific, they never have an accurate answer since Sweden (their reflex response) became rich when government was small and has stumbled ever since a large welfare state was imposed.

And if they are willing to have an extended discussion, my next step is to compare the long-run performance of market-friendly jurisdictions with statist jurisdictions. Whether we’re looking at Chile vs. Venezuela, North Korea vs. South Korea, or Hong Kong vs. Argentina, the results always show that economic liberty is the recipe for growth and prosperity.

When I ask them to show a statist nation with decades of good results, they don’t have an answer. Or, to be more specific, they never have an accurate answer since China (their reflex response) only started to grow once the economy was partially liberalized.

I’m pontificating on this topic because a reader sent me this very stark contrast between market-friendly Botswana and the statist hellhole of Zimbabwe. I can’t vouch for the specific numbers, though it appears some of them are from the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom.

The obvious lesson is that good policy is producing vastly superior results in Botswana.

But I wanted independent confirmation since not everything one sees on the Internet is true (shocking!).

So I checked Human Progress, the invaluable data portal created by Marian Tupy, and downloaded more than 50 years of data for inflation-adjusted ($2010) per-capita GDP in Botswana, Zimbabwe, and South Africa.

The results, to put it mildly, are stunning. Botswana has enjoyed much faster growth than South Africa and Zimbabwe has suffered horrible stagnation.

South Africa’s anemic performance doesn’t surprise me.

And I guess the gap between Botswana and Zimbabwe shouldn’t surprise me, either. After all, Marian wrote about the difference between Botswana and Zimbabwe back in 2008.

How different, I thought, was Zimbabwe from Botswana, the latter of which is safe and increasingly prosperous. But what accounts for such striking differences between the two neighbors? It turns out that much of the difference stems from the degree of freedom that each populace enjoys.

Here’s some of what he wrote about Botswana.

As Robert Guest of The Economist noted in his 2004 book, The Shackled Continent, “In the last 35 years, Botswana’s economy has grown faster than any other in the world…” According to Scott Beaulier, an economist at Beloit College, “Khama adopted pro-market policies on a wide front. His new government promised low and stable taxes to mining companies, liberalized trade, increased personal freedoms, and kept marginal income tax rates low to deter tax evasion and corruption.” …Economic openness served Botswana well. Between 1966 and 2006, its average annual compound growth rate of GDP per capita was 7.22 percent — higher than China’s 6.99 percent. Its GDP per capita (adjusted for inflation and purchasing power parity) rose from $671 in 1966 to $10,813 in 2005.

And here are some of his observations about Zimbabwe.

…almost all of the country’s 4,000 white-owned farms were invaded by state-organized gangs. Some of the farmers who resisted the land seizures were murdered, while others fled abroad. …The agricultural sector soon collapsed, and with it most of Zimbabwe’s tax revenue and foreign currency reserves. …the government ordered the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) to print more money, sparking the first hyperinflation of the 21st century. …Mugabe’s answer to the falling economy was to increase state patronage and the intensity of the looting.

Needless to say, nothing has changed in the decade since that article was published. Though hopefully Mugabe’s recent ouster may lead to better policy in Zimbabwe (it would be difficult to move in the wrong direction, though Venezuela is evidence that further deterioration is possible).

Let’s conclude with a video I shared three years ago, but it’s worth a second look since we’re considering Botswana’s comparative success.

By the way, none of this suggests Botswana is perfect. Indeed, it’s not even close.

According to the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World, it is ranked #50, which means it isn’t even in the top quartile. And its latest score of 7.37 (out of 10) is well below top-ranked Hong Kong’s score of 8.97.

But you don’t have to be fast to win a race. You simply need to be quicker than your competitors. And, on the continent of Africa, Botswana has the most economic freedom.

P.S. I fully expect South Africa to move in the wrong direction, at least in relative terms if not absolute terms.

P.P.S. If you liked the “story of two neighbors” comparison of Botswana and Zimbabwe at the beginning of this column, you’ll probably enjoy this comparison of Detroit and Hiroshima and this comparison of Hong Kong and Havana.

Read Full Post »

Reforms to Sweden’s Retirement System and Lessons for the United States

Given Social Security’s enormous long-run financial problems, the program eventually will need reform.

But what should be done? Some folks on the left, such as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, support huge tax increases to prop up the program. Such an approach would have a very negative impact on the economy and, because of built-in demographic changes, would merely delay the program’s bankruptcy.

Others want a combination of tax increases and benefit cuts. This pay-more-get-less approach is somewhat more rational, but it means that today’s workers would get a really bad deal from Social Security.

This is why I frequently point out that personal retirement accounts (i.e., a “funded” system based on real savings) are the best long-run solution. And to help the crowd in Washington understand why this is the best approach, I explain that dozens of nations already have adopted this type of reform. And I’ve written about the good results in some of these jurisdictions.

• Australia
• Chile
• Switzerland
• Hong Kong
• Netherlands
• Faroe Islands

Now it’s time to add Sweden to the list.

I actually first wrote about the Swedish reform almost 20 years ago, in a study for the Heritage Foundation co-authored with an expert from Sweden. Here’s some of what we said about the nation’s partial privatization.

Swedish policymakers decided that both individual workers and the overall economy would benefit if the old-age system were partially privatized. …Workers can invest 2.5 percentage points of the 18.5 percent of their income that they must set aside for retirement. …the larger part-16 percent of payroll-goes to the government portion of the program. …What makes the government pay-as-you-go portion of the pension program unique, however, is the formula used for calculating an individual’s future retirement benefits. Each worker’s 16 percent payroll tax is credited to an individual account, although the accounts are notional. …the government uses the money in these notional accounts to calculate an annuity (annual retirement benefit) for the worker. …the longer a worker stays in the workforce, the larger the annuity received. This reform is expected to discourage workers from retiring early… There are many benefits to Sweden’s new system, including greater incentives to work, increased national savings, a flexible retirement age, lower taxes and less government spending.

While that study holds up very well, let’s look at more recent research so we can see how the Swedish system has performed.

I’m a big fan of the fully privatized portion of the Swedish system (the “premium pension”) funded by the 2.5 percent of payroll that goes to personal accounts.

But let’s first highlight the very good reform of the government’s portion of the retirement system. It’s still a tax-and-transfer scheme, but there are “notional” accounts, which means that benefits for retirees are now tied to how much they work and how much they pay into the system.

A new study for the American Enterprise Institute, authored by James Capretta, explains the benefits of this approach.

Sweden enacted a reform of its public pension system that combines a defined-contribution approach with a traditional pay-as-you-go financing structure. The new system includes better work incentives and is more transparent to participants. It is also permanently solvent due to provisions that automatically adjust payouts based on shifting demographic and economic factors. …A primary objective…in Sweden was to build a new system that would be solvent permanently within a fixed overall contribution rate. …pension benefits are calculated based on notional accounts, which are credited with 16.0 percent of workers’ creditable wages. …The pensions workers get in retirement are tied directly to the amount of contributions they make to the system. …This design improved incentives for work… To keep the system in balance, this rate of return is subject to adjustment, to correct for shifts in demographic and economic factors that affect what rate of return can be paid within the fixed budget constraint of a 16.0 percent contribution rate.

The final part of the above excerpts is key. The system automatically adjusts, thus presumably averting the danger of future tax hikes.

Now let’s look at some background on the privatized portion of the new system. Here’s a good explanation in a working paper from the Center for Fiscal Studies at Sweden’s Uppsala University.

The Premium Pension was created mainly for three purposes. Firstly, funded individual accounts were believed to increase overall savings in Sweden. …Secondly, the policy makers wanted to allow participants to take account of the higher return in the capital markets as well as to tailor part of their pension to their risk preferences. Finally, an FDC scheme is inherently immune against financial instability, as an individual’s pension benefit is directly financed by her past accumulated contributions. The first investment selections in the Premium Pension plan took place in the fall of 2000, which is known as the “Big Bang” in Sweden’s financial sector. …any fund company licensed to do business in Sweden is allowed to participate in the system, but must first sign a contract with the Swedish Pensions Agency that specifies reporting requirements and the fee structure. Benefits in the Premium Pension Plan are paid out annually and can be withdrawn from age 61.

And here’s a chart from the Swedish Pension Agency’s annual report showing that pension assets are growing rapidly (right axis), in part because “premium pension has provided a 6.7 percent average value increase in people’s pensions per year since its launch.” Moreover, administrative costs (left axis) are continuously falling. Both trends are very good news for workers.

Let’s close by citing another passage from Capretta’s AEI study.

He looks at Sweden’s long-run fiscal outlook to other major European economies.

According to European Union projections, Sweden’s total public pension obligations will equal 7.5 percent of GDP in 2060, which is a substantial reduction from the…8.9 percent of GDP it spent in 2013. …In 2060, EU countries are expected to spend 11.2 percent of GDP on pensions. Germany’s public pension spending is projected to increase…to 12.7 percent of GDP in 2060. …The EU forecast shows France’s pension obligations will be 12.1 percent of GDP in 2060 and Italy’s will be 13.8 percent of GDP.

I think 8.9 percent of GDP is still far too high, but it’s better than diverting 11 percent, 12 percent, or 13 percent of economic output to pensions.

And the fiscal burden of Sweden’s system could fall even more if lawmakers allowed workers to shift a greater share of their payroll taxes to personal accounts.

But any journey begins with a first step. Sweden moved in the right direction. The United States could learn from that successful experience.

P.S. Pension reform is just the tip of the iceberg. As I wrote two years ago, Sweden has implemented a wide range of pro-market reforms over the past few decades, including some very impressive spending restraint in the 1990s. If you’re interested in more information about these changes, check out Lotta Moberg’s video and Johan Norberg’s video.

Read Full Post »

Three Great Moments in Regulation

As a policy wonk, I mostly care about the overall impact of government on prosperity. So when I think about the effect of red tape, I’m drawn to big-pictures assessments of the regulatory burden.

Here are a few relevant numbers that get my juices flowing.

• Americans spend 8.8 billion hours every year filling out government forms.
• The economy-wide cost of regulation reached $1.75 trillion in 2010.
• For every bureaucrat at a regulatory agency, 100 jobs are lost in the economy’s productive sector.
• A World Bank study determined that moving from heavy regulation to light regulation “can increase a country’s average annual GDP per capita growth by 2.3 percentage points.”
• Regulatory increases since 1980 have reduced economic output by $4 trillion.
• The European Central Bank estimated that product market and employment regulation has led to costly “misallocation of labour and capital in eight macro-sectors,” and also found that reform could boost national income by more than six percent.

But one thing I’ve learned over the years is that I’m not normal.

Most people don’t get excited about these macro-type calculations.

Instead they’re far more likely to get agitated by regulations that make their daily lives a hassle. Such as:

• Inferior light bulbs
• Substandard toilets
• Inadequate washing machines
• Crummy dishwashers
• Dribbling showers
• Dysfunctional gas cans

I certainly can sympathize. It’s galling that the clowns in Washington have made our existence less pleasant.

Most people also are quite responsive to anecdotes about red tape. Simply stated, big-picture numbers are like a skeleton, while real-world examples put meat on the bones.

Today, let’s look at some absurd examples of the regulatory state in action.

We’ll start with bone-headed pizza regulation, as explained by the Wall Street Journal.

FDA released guidance for posting calorie disclosures at restaurants with more than 20 locations, and the ostensible point is to help folks choose healthier foods. The regulations…are an outgrowth of the 2010 Affordable Care Act… The reason some restaurants have spent years fighting these rules is not because executives lay awake at night plotting how to make Americans obese. It’s because the rules are loco. …Take pizza companies, which have to display per slice ranges or the number for the entire pie. Calories vary based on what you order—the barbarians who put pineapple on pizza are consuming fewer calories than someone who chooses pepperoni and extra cheese. But the number of pepperonis on a pizza depends on the pie’s size and whether someone also adds onions and sausage. ..The rules are so vague that companies could face a crush of lawsuits, which will be abetted by this “nonbinding” FDA guidance.

By the way, you won’t be surprised to learn that academic researchers have found these types of rules have no effect on consumer choices.

A systematic review and meta-analysis determined the effect of restaurant menu labeling on calories and nutrients…were collected in 2015, analyzed in 2016, and used to evaluate the effect of nutrition labeling on calories and nutrients ordered or consumed. Before and after menu labeling outcomes were used to determine weighted mean differences in calories, saturated fat, total fat, carbohydrate, and sodium ordered/consumed… Menu labeling resulted in no significant change in reported calories ordered/consumed… Menu labeling away-from-home did not result in change in quantity or quality, specifically for carbohydrates, total fat, saturated fat, or sodium, of calories consumed among U.S. adults.

Shocking, just shocking. Next thing you know, somehow will tell us that Obamacare didn’t lower premiums for health insurance!

For our second example, we have a surreal story out of California.

A farmer faces trial in federal court this summer and a $2.8 million fine for failing to get a permit to plow his field and plant wheat in Tehama County. A lawyer for Duarte Nursery said the case is important because it could set a precedent requiring other farmers to obtain costly, time-consuming permits just to plow their fields. “The case is the first time that we’re aware of that says you need to get a (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers) permit to plow to grow crops,” said Anthony Francois, an attorney for the Pacific Legal Foundation. “We’re not going to produce much food under those kinds of regulations,” he said. …The Army did not claim Duarte violated the Endangered Species Act by destroying fairy shrimp or their habitat, Francois said. …Farmers plowing their fields are specifically exempt from the Clean Water Act rules forbidding discharging material into U.S. waters, Francois said.

Wow, sort of reminds me of the guy who was hassled by the feds for building a pond on his own property. Or the family persecuted for building a house on their own property.

Last but not least, our third example contains some jaw-dropping tidbits about red tape in a New York Times story.

Indian Ladder Farms, a fifth-generation family operation near Albany, …sells homemade apple pies, fresh cider and warm doughnuts. …This fall, amid the rush of commerce — the apple harvest season accounts for about half of Indian Ladder’s annual revenue — federal investigators showed up. They wanted to check the farm’s compliance… Suddenly, the small office staff turned its focus away from making money to placating a government regulator. …The investigators hand delivered a notice and said they would be back the following week, when they asked to have 22 types of records available. The request included vehicle registrations, insurance documents and time sheets — reams of paper in all. …the Ten Eyck family, which owns the farm, along with the staff devoted about 40 hours to serving the investigators, who visited three times before closing the books. …This is life on the farm — and at businesses of all sorts. With thick rule books laying out food safety procedures, compliance costs in the tens of thousands of dollars and ever-changing standards from the government…, local produce growers are a textbook example of what many business owners describe as regulatory fatigue. …The New York Times identified at least 17 federal regulations with about 5,000 restrictions and rules that were relevant to orchards. …Mr. Ten Eyck…fluently speaks the language of government compliance, rattling off acronyms that consume his time and resources, including E.P.A. (Environmental Protection Agency), OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration), U.S.D.A. (United States Department of Agriculture) and state and local offices, too, like A.C.D.O.H. (Albany County Department of Health).

And here’s an info-graphic that accompanied the article.

Wow. No wonder a depressingly large share of the population prefers to simply get a job as a bureaucrat.

Needless to say, this is not a system that encourages and enables entrepreneurship.

Which is why deregulation is a good idea (and Trump deserves credit for making a bit of progress in this area). We need some sensible cost-benefit analysis so that bureaucracies are focused on public health rather than mindless rules.

And it also would be a good idea in many cases to rely more on mutually reinforcing forms of private regulation.

Since I’m a self-confessed wonk, I’ll close by sharing this measure of the ever-growing burden of red tape. I realize it’s not as attention-grabbing as anecdotes and horror stories, but it is very relevant if we care about long-run growth and competitiveness.

P.S. On the topic of regulation, I admit that this example of left-wing humor about laissez-faire dystopia is very clever and amusing.

P.P.S. I’ve used an apple orchard as an example when explaining why a tax bias against saving and investment makes no sense. I’ll now have to mention that the beleaguered orchard owner also has to deal with 5,000 regulatory restrictions.

Read Full Post »

Administrative Law Is the Real “Deep State”

I’m not a fan of conspiracy theories. When people ask me whether there is some sinister, behind-the-scenes cabal running Washington, I tell them that petty corruption, self interest, and “public choice” are much better explanations for the nonsensical policies being imposed on the country.

So you won’t be surprised that rhetoric about the “deep state” rubs me the wrong way. If the term simply was used to describe D.C.’s bloated, self-interested, and left-leaning bureaucracies, that would be okay. But is seems that the phase also implies some sort of secret master plan on the part of shadowy insiders.

To be blunt, the people in Washington don’t have the competence to design, implement, and enforce any type of master plan. Yes, we have a Leviathan state, but it’s much more accurate to think of Uncle Sam as a covetous, obese, and blundering oaf (as illustrated by my collection of cartoons).

That being said, that oaf is not a friend of liberty, as explained in an article published by the Federalist.

…to make a government job more like the ones the rest of us have will require the president and Congress to undo more than a century of misguided, anti-democratic, and unconstitutional laws governing the civil service. …the bulk of the civil service—2.8 million bureaucrats—has become a permanent class of powerbrokers, totally unaccountable to the winds of democratic change. …incompetence and corruption are the least of the problems with the modern civil service. With 95-99 percent of political donations from government employees going to Hillary Clinton in the last election, it looks less like a system of apolitical administrators and more like an arm of the Democratic Party. …Civil service protections…have created a system that grows government and advances left-wing causes regardless of who the people elect.

Moreover, there is a structural feature of the Washington bureaucracy that gives it dangerous powers.

John Tierney’s column in the Wall Street Journal explains the problem of the “administrative state.”

What’s the greatest threat to liberty in America? …the enormous rogue beast known as the administrative state. Sometimes called the regulatory state or the deep state, it is a government within the government… Unelected bureaucrats not only write their own laws, they also interpret these laws and enforce them in their own courts with their own judges. All this is in blatant violation of the Constitution… Mr. Hamburger, 60, a constitutional scholar…says, sitting in his office at Columbia Law School… “The government can choose to…use an administrative proceeding where you don’t have the right to be heard by a real judge or a jury and you don’t have the full due process of law…” In volume and complexity, the edicts from federal agencies exceed the laws passed by Congress by orders of magnitude. “The administrative state has become the government’s predominant mode of contact with citizens,” Mr. Hamburger says. …“The framers of the Constitution were very clear about this,” Mr. Hamburger says…”Congress cannot delegate the legislative powers to an agency, just as judges cannot delegate their power to an agency.”

George Will elaborates, noting that “administrative law” is an affront to the Constitution’s principle of “rival branches.”

…the administrative state distorts the United States’ constitutional architecture…Clarence Thomas…is urging the judicial branch to limit the legislative branch’s practice of delegating its power to the executive branch. …This subject is central to today’s argument between constitutionalists and progressives. …Today, if Congress provides “a minimal degree of specificity” in the instructions it gives to the executive, the court, Thomas says, abandons “all pretense of enforcing a qualitative distinction between legislative and executive power.” …the principles Thomas has articulated “attack the very existence of the modern administrative state.” This state, so inimical to conservatism’s aspiration for government limited by a constitutional structure of rival branches… Woodrow Wilson…became the first president to criticize America’s founding, regretted the separation of powers because he thought modern government required a clerisy of unfettered administrators. …Today we are governed by Wilson’s clerisy, but it does not deliver what is supposed to justify the overthrow of James Madison’s constitutional system — efficient, admirable government.

Peter Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute adds some cogent analysis.

Although the Constitution places the federal legislative power in Congress, it is now increasingly — and alarmingly — flowing to administrative agencies that, unlike Congress, are not directly accountable to the public affected by their decisions. Unless we can find a solution to this problem—a way to curb and cabin the discretionary power of administrative agencies —decentralization and individual self-determination will eventually be brought to an end. …The framers believed that the tripartite structure of the federal government would be enough to prevent any one of the three branches from consolidating the power of government and becoming a danger to liberty. But with the growth of the administrative state, we may now be seeing exactly the consolidation of powers that Madison feared. …the judicial branch is supposed to be the final interpreter of the Constitution and thus the objective protector of the framework the Constitution ordains. But unfortunately, modern courts have generally failed to perform this role… America is an exceptional country in part because its constitutional framework has, until relatively recently, limited the government’s ability to centralize its control and restrain the nation’s diversity. If we are to avoid a dramatic over-centralization of power, the growth of the administrative state must be restrained.

In an article for National Review, Stanley Kurtz delves into the topic.

the gist of the growing conservative critique of the administrative state…focuses on a runaway bureaucracy’s threat to constitutional government. Congress has improperly delegated much of its law-making power to bureaucrats, who in turn have abusively expanded this authority. The courts, for their part, have turned a blind eye to the administrative power-grab. Meanwhile, agencies staffed by unelected bureaucrats now operate de facto courts. In effect, these agencies negate the separation of powers by simultaneously exercising legislative, executive, and judicial functions, the very definition of authoritarian rule. …governors and state legislators can be unaware of policy end-runs imposed by federal agreements with a state’s own bureaucrats. At both the state and federal levels, then, bureaucracy has broken loose and effectively turned into a national fourth branch of government. …The Founders designed our federalist system to secure liberty by dividing and disbursing power, and by ensuring that local and state governments would remain more accountable to citizens than a distant federal government ever could. In fundamental ways, however, the modern practice of conditioning federal grants on state acceptance of federal dictates undermines the Founders’ intent. …

Robert Gebelhoff of the Washington Post points out that this fight has major implications.

One of the legal issues that’s less often discussed is the role that the next Supreme Court justice will play in conservatives’ long-running legal fight to limit the size of the federal government. For decades, conservatives on the bench have been losing that war, giving way to a system of administrative law that is written, for the most part, by bureaucratic agencies. …it’s a really big deal. Over the past half century, agencies have exploded in size and power, so this debate really is about how much power the federal government should have. …Conservatives, fearful that bureaucracies are becoming an unchecked “fourth branch of government,” have decried agency deference. Just last month, Justice Clarence Thomas argued that the doctrine “has metastasized,” as if it were a cancer. And back in 2013, Chief Justice John Roberts warned of the “danger posed by the growing power of the administrative state…” Both Roberts and Thomas frame the issue as a threat to the separation of powers: We’re letting agencies in the executive branch dip into the powers reserved for the judicial and legislative branches. …And by allowing bureaucrats the ability to define the scope of their own jurisdiction, we let them answer questions meant to be left up to the courts. This, they argue, is at odds with the Constitution. …Conservatives fearing a powerful bureaucratic state have few legal weapons to fight it. The future of a small-government Supreme Court is bleak, and the march toward greater agency control of the law will probably continue forward.

I’ll close with some recent polling data about the “deep state” from Monmouth University.

Here’s a question asking whether there’s a conspiratorial version of the “deep state.”

I’m not sure what to think of the answers.

I like people to be suspicious of the federal government. But I’d much prefer them to be concerned because they’re reading my daily columns, not because they think there’s a sinister plot.

I prefer the answers to this next question. Most people presumably have never heard of “administrative law” or the “administrative state,” but they do have a healthy skepticism of bureaucratic rule.

Most of the authors cited today correctly want federal judges to fix the problem by limiting the power of bureaucrats to make and enforce law.

That would be desirable, but I’d go much further. We should eliminate almost all of the agencies, programs, and departments that clutter Washington. Then the problem of the administrative state automatically disappears.

Read Full Post »

IMF’s High-Tax Agenda Will Undermine Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa

If you were exempted from taxation, you’d presumably be very happy. After all, even folks on the left do everything they can to minimize their tax payments.

Now imagine that you are put in charge of tax policy.

Like Elizabeth Warren, you obviously won’t volunteer to start paying tax, but what would you recommend for other people?

Would you want them to also enjoy tax-free status, or at least get to experience a smaller tax burden? Or would you take a malicious approach and suggest tax increases, comforted by the fact that you wouldn’t be affected?

In this theoretical scenario, I hope most of us would choose the former approach and seek tax cuts.

But not everybody feels the same way. The bureaucrats at the International Monetary Fund actually do receive tax-free salaries. Yet instead of seeking to share their good fortune with others, they routinely and reflexively urge higher taxes on the rest of us. Here are some articles, all from the past 12 months, that I’ve written about the IMF’s love affair with punitive taxation.

• Last June, I wrote about the IMF pushing a theory that higher taxes would improve growth in the developing world.
• Last July, I wrote about the IMF complaining that tax competition between nations is resulting in lower corporate tax rates.
• Last October, I wrote about the IMF asserting that lower living standards are desirable if everyone is more equally poor.
• Also in October, I wrote about the IMF concocting a measure of “fiscal space” to justify higher taxes across the globe.
• Last November, I wrote about the IMF publishing a study expanding on its claim that equal poverty is better than unequal prosperity.
• This February, I wrote about the IMF advocating more double taxation of income that is saved and invested.

Needless to say, I especially don’t like it when the IMF urges higher taxes in America.

But I think everybody should have more freedom and prosperity, so I also don’t like it when the IMF pushes tax hikes elsewhere. I don’t like it when the tax-free bureaucrats advocate higher taxes on an entire region. I don’t like it when they push a high-tax agenda on big countries. I don’t like it when they urge tax increases on small countries.

What upsets me most of all, however, is that the IMF is trying to punish very poor nations is sub-Saharan Africa.

This came to my attention when I saw a Bloomberg report about the IMF recommending policy changes in Ivory Coast. At first glance, I thought the IMF was doing something sensible, supporting faster growth and higher income.

Ivory Coast must improve its tax system if the world’s biggest cocoa producer wants to maintain economic growth of at least 7 percent, the International Monetary Fund said. Jose Gijon, the resident representative for the Washington-based lender, said in an interview in the commercial capital of Abidjan Wednesday. “…if it wants to become an emerging country and for that, it needs higher income.”

But I found out that the bureaucrats wanted higher income for the government.

“The key for Ivory Coast is revenue…The government needs to create sufficient fiscal space…”

Unsurprisingly, local politicians like the idea of getting more loot.

The government seeks to gradually increase its tax revenue to 20 percent of gross domestic product from 15.9 percent now, Prime Minister Amadou Gon Coulibaly said in 2017.

How sad. Ivory Coast (now usually known as Côte d’Ivoire) is a very poor country, with living standards akin to those of the United States in 1860. Yet rather than recommend the policies that allowed the United States and other western nations to become rich, such as no income tax and very small government, the IMF wants to fatten the coffers of a corrupt and ineffective public sector.

Here’s something else that is sad. This seems to be the advice the IMF gives to all nations in sub-Saharan Africa.

Consider this story from Kenya.

Kenyans should brace themselves for higher taxes after the Government caved in to the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) demands. …It made the commitment to the IMF in a letter of intent that spells out a raft of measures that are likely to eat into consumers’ pockets. …The sectors to be hit include agriculture, manufacturing, education, health, tourism, finance, social work, and energy. …The Government hopes to squeeze an extra Sh40 billion in taxes from these sectors. This is likely to have a ripple effect by pushing up the cost of goods and services… The Government intends to increase income tax by over Sh100 billion in the financial year 2018/19.

We also have the IMF’s perverse approach to “tax reform” in Nigeria.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has advised Nigeria to embark on a full Value Added Tax (VAT) reform. …The lender’s Mission Chief for Nigeria, African Department, Mr Amine Mati, …said government must raise taxes… In addition, government should also increase taxes on alcohol and tobacco and broaden VAT.

The bureaucrats also want more tax revenue in Tanzania.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) Deputy Managing Director, Tao Zhang has hailed Tanzania for managing to boost tax collection… The visiting IMF leader said it was vital to mobilise more…public resources by strengthening tax collection… “it is crucial to mobilise more…public resources within Tanzania, especially by strengthening tax collection…” he said at a public lecture he gave in Dar es Salaam yesterday.

The IMF is even using a $190 million bribe to advocate higher taxes in Ghana.

Ghana needs to improve revenue collection…to achieve its fiscal targets, the International Monetary Fund said. …“Fiscal consolidation has to be revenue-based,” Koliadina told reporters in the capital, Accra. …A positive outcome of the fifth and sixth reviews of the program will lead to the IMF disbursing $190 million to Ghana, Koliadina said.

Last but not least, let’s look at the IMF’s misguided advice for Botswana.

The Government of Botswana should seek to strengthen its revenue base…, the International Monetary Fund has said. …”The authorities agreed that there is a significant potential to boost domestic revenues through tax administration and tax policy reforms that could…provide additional funding for future fiscal expenditures,” the report stated.

Higher taxes to finance bigger government? Wow, talk about economic malpractice.

Since Botswana has been one of the few bright spots in Africa, I hope lawmakers tell the IMF to get lost. But I worry that politicians will be happy to take the IMF’s bad advice.

How tragic.

These are the only nations I investigated, so I guess it’s possible that there’s a sub-Saharan nation where the IMF hasn’t recommended higher taxes. Heck, it’s even theoretically possible that the bureaucrats may have suggested lower taxes somewhere on the continent (though that’s about as likely me playing pro football next season).

I’ll simply note that the IMF openly admits that it wants higher taxes all across the region.

Tax revenues play a critical role for countries to create room in their budgets to increase spending on social services…raising tax revenues is the most growth-friendly way to stabilize debt. More broadly, building a country’s tax capacity is at the center of any viable development strategy…we see potential in many countries of sub-Saharan Africa to raise tax revenues by about one percent of GDP per year over the next five or so years. …Since building the capacity to collect more from personal income taxes takes time, in the next few years VAT and excise taxes likely offer the biggest potential for additional revenue. For example, recent studies by the IMF indicate a revenue potential of about 3 percent of GDP from VAT in Cape Verde, Senegal, and Uganda, and ½ percent of GDP from excises for all countries in sub-Saharan Africa. …It is also important to consider newer sources of revenue, such as property taxes. …Raising revenues is often a politically difficult task. But the current economic junction in sub-Saharan Africa together with sustained development needs creates an imperative for action now.

I’m almost at a loss for words. It’s mind-boggling that anybody could look at policy in sub-Saharan Africa and conclude that the recipe for growth is giving more money to politicians.

And I’m equally flabbergasted that the IMF openly claims that bigger government is good for growth. Unsurprisingly, the bureaucrats never try to justify that bizarre and anti-empirical assertion.

For those who are interested in genuinely sensible information on how poor nations can become rich nations, I strongly recommend this video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity.

P.S. Back in 2015, to mock the pervasive statism at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, I created a fake fill-in-the-blanks/multiple-choice template. A similar exercise for the IMF would only require one short sentence: “The nation of __ should raise taxes.”

P.P.S. In other words, this cartoon is very accurate.

Read Full Post »

Everything You Need to Know about the Budget Deal in One Image

Ever since there was a deal to bust the budget caps back in February, I knew it was just a matter of time before Congress and the White House responded with an odious orgy of new spending.

Some people told me I was being too pessimistic.

After all, the President’s Office of Management and Budget has a big banner on the budget webpage. It boldly states that President Trump is going to “reverse the trend of rising government spending.”

But I’ve learned to discount the rhetoric of politicians. It’s more important to look at the actual budget numbers in legislation that the President signs into law.

And that’s what Trump did yesterday, giving his approval to a bill that funds the parts of the budget included in annual appropriations.

So did he “reverse the trend”?

The good news is that the answer is yes. But the bad news is that he reversed the trend by increasing spending faster than Obama.

I’m not joking. Courtesy of the Committee for a Responsible Budget, here are the year-over-year numbers for various parts of the bill.* This table tells you everything you need to know about the grotesque recklessness of Washington.

An overall increase of 12.9 percent!

But maybe spending is climbing so rapidly because the cost of living has suddenly jumped?

Nope, that’s not an excuse. The CRFB put together a list of the major inflation projections. As you can see, there’s not the slightest sign of a spike in prices in either 2018 or 2019.

Indeed, it turns out that the Republican Congress and the Republican President decided to increase spending six times faster than needed to keep pace with inflation. Six times.

Yes, we can definitely say the spending trend has been reversed. Just not in a good way.

So who should be blamed, congressional Republicans or Trump?

The simple answer is both.

Trump is responsible because he could veto budget-busting bills. All he would need to do is tell the crowd on Capitol Hill that he is perfectly happy to close down the non-essential parts of the federal government until he gets some responsible legislation. Sooner or later, the pro-spending crowd would have to cave.

That being said, congressional GOPers also deserve blame. It’s a failure by the Republicans on the Appropriations Committee who are motivated by a desire to spend the maximum amount of money. It’s a failure of GOP leadership for not removing members from that Committee if they don’t agree to some level of spending restraint. It’s also a failure of leadership that they don’t get conservatives and moderates in a room and hammer out a common approach that would restrain the growth of Leviathan. And it’s a failure of the individual Senators and Representatives for not upholding the Constitution and not doing what’s right for the country.

But this also brings me back to Trump. If the President credibly drew a line in the sand and said “I’ll veto any spending bill that is over X”, that would change behavior on Capitol Hill. But Members of Congress believe (correctly, it seems) that Trump has no interest in fiscal restraint. So without any leadership from the White House, you get an every-man-for-himself, grab-as-much-pork-as-you-can attitude among lawmakers that makes it virtually impossible for leadership to pursue an effective strategy.

The net result is that politicians win, the special interests win, and the bureaucracy wins.

And who loses? Well, look in the mirror for the answer.

*The data in the CRFB table is for “budget authority” rather than “budget outlays.” These are closely related concepts, but technically different. When Congress approves “budget authority,” it is basically giving money to an agency. When the agencies then spend the money, it is “budget outlays.”

P.S. I’m a big fan of spending caps, but I confess that they aren’t very helpful if politicians simply change the law whenever they want more spending. The ultimate answer is to have constitutional spending limits, like Switzerland and Hong Kong, but amending the Constitution is hardly as easy task. So my best guess is that we’ll become Greece at some point.

P.P.S. Some people tell me not to worry because the real problem is entitlement spending rather than appropriated spending. They’re right that entitlements are the biggest long-run problem. But I point out that if GOPers aren’t willing to tackle the low-hanging fruit of pork-filled appropriations, that doesn’t fill me with optimism that they will ever adopt genuine entitlement reform.

P.P.P.S. The same people also claim that at least Republicans will hold the line on taxes. I think they’re hallucinating. If we don’t get control of spending, sooner or later we’ll get massive tax hikes. Which will make our fiscal problems worse, needless to say. But that’s our grim future because of GOP irresponsibility today.

Read Full Post »

The Fight over “Internet Taxation” Is Really a Proxy for an Important Battle on Whether Government Power Should Be Constrained by Borders

One of the key principles of a free society is that governmental power should be limited by national borders.

Here’s an easy-to-understand example. Gambling is basically illegal (other than government-run lottery scams, of course) in my home state of Virginia. So they can arrest me (or maybe even shoot me) if I gamble in the Old Dominion.

I think that’s bad policy, but it would be far worse if Virginia politicians also asserted extraterritorial powers and said they could arrest me because I put a dollar in a slot machine during my last trip to Las Vegas.

And if Virginia politicians tried to impose such an absurd policy, I certainly would hope and expect that Nevada authorities wouldn’t provide any assistance.

This same principle applies (or should apply) to taxation policy, both globally and nationally.

On a global level, I’m a big supporter of so-called tax havens. I’m glad when places with pro-growth tax policy attract jobs and capital from high-tax nations. This process of tax competition rewards good policy and punishes bad policy. Moreover, I don’t think those low-tax jurisdictions should be under any obligation to enforce the bad tax laws of uncompetitive countries.

There’s a very similar debate inside America. Some states – particularly those with punitive sales taxes – want to force merchants in other states to be deputy tax enforcers.

I’ve written about this topic and I think even my writings from 2009 and 2010 are still completely relevant. But let’s check some other sources, starting with a column in the Wall Street Journal. It’s from 2016, but the issue hasn’t changed.

The state of Alabama is openly defying the U.S. Supreme Court in an effort to squeeze millions of dollars of tax revenue from businesses beyond its borders. …This unconstitutional tax grab cuts to the heart of the Commerce Clause, which gives Congress the power to regulate trade “among the several States.” Alabama’s regulation directly contravenes the Supreme Court’s 1992 ruling in Quill v. North Dakota. In that case, the court held that North Dakota could not require an out-of-state office-supply company to collect sales taxes because the firm had no offices or employees there. …Alabama’s revenue commissioner, Julie Magee, is putting forward an untested and suspect legal theory: The state claims that if its residents buy more than $250,000 a year from a remote business, then the seller has an “economic presence”… There are around 10,000 sales-tax jurisdictions in the U.S., with varying rates, rules and holidays, and different definitions of what is taxable. Keeping track of this ever-changing patchwork is a burden, and forcing retailers to scramble to comply would profoundly hinder interstate commerce in the Internet age.

And here are some excerpts from a column published that same year by Fortune.

When politicians call for “fairness,” it’s important to take a closer look at their definition of fair. See, for example, the nationwide push in state capitols to slap online sales taxes on out-of-state retailers—a simple tax grab… states are constitutionally prohibited from collecting sales taxes from retailers that have no presence within their borders…thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1992 ruling in Quill Corp. v. North Dakota… Any national online sales-tax system will burden online retailers to a degree never felt by brick-and-mortar businesses. Local businesses only have to deal with a limited number of sales taxes—usually only the state, county, and local levies that apply to specific stores. Online retailers, on the other hand, would have to calculate and apply sales taxes across the entire nation—and roughly 10,000 jurisdictions have such taxes. Complying with this convoluted system would necessarily raise costs for consumers and stifle competition.

And the debate continues this year. The Wall Street Journal editorialized against extraterritorial state taxing last week.

A large faction of House Republicans are pressing GOP leaders to attach legislation to the omnibus spending bill that would let states collect sales tax from remote online retailers. South Dakota Rep. Kristi Noem’s legislation…would let some 12,000 jurisdictions conscript out-of-state retailers into collecting sales and use taxes from their customers. …Contrary to political lore, sales tax revenues have been increasing steadily in states with healthy economies. Over the past five years, Florida’s sales tax revenues have grown 27%. South Dakota’s are up by nearly 30% since 2013. …Twenty or so states have adopted “click-through” taxes to hit remote retailers that have contracts with local businesses. In 2016 South Dakota invited the High Court to revisit Quillby extending its sales tax to out-of-state sellers. …the Court could enable broader taxation and regulation of out-of-state businesses. This is what many states want to happen. …Raising taxes on small business and consumers won’t be a good look for Republicans in November, nor an inducement for investment and growth.

Jeff Jacoby also just wrote on this topic for his column in the Boston Globe.

First, the flow of interstate commerce must not be impeded by one state’s impositions. And second, there should be no taxation without representation; vendors should not be liable for taxes in states where they have no vote or political recourse. The Supreme Court upheld this “physical connection” standard in a 1992 case, Quill v. North Dakota. …the high court should reaffirm it. In the 26 years since the justices rebuffed North Dakota’s claim, the case against allowing states to exert their taxing power over remote sellers has grown even stronger. …there are now 12,000 taxing jurisdictions — not only states, counties, and cities, but also parishes, police districts, and Indian reservations. A lone online seller, unprotected by the Quill rule, could be obliged to remit taxes to any combination of them, with all their multitudinous rules and definitions, tax holidays and filing deadlines. …South Dakota can impose onerous burdens on companies operating within its borders, but not on vendors whose only connection to the state is that some of their customers happen to live there. The court got it right the first time. No merchant — whether selling online, via mail order, or in a traditional shop — is obliged to be a tax collector for states it doesn’t operate in.

And here are some passages from Jessica Melugin’s article for FEE. She makes the key point that extraterritorial tax powers would undermine – if not cripple – the liberalizing impact of tax competition.

…the Remote Transactions Parity Act (RTPA)…seeks to get rid of that physical presence limit on state taxing powers. It would let states reach outside their geographical borders and compel another state’s business to calculate, collect, and remit to that first state. …the long-term effect is that this arrangement will lessen the downward pressure on taxes between jurisdictions. Think of it like this: it’s the difference between driving your car across the D.C. border to Virginia to fill up with lower Virginia gas taxes—that’s how it works now and that’s what keeps at least some downward pressure on D.C. tax rates. If D.C. made the rate high enough, everyone would exit and fill up in Virginia. But if the approach in the RTPA is applied to this thought experiment, it would mean that when you pull into that Virginia gas station, they look at your D.C. plates and charge you the D.C. gas tax rate. …it’s a makeshift tax cartel among the states. …the RTPA is a small-business killer—which is why big box retailers support it. It crushes small competitors with compliance costs. State politicians are for it because they’d rather tax sellers in other states who can’t vote them out of office. Consumers will be left with less money in their pockets and fewer choices.

By the way, there are some pro-market people on the other side. Alex Brill of the American Enterprise Institute has written in favor of extraterritorial taxation.

…lawmakers have proposed legislation to allow (not require) states to collect sales tax on goods purchased from out-of-state sellers. …critics of this legislation…argue that “internet freedom is under attack by politicians willing to distort markets and tilt the playing field toward their favored businesses.” Internet freedom is certainly not being “attacked” by a policy to improve enforcement of existing tax liability. Second, these critics oppose the legislative reform based on the belief that just because the internet benefits people, online retail activities should be advantaged by public policy. If public finance were based on this type of specious logic, we would have a tax code far more unfair and distorted than it currently is.

I actually agree with both of his arguments. Giving states extraterritorial tax powers isn’t an attack on the Internet. And I also agree that tax policy shouldn’t provide special preferences.

But neither of his points address my concern that extraterritorial tax powers give too much power to governments and undermine tax competition.

Unless he’s going to argue that Nevada’s no-income-tax status is “distorted” compared to California’s punitive system. Or unless he’s going to argue that Delaware’s no-sales-tax status is “unfair” compared to New Jersey’s onerous system.

For more information, here’s my speech to congressional staffers from 2012.

P.S. For folks who like technical details, this fight is not about Internet taxation. It’s a battle between “origin-based” taxation (basically territorial taxation) and “destination-based” taxation (basically worldwide or extraterritorial taxation). I favor the former and oppose the latter, which helps to explain my opposition to the border-adjustment tax and the value-added tax.

P.P.S. I was afraid that congressional leaders would attach a provision to the new spending bill that would allow extraterritorial taxation by states. Fortunately, that didn’t happen. So the “omnibus” plan is a pork-filled affront to fiscal sanity, but at least it’s not a state-goverment-empowering, pork-filled affront to fiscal sanity.

Read Full Post »

The Macron Paradox: Internal Liberalization, External Statism

In last year’s French presidential election between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, I joked that voters should choose the socialist over the socialist, but made a serious point that Macron – despite having been part of Hollande’s disastrous government – was preferable since there was at least a hope of market-oriented reform.

…the chance of Macron being good are greater than zero. After all, it was the left-wing parties that started the process of pro-market reforms in Australia and New Zealand. And it was a Social Democrat government in Germany that enacted the labor-market reforms that have been so beneficial for that nation.

And after Macron won the election, I reviewed some of his initiatives to restrain government, including plans to reduce the burden of government spending, lower France’s corporate tax rate, and to shrink the size of the bureaucracy.

His ideas sounded so good that I wrote – only partly in jest – that “I wish the Republicans in Washington were as sensible as these French socialists.”

We’re not quite to the one-year anniversary of his election, but let’s take a look at Macron’s track record. And we’ll start with a very encouraging report from the New York Times.

…if France’s young president, Emmanuel Macron, has made one thing clear, it is that he is not afraid to shake up France and take on its venerable institutions. Now it is the turn of the heavily subsidized and deeply indebted French rail system. Mr. Macron says he wants to erase the railway workers’ special status, which gives them more generous benefits than almost any other workers, including a guarantee of early retirement. In doing so, he has set himself a new and formidable challenge in his expanding campaign to reshape France’s society and economy, which started last year with a law that made it easier for private companies to hire and fire workers, a near revolution for France.

Macron has a difficult task.

…the railway workers are a public-sector work force, one of the most powerful in the country, with a chokehold on as many as five million riders daily. When they go on strike, the whole country feels it. …rail unions have already pledged to join a strike by public-sector employees planned for Thursday… The rail workers then plan weeks of strikes starting in April that will be staged on a rolling basis.

Here’s some of what Macron wants to fix.

French rail workers’ current, ample benefits — including in some cases, the option of retiring at 52 — date to the first half of the 20th century, when many railway jobs involved hard, physical labor… Mr. Macron…to push for a broader overhaul that, for new hires, would end advantages like guaranteed jobs, automatic pay raises and generous social security benefits. …The French rail system is both heavily subsidized and deeply in debt, to the tune of 55 billion euros, or about $68 billion.

And if the French President succeeds, there are other reforms on the horizon.

Mr. Macron has pledged to follow the railway plan with an overhaul of the unemployment system later in the year. Next year he intends to take on the French pension system. …changing the employment terms for railway workers appears to be part of a larger crusade to push French workers into the 21st century.

Good. Similar reforms were very beneficial for German workers and the German economy, so I’m sure Macron’s proposals will produce good results in France.

Writing last October for CapX, Diego Zuluaga expressed optimism about Macron’s agenda.

…it is the French government that is tackling the big barriers to growth and dynamism that have stifled their economy since 1975. …Emmanuel Macron…has vowed to attack this status quo. He aims to deconstruct the onerous French labour market law, the infamous Code du travail. This is a 1,600-page, 10,000-article gargantuan piece of legislation which is blamed for clobbering employment in France over the past 25 years. …Macron may be able to deliver considerable reforms when it comes to the labour market. His cabinet intends to move a larger share of collective bargaining to the firm level, remove the requirement of union representation for small- and medium-sized businesses, limit severance pay – right now it averages €24,000 per dismissal – to give employers greater certainty about the costs of hiring… Spain reformed its dysfunctional hiring and firing regulations in 2012, and robust employment growth followed. Now, it is long-ossified France that is taking up the baton.

If you stopped reading at this point, you might conclude that Macron is a French version of Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher.

But that would be a considerable exaggeration. The French President also is pushing some questionable policies, such as higher taxes on luxury goods. But, in Macron’s defense, those class-warfare taxes are an offset for the abolition of the wealth tax, which was a very good reform.

Emmanuel Macron’s administration will propose a tax on luxury yachts, supercars and precious metals in France’s 2018 budget. Lawmakers will propose amendments after critics attacked the President’s move to scrap the wealth tax in France. Mr Macron abolished the tax, which has been seen as a symbol of social justice for the left but blamed by others for driving thousands of millionaires abroad. …The wealth tax, introduced by the Socialists in the 1980s, was levied on individuals with assets above 1.3 million euros (£1.2 million).

Since I’m not familiar with the details (i.e., do these changes result in a revenue-neutral shift, a net tax cut, or a net tax increase?), there’s no way to determine if swapping the wealth tax for luxury taxes is a net positive or a negative. Though I assume the overall effect is positive because wealth taxes are a very bad idea and luxury taxes, while self-destructive, generally are futile.

But this doesn’t let Macron off the hook. Even if we decide that he’s a pro-market reformer inside his country, he has a very bad habit of promoting statism at the European level.

The Wall Street Journal opined unfavorably last year on his plan for greater centralization.

…the French President issued a call for more, more and more Europe. …His EU would be responsible for many of the functions traditionally performed by a nation-state, such as defense, taxation, migration control and economic regulation. …The problem is…Mr. Macron’s dreams of fiscal and economic union. He wants to create an EU finance ministry, funded by corporate and other taxes, that can spend money across the bloc with minimal interference from national capitals. Mr. Macron also wants to harmonize—eurospeak for raise—corporate taxes across the EU. He’d further establish Franco-German regulatory excess as the benchmark for the rest of the EU… This is a recipe for political failure because Europeans already know these policies are economic duds.

Writing for the New York Times, a German journalist poured cold water on Macron’s plan to give redistribution powers to the European Union.

It would be funny if it weren’t dangerous — the solution offered by the new, pro-Europe president, Emmanuel Macron, is to create a eurozone budget, with its own finance minister. …Mr. Macron’s proposal is a disaster in the making. It will only further alienate Europeans from one another and weaken the bloc economically. …Brussels’s money has often been Europe’s curse. The Greek government, for instance, knew it could take for granted the support of the other euro members for its unsustainable budget after Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany recklessly declared, “If the euro fails, Europe fails.” Athens slowed down on reform, knowing Brussels would bail it out, and northern Europeans grew angry. In the worst case, Mr. Macron’s plan could turn this disincentive into a characteristic feature of the European Union. …Brussels would end up holding the purse but not the purse strings.

So what’s the story with Macron’s schizophrenic approach? Why is he a pro-market Dr. Jekyll for French policy but a statist Mr. Hyde for European policy?

I don’t have the answer, but Diego Zuluaga wrote about this dichotomy for CapX.

The puzzle of Macronism is that it tends to advocate dynamism at home, but stasis abroad. The French President, both during his tenure in Hollande’s cabinet and in his new office, has championed reform of the country’s bewilderingly byzantine employment code, which has promoted social exclusion and led to a high rate of structural unemployment. …But Macron’s liberalism seemingly stops at France’s borders. On the EU level, he has called for increased risk-sharing among euro member states, a eurozone budget and finance minister… Whatever one makes of his climate-change activism, it is nothing if not dirigiste in the extreme, wishing to curb carbon emissions through bureaucratic pacts on a global level. What we are left with is the pro-market equivalent of Stalin’s pre-WWII economic policy of  “socialism in one country”. Liberalism in one country acknowledges the need for economic flexibility and a greater reliance on market forces at home. It champions tax reform and deregulation of industry and hiring. But it shuns those principles on the international level.

By the way, Mr. Zuluaga is using “liberalism” in the classic sense, meaning pro-market policies.

Let’s close with a couple of items that show France still has a long way to go.

First, a leftist columnist wants us to believe that recent riots, caused by a sale on Nutella, are symbolic of a dystopian future.

You may have seen the videos: in French supermarkets Intermarché, customers are rushing towards shelves of Nutella jars. They’re running, shouting, fighting, rummaging to grab a jar of the chocolate flavoured paste… This mess happened simultaneously in various French supermarkets when grocery chain Intermarché advertised a massive sale on 1kg Nutella jars, priced at €1,41 instead of the usual €4,50. …I don’t find this news funny, not even remotely. …it is telling of a France that is more and more divided… The massive response to this sale shines light…on the precarious position in which many French workers, and shoppers, find themselves. …And it’s not going to get any better for them. Macron’s looming labour reform is already eroding French workers’ rights… Macron’s great vision for France increasingly looks like a country where only the rich and “successful” will be able to afford Nutella – and those who “are nothing” will be left to fight for sale prices.

This type of over-wrought analysis makes me want to cheer for Macron.

Why? Because I understand that the best hope for workers is faster growth, not “labor-protection policies” that actually undermine job creation and cause wages to stagnate.

Second, we have a story that highlights the impossible regulatory burden in France.

A French boulanger has been ordered to pay a €3,000 fine for working too hard after he failed to close his shop for one day a week last summer. …Under local employment law, two separate regulations from 1994 and 2000 require bakers’ shops to close once a week… He has been advised the only way to get around the regulations would be to open a second boulangerie with different opening hours. …The federation of Aube boulangeries and patisseries questioned 126 members at the end of last year: the majority were in favour of maintaining the obligatory one-day closure. Eric Scherrer of the retail union CLIC-P, said French employment laws were there to protect workers and employers and had to be respected. …“These people need to have a rest day each week. We can’t just allow them to work non-stop. It’s absolutely necessary that both bosses and employees have a day of rest.”

The bottom line is that Macron should drop his statist European-wide proposals and put all of his focus on fixing France.

If you look at his country’s scores from Economic Freedom of the World, he should be working day and night to reduce the fiscal burden of government.

And lowering the regulatory burden should be the second-most important priority.

P.S. If the numbers in this poll are still accurate, Macron better fix his nation’s bad policies or his productive citizens will escape to America. After all, France is a great place to live if you’re already rich, but not so good if you aspire to become rich.

P.P.S. Here’s a story highlighting the lavish government-financed benefits for the privileged class in France.

P.P.P.S. My favorite French-themed cartoon features Obama and Hollande.

P.P.P.P.S. And let’s not forget Paul Krugman’s conspiracy theory about a “plot against France.”

Read Full Post »

To Discourage China’s Mercantilism, Trump Should Use the World Trade Organization instead of Unilateral Trade Barriers

At the risk of stating the obvious, I’m not a fan of international bureaucracies. The International Monetary Fund and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development are the worst multilateral institutions because of their promotion of bad policy, but I’ve also gone after the United Nations and World Bank for their periodic efforts to advance statism.

But this doesn’t mean I’m reflexively against international organizations. My criticisms of the IMF, OECD, UN, and WB are solely a function of their work to empower governments at the expense of people.

And this is why I generally like the World Trade Organization. The WTO is a Geneva-based international bureaucracy, but its mission is to empower people at the expense of governments by reducing import taxes and other trade barriers.

Which explains why I think President Trump will be making a mistake if he imposes unilateral tariffs on China. Yes, there seems to be strong evidence that China’s government is misbehaving, but I think that a positive outcome is far more likely if the U.S. government takes the issue before the WTO. Which is what I said in this short interview with Neil Cavuto.

And I’m not alone.

Bloomberg editorialized recently about this issue.

President Donald Trump…is…addressing a legitimate trade dispute: China’s alleged theft of intellectual property and forced technology transfers. …the U.S. alleges — with reason — that China has been stealing U.S. trade secrets, forcing American companies to hand over proprietary technology as a condition of doing business on the mainland, and providing state support for Chinese firms to acquire critical technology abroad. …Yet unilateral blanket tariffs of the sort the administration is considering are the wrong answer. In the first instance, they’d hurt U.S. consumers and producers even if they didn’t provoke retaliation (which they probably would). They’d undermine the World Trade Organization’s dispute-resolution system, perhaps fatally.

And the editorial points out that the WTO is a better place to settle the dispute.

…one can question the WTO’s effectiveness in resolving disputes of this kind: The process moves slowly. On the other hand, it works. The U.S. has won the great majority of the cases it’s taken there. The complaint against China’s practices would be stronger if it was coordinated with other governments. Japan and the European Union share U.S. concerns and would be willing to cooperate. As recently as last month, this seemed to be the strategy. …the U.S. needs to take the lead, once more, in global economic statecraft. Champion the rules-based order that has served the country and the world so well. Strengthen the WTO, don’t subvert it.

And the Wall Street Journal opined today on this topic.

…there’s no denying that Beijing’s mercantilism has fueled the political backlash against free trade. China’s increasingly predatory behavior, especially intellectual-property theft, poses a particular problem to a sustainable trading system. The question is how to respond in a way that encourages better Chinese behavior without harming the global economy and American companies and workers. …the danger is a tariff tit-for-tat that harms everyone. …Beijing is more likely to respond in kind at such a broad public assault on its goods.

The WSJ notes that China’s behavior has left something to be desired.

Beijing has turned to mercantilism over the last decade. …The government gives subsidies in several forms, including loans from state-owned banks on easy terms and low interest rates. …Along with subsidies and government help in acquiring foreign companies, the policy explicitly requires foreign companies to transfer intellectual property in return for access to the Chinese market. …Beijing has also stepped up its use of regulations to discriminate against foreign companies. …All of these policies violate WTO agreements. …The China problem now is the predatory use of government power to punish foreign competitors to benefit Chinese companies.

The WSJ doesn’t necessarily think the WTO is the right vehicle to respond, but it definitely supports a plurilateral approach.

…remedies should be based on the principle of reciprocity. If Beijing pressures multinational car companies to build electric cars in China, the U.S., EU and Japan could impose a tariff on Chinese-made vehicles and restrict the transfer of related technology. This would avoid the Trump Administration’s approach of tariffs on a wide variety of goods, a policy that alienates allies and raises the risk of a wider trade war. A targeted approach…could even strengthen the WTO as China would have an interest in modernizing and using the organization’s courts to resolve the disputes.

I’m a fiscal wonk rather than a trade wonk, so I’m open to the notion that perhaps a plurilateral approach is better than the WTO’s dispute resolution mechanism.

Though it’s worth noting that the United States has a very high batting average when bringing cases to the WTO.

Dan Ikenson, director of Cato’s Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies, reviewed WTO trade disputes involving the U.S. from 1995 to March of this year. He found that the U.S. prevailed in 91 percent of cases that it brought against other countries. “When the United States has been a complainant (as it has in 114 of 522 WTO disputes over 22 years — more than any other WTO member) it has prevailed on 91 percent of adjudicated issues,” he wrote.

I’ll close by noting that China’s bad policies don’t make it an enemy. The European Union is a semi-protectionist bloc and it isn’t our enemy either.

My goal is to simply point out that China’s approach to trade can be improved and should be improved. And since the country has moved in the right direction on overall economic policy (with very positive effects for the Chinese people), my hope is that coordinated opposition to Chinese mercantilism will have a positive effect.

Read Full Post »

Another Proposed Expansion of Costly and Ineffective Financial Regulation

Beginning in the 1980s, money-laundering laws were enacted in hopes of discouraging criminal activity by making it harder for crooks to use the banking system. Unfortunately, this approach has been an expensive failure.

• They don’t reduce crime or discourage bad behavior.
• They require banks to spy on innocent people and report their transactions.
• They impose heavy costs on the financial sector and boost prices for consumers.
• They disproportionately hurt poor people and poor countries.

Amazingly, some politicians actually want to make these laws even worse. I wrote last year about some intrusive, expensive, and pointless legislation proposed by Senators Grassley, Feinstein, Cornyn, and Whitehouse.

Now there’s another equally misguided set of proposals from Senators Rubio and Wyden, along with Representatives Pearce, Luetkemeyer, and Maloney. They want to require complicated and needless ownership data from millions of small businesses and organizations.

David Burton of the Heritage Foundation has a comprehensive report on the legislation. Here’s some of what he wrote.

Congress is seriously considering imposing a beneficial ownership reporting regime on American businesses and other entities, including charities and churches. …the House and Senate bills…share three salient characteristics. First, they would impose a large compliance burden on the private sector, primarily on small businesses, charities, and religious organizations. Second, they create hundreds of thousands—potentially more than one million—inadvertent felons out of otherwise law-abiding citizens. Third, they do virtually nothing to achieve their stated aim of protecting society from terrorism or other forms of illicit finance. …Furthermore, the creation of this expensive and socially damaging reporting edifice is unnecessary. The vast majority of the information that the proposed beneficial ownership reporting regime would obtain is already provided to the Internal Revenue Service.

Richard Rahn criticizes this new proposal in his weekly column.

…what would you think of a member of Congress who proposes to put a new regulation on the smallest of businesses that does not meet a cost-benefit test, denies basic privacy protections and, because of its vagueness and ambiguity, is likely to cause very high numbers of otherwise law-abiding Americans to be felons? …Some bureaucrats and elected officials argue that the government needs to know who the “beneficial owners” are of even the tiniest of businesses in order to combat “money-laundering,” tax evasion or terrorism. …Should the church ladies who run the local non-profit food bank be put in jail for their failure to submit the form to the Feds that would give them the exemption from the beneficial ownership requirement? …Given how few people are actually convicted of money-laundering, the overwhelming evidence is that 99 percent of the people being forced to submit to these costly and time-consuming proposed regulations will not be guilty of money-laundering, terrorism or whatever, and thus should not be harassed by government.

Writing for the Hill, J.W. Verret, an expert in business law from George Mason University Law School, highlights some of the serious problems with this new regulatory scheme.

Legislation under consideration in Congress, the Counter Terrorism and Illicit Finance Act, risks tying entrepreneurs’ hands with even more red tape. In fact, it could destroy any benefit some small businesses stand to gain from the tax reform legislation passed last year. It would require corporations and limited liability companies with fewer than 20 employees to file a form with the Treasury Department at the time of formation, and update it annually, listing the names of all beneficial owners and individuals exercising control. …Given the substantial penalties, this will impose a massive regulatory tax on small businesses as they spend money on lawyers that should go toward workers’ pay. …It is unlikely someone on a terrorist watch list would provide their real name on the required form, and Treasury will probably never have sufficient resources to audit names in real time.

Professor Verret explains some of the practical problems and tradeoffs with these proposals.

…some individual money laundering investigations would be easier with a small business registry available. But IRS tax fraud investigations would be much easier with access to taxpayers’ bank account login information — would we tolerate the associated costs and privacy violations? …How is the term “beneficial owner” defined? How is “control” defined? As a professor of corporate law, I have given multiple lectures on those very questions. What if your company is owned, in part, by another company? Or there is a chain of ownership through multiple intermediary companies? What if a creditor of the company, though not currently a shareholder or beneficial owner, obtains the contractual right to convert their debt contract into ownership equity at some point in the future? …for the average small business owner, navigating those complexities against the backdrop of a potential three year prison sentence will often require legal counsel. Companies affected by this legislation should conservatively expect to spend at least $5,000 on a corporate lawyer to help navigate the complexities of the new filing requirements.

Needless to say, squandering $5,000 or more for some useless paperwork is not a recipe for more entrepreneurship.

So how do advocates for this type of legislation respond?

Clay Fuller of the American Enterprise Institute wants us to have faith that bad people will freely divulge their real identities and that bureaucrats will make effective use of the information.

It is time to weed out illicit financing and unfair competition from criminals and bad actors. …Passing the House Financial Services Committee’s Counter Terrorism and Illicit Finance Act should be a priority for the 115th Congress. …Dictators, terrorists and criminals have been freeriding on the prosperity and liberty of the American economy for too long. Officials at FinCEN are sure that beneficial ownership legislation will exponentially increase conviction rates. We should give law enforcement what they need to do their jobs.

Gee, all that sounds persuasive. I’m also against dictators, terrorists, and criminals.

But if you read his entire column, you’ll notice that he offers zero evidence that this costly new legislation actually would catch more bad guys.

And since we already know that anti-money laundering laws impose heavy costs and catch almost no bad guys, wouldn’t it be smart to figure out better ways of allocating law enforcement resources?

I don’t know if we should be distressed or comforted, but other parts of the world also are hamstringing their financial industries with similar policies.

Here’s some analysis from Europe.

…a new reportfrom Consult Hyperion, commissioned by Mitek, reveals that the average UK bank is currently wasting £5 million each year due to manual and inefficient Know Your Customer (KYC) processes, and this annual waste is expected to rise to £10 million in three years. …Key Findings…Inefficient KYC processes cost the average bank £47 million a year…Total costs for KYC processes range from £10 to £100 per check…In the UK, 25% of applications are abandoned due to KYC friction… The cost of KYC checks is much too high, placing too much reliance on inefficient and error-prone manual processes,” said Steve Pannifer, author of the report and COO at Consult Hyperion.

And here’s an update from Asia.

Anti-money laundering and know-your-customer compliance have become leading concerns at financial institutions in Asia today. … we estimate that AML compliance budgets across the six Asian markets in this study total an estimated US$1.5 billion annually for banks alone. …A majority of respondents (55%) indicated that AML compliance has a negative impact on their firms’ business productivity. …An additional 15% felt that AML compliance actually threatens their firms’ ability to do business. …Eighty-two per cent of survey respondents saw overall AML compliance costs increasing in 2016, with one third projecting that costs will rise by 20% or more.

The bottom line is that laws and regulations dealing with money laundering are introduced with high hopes of reducing crime.

And when there’s no effect on criminal activity, proponents urge ever-increasing levels of red tape. And when that doesn’t work, they propose new levels of regulation. And still nothing changes.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Here’s the video I narrated on this topic. It’s now a bit dated, but everything I said is even more true today.

Let’s close with a surreal column in the Washington Post from Dana Milbank. He was victimized by silly anti-money laundering policies, but seems to approve.

I did not expect that my wife and I would be flagged as possible financiers of international terrorism. …The teller told me my account had been blocked. My wife went to an ATM to take out $200. Denied. Soon I discovered that checks I had written to the au pair and my daughter’s volleyball instructor had bounced. …I began making calls to the bank and eventually got an explanation: The bank was looking into whether my wife and I were laundering money, as they are required to by the Bank Secrecy Act as amended by the Patriot Act. …the bank seemed particularly suspicious that my wife was the terrorist… The bank needed answers. Did she work for the government? How much money does she make? Is she a government contractor? …a week later they came back with a new threat to freeze the account and a more peculiar question: Is my wife politically influential?

Sounds like an awful example of a bank being forced by bad laws to harass a customer.

Heck, it is an awful example of that happening.

But in a remarkable display of left-wing masochism, Milbank approves.

The people who flagged us were right to do so. …Citibank, though perhaps clumsy, was doing what it should be doing. “Know your customer” regulations are important because they prevent organized-crime networks, terrorists and assorted bad guys from moving money. Banking regulations generally are a hassle, and expensive. But they protect us — not just from terrorists such as my wife and me but from financial institutions that would otherwise exploit their customers and jeopardize economic stability the way they did before the 2008 crash.

I guess we know which way Milbank would have responded to this poll question from 2013.

But he would be wrong because money-laundering laws don’t stop terrorism.

We’re giving up freedom and imposing high costs on our economy, yet we’re not getting any additional security in exchange.

And I can’t resist commenting on his absurd assertion that money laundering played a role in the 2008 crash. Does he think that mafia kingpins somehow controlled the Federal Reserve and insisted on easy-money policies and artificially low interest rates? Does he think ISIS operatives were somehow responsible for reckless Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac subsidies?

Wow, I thought the people who blamed “tax havens” for the financial crisis deserved the prize for silliest fantasies. But Milbank gives them a run for their money.

P.S. You probably didn’t realize you could make a joke involving money laundering, but here’s one featuring former President Obama.

Read Full Post »

Using Protectionism to Reduce Protectionism?

I’ve been very critical of Trump’s protectionism. I explained why he was wrong before the 2016 election and I’ve continued to argue he is misguided ever since he became President.

Most recently, I even expressed hope that Congress would overturn his new taxes on American consumers.

Some people are arguing, however, that the situation isn’t quite so bad because Trump may have a clever plan to use tariffs as a tool to force other nations to reduce their trade barriers.

I very much hope that’s the case, as I noted in this interview with Fox Business, but I’m not holding my breath for a favorable outcome.

I’m not the only one who is skeptical.

In her column for the Wall Street Journal, Mary Anastasia O’Grady pours cold water on the hypothesis that Trump is playing a very clever game.

President Trump’s practice of staking out extreme positions on trade as a negotiating tactic is a sign of his brilliance. Or so we’re told. But that theory took on water last week, when Mr. Trump had to backtrack on a promise to hit Mexico and Canada with a 25% tariff on steel and a 10% tariff on aluminum, without any concessions from either Mexico City or Ottawa. …Mr. “Art of the Deal” figured out that his opening tariff bid was on track to blow up the two best foreign markets for American-made steel and significant markets for American-made aluminum. It’s a good bet that the same producers who are lobbying for protection asked the president to back off the neighbors. The gaffe exposes the Trump administration’s failure to grasp the complexity of the supply chains that interconnect the global economy.

Well said.

By the way, I’m not just picking on Trump. I’ve criticized other Presidents for protectionist policies, most notably Hoover.

And I even dinged Saint Ronald for trade barriers (though I also noted Reagan’s good policies regarding NAFTA and the GATT).

Unsurprisingly George W. Bush also belongs on the list. Professor Vernon Smith relates a story about Bush’s protectionism in the Wall Street Journal.

I was one of nine American Nobel laureates invited to visit the White House Nov. 19, 2002, by President George W. Bush. Each of us had a few minutes to speak privately with the president… Mr. Bush congratulated me on my award in economics. …I added: “You must be doing some things right, but you did two things wrong—your steel tariff proposal and the farm bill.” I startled him, but our exchange was not over. …Later in the Lincoln Room, Mr. Bush was talking with a group of my colleagues from George Mason University. Seeing me nearby, he raised his voice in a friendly retort: “Earlier, your laureate friend gave me a hard time about the steel tariff. I’m thinking that he should handle the economics, and I’ll take care of the politics.”

Professor Smith points out, however, that Bush was wrong on the politics as well as the economics (a lesson the GOP should have learned from Reagan).

His proposal collided with a widespread political backlash at home and abroad, and with retaliation from our foreign trading partners. The Bush steel tariff, imposed in 2002, was rescinded in 2003. It was not feasible. He recognized its unreality, and backed off.

Hopefully Trump will retreat as well.

The last thing the world needs is a repeat of the 1930s.

But if that happens, be prepared for very bad news. Here’s a report on how trade taxes would undermine America’s economy.

A full-blown trade war would erase any economic benefits from the Republican tax cuts passed last year, according to an analysis by the University of Pennsylvania. …The Penn Wharton Budget Model, a research center at the university, imagined the worst case — no US imports or exports crossing borders tariff-free. The United States has free trade agreements with 20 nations. Wharton’s model assumes those all disappear. Such a trade war would make US economic output 0.9% lower than otherwise by 2027, according to the analysis. …Over the longer term, the costs of a trade war would heavily outweigh the benefits of the tax cut. By 2040, the US would lose 5.3% of economic output in the worst trade-war scenario, compared with a 1.6% increase from the tax cuts, the university found. Put another way, a full-blown trade war would cost the economy $200 billion over 10 years, and $1.4 trillion by 2040. American wages would decline, too, falling 1.1% over the next 10 years.

Last but not least, Mark Perry recently shared three videos from Khan Academy on international trade and economics. All of them are worth watching if you really want to understand the issue.  But here’s the one that I think everyone should watch.

And Mark adds this chart, which reinforces the point from the video – and something I’ve also tried to explain – about a capital surplus being the necessary and automatic flip side of a trade deficit.

In other words, when foreigners get dollars, they oftentimes think the best use of that money is to invest in America’s future. That’s a sign of strength, not weakness.

P.S. If you think protectionism is a good idea, please review these five charts.

P.P.S. Though I’m willing to go back to 19th-century tariffs – assuming we roll back all the government that has accumulated since then.

Read Full Post »

Mocking Gun Control

I shared some satire about gun control last month, but the left’s campaign to exploit the horrible Parkland shooting seems to have instigated a bunch of new material.

So let’s have some weekend fun.

We’ll start with this humorous image from Reddit‘s libertarian page that actually does a good job of showing that gun control is pointless because criminals don’t care about laws.

This next image, also from Reddit, resonates with me because I’ve had many conversations with leftists who genuinely think a “semi-automatic rifle” is the same as a machine gun.

Or that “assault weapons” are somehow more lethal hunting rifles.

Though the gun-control crowd doesn’t seem to care even when you point out that their talking points are nonsense.

This next image arrived in my inbox a few days ago. I imagine the women calling the cops also failed this IQ test.

Next we have an apparently genuine sign from one of the student protests against civil liberties. Astoundingly, this girl doesn’t realize that she has everything wrong. The White House is filled with armed personnel and her school is the gun-free zone.

And we know from this cartoon whether bad people prefer unarmed victims. I guess we’ll call the student Exhibit A in the case against government-run schools.

This next item isn’t humorous, but I’m including it solely because I hope it’s a true story rather than an urban legend. If anybody knows, please share details in the comments section.

I like this next item because libertarians seem to be the only ones who value both the 1st Amendment and 2nd Amendment.

Given how California has drifted so far to the left, this next joke my turn into reality at some point. Well, even they’re not that foolish, but I can’t help but hope it might happen.

Last but not least, this item from Reddit‘s libertarian page does make me wonder about my left-wing friends. They despise Trump, yet they want to citizens to be disarmed.

Wow. Reminds me of this image.

P.S. You can still cast a vote in the online poll to identify the most important reason to defend the Second Amendment.

Read Full Post »

New Jersey’s Fiscal Suicide

A couple of decades can make a huge difference in the political and economic life of a jurisdiction.

• Two decades ago, Venezuela had not yet been subjected to the horror of Hugo Chavez and his destructive statism.
• Three decades ago, the pro-market success story of Estonia was an enslaved part of the totalitarian Soviet Union.
• Four decades ago, the Latin superstar of Chile was still in a hangover stage from a disastrous communist government.
• Five decades ago, Ronald Reagan was a conservative governor of the now-notoriously left-wing state of California.

And here’s something especially amazing from a bit more than five decades in the past. New Jersey used to have no state income tax and no state sales tax.

Yes, your eyes are not deceiving you. The basket case of New Jersey used to be a mid-Atlantic version of New Hampshire. But once the sales tax was imposed in 1966 and the income tax was imposed in 1976, it’s been all downhill ever since.

An article in the City Journal helps to explain the state’s fiscal decay.

Brendan Byrne, a Democratic former governor of the Garden State, …told mayors that the state would need a “large revenue package”… The heart of the package would be a new statewide income tax, which went into permanent effect in 1977. Byrne promised that the additional money would help relieve the high property-tax burden on New Jersey’s citizens… Four decades later, the plan has failed. …politicians and special interests don’t see new streams of tax revenue as a means to replace or eliminate an existing stream, but rather as a way of adding to the public coffers. (For those who entertain fantasies of a value-added tax replacing the federal income tax, take heed.) New Jersey’s income tax started with a top rate of about 2.5 percent; it’s now around 9 percent.

Needless to say, nothing politicians promised has happened.

Property taxes haven’t been reduced. They’ve gone up. The government schools haven’t improved. Instead, the test scores in the state are embarrassing. And debt hasn’t gone down. Red ink instead has skyrocketed.

And what’s amazing – and depressing – is that New Jersey politicians continue to make a bad situation worse. Here are some excerpts from a Bloomberg report.

New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy proposed taxing online-room booking, ride-sharing, marijuana, e-cigarettes and Internet transactions along with raising taxes on millionaires and retail sales to fund a record $37.4 billion budget that would boost spending on schools, pensions and mass transit. …Murphy, a Democrat…has promised additional spending on underfunded schools and transportation in a credit-battered state with an estimated $8.7 billion structural deficit for the fiscal year that starts July 1. …Murphy said Tuesday in his budget address to lawmakers. “A millionaire’s tax is the right thing to do –- and now is the time to do it.” …The budget…would…restore the state’s sales tax to 7 percent from 6.625 percent… Murphy’s proposal would almost triple the direct state subsidy for New Jersey Transit, which has been plagued by safety and financial issues.

More taxes, more spending, followed by even more taxes and more spending.

I wonder if Greek taxpayers would want to tell their counterparts in New Jersey how that story ends.

Assuming, of course, there are any taxpayers left in the Garden State. There’s already been a big exodus of productive people who are tired of being treated like fatted calves.

And don’t forget that New Jersey taxpayers no longer have unlimited ability to deduct their state and local taxes on their federal tax return. So these tax hikes will hurt much more than past increases.

In any event, taxpayers better escape before the die.

Though I know one guy who won’t be leaving.

P.S. Anybody want to guess whether New Jersey collapses before California, Illinois, or Connecticut? They’re all in the process of committing slow-motion suicide.

Read Full Post »

Honesty about Gun Confiscation

I have a special page to highlight honest left wingers, and I’ve acknowledged several who have confessed that gun control is misguided.

• Jeffrey Goldberg admits gun ownership reduces crime.
• Justin Cronin explains how he became a left-wing supporter of gun rights.
• Jamelle Bouie pours cold water on Obama’s gun control agenda.
• Leah Libresco confesses that gun control simply doesn’t work.

A columnist for Vox also is honest. Dylan Matthews starts by acknowledging that the standard agenda of the anti-gun movement is pointless.

Congress’s decision not to pass background checks is not what’s keeping the US from European gun violence levels. The expiration of the assault weapons ban is not behind the gap.

But don’t get your hopes up that Matthews is on the right side.

His problem with the incremental ideas is that they don’t go far enough.

What’s behind the gap, plenty of research indicates, is that Americans have more guns. …Realistically, a gun control plan that has any hope of getting us down to European levels of violence is going to mean taking a huge number of guns away from a huge number of gun owners. …And here’s the truth: Even the most ardent gun control advocates aren’t pushing measures that could close the gap. Not even close. …Obama’s plan to tackle gun violence focused on universal background checks for gun sales, banning assault weapons again, and increasing criminal penalties for illicit gun traffickers. That’s nowhere near as dramatic as taking…America’s guns off the street.

I obviously disagree, but I give him credit for honesty. Unlike other leftists who privately share the same ideology, Matthews is open and honest about his desire to eviscerate civil liberties.

Even if he understands it’s not going to happen any time soon.

…large-scale confiscation look like easily the most promising approach… Large-scale confiscation is not going to happen. That’s no reason to stop advocating it.

So I applaud Matthews for not hiding his true desire. Just like I applaud leftists who openly admit that they want 90 percent tax rates or who freely confess that they think all our income belongs to government.

I think they’re all profoundly misguided, but that’s a separate issue.

Now let’s briefly contemplate what would be necessary for Mr. Matthews to get his wish of total gun confiscation.

Reason produced a mocking “five-step” video on the near-impossible actions that would be needed to achieve that goal.

But the first three steps in that video were about how difficult it is to amend the Constitution and I don’t think that’s what the left has in mind. If they ever get to the point of trying to ban guns, presumably it will be after a leftist President has put a sufficient number of doctrinaire Ruth Bader Ginsburg clones on he Supreme Court. In which case, they will simply pretend the 2nd Amendment doesn’t say what it says.

And if that happens, then presumably it will be easy to envision the fourth step, which is legislation prohibiting private ownership of firearms. After all, does anybody doubt that this is what Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi actually would prefer?

But I fully agree that the fifth and final step – actually confiscating guns – would be extremely difficult.

There was a poll on this issue back in 2013 and it’s worth noting that respondents, by a 3-1 margin, said they would defy such a law.

I oscillate between being proud about the result and being disappointed that the margin isn’t 10-1 in favor of defiance.

Regardless, the takeaway from this result is that there would be pervasive and ubiquitous civil disobedience.

Moreover, it goes without saying that the people who obeyed such a fascist law would not be the criminals. So the net effect of such legislation would be an unfortunate shift in the ratio of good gun owners and bad gun owners.

P.S. Which is sort of the point of this satirical comparison between Chicago and Houston.

Read Full Post »

The Capital Gains Tax Should Not Be Imposed on Inflationary Gains

Ideally, there should be no capital gains tax.

After all, the levy is a self-destructive form of double taxation that reduces the quantity and quality of investment. And that’s not good for wages and jobs.

To add insult to injury (to be more accurate, to add injury to injury), the tax isn’t indexed for inflation. So investors get taxed on the full increase in the value of an asset even though a significant chunk of the increase often is due solely to inflation.

Steven Entin of the Tax Foundation has some new research on this issue.

Many elements of the income tax are adjusted for inflation, such as tax brackets, standard deductions, and income thresholds or dollar amounts of some tax credits. However, the purchase price of assets later sold for capital gains or losses is not adjusted for inflation. As a result, inflation can do a real number on savers by turning real losses into taxable nominal gains. To avoid such outcomes, it would make sense for the government to allow an inflation adjustment for the cost of assets.

Steve points out that the absence of indexing is very brutal during periods of high inflation – which may soon become a relevant issue again.

During the late 1960s and 1970s, when inflation was high and the stock market was flat, it was not uncommon for people who sold assets to report inflated nominal capital gains that were negative in terms of purchasing power. In effect, the savers were taxed on a real loss. …Suppose one had bought $100 of stock in the XYZ Corporation in 1965, and sold it in 1981, for $110. This looks like a $10 gain. But…The stock would have had to rise to $286 just to keep pace with inflation. …the investor lost $176, in 1981 dollars ($286 – $110). Any tax collected on the nominal $10 gain was, in fact, a tax on a real loss.

But even if inflation remains low, this is still an important issue.

Taxing genuine capital gains is bad enough, so it’s not a surprise to learn that taxing inflationary gains is even worse. It exacerbates the anti-capital bias in the current tax code.

Taxation of fictitious gains or other capital income reduces saving and raises the cost of capital, thereby retarding investment, productivity growth, and wage growth. …In an ideal tax system, saving would not be treated worse than consumption. …When we earn income and pay tax, and use the after-tax income for consumption, the federal government generally leaves the consumption alone, except for a few excise taxes… The earnings are taxed, but not the enjoyment of the subsequent purchases. Saving is a purchase too. It lets us “buy” a stream of future income with after-tax money. But if we buy a bond, the stream of interest is taxed. If we buy a share of stock, the dividends are taxed, and any reinvested earnings that increase the value of the company are taxed as capital gains.

Here’s Steve’s conclusion.

Inflation raises the price of many assets acquired by savers. When they sell the assets, much of their capital gains may be due only to inflation. Inflation-related gains are not a real increase in wealth. Indexing the purchase price (tax basis) for inflation would provide savers some relief for this type of tax on fictitious income.

Well said, though I have one minor quibble. A capital gain, whether real or caused by inflation, is not income. It’s a change in nominal net worth.

Though I’m sure Steve would agree with me. He’s presumably using “income” because the tax code treats that change in net worth as income.

There is a chance we’ll see some progress on this issue. Ryan Ellis, writing for Forbes, is optimistic that the newly appointed head of Trump’s National Economic Council will try to fix this problem.

There’s one project that Kudlow needs to get to work on right away: indexing the basis of capital gains to inflation. …Just last August, Kudlow wrote an op-ed…urging President Trump to do this by executive order. …This finally may be the time that this issue is ready to cross the finish line.

Executive order?

Yes, because the law specifies the rates for capital gains taxation, but it’s up to the Treasury Department to specify what counts as a gain. And there’s a very strong argument that it’s not a genuine gain if an asset rises in value solely because of inflation.

Ryan explains the mechanics of how indexing would work..

How would indexing capital gains basis to inflation work? In the tax world, reporting a capital gain is a pretty simple exercise. When you sell an asset, like a stock, you report how much you sold it for. You can subtract what you bought it for (your “basis”) from what you sold it for to arrive at your gain. …If you’ve held the asset longer than a year, you generally pay tax at…20 percent, plus the 3.8 percent Obamacare investment surtax… A problem arises in that your basis purchase may have happened many years ago. The real value of the money you used to buy a stock has been eroded by inflation. For example, $100 in 1990 is only worth $51.41 today, a little more than half the supposed basis in real terms. …Someone whose $100 initial investment has grown to $500 would see a big difference in taxes.

Here’s the table showing that difference.

And here’s what it means.

Uncle Sam still gets to tax the gain–he just doesn’t get to take the phantom gains attributable to inflation. In fact, $22.50 of the current law tax–nearly one quarter of the tax bill–is entirely due to inflation, not any real increase in wealth. …This law change would help owners of real estate, including corporate owners of real estate. It would help small businesses who pay the capital gains tax when acquired by larger firms. It would help everyone in America with a prized collection of old baseball cards or stamps sitting in an album in their den. This is truly a tax cut for everyone.

For more information, here’s a video on the topic from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity.

As was pointed out in the video, Ronald Reagan indexed much of the tax code as part of his 1981 tax cut. Now it’s time to take the next step.

But let’s not forget that indexing should only be an interim step (assuming, of course, that the White House and Treasury are willing to do the right thing and protect investors from inflation).

The real goal should be total repeal of the capital gains tax.

Read Full Post »

A Primer on Debt, Deficits, and Public Finance

Way back in 2009, I narrated a video explaining that people worry too much about deficits and debt. Red ink isn’t desirable, to be sure, but I pointed out that the real problem is government spending.

And the bottom line is that most types of government spending are bad for an economy, regardless of whether they are financed by taxes or borrowing.

It is possible, of course, for a nation to have a debt crisis. But keep in mind that this simply means a government has accumulated so much debt that investors no longer trust that they will receive payments on government bonds.

That’s not a good outcome, but replacing debt-financed spending with tax-financed spending is like jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. Or the fire into the frying pan, if you prefer. In either case, politicians are ignoring the real problem.

Greece is a cautionary example. Thanks to a period of overspending, Greek politicians drove the country into a debt crisis. But this dark cloud had a silver lining. The good news (at least relatively speaking) is that the government no longer could borrow from the private sector to finance more spending.

But the bad news is that Greek politicians subsequently hammered the economy with huge tax increases in hopes of propping up the country’s bloated welfare state. And the “troika” made a bad situation worse with bailout funds (mostly to protect big banks that unwisely lent money to Greek politicians, but that’s a separate story).

In other words, Greece got in trouble because of too much government spending and it remains in trouble because of too much government spending. As is the case for many other European nations.

And I fear the United States is slowly but surely heading in that direction. I elaborate about the problem of government spending – and the concomitant symptom of red ink – in this interview with the Mises Institute.

For all intents and purposes, I’m trying to convince people that deficits and debt are bad, but they’re bad mostly because they are a sign that government is too big. Sort of like a brain tumor being the real problem and headaches being a warning sign.

I feel like Goldilocks on this issue. Except instead of porridge that is too hot or too cold, I deal with people on both sides who think red ink is either wonderful or terrible.

For an example of the former group, here’s some of what Stephanie Kelton wrote for the New York Times last October.

…bigger deficits wouldn’t wreck the nation’s finances. …Lawmakers are obsessed with avoiding an increase in the deficit. …It’s also holding us back. Politicians of both parties should stop using the deficit as a guide to public policy. Instead, they should be advancing legislation aimed at raising living standards and delivering…long-term prosperity.

Hard to disagree with the above excerpt.

But here’s the part I don’t like. She’s a believer in the perpetual motion machine of Keynesian economics. She thinks deficits are actually good for the economy and she wants to use debt to finance an ever-larger burden of government spending.

Government spending adds new money to the economy, and taxes take some of that money out again. …we should think of the government’s spending as self-financing since it pays its bills by sending new money into the economy. …the deficit itself could be deployed as a potent weapon in the fights against inequality, poverty and economic stagnation.

Ugh.

Now let’s check out the view of the so-called deficit hawks who think red ink is an abomination.

Here are some passages from a Hill report on the battle over last year’s tax plan.

A handful of GOP deficit hawks are worried that their party’s tax plan could add trillions to the deficit, deepening a debt crisis for future generations. …The tax plan could cost the government $1.5 trillion in revenue over the next decade… Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who recently announced his retirement at the end of this Congress, has warned he’ll oppose the tax plan if it adds to the deficit. …In a separate interview, he told The New York Times that the debt is “the greatest threat to our nation,” more dangerous than the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or North Korea.

Ugh, again.

The threat isn’t the red ink. The real danger is an ever-increasing burden of government spending, driven by entitlements.

Besides, the GOP tax bill actually is a long-run tax increase!

Let’s close with a video on the topic from Marginal Revolution. It has too much Keynesianism in it for my tastes, but the discussion of Argentina’s default is useful for those who wonder about whether the United States is going to have a debt meltdown at some point.

P.S. I don’t agree with Keynesians and I don’t agree with the self-styled deficit hawks. But I can appreciate that both groups have a consistent approach to public finance. What really galls me are the statist hypocrites who are cheerleaders for debt when there are proposals to increase government spending, but then do a back flip and pretend that debt is terrible and must be reduced when tax increases are being discussed.

Read Full Post »

Is Good Globalism Being Undermined by Bad Globalism?

The biggest challenge, when I talk to politicians about the free-market agenda, is convincing them that they should restrain the growth of government. To be more specific, I think they often understand and accept the argument that ever-rising fiscal burdens are bad for a nation’s economic and moral health, but they are afraid that voters and interest groups will kick them out of office if they reduce the size and scope of the public sector.

I have a different challenge when talking to ordinary people about the free-market agenda. They’re quite comfortable (at least in theory) with the notion that it’s good to cap the growth of government spending, but there is a lot of skepticism about trade. And their doubts sometimes persist even after I share my eight questions and five charts showing the folly of protectionism.

In part, I think these skeptics share Trump’s mistaken belief that a trade deficit is a sign of weakness. But I’ve also found in my many conversations that some people simply are not comfortable with globalization.

But what does that concept even mean?

In his latest column for the New York Times, Bret Stephens points out that there’s no clear definition of what it means to be pro-globalist.

I grew up in Mexico City… Since then, I have lived in Chicago, London, Brussels, Jerusalem, New York and Hamburg. I suppose this makes me a “globalist” in certain eyes… To be a globalist means almost nothing — even “Davos Man” has to trundle home somewhere after the annual forum draws to a close. Rex Tillerson is as much a globalist as Samantha Power. Ditto for John Bolton and John Kerry, Charles Koch and George Soros, Mike Pompeo and Julian Assange. A term that embraces opposites has almost no explanatory power.

So he suggests a definition of what it means.

Maybe it’s time now to make “globalist” mean something after all. An earlier generation of globalists — they called themselves internationalists — had learned the lessons of the 1930s and understood that the U.S. could not cut itself off from the world and expect to remain safe from it. Successive generations of Americans — military and foreign-service officers, businessmen and teachers, humanitarians and entertainers — went out into the world and sought to make it a better place.

All of that sounds very appealing.

Especially when compared to what it means to be on the other side.

To be an anti-globalist…does specify something. …In short, anti-globalism is economic illiteracy married to a conspiracy mind-set.

Since I’ve written about the foolishness of protectionism and also explained why it’s silly to believe in conspiracy theories, I obviously agree.

But we have a problem. Globalism (or globalization, or internationalism, or the policies of “Davos Man,”, or whatever you want to call it) increasingly is perceived to be about more than free trade and comity between nations. In the minds of market-oriented people, it is getting linked with other policies that cause considerable angst.

• Does globalism mean supporting the OECD’s efforts to undermine tax competition so that it’s easier for politicians to impose bad tax policy and more redistribution?
• Does globalism mean agreeing with the IMF’s support for bailouts and higher taxes, policies which arguably are only for the benefit of politically connected big banks?
• Does globalism mean adding regulatory harmonization to trade agreements, supplanting the much more market-friendly approach of mutual recognition?
• Does globalism mean signing onto agreements that give powers to unaccountable and corrupt international bureaucracies such as the United Nations?
• Does globalism mean siding with the European Commission in imposing one-size-fits-all rules for member nations notwithstanding the subsidiarity principle?

This is why I find this issue so frustrating.

Like Bret Stephens, I consider myself a globalist. To me, it’s a way of saying I want peaceful trade and investment flows between people in different nations. Heck, it’s also a way of saying I like and appreciate other peoples and other cultures.

But many of the other people who self-identify as globalists support policies that increase the power of governments over the private economy.

Here’s my simplified way to looking at this issues. All globalists are in favor of free trade and cross-border investment flows, but there’s then a division based on whether they want governments to compete or collude. And that’s basically a proxy for whether they favor small government or big government.

In this 2×2 matrix, the globalists are on the left side, but they’re divided between “Good Globalism” and “Bad Globalism.” Sort of the difference between Switzerland and Sweden.

I initially identified the bottom-right as “Anti Globalism,” but decided that “Statism” was the better label. After all, there should be a place for those who want global agreements to expand the power of government while also closing borders to trade and investment. Maybe India would be a good example of this bad approach.

But I couldn’t figure out a good label for the top-right. So I put “Irrationality” for the obvious reason that competition and protectionism are mutually exclusive concepts. And I have no idea what country belongs in this box.

P.S. This is my first stab at this issue. I’m open to suggestions on better labels and descriptions for my 2×2 matrix. And I also freely admit that there are aspects of the globalization debate – such as migration and military alliances – that aren’t included in my analysis. I’ll let others figure out how to create and classify a 4-dimensional matrix.

P.P.S. Not all global agreements are bad. Consider international pacts on air traffic control. Or certain anti-pollution treaties.

P.P.P.S. For more information on today’s topic, here’s my explanation of how borders can promote liberty, and here’s my explanation for why protectionism and tax harmonization are two peas in a pod.

Read Full Post »

Seven Adverse Consequences of Big Government

I’ve narrated a video on why big government is theoretically bad for an economy, another video looking at the empirical evidence on government spending and economic performance, and also a video on the growth-maximizing size of the public sector.

But if you want to see a lot of what I said condensed into one video, here’s Dennis Prager talking about differences in how the left and right view government. The opening part of the video is interesting, though I suspect his descriptions only apply to philosophically motivated activists on each side.

The part I want to focus on begins about 1:15, when he outlines seven adverse consequences of ever-growing government.

I think he put together a very good list. Here’s my two cents on his seven points.

1. More Corruption – He points out that a government with lots of power and control will be very susceptible to misbehavior as interest groups and politicians figure out ways of scamming the system. Very similar to the message in one of my videos.
2. Less Liberty – It is basically a tautology that ever-larger government necessitates a reduction in liberty. Not in a totalitarian sense, but taxes and regulations constrain the freedom of individual to earn and control income.
3. Fiscal Crisis – He warns that big government is a recipe for fiscal crisis. I’m not sure if this has to be inevitable, but from a practical perspective, he is right. Demographic change and entitlements are a poisonous combination.
4. Punitive Taxation – If government consistently expands faster than the productive sector of the economy, that almost certainly means ever-higher taxes, which ultimately will be self defeating because of the Laffer Curve.
5. Unsustainable Debt – An expanding burden of government spending also will mean ever-higher levels of red ink, especially once the tax burden is so high that additional levies don’t produce much – if any – revenue.
6. Totalitarianism – This is probably Prager’s weakest point. He’s right that bad people do very bad things when they control a government, but I suspect western nations will suffer societal breakdown rather that dictatorship.
7. Dependency – He closes very strong with observations about the danger of luring people into reliance on government. This concern about the erosion of societal capital is much more important than most people think.

For all intents and purposes, Prager’s video is a very good description of “goldfish government.”

This is the term I use to describe the unfortunate tendency of politicians to over-tax and over-spend until a society faces a crisis.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think western nations necessarily will collapse (though some almost certainly will depending on the degree to which societal capital has been destroyed).

But I will acknowledge that politicians generally don’t like taking the necessary steps to avert fiscal crisis.

Which is one of the reasons I’m such a big fan of tax competition. I don’t want politicians to think that endless tax increases are a way of postponing the fiscal day of reckoning.

Read Full Post »

The (Highly Implausible but Theoretically Attractive) Case for Import Taxes

Every time I write a column criticizing Trump’s protectionism, I get pushback. Some of the resistance is from people who genuinely think trade barriers are a good thing, and I routinely respond by asking them to ponder these eight questions or these five charts.

But I also get negative feedback from people who point out that the United States imposed significant import taxes in the 1800s, a period when the United States transitioned from agricultural poverty to middle-class prosperity.

Doesn’t this prove tariffs are pro-growth?

That’s sort of what Brian Domitrovic asserts in a recent column for Forbes.

There is an indisputable chronological correlation between the tariff and phenomenal economic growth. From the late 18^th to the early 20th twentieth centuries, the United States steadily developed into the most successful economy in the world.

Brian’s column explores how trade taxes worked in the early history of the United States, but let’s skip to the part that is relevant to today’s discussion.

From 1789 to 1913, the size of the federal government in the economy as a whole averaged about 3%, with variation in time of war. Today, that number is over 20%—a 7-fold increase. State and local government was another 3% back then, and is another 12% today. Where total government was 6% of economic output in the era of the tariff, it is five times larger at over 30% today.

In other words, the real lesson to be learned is not that trade taxes are good for growth, but rather that an economy can prosper if the public sector is very small. And Brian is right that the federal government used to be only a tiny burden in the United States.

Brian even makes the case that government may have stayed small during the 1800s precisely because import taxes were seen as naked cronyism.

The quid pro quo the populace made with the tariff is that Congress and its conspirators in business got their favors, but in turn Congress’s realm, the government, had to stay small. Therefore, the private economy was free… Boundless growth at the hands of entrepreneurs and a talented and ambitious workforce built up year after year as Congress got to curry its petty favors on the condition that government stayed limited in size.

He also explains that politicians back then were very cognizant of the Laffer Curve.

A tariff “for revenue” was one where a rate was set low enough for the good in question to flow into the country in sufficient quantity to bring in increasing receipts to the government. A “prohibitive” tariff was one that was so high, receipts would go up if a rate were lowered. The “Laffer curve” concept was the most discussed theorem in political-economic debates in the United States in the 19^th century.

The same principle applies to the income tax today. A modest rate generates lots of revenue, whereas a punitive rate can actually cause a drop in tax receipts.

And, speaking of the income tax, the introduction of that awful levy actually gave Hoover and other politicians the fiscal leeway to impose “prohibitive” tariffs…with very bad results.

After the income tax was put in place in 1913, the tariff shed its revenue purpose and became exclusively a vehicle for cronyism. Therefore it got very high—so high, in 1930, that…the…system was ruined and the result was the Great Depression.

For what it’s worth, I think there were lots of other bad policies from Hoover and Roosevelt that caused – and then exacerbated – the economic damage of the 1930s, so high tariffs don’t deserve all the blame.

But let’s not digress from our main topic of whether trade taxes can be justified.

Brian’s column doesn’t say that tariffs are good, but he does point out that such a system was only capable of financing a very small government. And that meant the private sector had lots of breathing room to operate.

But a “sin of omission” is that he also could have elaborated on the economic benefits of having no income tax. During the 1800s (with the exception of Lincoln’s income tax during the Civil War and an income tax in 1894 that was declared unconstitutional in 1895), there was no personal income tax. And no corporate income tax. And no payroll taxes. Or death tax. Or capital gains tax.

Dean Clancy highlighted these benefits when considering the conditions that would be necessary for him to support trade taxes.

I sort of agree. But I hope Dean would agree to a friendly tweak to his tweet, so that it read “McKinley-size tariffs were a less-worse option because of…”, and then list the polices that actually were good, such as no taxes on income and very small government.

Sadly, I don’t see any practical way of unwinding all the bad policy of the past 100 years.

So the case for trade taxes is very similar to the market-friendly case for a value-added tax. Yes, there is a theoretical argument to replace all income taxes with a VAT, but it’s not realistic.

Likewise, I’m open to the argument that higher tariffs might be acceptable, but only if someone first shows me a practical plan to 1) shrink the federal government back down to what the Founding Fathers envisioned, and 2) get rid of the IRS and all taxes on income.

P.S. Alexander Hamilton, writing about tariffs and excises in Federalist 21, clearly appreciated the insights of the Laffer Curve: “It is a signal advantage of taxes on articles of consumption, that they contain in their own nature a security against excess. They prescribe their own limit; which cannot be exceeded without defeating the end proposed, that is, an extension of the revenue.”

P.P.S. The Cayman Islands is the closest example of a successful modern economy that finances a big chunk of government with import taxes. But that example is somewhat limited since almost all goods are imported. For such an economy, tariffs are basically the same as a sales tax. For what it’s worth, I would argue Cayman’s fiscal system has more in common with Monaco today than with the United States in the 1800s.

Read Full Post »

New IMF Study Shows U.S. Would Benefit from Lower Tax Rates and Less Government Spending

I’m not a fan of international bureaucracies, but they’re not universally bad. Yes, we almost always get a bad policy agenda from the left-leaning political appointees who run these organizations.

But it’s also true that the professional economists at these bureaucracies oftentimes produce solid reasearch. A good example is the new study of the American fiscal system by three economists at the International Monetary Fund.

They start with an observation that should be uncontroversial, but is nonetheless surprising given the tendency of the IMF’s leadership to advocate more taxes.

The consensus is that reducing distortionary taxes on labor and capital income can stimulate economic activity by encouraging an increase in labor supply and higher savings. Indeed, the empirical literature on tax multipliers is vast and points to measurable effects of reducing taxes on output and employment.

I’m delighted by these two sentences. Makes me wonder why the political types who run the IMF overlook these basic insights when they’re bullying governments into enacting higher tax rates!

But let’s set that aside and look at the specific findings in this report. Here’s what the IMF tried to calculate.

We simulate three types of tax policy changes (i) A “middle-class tax cut” which reduces the effective tax rates for households earning between 0.5 to 4 times the median income and is offset by lower government spending; (ii) A “middle-class tax cut” and an EITC expansion that is fully financed by an increase in consumption taxes; (iii) tax cut for high income groups that is also combined with an EITC expansion and financed by a higher consumption tax.

Since I’ve pointed out that not all tax cuts are created equal, I think this kind of research can be very helpful.

Here are the core findings from the IMF’s analysis.

The model generates positive effects on growth, consumption and investment that are broadly in line with the recent empirical literature on PIT multipliers. Despite the positive macro response, supply side effects are never strong enough to prevent cuts from being revenue losing (i.e., tax cuts do not “pay for themselves”). …A tax cut for the middle-class, financed from a lump-sum reduction in government spending, results in a loss of revenues of 0.8 percent of GDP but raises the steady state GDP by just under 1 percent after 5 years (i.e., a personal income tax multiplier of 1.1). …growth effects are smaller when lower personal income taxes are paid for with a VAT. …Tax cuts for higher income groups tend to have a stronger aggregate impact than tax cuts for the middle class. Indeed, in the simple case where the tax cuts are paid for by lump sum cuts in government spending, the personal income tax multiplier is around 3. … tax cuts that are incident on high income households increase income polarization.

This all makes sense. Lower tax rates are good for growth, particularly if offset by reductions in the burden of government spending.

And since lower tax rates are only self-financing in very rare circumstances, I have no problem with the conclusion about lower revenues.

Indeed, the concluding section about “income polarization” was the only part of the above excerpt that rubbed me the wrong way. And even then, I’m only irked because of the implication that lower tax rates might be a bad idea if the rich get richer faster than the poor get richer.

While I like the overall findings, I want to focus on two details from the study.

First, let’s look at the results for middle-class tax cuts. The IMF researchers looked at two versions, with one tax cut financed by lower spending and the other tax cut financed by higher consumption taxation.

As you can see from these two charts, you get more growth and higher wages when you simultaneously reduce taxes and spending.

Second, let’s look at the IMF’s comparison of middle-class tax cuts and tax cuts for high-income people. The conclusion is that you get more bang-for-the-buck when lowering tax rates at the top.

…there are larger growth effects when the tax cut is incident on the higher income groups. The reasons behind this are two-fold: First, the top quintile responds to lower taxes by saving more which, in the closed economy version of the model, leads to more capital formation and a decline in the equilibrium real interest rate. Second, those receiving a reduction in their tax rate supply more high-skilled labor which helps boost output.

By the way, I should hasten to add that this isn’t an argument against middle-class tax relief. As far as I’m concerned, all taxpayers are sending too much money to politicians.

I’m merely highlighting this analysis because some types of tax cuts have larger growth effects. For what it’s worth, I’m not even sure I agree with the IMF’s analysis of why lower tax rates on the rich produce more growth. I suspect the main reason for the stronger results is that high-income taxpayers have much greater ability to change their behavior in response to altered incentives.

In any event, here’s the IMF’s comparison of the two types of tax cuts and what happens to output, consumption, and investment.

P.S. Since we’re discussing the occasional good work of international bureaucracies, here’s my favorite World Bank study and here’s my favorite OECD study.

P.P.S. I’ve never seen any good research from the United Nations. I’m not claiming there’s never been an economically sound study from that bureaucracy. All I’m saying is that I’ve never run across an example.

P.P.P.S. I don’t know if the European Central Bank should be characterized as an international bureaucracy, but it definitely has the highest percentage of quality research (see here, here, here, here, here, and here for examples).

Read Full Post »

Fiscal Fights with Friends: Should there Be a Federal Program for Paid Parental Leave?

Back in 2015, I wrote some columns about policy differences with folks who normally would be considered allies.

• In Part I, I defended the flat tax, which had been criticized by Reihan Salam
• In Part II, I explained why I thought a comprehensive fiscal package from the American Enterprise Institute was too timid.
• In Part III, I disagreed with Jerry Taylor’s argument for a carbon tax.

Now it’s time for another friendly spat.

A handful of right-of-center groups and individuals have decided to embrace a new entitlement for paid parental leave.

Such as the Independent Women’s Forum.

…the United States is the only industrialized nation that does not mandate or subsidize at least some form of paid parental leave. …there is a way for the federal government to provide paid parental leave to every worker in the United States at no additional cost: offer new parents the opportunity to collect early Social Security benefits after the arrival of their child in exchange for their agreeing to defer the collection of their Social Security retirement benefits. …New parents deserve this choice.

Along with the American Enterprise Institute (cooperating with the left-leaning Urban Institute).

…public interest in creating a federal paid family leave policy has grown. …we came up with a compromise proposal… Its key elements are benefits available to both mothers and fathers, a wage-replacement rate of 70 percent up to a cap of $600 per week for eight weeks, and job protection for those who take leave. It would be financed in part by a payroll tax on employees and in part by savings in other parts of the budget. …we felt an obligation…this was better than doing nothing when the US is the only developed nation without a national paid leave policy.

And Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review.

The more I’ve followed the debate, the more I’ve supported the idea. …there are certain similarities between the personal-account and paid-leave ideas that ought to reduce conservative skepticism of the latter. …there’s a mental block that’s keeping the paid-leave objectors from seeing how much these debates have in common.

Kristin Shapiro of IWF and Andrew Biggs of AEI elaborated on a version of this idea in a column for the Wall Street Journal.

The U.S. is the only industrialized nation without a law guaranteeing workers paid parental leave. The idea has broad public support, but how to pay for it? One idea is to mandate that employers fund it, but economists find employers offset the cost by reducing wages for female employees. …Our proposal is simple: Offer new parents the opportunity to collect early Social Security benefits for a period—say, 12 weeks—after the arrival of their child. To offset the cost, parents would agree to delay collecting Social Security retirement benefits… We estimate that to make the Social Security program financially whole, a parent who claimed 12 weeks of benefits would need to delay claiming retirement benefits by only around six weeks. …This idea should be considered as Congress turns to entitlement reform. It’s a fiscally responsible opportunity to help parents and children.

All of this sounds nice, but there are several reasons why I’m very skeptical.

But let’s first distinguish between a very bad idea and a somewhat bad idea. The AEI-Urban scheme for a payroll-tax-funded paid leave program is the very bad idea. The United States already has a baked-in-the-cake entitlement crisis, so the last thing we need is the creation of another tax-and-transfer program.

So I’ll focus instead on the IWF-designed plan to enable parents to get payments from Social Security when they have a new child.

I have three objections.

1. From a big-picture philosophical perspective, I don’t think the federal government should have any role in family life. Child care certainly is not one of the enumerated powers in Article 1, Section 8, of the Constitution. Proponents of intervention routinely argue that the United States is the only advanced nation without such a program, but I view that as a feature, not a bug. We’re also the only advanced nation without a value-added tax. Does that mean we should join other countries and commit fiscal suicide with that onerous levy?
2. Another objection is that there is a very significant risk that a small program eventually become will become much larger. I haven’t crunched the numbers, but I assume the plan proposed by Shapiro and Biggs is neutral. In other words, the short-run spending for parental leave is offset by future reductions in retirement benefits. But once the principle is established that Uncle Sam is playing a role, what will stop future politicians from expanding the short-run goodies and eliminating the long-run savings? It’s worth remembering that the original income tax in 1913 had a top rate of 7 percent and it only applied to 1/2 of 1 percent of the population. How long did that last?
3. Finally, I still haven’t given up on the fantasy of replacing the bankrupt tax-and-transfer Social Security system with a system of personal retirement accounts. Funded systems based on real savings work very well in jurisdictions such as Australia, Chile, Switzerland, Hong Kong, and the Netherlands, but achieving this reform in the United States will be a huge challenge. And I fear that battle will become even harder if we turn Social Security into a piggy bank for other social goals. For what it’s worth, this is also why I oppose plans to integrate the payroll tax with the income tax.

Now let’s see what others have to say about a new entitlement for parental leave.

Veronique de Rugy of Mercatus explains for National Review why Ramesh’s support for a new federal entitlement is the wrong approach.

…we don’t currently have a national parental-leave entitlement. Yes, the plan he’s talking about isn’t as bad as what Hillary would propose, but it still assumes that the federal government should be playing a role in this. Let’s not pretend otherwise. It relies on the government-run Social Security system, and it increases spending for a good while. That’s regress, not progress. And we also need to be realistic. Once the door has been opened, the Left will radically expand the scheme in ways that none of us like. And, to be honest, I can already hear future conservatives demanding that the program be expanded because parents who have to retire a few months later because they use paid leaves pay “a retirement penalty” compared to non-parents. …my point of reference for judging this plan is economic freedom and smaller government involvement. If you prefer more pro-family benefits even at the risk of growing the government, then we won’t agree.

Writing for Reason, Shikha Dalmia also is a skeptic.

…this is a flawed proposal that’ll do more harm than good, including to its intended beneficiaries. …The scheme will incentivize more workers to take off and for longer periods of time. This will be especially disruptive for small businesses and start-ups that operate on a shoestring budget and can’t spread the responsibilities of the absent workers across a large workforce. They will inevitably shy away from hiring young women of childbearing age. This will diminish these women’s job options. …Furthermore, it isn’t like Social Security has a ton of spare cash lying around to dole out to people other than retirees. The program used to generate surpluses when its worker-to-retiree ratio was high. But this ratio has dropped from 42 workers to one retiree in 1945 to less than four workers per retiree now. And even though payroll taxes have gone up from 2 percent at the program’s inception to 12.6 percent now, the system is still taking in less money than it is paying out in benefits, because of all the retiring baby boomers. …It is also beyond naïve to think that once the government is allowed to dip into Social Security to pay for family leave at childbirth, it’ll simply stop there. Why shouldn’t families taking care of old and sick parents get a similar deal? Liberals are already floating proposals to use Social Security for student loan forgiveness. The possibilities are endless.

The Wall Street Journal opined against the idea last month.

…some in the ostensible party of limited government think this is the perfect time to add a new entitlement for paid family leave. …this would shift the burden of providing the benefit from the private economy to government. Academic evidence shows that family leave keeps employees in their jobs and can make them happier or more productive, which is one reason many companies pay for it. But why pay when the government offers 12 weeks? …This “crowd out” effect is a hallmark of all entitlements… Also strap yourselves in for the politics. Social Security started as a 2% payroll tax to support the elderly poor, but the tax is now 12.4% and the program is still severely under-funded.

The WSJ shares my concerns about a small program morphing into a huge entitlement.

No politician is going to deny leave to a pregnant 22-year-old merely because she hasn’t paid much into Social Security. Watch the social right demand a comparable cash benefit for stay-at-home moms, and also dads, or caring for an elderly dependent. And wait until you meet the focus group known as Congressional Democrats, who are already dismissing the proposal as unfair for forcing women to choose between children and retirement. Democrats will quickly wipe out the deferral period so everyone is entitled to leave now and get the same retirement benefits later. And once Republicans open Social Security for family leave, the door will open for other social goals. Why not college tuition? …every entitlement since Revolutionary War pensions has skied down this slope of inexorable expansion. Disability started as limited insurance but now sends checks to roughly nine million people. Medicaid was intended to cover the vulnerable and disabled but today dozens of states cover childless working-age adults above the poverty line.

If you want more information, I had two columns last year (here and here) explaining why federally mandated parental leave is a bad idea.

To put the issue in context, we should be asking whether it makes sense for the government to make employees more expensive to employers. And since this proponents will probably sell this new entitlement as being good for new mothers, it’s worth pointing out that even a columnist for the New York Times admitted that women actually get hurt by such policies.

Remember, if someone says the answer is more government, they’ve asked a very silly question.

Read Full Post »

Will Congress Reject Trump’s Job-Killing Tax Increases on Trade?

I wrote last month about the risk of Trump harming American workers, consumers, and producers by pulling the United States out of NAFTA.

That’s still a danger to the U.S. economy, but it’s been pushed to the back burner by a more immediate threat – the President’s unilateral decision to impose big tax increases on steel and aluminum imports.

American trade law (specifically the Trade Expansion Act of 1962) does give Trump the authority to impose such taxes, but it’s worth noting that Congress has the power to change the law and negate the President’s short-sighted actions.

To be sure, such a change presumably would require two-thirds support to override a Trump veto. And I have no idea how many congressional Republicans are loyal to free markets rather than Trump, and I also don’t know how many congressional Democrats would vote against Trump’s protectionism, either because they support trade or because they simply don’t like the President.

But I do know that there would be lots of support. In today’s Washington Post, Charles Koch makes a principled case for open trade and condemns the President’s protectionism.

Countries with the freest trade have tended to not only be the wealthiest but also the most tolerant. Conversely, the restriction of trade — whether through tariffs, quotas or other means — has hurt the economy and pitted people against each other. Tariffs increase prices, limit choices, reduce competition and inhibit innovation. Equally troubling, research shows that they fail to increase the number of jobs overall. …History is filled with examples of administrations that have implemented trade restrictions with devastating results. At the dawn of the Great Depression, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act raised U.S. tariffs on more than 20,000 imported goods, which accelerated our decline instead of correcting it. More recently, President George W. Bush’s 30 percent steel tariff led to increased consumer costs and higher unemployment. And President Barack Obama’s 2009 decision to raise tariffs on Chinese tires ultimately burdened consumers with $1.1 billion in higher prices. The cost per job saved was nearly $1 million , not considering all the lost jobs that went unmeasured.

And he specifically condemns the new trade taxes Trump has imposed.

The administration’s recent decision to impose major steel and aluminum tariffs — on top of higher tariffs on washing machines and solar panels — will have the same harmful effect. …those who can least afford it will be harmed the most. Having just helped consumers keep more of their money by passing tax reform, it makes little sense to take it away via higher costs.

Mr. Koch also observed that we’ve become richer during a period when trade taxes fell.

It is no coincidence that our quality of life has improved over the years as the average U.S. tariff on imported goods has fallen — from nearly 20 percent in 1932 to less than 4 percent in 2016.

This is an under-appreciated point. I’ve argued – and shared evidence – that trade liberalization played a key role in offsetting the damage of higher fiscal burdens in the post-WWII era. Yet Trump wants to reverse some or all of this progress.

The Wall Street Journal also opined on this issue.

President Trump could reduce the benefits of his tax cuts and regulatory rollback with protectionism. This risk became more serious after the Commerce Department…recommended broad restrictions on aluminum and steel imports that would punish American businesses and consumers. …the wide-ranging economic damage from restricting imports would overwhelm the narrow benefits to U.S. steel and aluminum makers.

The protectionists try to justify tariffs on the basis of national defense, but this is a silly argument since we’re not relying on potential enemies.

Canada accounts for 43% of aluminum imports—more than twice as much as China and Russia combined. Steel imports are also diversified with Canada (17%), South Korea (12%) and Mexico (9%) accounting for three of the top four foreign sources. China accounts for about 2% of steel and 10% of aluminum imports.

The WSJ then lists some of the harmful effects of trade taxes.

About 16 times more workers are employed today in U.S. steel-consuming industries than the 140,000 American steelworkers. Economists Joseph Francois and Laura Baughman found that more U.S. workers lost jobs (200,000) due to George W. Bush’s 2002 steel tariffs than were employed by the entire steel industry (187,500) at the time. …Raising the cost of steel and aluminum inputs would impel many manufacturers to move production abroad to stay competitive globally. Does Mr. Trump want more cars made in Mexico? …Oh, and don’t forget that other countries could retaliate with trade barriers that hurt American exporters. …Why would Mr. Trump undercut his achievements with trade barriers that harm American workers and consumers?

Irwin Stelzer, writing for the Weekly Standard, also is quite critical.

…the president doesn’t like trade deficits—job killers as he sees it—and so he has put tariffs on washing machines and solar panels and now is deciding what costs and restrictions to place on imports of steel and aluminium. …Never mind that such measures will raise the costs of steel and aluminum-using industries such as autos, making them less competitive with imports that can keep their costs down by buying cheaper, un-tariffed metals. One economic study after George W. Bush imposed tariffs on steel in 2002 concluded that job losses in steel-consuming industries exceeded the number that would have been lost had the entire American steel industry gone out of business. …if that causes job losses scattered among a lot of other industries and states, then so be it. Trump figures that those voters won’t make the connection between the job losses and the steel tariffs.

Last but not least, Tom Mullen eviscerates protectionism in a piece for CapX.

When Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, it…was to refute the kinds of protectionist ideas championed by conservatives like Edmund Burke and Alexander Hamilton in Smith’s day, Abraham Lincoln eighty years later, and Trump today. Bastiat remade Smith’s case in 1848. Henry Hazlitt did so again in 1946. …What is unseen is the money American consumers no longer have when the tariffs are put in place. For example, the tariff may result in them paying $200 for the same pair of sneakers they previously paid $100 for. That means they no longer have $100 they previously had after buying the sneakers, which they could spend on other products. Whatever jobs they were supporting with that $100 are now lost. …When the ledger is balanced, Americans, in general, are far better off without the tariff.

Here’s more on the economic poison of protectionism.

The lower prices Americans pay for automobiles, clothing, Apple iPhones, and Bobcats allow them to patronise those American industries which operate more efficiently than their overseas competitors. That’s called “comparative advantage,” something else free market advocates since Adam Smith have been educating people about. …No matter what spurious arguments special interests make in favour of tariffs, they are, at the end of the day, just another tax. …And don’t forget, all the unseen, negative consequences of tariffs apply equally to foreigners. If they are taxing imports on automobiles, their citizens have less money to spend on other products. Their businesses that use imported materials must raise their prices and become less competitive. Any advantage they appear to gain in one sector, they lose in another, with the same overall net loss as we experience.

Amen.

Protectionism is a no-win game. Politicians in Country A take aim at businesses in Country B, but the main casualties are inside their own borders. Consumers lose, taxpayers lose, and all the upstream and downstream businesses in the supply chain lose.

Which is why researchers inevitably find that trade barriers are associated with net job losses. In other words, the “unseen” losses are far larger than the “seen” gains.

Which is exactly what Bastiat warned about more than 150 years ago.

P.S. Shifting gears, I’ve periodically complained about the immoral and amoral actions of large corporations. Simply stated, big businesses oftentimes are perfectly happy to use the coercive power of government to grab unearned wealth.

Koch Industries is a noble exception. Here’s another excerpt from Charles Koch’s Washington Post column.

One might assume that, as the head of Koch Industries — a large company involved in many industries, including steel — I would applaud such import tariffs because they would be to our immediate and financial benefit. But corporate leaders must reject this type of short-term thinking, and we have. …We only support policies that are based on equality under the law and that help people improve their lives. This is why we successfully lobbied to end direct ethanol subsidies, despite being one of the largest ethanol producers in the United States. It is why we fought against the inclusion of a border adjustment tax in the tax-reform package, even though it would have greatly increased our profits by increasing costs to consumers.

I’m obviously pleased that the folks at Koch are on the right side of the ethanol and BAT issues, but that’s a secondary matter. What’s praiseworthy is that the company rejects all cronyism. Even when it would benefit.

If more businesses acted that way, there would be a lot more support for free enterprise.

Read Full Post »

Switzerland: Home to Practical Libertarians rather than Ideological Libertarians

The Swiss people are normally very sensible when asked to vote in national referendums. Here are some recent results.

• In 2010, nearly 60 percent of the electorate rejected a class-warfare income tax proposal.
• In 2014, Swiss voters overwhelmingly killed a minimum-wage mandate.
• Also in 2014, the voters of Switzerland rejected single-payer healthcare by a landslide margin.
• And in 2015, more than 70 percent of voters rejected a federal death tax.
• In 2016, there was a landslide vote against a scheme to provide universal basic income.

Though my favorite referendum result occurred several years before I started writing on this site.

• In 2001, the people of Switzerland voted by a 5-1 margin in favor of a spending cap.

Given all these results, you won’t be surprised to learn that Switzerland is near the top in rankings of economic freedom, trailing only Hong Kong, Singapore, and New Zealand.

But this does not mean that Switzerland is a libertarian nation. At least not in an ideological sense. And we have two new referendum results that underscore this point.

This past weekend, Swiss voters had an opportunity to get rid of the central government’s value-added tax, personal income tax, and corporate income tax.

Ending those taxes would be a libertarian fantasy, but the initiative to extend the levies was easily approved.

More than 84% of voters have renewed the government’s right to tax its citizens and companies for another 15 years. This is a unique feature of Switzerland’s political system of direct democracy and federalism.  …rejection would have been a nightmare for the government. …said Finance Minister Ueli Maurer in January. “If voters were to say no, the Swiss government wouldn’t have enough funds and there’s no way we could find another source of revenue or introduce spending cuts of the same order.”

Voters were swayed by arguments that a no vote would cause too much fiscal disruption. Slashing the central government’s budget by 60 percent might appeal to ideological libertarians, but it didn’t fly with don’t-rock-the-boat Swiss voters.

The direct federal tax and the sales tax together contributed about two-thirds of the Swiss central government’s budget, bringing in around 43.5 billion Swiss francs ($44.25 billion) in 2016. …Should voters reject the measure, the government would have to slash spending by more than 60 percent practically overnight or find new sources of revenue, Maurer told reporters.

Here’s a pie chart showing the revenue sources for the central government.

I would have voted no, of course, and I wish more Swiss voters had lined up against the initiative.

Not because I would have thought that an immediate 60-percent reduction in the size of the central government was feasible. But a larger share of no votes at least would have sent a signal to politicians in Bern that frugality is a good idea.

There was another referendum over the weekend that also produced an unfortunate result. Swiss voters approved continuing subsidies for state-run media.

The Swiss Broadcasting Corporation, Switzerland’s public broadcaster is largely funded by a broadcasting fee. This fee, known colloquially as Billag, the name of the agency that collects it, is paid by most companies and essentially every household. The No Billag initiative, is a bid to do away with fee. …the No Billag vote was rejected by 71.6% of voters.

The margin of defeat is especially disappointing since libertarians actively campaigned for this initiative.

Switzerland, like many European nations, has certain television and radio channels that are run by the government. …Together with other classical liberals in Switzerland, Frédéric Jollien is fighting against the royalties imposed by the government for media consumption. 450 Swiss Francs, the equivalent of €382 or $456, is the annual fee that consumers are required to pay, regardless if they want state-run TV and radio channels or not. …Journalists (who, by the way, are exempt from paying this fee) are releasing heavy verbal fire on the campaigners. They claim it would cause massive unemployment in the media sector, that it is anti-democratic, and that it would enable big foreign companies to take over the Swiss market.

Alas, the fear campaign succeeded.

But I hasten to add that this doesn’t mean Switzerland is turning towards statism. I suspect the real story is that the Swiss are content with the status quo.

And the status quo (especially by European standards) is a practical form of libertarianism.

Here’s some of what Dan Hannan wrote last year.

I have always loved Switzerland…its devolved decision-making, its entrenched Euroskepticism. …I am a Helvetophile for many of the same reasons as America’s Founders. James Madison was fascinated by the way Switzerland had “no concentered authority, the Diets being only a Congress of Delegates from some or all of the Cantons.” …George Mason was entranced by the militia system: “Every Husbandman will be quickly converted into a Soldier, when he knows & feels that he is to fight for his own. It is this which preserves the Freedom and Independence of the Swiss Cantons, in the midst of the most powerful Nations.” …Switzerland has stubbornly retained its sovereignty, despite being surrounded by the EU. …Swiss democracy is direct, decentralized and devolved. Most fiscal decisions are taken locally. Result? Swiss voters are the happiest in Europe, their economy is the freest, and their state budget the smallest.

And let’s not forget that Switzerland is still a bright spot on gun rights.

In February 2011, Swiss citizens voted in a referendum that called for a national gun registry and for firearms owned by members of the military to be stored in public arsenals. …Hermann Suter, who at the time was vice president of the Swiss gun-rights group Pro Tell, told the BBC then. “The gun at home is the best way to avoid dictatorships—only dictators take arms away from the citizens.” Apparently many of his fellow Swiss agreed. The referendum was easily defeated. Gun ownership in the country has deep historic roots… guns are popular… Children as young as 12 are taught how to shoot…and are encouraged to participate in highly popular target-shooting competitions. The country’s cultural attachment to firearms resembles America’s in some ways…it has the third-highest rate of private gun ownership in the world… The Swiss Defense Ministry estimates that there are 2 million privately owned weapons in the country of 8.3 million people.

Yet there’s almost no gun-related crime.

Switzerland has a low rate of gun crime, and hasn’t seen a mass shooting since 2001.

And let’s not forget that the fiscal burden of government in Switzerland is comparatively modest.

Not by libertarian standards. Not by historical standards.

But compared to other European nations, Switzerland is a fiscal Shangi-La. The tax burden is lower, and spending consumes a smaller share of economic output.

And this translates into lower levels of red ink.

P.S. I find Switzerland to be a very interesting case study, for reasons noted above and also on issues such as decentralization, privacy rights, gun rights, and private retirement savings. But I’m a policy wonk, so I’m drawn to unusual examples. What does surprise me is that other people must be interested in the country as well. My 2011 column comparing Switzerland and the United States is the 7th-most-viewed piece in the history of this site.

Read Full Post »

Entitlements: The “Most Predictable Economic Crisis in History”

Writing about federal spending last week, I shared five charts illustrating how the process works and what’s causing America’s fiscal problems.

Most important, I showed that the ever-increasing burden of federal spending is almost entirely the result of domestic spending increasing much faster than what would be needed to keep pace with inflation.

And when I further sliced and diced the numbers, I showed that outlays for entitlements (programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare) were the real problem.

Let’s elaborate.

John Cogan, writing for the Wall Street Journal, summarizes our current predicament.

Since the end of World War II, federal tax revenue has grown 15% faster than national income—while federal spending has grown 50% faster. …all—yes, all—of the increase in federal spending relative to GDP over the past seven decades is attributable to entitlement spending. Since the late 1940s, entitlement claims on the nation’s output of goods and services have risen from less than 4% to 14%. …If you’re seeking the reason for the federal government’s chronic budget deficits and crushing national debt, look no further than entitlement programs. …entitlement spending accounts for nearly two-thirds of federal spending. …What about the future? Social Security and Medicare expenditures are accelerating now that baby boomers have begun to collect their government-financed retirement and health-care benefits. If left unchecked, these programs will push government spending to levels never seen during peacetime. Financing this spending will require either record levels of taxation or debt.

Here’s a chart from his column. Only instead of looking at inflation-adjusted growth of past spending, he looks at what will happen to future entitlement spending, measured as a share of economic output.

And he concludes with a very dismal point.

…restraint is not possible without presidential leadership. Unfortunately, President Trump has failed to step up.

I largely agree. Trump has nominally endorsed some reforms, but the White House hasn’t expended the slightest bit of effort to fix any of the entitlement programs.

Now let’s see what another expert has to say on the topic. Brian Riedl of the Manhattan Institute paints a rather gloomy picture in an article for National Review.

…the $82 trillion avalanche of Social Security and Medicare deficits that will come over the next three decades elicits a collective shrug. Future historians — and taxpayers — are unlikely to forgive our casual indifference to what has been called “the most predictable economic crisis in history.” …Between 2008 and 2030, 74 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964 — or 10,000 per day — will retire into Social Security and Medicare. And despite trust-fund accounting games, all spending will be financed by current taxpayers. That was all right in 1960, when five workers supported each retiree. The ratio has since fallen below three-to-one today, on its way to two-to-one by the 2030s. …These demographic challenges are worsened by rising health-care costs and repeated benefit expansions from Congress. Today’s typical retiring couple has paid $140,000 into Medicare and will receive $420,000 in benefits (in net present value)… Most Social Security recipients also come out ahead. In other words, seniors are not merely getting back what they paid in. …the spending avalanche has already begun. Since 2008 — when the first Baby Boomers qualified for early retirement — Social Security and Medicare have accounted for 72 percent of all inflation-adjusted federal-spending growth (with other health entitlements responsible for the rest). …

Brian speculates on what will happen if politicians kick the can down the road.

…something has to give. Will it be responsible policy changes now, or a Greek-style crisis of debt and taxes later? …Restructuring cannot wait. Every year of delay sees 4 million more Baby Boomers retire and get locked into benefits that will be difficult to alter… Unless Washington reins in Social Security and Medicare, no tax cuts can be sustained over the long run. Ultimately, the math always wins. …Frédéric Bastiat long ago observed that “government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.” Reality will soon fall like an anvil on Generation X and Millennials, as they find themselves on the wrong side of the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in world history.

Not exactly a cause for optimism!

Last but not least, Charles Hughes writes on the looming entitlement crisis for E21.

Medicare and Social Security already account for roughly two-fifths of all federal outlays, and they will account for a growing share of the federal budget over the coming decade. …Entitlement spending growth is a major reason that budget deficits are projected to surge over the next decade. …The unsustainable nature of these programs face mean that some reforms will have to be implemented: the only questions are when and what kind of changes will be made. The longer these reforms are put off, the inevitable changes will by necessity be larger and more abrupt. …Without real reform, the important task of placing entitlement programs back on a sustainable trajectory will be left for later generations—at which point the country will be farther down this unsustainable path.

By the way, it’s not just libertarians and conservatives who recognize there is a problem.

There have been several proposals from centrists and bipartisan groups to address the problem, such as the Simpson-Bowles plan, the Debt Reduction Task Force, and Obama’s Fiscal Commission.

For what it’s worth, I’m not a big fan of these initiatives since they include big tax increases. And oftentimes, they even propose the wrong kind of entitlement reform.

Heck, even folks on the left recognize there’s a problem. Paul Krugman correctly notes that America is facing a massive demographic shift that will lead to much higher levels of spending. And he admits that entitlement spending is driving the budget further into the red. That’s a welcome acknowledgement of reality.

A note on the folly of tax cuts. The US govt is an insurance company with an army; its expenses dominated by the elderly — and the ratio of >65 to working-age is rising sharply 1/ pic.twitter.com/AZA8ue0kBQ

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) February 28, 2018

Sadly, he concludes that we should somehow fix this spending problem with tax hikes.

That hasn’t worked for Europe, though, so it’s silly to think that same tax-and-spend approach will work for the United States.

I’ll close by also offering some friendly criticism of conservatives and libertarians. If you read what Cogan, Riedl, and Hughes wrote, they all stated that entitlement programs were a problem in part because they would produce rising levels of red ink.

It’s certainly true that deficits and debt will increase in the absence of genuine entitlement reform, but what irks me about this rhetoric is that a focus on red ink might lead some people to conclude that rising levels of entitlements somehow wouldn’t be a problem if matched by big tax hikes.

Wrong. Tax-financed spending diverts resources from the private economy, just as debt-financed spending diverts resources from the private economy.

In other words, the real problem is spending, not how it’s financed.

I’m almost tempted to give all of them the Bob Dole Award.

P.S. For more on America’s built-in entitlement crisis, click here, here, here, and here.

Read Full Post »

Markets, Choice, and the Economic Illiteracy of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn

Not all leftists are alike.

I speculated a couple of years ago that there were four types of statists and put them on a spectrum. I put “rational leftists” at one end. If you wanted to pick a nation that represents this mindset, think Sweden. Nice, civilized, market-oriented, but plenty of redistribution.

On the other end of the spectrum were three less-palatable types.

1. The “totalitarians,” which means a dictatorial state-run economy, as represented by the Soviet Union and China.
2. The “socialists,” a democratically elected form of a state-run economy, as represented by post-WWII United Kingdom.
3. The “crazies,” which I confess is a catch-all category to capture visceral, unthinking, and punitive intervention.

And for that final category, I listed Bernie Sanders and Greece as representatives.

And if you want to know why I listed Sanders, here’s some of Jeffrey Tucker’s FEE column from 2015.

Bernie Sanders, that sweet old socialist who we would have to invent if he didn’t exist in real life, elicited guffaws all over the Internet with his now famous comment about deodorant choice. “You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers,” he said, “when children are hungry in this country.” …The underlying theory here is that the proliferation of deodorant and tennis shoes come at the expense of food for the poor. There is only a certain amount of wealth in the world, this thinking goes.

In practical terms, Sanders must think the world is zero-sum. I can’t be rich unless you are poor, and vice-versa.

Tucker explains that this isn’t true. Or, to be more accurate, it’s not true when markets are allowed to function.

That’s what was so captivating about the Industrial Revolution. All kinds of people were suddenly getting richer, and not by grabbing other people’s stuff. Wealth seemed to be actually expanding. ..Adam Smith…patiently observed how expansion of the division of labor, innovation, and trade — all based on secure ownership titles and free association — were working together to make everyone better off. This was not a zero-sum world. We escaped that fate long ago. …This was the single most marvelous discovery that economics made.

But because of his visceral disdain for markets, Sanders doesn’t trust free people to make decisions.

People who talk like Sanders imagine themselves in the position of dictators, deciding what social priorities ought to be. …What if they got their way? They would have to override billions of decentralized decisions. They would have to reject the judgements of millions of balance sheets. They would have to use massive force to prevent people from inventing, making bargains, striking deals, and buying and selling. It really does mean the end of freedom… It is for this reason that socialist central planning has brought reduced standards of living, poverty, and economic stagnation and chaos everywhere it has been tried.

And Sanders isn’t the only crazy.

Jeremy Corbyn’s economic views are also astoundingly bad, as explained by Andrew McKie for CapX.

…no matter how clueless and unrealistic the Labour leader is when it comes to Europe, that’s nothing compared with his failure to come to grips with the real world. Corbyn said: “I do not agree with or accept the idea there has to be competition in mail delivery. After all, we all have one letterbox, and it is much more efficient to have one postal delivery person coming down the street rather than three or four from different or competing companies.” …Corbyn isn’t just saying that Labour plans to renationalise the Royal Mail. …wave goodbye to Amazon Prime and next-day delivery from Asos, and say so long to FedEx, DHL or UPS and their guarantees. As for innovations that have just arrived or are in the works, such as universal same-day delivery and the use of drones, forget it.

McKie delves into the many reasons why Corbyn is so misguided.

The extraordinary point is that Corbyn really seems to think that, if there’s one of something, it’s neither realistic nor desirable that there should be any alternative on offer. Heaven forbid that you might think that you could make a choice, or that anyone else might provide a better, a cheaper or – in any way at all – a different service. …Corbyn’s “one-size fits all” approach ought to seem ridiculous, even if no one would laugh if they had to live in a country that operated that way. But he’s not joking; he really seems to think that all the reforms, the improvements in living standards, the economic growth and consumer choice of the last 40 years were a mistake, and that the state-run companies of Britain (then known as ‘the sick man of Europe”) were better. He doesn’t seem to realise that it is exactly the market – the existence of choice and competition – which led to those improvements, which drove innovation, drove up living standards, and drove down prices.

Everything Tucker and McKie says is spot on.

My two cents on this issue is that Sanders and Corbyn are guilty of two huge mistakes.

• First, they think the economy is a fixed pie, which is laughably false. Just watch these videos by Don Boudreaux and Deirdre McCloskey. The simple lesson is that everyone can become richer at the same time. At least if they have decent policy.
• Second, they have no idea of the valuable role of “creative destruction” in encouraging ever-more efficient and less costly ways of generating ever-more valuable goods and services. Watch this video and this video for more details.

You don’t need to be an economist to understand why Sanders and Corbyn are wrong. Normal people can look at how fast various nations grow (or don’t grow) and draw the appropriate conclusions.

Read Full Post »

What’s the Best Way to Reduce School Shootings, Armed Teachers or Gun Control?

It’s been several weeks since the awful tragedy in Parkland, FL, where 17 students were killed by an evil loser. Since I written several times about the utter impracticality of gun control, and since a growing number of honest liberals (see here, here, here, and here) also acknowledge that such laws are ill-advised, I didn’t think another column would be necessary.

However, the controversy isn’t going away. Left-wing groups are using some of the students as props in a campaign to push restrictions on private gun ownership.

So I decided to take part in a four-person debate on the issue for France 24. Needless to say, I was the only pro-Second Amendment person on the show (it was 4-1 against me if you include the moderator). You can watch the entire 45 minutes by clicking here, but you can get a good idea of the one-sided nature by simply watching this excerpt from the introduction.

Here’s the first question I fielded, which gave me a chance to knock our unprincipled President.

But more importantly, I noted that gun control doesn’t succeed because ordinary Americans are very diligent about protecting their constitutional rights.

This next segment gave me an opportunity to make several points.

• The silliness of banning “scary looking” rifles when there are hundreds of millions of other weapons that work the same way.
• Democrats have rallied behind truly radical legislation targeting all semi-automatic weapons (knowing that non-gun people don’t know what that term means, I used “non-revolver” as a synonym, but I admit that probably isn’t any better).
• Gun bans are especially absurd in a world with 3D printers.
• Censorship would probably be effective in reducing mass shooters, but I don’t want to repeal the First Amendment.
• Rising levels of gun ownership are correlated with lower levels of crime.

By the way, none of the other guests ever tried to refute any of my points. Check the full video if you doubt me.

I also was asked about private companies restricting gun sales.

And since I believe in freedom of association, I said that was their right, even if such steps are both futile and bad for business.

In my final segment, I noted the good news that states are liberalizing gun laws, while also pointing out that global evidence also shows why gun control is a bad idea.

And you’ll notice I took another shot at our unprincipled president. Our Constitution is not a pick-and-choose document.

So what’s the practical impact of all this?

Gun-control proposals generally fall into two categories. Some politicians go after the “military-style” weapons, which is empty posturing that will no (positive) impact on crime. I wrote about this issue in the past, and you can click here and here for added info on the failed 1994 ban.

Or they go for sweeping gun bans and confiscation. Which, if ever enacted, would lead to widespread civil disobedience.

So we know that’s not the answer.

But what is the right approach? As I noted in the interview, there probably is no complete solution.

That being said, let’s dig into the issue of whether teachers and other school personnel should be allowed to carry concealed weapons are a last line of defense of nutjobs.

Here’s  story on the issue from Kentucky.

Teachers could soon be carrying concealed guns inside schools in Pike County under a proposal that was preliminarily approved Monday evening by the Pike County School Board. The unanimous decision…was prompted by multiple school shootings in recent weeks… Schools Superintendent Reed Adkins said he hopes the board will give final approval within two to three weeks, and to have armed staff in schools by fall, if not sooner. …State Sen. John Schickel, R- Union, has introduced Senate Resolution 172 that would urge boards of education to allow teachers and other school personnel to carry firearms for their own protection. …Multiple mothers of Pike County students urged quick action Monday to provide schools with some type of security, saying their children have been scared to attend school.

And we also have a news report from Colorado.

One of the first school districts in the state of Colorado to implement such a policy was in eastern El Paso County… A decision made in hopes of preventing another school shooting here at home and more than a year later, most people are grateful this was put into place. “Our school’s pretty much a model for school safety,” Terry Siewiyumptewa, a parent said. …”Our staff members, it could be 100 percent, are armed and are here to protect and keep our students safe,” Dr. Grant Schmidt, Superintendent for Hanover School District 28 said. Now, teachers, administrators, custodians and even bus drivers can all volunteer to conceal carry in school… “We need safe schools and our school is providing us what we’ve asked for,” Siewiyumptewa said. …”The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun,” she said. …Students we spoke with say it has added an extra level of comfort. …Dr. Schmidt says he’s been getting calls from other school districts across the country all year, wanting to know how they put this into place, asking for guidance, research and other documents to use as a model.

Unsurprisingly, Texas is another example.

…at Argyle High School, the..teachers are packing handguns. A sign outside campus warns: “Please be aware that the staff at Argyle [Independent School District] are armed and may use whatever force is necessary to protect our students.” …In about two dozen states, including California, schools can allow staff to carry guns on campus, although some require concealed-carry licenses, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. …Officials at Argyle and other districts say the policies deter shooters and provide peace of mind, and that other schools should follow their lead. Scores of Texas school districts allow teachers to carry arms. …”It’s essential to keep us safe,” said Lizzie Dagg, 18, Argyle senior class president, who spent part of lunch Thursday signing a banner expressing sympathy to Parkland students. …history teacher Sharon Romero…said. “I feel safer coming to work than a lot of other teachers in this country do.” …Argyle High Principal James Hill, who has three children in the school system, was skeptical about the policy when he was hired in 2015, but said, “Now I’m a believer.” …he said of school shootings. “… I want to give our kids a fighting chance.”

Here are two maps from the article, showing who is allowed to have guns in a school. Here’s the map for the general public.

And here’s the map for government employees.

Amazingly, there is an outpost of common sense in California.

One California school district has voted to allow staff members to carry guns on campus. The district says the policy was put in place to ensure the safety of students in case there is an active shooter situation. …Kingsburg High School District, near Fresno, is just the second district in the state to allow concealed weapons at school buildings.

Even the New York Times has noticed this growing trend.

For all the outcry, though, hundreds of school districts across the country, most of them small and rural, already have. Officials…do not see the weaponry scattered through their schools as a political statement, but as a practical response to a potent threat. …At least 10 states allow staff members to possess or have access to a firearm on school grounds, according to an analysis by the Education Commission of the States. And local districts have varied their approach to arming educators — in Ohio, guns are kept in safes; in Texas, they can be worn in holsters or kept in safes within immediate reach. …In Texas, some public school systems have been quietly arming teachers and administrators for more than a decade.

This part of the story is very powerful.

Sidney City Schools was shaken by the slaughter of 20 first graders and six staff members at Sandy Hook in 2012. In the following days, Sheriff Lenhart presented Mr. Scheu with an equation: Every 17 seconds after the first shots are fired and the first 911 call is made, somebody gets hurt or dies. “Even in the best-case scenario, we could get here in four to five minutes,” Sheriff Lenhart said. “You do the math.” …Sheriff Lenhart…led what he calls a “layered” approach to school security and a “conservative” approach to arming teachers in the 3,400-student school district. The district spent about $70,000 on safes, bulletproof vests, cameras, guns, radios and ammunition…negligible costs for a school district with a $36 million budget… there’s a secret group of 40 educators — teachers, principals, custodians, secretaries — called a “first responder team” that can retrieve firearms in under a minute.

Bureaucrats weren’t happy about this development, but guess who is pleased?

The measures here met some opposition at first, from the town’s teachers union and police chief, who were concerned about gun safety. …Nicki New, the parent of three students in Sidney City Schools, said she felt safer dropping off her children knowing there were staff members equipped to respond to a parent’s worst nightmare.

Does that guarantee safety? Nope. Is it possible a teacher might shoot an innocent person in the stress and chaos of an active-shooter situation? Yup. There are no sure-fire, cost-free solutions to this horrible problem. It’s all about the policies that will improve the odds of good outcomes and reduce the likelihood of bad outcomes.

But here’s my bottom line. If my kids were still young and some miserable excuse for a human being came into one of their schools and started shooting, there’s no question that I would want some of the teachers to be armed.

Moreover, ask yourself whether a nutjob shooter is more likely or less likely to target a school with armed teachers. Like other mass shooters, they almost universally wreak their havoc in so-called gun-free zones.

Why? Because they know that simply means there are no good people with guns who can fight back.

I’ll close with one final observation. Teacher unions are controlled by leftist ideologues and claim that it’s a bad idea to allow armed teachers. They’re wrong, but the really preposterous part of their argument is that teachers shouldn’t be forced to carry guns.

But nobody is suggesting that. Instead, it’s an option for teachers who are prefer fighting to cowering in a corner waiting to be shot.

And lots of teachers don’t like the latter option, as indicated by this story in the Washington Examiner.

A sheriff in Ohio has already started the process of training school personnel on how to carry a concealed weapon, and predicted on Friday that hundreds would soon be trained and ready. …”While our gov still debates what 2 do we will have trained over 100 school personnel by Saturday,” he added. …Sheriff Jones said his offer to train teachers has been met with an overwhelming response. On Tuesday, he said he cut off requests at 300.

Makes me proud of America’s teachers. Their union stinks, but three cheers for the rank and file.

P.S. Since I’m a fiscal wonk, I rarely get to publicly pontificate on gun rights. Here’s my only other interview on the topic.

Read Full Post »

Three More Reasons to Laugh at Communism

I sometimes feel guilty when I mock communism. Should I really be joking about an ideology that directly or indirectly caused 100 million deaths? Are laughs appropriate when there is ongoing torture, abuse, and starvation in communist hellholes such as North Korea and Cuba?

Seems on the same level as cracking jokes about the holocaust.

But I think there’s a difference. Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Workers Party is gone and every single educated and civilized person agrees we never want something similar to reemerge.

By contrast, there are still modern-day Marxists. They’re in the Antifa movement. There are Marxist professors with tenure on college campuses. I certainly don’t think it’s a dominant ideology on the left, but there are far too many Marxists and Marxist apologists.

Indeed, this is why I think there’s a big difference between liberal socialism and Marxist socialism.

Anyhow, I’ll continue to share anti-communism humor for the simple reason that we still need to discourage this evil ideology from gaining more adherents. And since people don’t like to be mocked and ridiculed, it’s good to use humor to make Marxism toxic.

We have three items today, starting with some very clever Twitter satire.

The millions of people who starved to death under Mao’s reign in China and during the oppression of the Ukraine certainly wouldn’t laugh at this joke, but I found it amusing.

Next, we have one of Fidel’s chief butchers. Vapid college kids may put Che Guevara on a t-shirt, but the rest of us should put his image in urinals.

Anti-Hero from Libertarian

I’ve saved the best for the last.

Here’s the communist version of monopoly, featuring many chances to go the gulag. But if you’re lucky, you get food rations!

My only quibble is that “pay luxury tax” is a real thing in the real Monopoly. Certainly seem that it also belongs in the commie version.

P.S. Previous collections of ant-communism mockery can be found here, here, and here.

Read Full Post »

The Importance of Property Rights – with South Africa as a Sad Example of What Not to Do

There’s an easy way to judge whether countries have good economic policy or bad economic policy. Simply look at the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World and check out a nation’s absolute score as well as how it ranks relative to other nations.

The EFW report even allows readers to see how nations score in the five major policy areas the are used to produce the overall grade. These categories are:

• Size of Government – A measure of the burden of taxes and spending.
• Regulation – A measure of intervention and red tape.
• Sound Money – A measure of monetary stability and financial freedom.
• Freedom to Trade Internationally – A measure of liberty to engage in cross-border commerce.
• Legal System and Property Rights – A measure of the quality of governance.

This last category sometimes doesn’t get enough attention. I sometimes refer to it as the rule-of-law measure. It’s basically a way of trying to estimate whether government is doing a good job with institutional public goods. The variables used include 1) Judicial independence, 2) Impartial courts, 3) Protection of property rights, 4) Military interference in rule of law and politics, 5) Integrity of the legal system, 6) Legal enforcement of contracts, 7) Regulatory costs of the sale of real property 8) Reliability of police, and 9) Business costs of crime.

Let’s look today at property rights. And I’m motivated to address this issue because of some horrifying news from South Africa. The Wall Street Journal opined on the issue this morning.

No country ever became rich through its government’s seizure of private property (exhibit A: the Soviet Union), but politicians in South Africa want to give it another go. That’s the disheartening news from Cape Town this week, where the National Assembly voted 241-83 on Tuesday to start a process to amend the constitution and allow land expropriation without compensation.

When I saw the headline and read the opening paragraph, my initial instinct was “so what?” After all, the whites probably stole the land from the blacks in the first place.

But then I found out that issue already has been handled.

Post-apartheid, the government bought land and offered compensation to South Africans whose property had been forcibly seized after 1913. Many of those claims are now settled… According to a 2016 Institute of Race Relations survey, less than 1% of South Africans think land is one of the country’s “serious unresolved problems.” Unemployment, public services, housing and crime rank far higher.

What’s actually happening is hard-core leftist populism. And it may turn South Africa into another Zimbabwe.

Julius Malema of the far-left Economic Freedom Fighters party…believes the state should be the “custodian” of the nation’s property… His party says the expropriation “should apply to all South Africans, black and white.”

Huh? Stealing property from everybody, regardless of race, while calling your party Economic Freedom Fighters?!?

I guess their idea of freedom means freedom to loot, which is sometimes called – rather perversely – positive liberty. But I shouldn’t laugh too hard because the United States actually had a president with the same twisted mindset.

In any event, the WSJ reminds us that this won’t produce good results.

The idea is likely to duplicate the awful experience of Zimbabwe during the Robert Mugabe era, a case study in the reality that bureaucrats can’t distribute resources more efficiently or productively than private markets. Mugabe’s confiscations spooked investors, the agricultural industry collapsed, and a once prosperous country became known for hyperinflation and poverty. …the ruling African National Congress is supporting the measure to distract attention from its own failed statist economic policies, which have produced subpar growth and denied opportunity to poor South Africans. …South Africa needs more capital, more investment and a favorable business environment. Seizing private property has produced misery everywhere it has been tried.

This is very troubling, especially since South Africa, compared to other nations on the continent, maintained semi-decent policies after dismantling the racist apartheid regime.

I wrote back in 2014 about South African economic policy and shared data about the nation’s EFW score. I was worried about the trend, and I’m now even more pessimistic.

Since today’s topic is property rights, let’s look at the global scores from the International Property Rights Index, which is published each year by the Property Rights Alliance.

As you can see, South Africa currently is in the second quintile. Best score of any African country, and above some European nations as well.

But if the South African constitution is changed and land expropriation is allowed, it’s a foregone conclusion that the country will suffer a precipitous fall in the rankings.

And here’s the map accompanying the study. The bottom line is that blue is good and purple/maroon (or whatever that color is…mauve?) is bad.

Switching to other nations, notice that all the Nordic nations are highly ranked. Indeed, they hold three of the top five slots. No wonder they score highly in that part of Economic Freedom of the World. Moreover, they also get very good scores for monetary policy, regulatory policy, and trade policy. Which explains why their economies get decent performance notwithstanding very bad fiscal policy.

And I’m certainly not surprised that New Zealand has the top spot.

The United States also does reasonably well. Not in the top 10, but at least in the top quintile.

P.S. In addition to moving in the wrong direction on property rights, South African politicians are making the tax code more destructive.

P.P.S. There is a country in sub-Saharan Africa to emulate.

Read Full Post »