Is Alexander Hamilton the Real Libertarian Hero, not Thomas Jefferson?

Like many libertarians, I’ve always assumed that Thomas Jefferson was one of the best Founding Fathers.

He certainly was an advocate of liberty and I’ve cited him several times (see here, here, here, here, here, and here) over the years.

But maybe being quotable is not enough.

There’s a fascinating article in the latest issue of Cayman Financial Review that looks at the emergence of economic liberty in the Anglo-Saxon world and it makes a persuasive argument that Alexander Hamilton was a more effective advocate of free markets.

Written by a Washington-area economist who uses a nom de plume because of his position in government, the article starts by explaining that England’s Whig Revolution in the early 1700s helped create the conditions for astounding British prosperity. Notwithstanding resistance from the landed elites.

In England, the Whig Revolution was a series of events – the successful invasion of William  of Orange to dethrone James II in 1688, the selection of George I to succeed Queen Anne in 1714, and the selection of Robert Walpole as the first Prime Minister in 1721 – that created the Westminster parliamentary system… Most important, the Whig Revolution also created the institutional and legal framework that transformed England into a modern capitalist economy and sparked the Industrial Revolution. The adoption of Dutch commercial law, the creation of the Bank of England, and the circulation of its bank notes monetized the English economy. English courts abandoned the medieval “just price” doctrine, which let judges nullify contracts after the fact based on the concept that all goods and services had an objective value and any deviation from this just price should therefore be unlawful. …Traditional guilds collapsed. Entrepreneurs were free to create new firms, determine output and prices, borrow from banks, and issue stock. New manufacturing firms lured workers away from the estates of the landed gentry to rapidly growing English cities with wages paid in paper currency. …Rapid economic, political, and social change inevitably produced a reaction led by the arch-Tory Henry St. John, the First Viscount Bolingbroke. …To Bolingbroke, the Whig Revolution corrupted England… Bolingbroke rejected the legal and political reforms that created a modern capitalist economy. …But he failed to turn back the clock.

The same battle occurred on the other side of the ocean. albeit several decades later.

And most of America’s Founders apparently were not on the right side.

The Whig Revolution, which had allowed England to develop a modern capitalist economy, did not immediately cross the Atlantic. …In the 1770s, colonial legislatures still regulated the prices for many goods and services and forbade arbitrage and speculation. Colonial courts still accepted “just price” doctrine, allowing judges, all whom were members of a small oligarchy, to overturn contracts when market prices moved against colonial elites. And when crops failed or prices fell, colonial legislatures frequently declared “debt holidays” to prevent creditors from seizing the property of the colonial oligarchs. …Most of the America’s founders were from the small, wealthy elite in the colonies. Identifying with the English gentry rather than the rising middle class, Bolingbroke greatly influenced most of the founders’ views of economics and politics. Most founders, especially Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, agreed with Bolingbroke about the primacy of agriculture, shared his fears of banks and a paper currency, and dreaded industrialization. Most founders accepted Bolingbroke’s policy recommendations.

But Alexander Hamilton had a more enlightened outlook.

Alexander Hamilton was different than other founders. …Hamilton immigrated to America in 1773. Serving as General George Washington’s aide-de-camp, Hamilton observed how a weak Continental Congress imperiled the war effort. …Hamilton had a very different prospective from other founders with the notable exceptions of Washington and John Marshall. Hamilton wanted America to become a dynamic meritocracy. …Hamilton wanted poor, but talented individuals like himself to have avenues other than land ownership to earn wealth. Moreover, Hamilton rejected slavery because it prevented slaves from their full economic potential and made masters indolent and lazy. Moreover, Hamilton rejected racism. “The contempt we have been taught to entertain for the blacks, makes us fancy many things that are founded neither in reason nor experience.” During the Revolution, Hamilton proposed emancipating slaves that agreed to fight in Continental Army. Later Hamilton founded the New York Society for the Manumission of Slaves. Instead of Bolingbroke, Hamilton embraced the Whig Revolution and wanted to bring its economic benefits to the United States. …Moreover, Hamilton was staunch defender of property rights even when it was politically costly to him. As a lawyer in New York City, he successfully argued for the restoration of property of Englishmen and Loyalists that had been seized after the Revolutionary War in violation of the Treaty of Paris and the law of nations.

What about Hamilton’s protectionism?

He’s semi-guilty, but the author explains that Hamilton was mostly looking for a way of funding a modest-sized government.

And as I wrote last month, a modest tariff to fund a very small central government (as all the Founders preferred) would be a great improvement over what we have now.

Moreover, Hamilton even understood the basic principle of the Laffer Curve a couple of hundred years before Art Laffer’s famous napkin sketch.

While some future policymakers misused Hamilton to justify their protectionism, Hamilton was not a protectionist in the modern sense. …In a world in which income and value-added taxes had not been invented, …Hamilton favored a revenue tariff that averaged about 10 percent over a property tax to fund the federal government. Hamilton sought to maximize the federal government’s revenue and provide a modest margin of protection to domestic manufacturers rather than to block imports. Indeed, Hamilton argued: “It is a signal advantage of tax 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.”

I’m not fully convinced that Alexander Hamilton is a libertarian hero (that would entail support for free banking rather than his version of central banking), but I’m looking at him much more favorably after reading this article.

And I’m now significantly less sympathetic to Thomas Jefferson.

I’ll close on a wonky note. In my column about the would-be nation of Liberland, I cited some research on the relationship between “state capacity” and economic prosperity. The notion is that an economy won’t prosper unless a government is both strong enough and effective enough to deter aggression and to provide rule of law (while otherwise leaving the private sector unmolested).

I’m certainly no expert on the Founding Fathers, but it seems that Hamilton had that point of view.

Read Full Post »

States Are Competing on Tax Policy and People Are “Voting with their Feet” against High-Tax States such as California

California is a lot like France. They’re both wonderful places to visit.

And they’re both great places to live if you already have a lot of money.

But neither jurisdiction is very friendly to people who want to get rich. And, thanks to tax competition, that’s having a meaningful impact on migration patterns.

I’ve previously written about the exodus of successful and/or aspirational people from France.

Today we’re going to examine the same process inside the United States.

It’s a process that is about to get more intense thanks to federal tax reform, as Art Laffer and Steve Moore explain in a column for the Wall Street Journal.

In the years to come, millions of people, thousands of businesses, and tens of billions of dollars of net income will flee high-tax blue states for low-tax red states. This migration has been happening for years. But the Trump tax bill’s cap on the deduction for state and local taxes, or SALT, will accelerate the pace. …Consider what this means if you’re a high-income earner in Silicon Valley or Hollywood. The top tax rate that you actually pay just jumped from about 8.5% to 13%. Similar figures hold if you live in Manhattan, once New York City’s income tax is factored in. If you earn $10 million or more, your taxes might increase a whopping 50%. …high earners in places with hefty income taxes—not just California and New York, but also Minnesota and New Jersey—will bear more of the true cost of their state government. Also in big trouble are Connecticut and Illinois, where the overall state and local tax burden (especially property taxes) is so onerous that high-income residents will feel the burn now that they can’t deduct these costs on their federal returns. On the other side are nine states—including Florida, Nevada, Texas and Washington—that impose no tax at all on earned income.

Art and Steve put together projections on what this will mean.

Over the past decade, about 3.5 million Americans on net have relocated from the highest-tax states to the lowest-tax ones. …Our analysis of IRS data on tax returns shows that in the past three years alone, Texas and Florida have gained a net $50 billion in income and purchasing power from other states, while California and New York have surrendered a net $23 billion. Now that the SALT subsidy is gone, how bad will it get for high-tax blue states? Very bad. We estimate, based on the historical relationship between tax rates and migration patterns, that both California and New York will lose on net about 800,000 residents over the next three years—roughly twice the number that left from 2014-16. Our calculations suggest that Connecticut, New Jersey and Minnesota combined will hemorrhage another roughly 500,000 people in the same period. …the exodus could puncture large and unexpected holes in blue-state budgets. Lawmakers in Hartford and Trenton have gotten a small taste of this in recent years as billionaire financiers have flown the coop and relocated to Florida. …Progressives should do the math: A 13% tax rate generates zero revenue from someone who leaves the state for friendlier climes.

I don’t know if their estimate is too high or too low, but there’s no question that they are correct about the direction of migration.

And every time a net taxpayer moves out, that further erodes the fiscal position of the high-tax states. Which is why I think one of the interesting questions is which state will be the first to suffer fiscal collapse.

In large part, taxpayers are making a rational cost-benefit analysis. Some states have dramatically increased the burden of government spending. Yet does anyone think that those states are providing better services than states with smaller public sectors? Or that those services are worth all the taxes they have to pay?

Consider, for instance, the difference between New York and Tennessee.

New York spends nearly twice as much on state and local government per person ($16,000) as does economically booming Tennessee ($9,000).

Anyhow, I’m guessing the new restriction on the state and local tax deduction is going to change the behavior of state politicians. At least I hope so.

But nobody ever said politicians were sensible. Ross Marchand of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance explains that Massachusetts and New Jersey are still thinking about more class-warfare taxation.

Massachusetts and New Jersey are currently considering “millionaires’ taxes,” which would significantly increase top rates and spark a “race to the top” for revenue… Instead of helping out the middle class, a millionaires’ tax will result in an exodus from the state, squeezing out opportunities for working Americans. …Prominent millionaires respond to these proposals by threatening to leave, and research shows that the well-to-do regularly follow through on these promises.  …nearly all of the migration that does happen in top brackets has to do with tax changes. Researchers at Stanford University and the Treasury Department estimate that a 10 percent increase in taxes causes a 1 percent bump in migration, assuming no change in any other policy. …If New Jersey and Massachusetts approve new millionaires’ taxes, it is difficult to predict how much will be raised and where these funds will ultimately wind up. But if New York and California are any guide, income surtaxes will be destructive. When it comes to higher taxation, interstate migration is just the tip of the iceberg. Higher-tax states, for instance, see less innovative activity and scientific research according to an analysis by economists at the Federal Reserve and UC Berkeley.

My suggestion is that politicians in Massachusetts and New Jersey should look at what’s happening to California.

CNBC reports on the growing exodus from the Golden State.

Californians may still love the beautiful weather and beaches, but more and more they are fed up with the high housing costs and taxes and deciding to flee to lower-cost states such as Nevada, Arizona and Texas. …said Dave Senser, who lives on a fixed income near San Luis Obispo, California, and now plans to move to Las Vegas. “Rents here are crazy, if you can find a place, and they’re going to tax us to death. That’s what it feels like. At least in Nevada they don’t have a state income tax. And every little bit helps.” …Data from United Van Lines show some of the most popular moving destinations for Californians from 2015 to 2017 were Texas, Arizona, Oregon, Washington and Colorado. Other experts also said Nevada remains a top destination. …Internal Revenue Service data would appear to show that the middle-class and middle-age residents are the ones leaving, according to Joel Kotkin, a presidential fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange, California. …Furthermore, Kotkin believes the outmigration from California may start to rise among higher-income people, given that the GOP’s federal tax overhaul will result in certain California taxpayers losing from the state and local tax deduction cap.

The Legislative Analyst’s Office for the California legislature has warned the state’s lawmakers about this trend.

For many years, more people have been leaving California for other states than have been moving here. According to data from the American Community Survey, from 2007 to 2016, about 5 million people moved to California from other states, while about 6 million left California. On net, the state lost 1 million residents to domestic migration—about 2.5 percent of its total population. …Although California generally has been losing residents to the rest of the country, movement between California and some states deviates from this pattern. The figure below shows net migration between California and individual states between 2007 and 2016. California gained, on net, residents from about one-third of states, led by New York, Illinois, and New Jersey.

Here’s the chart showing where Californians are moving. Unsurprisingly, Texas is the main destination.

By the way, state-to-state migration isn’t solely a function of income taxes.

A Market Watch column looks at the impact of property taxes on migration patterns.

Harty’s clients range from first-time buyers with sticker shock to people who’ve lived in and around Chicago all their lives. Each has a different story, but they share a common theme: many believe that Chicago-area property taxes are too high, and relief is just an hour away over the state line. …if all real estate is local, all real estate taxes may be even more so. …Attom’s data show that the average tax burden ranges from $10,612 in the most expensive metro area, Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk, Connecticut, to $525 in Montgomery, Alabama. And those are just averages. …taxes are “the icing on the cake” in areas that are seeing strong population inflows… Among the counties that saw the biggest percentage of in-migration in 2017, according to Census data, all are in Texas, Florida, Georgia, or the Carolinas. (Texas doesn’t have particularly low property taxes, but it has no personal income tax, making the overall tax burden much more manageable.) Cook County, where Chicago is located, had the biggest number of people leaving… Blomquist’s analysis of Census data showed that among all counties that had at least a 1% population increase, the average tax bill was $2,706, while in all counties with a least a 1% decline in population, the average was $3,900.

The key sentence in that excerpt is the part about Texas having relatively high property taxes, but making up for that by having no state income tax.

The same thing is true about New Hampshire.

But just imagine what it must be like to live in a state with high income taxes and high property taxes. If this map is any indication, places such as New York and Illinois are particularly awful for taxpayers.

Let’s close with a big-picture look at factors that drive state competitiveness.

Mark Perry takes an up-close look at the characteristics of the five states with the most in-migration and out-migration.

…four of the top five outbound states (Illinois ranked No. 46, Connecticut at No. 49, New Jersey at No. 48, and California at No. 47) were among the five US states with the highest tax burden — New York was No. 50 (highest tax burden). The average tax burden of the top five outbound states was 11.2%, with an average rank of 43.2 out of 50. In contrast, the top five inbound states have an average tax burden of 8.7% and an average rank of 16.6 out of 50. As would be expected, Americans are leaving states with some of the country’s highest overall tax burdens (IL, CT, CA and NJ) and moving to states with lower tax burdens (TN, SC and AZ). …that there are significant differences between the top five inbound and top five outbound US states when they are compared on a variety of measures of economic performance, business climate, tax burdens for businesses and individuals, fiscal health, and labor market dynamism. There is empirical evidence that Americans do “vote with their feet” when they relocate from one state to another, and the evidence suggests that Americans are moving from states that are relatively more economically stagnant, Democratic-controlled fiscally unhealthy states with higher tax burdens, more regulations and with fewer economic and job opportunities to Republican-controlled, fiscally sound states that are relatively more economically vibrant, dynamic and business-friendly, with lower tax and regulatory burdens and more economic and job opportunities.

Here’s Mark’s table, based on 2017 migration data.

As Mark said, people do “vote with their feet” for smaller government.

Which is one of the reasons I’m a big fan of federalism. When there’s decentralization, people can escape bad policy. And that helps to discipline profligate governments.

P.S. I’m writing today’s column from Switzerland, which is a very successful example of genuine federalism.

P.P.S. Americans are free to move from one state to another, and the uncompetitive states can’t stop the process. Unfortunately, the IRS has laws that penalize people who want to move to other nations. In this regard, the U.S. is worse than France.

Read Full Post »

In a Display of Moral Blindness, President of European Commission Celebrates Marxist Totalitarianism

The evil ideology known as communism left a track record of unimaginable horror. Experts estimate that 100 million people were killed by Marxist regimes.

Some were murdered. Other starved to death because of the pervasive economic failure of communism.

Yet there are dupes and apologists who overlook all this death and misery.

One of them is Jean-Claude Juncker, the President of the European Commission. A few days from now, this über-bureaucrat will help celebrate the 200th birthday of Karl Marx.

The European Commission President will travel to Trier, Germany, where he will give a speech to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth. …The Commission President will give a speech at the opening ceremony of the Karl Marx exhibition in the city. …The chief eurocrat’s trip has received critics, who have suggested the 63-year-old forgetting how Marx’s “warped ideology” led to millions of deaths across the world. Ukip MEP and the party’s former leader Paul Nuttall said: “It is appalling that Jean-Claude Juncker feels it necessary to commemorate a man whose ideology – Marxism/Communism – led to more than 100 million deaths. …Conservative MP Daniel Kawczynski…, who as a seven-year-old boy fled to Britain with his family from the Communist regime in Poland, said Mr Juncker should reject any invitations to commemorate the event. He said: “I think it’s in very poor taste we have to remember that Marxism was all about ripping power and individual means away from people and giving to State. “Marxism led to the killing of millions around the world as it allowed a small band of fanatics to suppress the people we must learn the lessons from this and share with our children.”

How disgusting.

And let’s not forget that communism is still claiming victims in places such as Cuba and North Korea.

Here’s the part of the story that caused my jaw to drop.

A commission spokeswoman defending Mr Juncker’s visit… She said: …“I think that nobody can deny that Karl Marx is a figure who shaped history in one way or the other.

In that case, why not celebrate Hitler’s birthday as well?

Writing for the Atlas Society, Alan Charles Kors expresses dismay that communism does not receive the same treatment as its sister ideology of National Socialism.

No cause, ever, in the history of all mankind, has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents, and more orphans than socialism with power. It surpassed, exponentially, all other systems of production in turning out the dead. The bodies are all around us. And here is the problem: No one talks about them. No one honors them. No one does penance for them. No one has committed suicide for having been an apologist for those who did this to them. …The West accepts an epochal, monstrous, unforgivable double standard. We rehearse the crimes of Nazism almost daily, we teach them to our children as ultimate historical and moral lessons, and we bear witness to every victim. We are, with so few exceptions, almost silent on the crimes of Communism. So the bodies lie among us, unnoticed, everywhere. We insisted upon “de-Nazification,” and we excoriate those who tempered it in the name of new or emerging political realities. There never has been and never will be a similar “de-Communization,” although the slaughter of innocents was exponentially greater, and although those who signed the orders and ran the camps remain. In the case of Nazism, we hunt down ninety-year-old men because “the bones cry out” for justice. In the case of Communism, we insisted on “no witch hunts”… The Communist holocaust should have brought forth a flowering of Western art, and witness, and sympathy. It should have called forth an overflowing ocean of tears. Instead, it has called forth a glacier of indifference. Kids who in the 1960s had portraits of Mao and Che on their college walls —the moral equivalent of having hung portraits of Hitler, Goebbels, or Horst Wessel in one’s dorm—now teach our children about the moral superiority of their political generation. Every historical textbook lingers on the crimes of Nazism, seeks their root causes, and announces a lesson that should be learned. Everyone knows the number “six million.” By contrast, it is always “the mistakes” of Communism or of Stalinism (repeated, by mistake, again, and again, and again). Ask college freshmen how many died under Stalin’s regime, and they will answer, even now, “Thousands? Tens of thousands?”

Of course, some of these kids are probably wearing t-shirts celebrating Che Guevara, so it goes without saying that they are ignorant.

Or, if they actually know Che’s track record, the kids are immoral punks.

In any event, Jean-Claude Juncker should know better. Sounds like he wants his name to be added to the biggest-clown-in-Brussels contest.

P.S. I’m embarrassed to admit that some economists were apologists for communism.

P.P.S. There’s a very small silver lining to the dark cloud of communism. You can click here, here, here, and here to enjoy some clever anti-communism humor.

Read Full Post »

Thanks to the EBRD, American Taxpayers Are Subsidizing Cronyism in Eastern Europe

Because of their aggressive support for bigger government, my least-favorite international bureaucracies are the International Monetary Fund and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

But I’m increasingly displeased by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which is another international bureaucracy (like the OECD and IMF) that is backed by American taxpayers.

And what does it do with our money? As I explained earlier this month in this short speech to the European Resource Bank in Prague, the EBRD undermines growth with cronyist policies that distort the allocation of capital.

In some sense, the argument against the EBRD is no different than the standard argument against foreign aid. Simply stated, you don’t generate growth by having the government of a rich nation give money to the government of a poor nation.

Poor nations instead need to adopt good policy – something that’s less likely when profligate and corrupt governments in the developing world are propped up by handouts.

That being said, the downsides of the EBRD go well beyond the normal problems of foreign aid.

I recently authored a study on this bureaucracy for the Center for Freedom and Prosperity.

Here are some of the main findings.

The EBRD was created with the best of intentions. The collapse of communism was an unprecedented and largely unexpected event, and policymakers wanted to encourage and facilitate a shift to markets and democracy. …But good intentions don’t necessarily mean good results. Especially when the core premise was that growth somehow would be stimulated and enabled by the creation of another multilateral government bureaucracy. …Unfortunately, even though its founding documents pay homage to markets…, there’s nothing in the track record of the EBRD that indicates it has learned from pro-intervention and pro-statism mistakes made by older international aid organizations. Indeed, there’s no positive track record whatsoever.

• There is no evidence that nations receiving subsidies and other forms of assistance grow faster than similar nations that don’t get aid from the EBRD.
• There is no evidence that nations receiving subsidies and other forms of assistance enjoy more job creation than similar nations that don’t get aid from the EBRD,
• There is no evidence that nations receiving subsidies and other forms of assistance have better social outcomes than similar nations that don’t get aid from the EBRD.

I also delved into three specific downsides of the EBRD, starting with its role in misallocating capital.

In a normal economy, savers, investors, intermediaries, entrepreneurs, and others make decisions on what projects get funded and what businesses attract investment. These private-sector participants have “skin in the game” and relentlessly seek to balance risk and reward. Wise decisions are rewarded by profit, which often is a signal for additional investment to help satisfy consumer desires. There’s also an incentive to quickly disengage from failing projects and investments that don’t produce goods and services valued by consumers. Profit and loss are an effective feedback mechanism to ensure that resources are constantly being reshuffled in ways that produce the most prosperity for people. The EBRD interferes with that process. Every euro it allocates necessarily diverts capital from more optimal uses.

I explain why taxpayers shouldn’t be subsidizing cronyism.

…the EBRD is in the business of “picking winners and losers.” This means that intervention by the bureaucracy necessarily distorts competitive markets. Any firm that gets money from the EBRD is going to have a significant advantage over rival companies. Preferential financing for hand-picked firms from the EBRD also is a way of deterring new companies from getting started since there is not a level playing field or honest competition. … cronyism is a threat to prosperity. It means the playing field is unlevel and that those with political connections have an unfair advantage over those who compete fairly. To make matters worse, nations that receive funds from the ERBD already get dismal scores from Economic Freedom of the World for the two subcategories (“government enterprises and investment” and “business regulations”) that presumably are the best proxies for cronyism.

Here’s a chart from the study showing that recipient nations already get low scores from Economic Freedom of the World for variables that reflect the degree of cronyism in an economy.

Last but not least, I warn that the EBRD enables and facilitates corruption.

When governments have power to arbitrarily disburse large sums of money, that is a recipe for unsavory behavior. For all intents and purposes, the practice of cronyism is a prerequisite for corruption. The EBRD openly brags about the money it steers to private hands, so is it any surprise that people will engage in dodgy behavior in order to turn those public funds into private loot? …Recipient nations get comparatively poor scores for “legal system and property rights” from Economic Freedom of the World. They also do relatively poorly when looking at the World Bank’s “governance indicators.” And they also have disappointing numbers from Transparency International’s “corruption perceptions index.” So, it’s no surprise that monies ostensibly disbursed for the purpose of development assistance wind up lining the pockets of corrupt insiders. For all intents and purposes, the EBRD and other dispensers of aid enable and sustain patterns of corruption.

And here’s the chart showing that recipient nations have poor quality of governance, which means that EBRD funds are especially likely to get misused.

I also cite several EBRD documents that illustrates the bureaucracy’s hostility for free markets and limited government.

Just in case you didn’t want to watch the entire video, here’s the relevant slide from my presentation.

And remember that your tax dollars back this European bureaucracy. Indeed, American taxpayers have a larger exposure than any of the European countries.

P.S. I’m also not a fan of the United Nations, though I take comfort in the fact that the UN is not very effective in pushing statist policy.

P.P.S. I’m most tolerant of the World Bank, though that bureaucracy periodically does foolish things as well.

Read Full Post »

Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, Where are Workers Pillaged Worst of All?

Congratulations to Belgium. According to the new edition of Taxing Wages, average Belgian workers have the dubious honor of surrendering the biggest chunk of their income to government. No wonder part of the country is interested in secession.

We can also give (sincere, this time, rather than sarcastic) congratulations to New Zealand and Switzerland, which impose the lowest overall tax burden on the labor income of average workers (with honorable mention to Chile and Mexico for low tax burdens in developing countries).

Here’s the key data, which shows how much of an average worker’s wages are lost because of income and payroll taxes.

The United States, I’m happy to report, is in the bottom half, which means the government confiscates a below-average amount of money from workers.

Other nations with onerous burdens include Germany, Italy, and France

Regarding the Belgian tax burden, the government understands this is bad news for Belgium’s economy, so there are periodic discussions about reducing the tax burden on labor income. Unfortunately, the potential “reforms” tend to be senseless tax swaps which would involve higher taxes on consumption or higher taxes on capital.

In the former case, the government would take more money as income is spent, so workers wouldn’t benefit. And in the latter case, there would be less investment, so workers wouldn’t benefit since their pre-tax wages would suffer.

The bottom line is that it’s impossible to have a good tax system with a bloated government.

By the way, the previous chart looked at the tax burden on the average worker with no children. Some countries have preferential tax policies for households with kids.

Here’s that data. Belgium still wins the Booby Prize for highest tax burden. But there are some noteworthy difference. Households with kids enjoy significantly lower tax burdens in Germany, France, Luxembourg, Ireland, Portugal, Slovenia, and the United States.

But you probably don’t want to have kids in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Let’s close with a couple of caveats.

First, we’re only looking at one slice of tax policy.

More specifically, this OECD data measures the tax burden on labor income, and it looks at that data only for middle-income workers.

It’s also important to consider tax rates upper-income taxpayers since they tend to be the entrepreneurs and job creators. From this perspective, Belgium had the second-worst tax system for these households, slightly behind Sweden.

Nothing to brag about.

It’s also important to consider the overall tax burden on saving and investment. And there are several ways of looking at that data.

• Most punitive level of double taxation.
• Most anti-competitive tax system.
• Most onerous tax regime for global companies.

As you can see, Belgium doesn’t get high marks in these indices, but the United States invariably scores poorly.

Last but not least, there are many other policies – such as trade, regulation, and the rule of law – that also help determine a country’s competitiveness.

And while Belgium and other European nations have bad fiscal systems, they tend to score highly in other areas. Same for the United States.

The real key, of course, is to get good scores in all areas, like Switzerland, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Those are the best jurisdictions for workers, with good wages and low tax burdens.

Read Full Post »

Finland Turns Against “Basic Income”

I’m conflicted.

I’ve repeatedly expressed skepticism about the idea of governments providing a “basic income” because I fear the work ethic will (further) erode if people automatically receive a substantial chunk of money.

Moreover, I also fear that a basic income will lead to an ever-expanding burden of government spending, particularly once net beneficiaries figure out they can vote themselves more money.

Given these concerns, I should be happy about this report from the New York Times.

For more than a year, Finland has been testing the proposition that the best way to lift economic fortunes may be the simplest: Hand out money without rules or restrictions on how people use it. The experiment with so-called universal basic income has captured global attention… Now, the experiment is ending. The Finnish government has opted not to continue financing it past this year, a reflection of public discomfort with the idea of dispensing government largess free of requirements that its recipients seek work. …the Finnish government’s decision to halt the experiment at the end of 2018 highlights a challenge to basic income’s very conception. Many people in Finland — and in other lands — chafe at the idea of handing out cash without requiring that people work. …Finland’s goals have been modest and pragmatic. The government hoped that basic income would send more people into the job market to revive a weak economy. …The basic income trial, which started at the beginning of 2017 and will continue until the end of this year, has given monthly stipends of 560 euros ($685) to a random sample of 2,000 unemployed people aged 25 to 58. Recipients have been free to do as they wished… The Finnish government was keen to see what people would do under such circumstances. The data is expected to be released next year, giving academics a chance to analyze what has come of the experiment.

The reason I’m conflicted is that the current welfare state – both in the United States and other developed nations – is bad for both taxpayers and poor people.

So I like the idea of experimentation. There has to be a better way of alleviating genuine suffering without trapping poor people in dependency or punishing taxpayers.

Indeed, one of my arguments for radical decentralization in America is that states will try different approaches and we’ll have a much better chance of learning what works and what doesn’t.

And maybe we’ll learn that there are some benefits of providing a basic income. But, as reported by the U.K.-based Guardian, it’s unclear whether the Finnish experiment lasted long enough or was comprehensive enough to teach us anything.

The scheme – aimed primarily at seeing whether a guaranteed income might incentivise people to take up paid work by smoothing out gaps in the welfare system…it was hoped it would shed light on policy issues such as whether an unconditional payment might reduce anxiety among recipients and allow the government to simplify a complex social security system… Olli Kangas, an expert involved in the trial, told the Finnish public broadcaster YLE: “Two years is too short a period to be able to draw extensive conclusions from such a big experiment. We should have had extra time and more money to achieve reliable results.”

I will be interested to see whether researchers generate any conclusions when they look at the two years of data from the Finnish experiment.

That being said, there already has been some research that underscores my concerns.

The OECD is not my favorite international bureaucracy, but its recent survey on Finland included some sobering estimates on the cost of a nationwide basic income.

In a basic income scenario, a lump-sum benefit replaces a number of existing benefits, financed by increasing income taxation by nearly 30% or around 4% of GDP. …the basic income requires significant increases to income taxation. …Financing a basic income at a meaningful level thus would require considerable additional tax revenue, and heavier taxation of income would at least partially undo any improvement in work incentives.

And in a report on basic income last year, the OECD poured more cold water on the idea.

…large tax-revenue changes are needed to finance a BI at meaningful levels, and tax reforms would therefore need to be an integral part of budget-neutral BI proposals. …abolishing tax-free allowances and making BI taxable means that everybody would pay income tax on the BI, and on all their other income. Tax burdens would go up for most people as a result, further increasing tax-to-GDP ratios that are currently already at a record-high in the OECD area. …There are also major concerns about unintended consequences of a BI. An especially prominent one is that unconditional income support would reduce the necessity for paid work.

Indeed, it’s difficult to see how work incentives aren’t adversely affected. Why go through the hassle of being employed when you can sit at home and play computer games all day?

P.S. Given the option of voting on a basic income in 2016, Swiss voters overwhelmingly rejected the notion.

P.P.S. Former Vice President Joe Biden actually agrees with me about one of the downsides of basic income.

Read Full Post »

Government Job-Training Programs Are a Recipe for Waste, Fraud, Duplication, and Failure

A few years ago, John Stossel did an undercover investigation of a government job-training program and he found that the operation was basically a scam.

Not that we should be surprised. Back in 2014, I explained to a C-Span audience that a healthy private sector was the only sure-fire way of producing a good job market. Which is why politicians (assuming they actually want job creation) should simply “get out of the way.”

Let’s now take a fresh look at the issue. The Wall Street Journal editorialized on this topic a few days ago.

…a new report from the Labor Department’s inspector general shows that the $1.7 billion federal Job Corps training program is a flop. …Nearly 50,000 people enrolled in 2017…the Job Corps provides meals, medical care, books, clothing and supplies, as well as an allowance for child care and living expenses. Such comprehensive support doesn’t come cheap—the taxpayer cost per student last year was $33,990—and the IG suggests that the investment often doesn’t pay off. …in 27 of 50 cases where full employment data existed, graduates were working the same sort of low-wage, low-skill jobs they held before training.

But there are beneficiaries of the program. The bureaucrats and contractors involved in the program make out like bandits.

The new report suggests that Job Corps’ biggest beneficiaries may be government contractors, not rookie job seekers. Job Corps spent more than $100 million between 2010 and 2011 on transition-service specialists to place students in a job after training. But among 324 sampled Job Corps alumni, the IG found evidence that contractors had helped a mere 18 find work. The contractors often claimed credit for success even though they provided no referrals or résumé and interview help.

Once again, this should not be surprising. It’s what we find over and over and over again.

Here are some excerpts from a report prepared a few years ago by then-Senator Tom Coburn.

…the government has taken on a role for which it was never intended, pouring billions of taxpayer dollars into a broken web of job training and employment programs that are rife with waste, fraud and abuse and lacking demonstrable effectiveness. …In FY 2009, nine federal agencies spent approximately $18 billion to administer 47 separate employment and job training programs, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). GAO identified another 51 federal programs that could be categorized as federal job training programs… The GAO found all but three of the 47 programs overlap with at least one other program in that they provide similar services to similar populations – yet maintain separate administrative structures.

All that bureaucracy and duplication might be an acceptable price to pay to get good results.

Except the programs are a miserable flop.

GAO finds ―little is known about the effectiveness of most programs. …impact studies that were conducted ―generally found the effects of participation were not consistent across programs, with only some demonstrating positive impacts that tended to be small, inconclusive or restricted to short-term impacts.

The report then lists 25 separate examples of wasteful and fraudulent spending.

It’s difficult to pick the most egregious example, but #14 caught my attention.

…a Department of Labor official was found to be taking bribes from a Job Corps contractor, even approving contracts that billed for ghost employees. …the government provided Job Corps with $1.68 billion in fiscal year 2009 and $1.7 billion in FY 2010. Job Corps also received $250 million in stimulus funding in addition to regular annual appropriations. …As part of the Inspector General‘s investigation, a search warrant was executed at the contractor‘s home. The contractor said that Brevard assisted in getting him contracts in exchange for payments. The contractor paid Brevard because if he did not do so, she would not process his invoices. When asked by law enforcement, Brevard admitted to receiving payments from the contractor paid her, and that she approved contracts – of which she knew were false.

Let’s look at a recent real-world example of failure.

The Daily Signal has done some solid reporting on this topic, including this look at the high cost and low benefits of job-training programs.

A government-funded job training program that promised to turn hundreds of residents of Kentucky’s coal country into computer coders so far has spent $2 million to place 17 people in tech jobs and may have left others worse off… The job training program, budgeted for a total of $4.5 million, was supposed to last through 2019 and train up to 200 people from an economically depressed region of Kentucky for middle- to high-skill careers in information technology. …But less than a year later, workers have torn down signs at Big Sandy Community and Technical College, where the program was based, and are closing shop on what appears to be a government-funded program run amok. A total of 32 of the 49 Kentuckians who originally enrolled in the TechHire program in Eastern Kentucky, known as TEKY, have not obtained jobs in the tech industry, according to government figures.

Predictably, the contractors were beneficiaries.

EKCEP spent $1.98 million on the partnership with Interapt. That total includes payments of $861,612 to Interapt for staff salaries and management fees, $706,146 for program service fees, and $115,287 for travel. In one case, Interapt billed EKCEP $5,200 a month for rental of a five-bedroom, five-bathroom house in Paintsville, complete with swimming pool, for Interapt staffers working on the training program. But Gopal, Interapt’s CEO, submitted as an expense and was reimbursed $1,022.40 in December alone for staying at a Ramada Inn in Paintsville, which is about 200 miles east of Louisville. …“Companies like Interapt can rely on the federal government as a crutch because the government has traditionally funded these job training programs, and it creates this vicious circle where industry supports it, politicians support it, but the results don’t bear out the intentions of the programs,” said Nick Loris, an economist who researches and writes about energy policy at The Heritage Foundation.

Let’s close with a meaty excerpt from an overview of job-training programs by Chris Edwards and Daniel Murphy.

The most thorough assessment of federal job training programs was a $25 million National JTPA study in 1994, which was commissioned by the Department of Labor. It tracked 20,000 people over a four-year period who used various training services, and compared them to control groups who did not. The study found that for most participants, federal programs had no significant benefits. …(Labor experts James Heckman and Jeffrey Smith note: “For youth, the record of government training programs for the disadvantaged is almost uniformly negative.”) All in all, the National JTPA study found that the modest benefits of the program were outweighed by the program’s costs. A 2002 book, The Job Training Charade, examines the failures of federal job training programs over the decades. The author, Gordon Lafer of the University of Oregon, is very liberal in his politics… But based on his detailed review, he finds that federal job training programs have provided very small or insignificant benefits. He argues that these programs exist for political reasons alone. Politicians have championed these programs in order to be seen as “doing something” to help workers, and whether they actually work or not is less important. Lafer argues that “as successive generations of job training programs fail to produce the hoped for results, policymakers have cycled through a stock repertoire of procedural fixes that promise to solve the problem.” CETA was supposed to fix problems of the 1960’s training programs. JTPA was supposed to fix CETA, and the WIA was supposed to fix JTPA. Lafer notes that “repeated reports of [JTPA’s] failure seem to have little impact on its political popularity… JTPA was succeeded by the Workforce Investment Act which . . . largely repeats the same strategies found to have failed under JTPA.” Job training legislation is little more than “political symbolism,” he says.

Unfortunately, empty “political symbolism” is the specialty of Washington.

Politicians don’t see the “unseen” and they don’t understand “creative destruction.”

So their efforts at job creation hinder rather than help.

Read Full Post »

Will the Supreme Court Grant States Extraterritorial Tax Powers?

On April 17, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc., a case dealing with whether states should have the power to levy taxes on companies in other states.

Most observers see this issue as a fight over taxing the Internet, taxing online sales, or a battle between Main Street merchants and Silicon Valley tech firms. Those are all parts of the story, but I’ve explained that this also is a contest between two competing approaches to taxation.

On one side are pro-market people who favor origin-based taxation, which is based on the notion that sales should be taxed where the merchant is based.

On the other side are pro-government people who want destination-based taxation, which is based on the notion that sales should be taxed where the consumer lives.

Needless to say, I’m not on the pro-government side of the battle. Here’s some of what I wrote when I was at the Heritage Foundation way back in 2001.

Requests to establish this destination-based tax authority should be denied. Such a regime would create an anti-consumer sales tax cartel for the benefit of profligate governments. It also would undermine privacy by requiring the collection of data on individual purchases. And it would violate important constitutional principles by giving state and local governments the power to impose their own taxes on businesses in other states.

All of that is still true today, but let’s look at some more recent analysis of the issue, all of which is tied to last week’s hearing at the Supreme Court.

George Will opines on South Dakota’s revenue grab for the Washington Post.

South Dakota has enacted a law contradicting a 26-year-old court decision concerning interstate commerce, and a law Congress passed and extended 10 times. It wants to tax purchases that are made online from vendors that have no physical presence in the state. South Dakota wants to increase its revenue and mollify its Main Street merchants. …In 1992, in the Internet’s infancy, the court held that retailers are required to collect a state’s sales taxes only when the retailers have a “substantial nexus” — basically, a physical, brick-and-mortar presence — in the state where the item sold is purchased. Such a nexus would mean that the retailer benefits from, and should pay for, local government services. Absent such a nexus, however, states’ taxation of sales would violate the Constitution, which vests in Congress alone the power to impose such burdens on interstate commerce. …Internet commerce…could not have flourished if vendors bore the burden of deciphering and complying with the tax policies of 12,000 state and local taxing jurisdictions, with different goods exempted from taxation. …the Internet Tax Freedom Act…is intended to shield small Internet sellers from discriminatory taxes and compliance burdens. …South Dakota is seeking the court’s permission for its extraterritorial grasping. …Governments often are reflexively reactionary when new technologies discomfort established interests with which the political class has comfortable relations of mutual support. The state’s sales-tax revenue has grown faster than the state’s economy even as Internet retailing has grown. …Traditional retailing will…prosper or not depending on market forces, meaning Americans’ preferences. State governments should not try to prevent this wholesome churning from going where it will.

The Wall Street Journal also has opined in favor of limits on the ability of states to impose their laws outside their borders.

The Supreme Court’s landmark 1992 Quill decision protects small businesses across the country from tax-grubbing politicians across the country. …At issue in South Dakota v. Wayfair is whether governments can tax and regulate remote retailers that don’t enjoy the state’s representation or benefit from its public services. …Fast forward 25 years. States complain that online commerce is eroding their tax base. Brick-and-mortar stores grouse that remote retailers are dodging taxes, putting them at a competitive disadvantage. …Politicians would prefer to soak out-of-state retailers rather than their own taxpayers. But America’s founders devised the Commerce Clause to prevent states from burdening interstate commerce and making long-arm tax grabs.

Here’s a troubling tidbit from the WSJ editorial. The Trump Administration is siding with South Dakota politicians, using the same statist rationale as the European politicians who are trying to grab more money from high-tech American companies.

The Justice Department has filed a brief supporting South Dakota… Seriously? According to Justice, businesses that operate a website have a “virtual” presence everywhere. The European Commission has invoked the same argument to impose a digital tax on Silicon Valley tech giants, which the Trump Administration has denounced as an extraterritorial tax grab.

Wow, the incompetence is staggering. The Stupid Party strikes again.

Veronique de Rugy explains in her Reason column that state governments want to overturn Quill because they don’t want tax competition.

If you think internet companies aren’t paying any taxes for online sales and that’s killing bricks-and-mortar retailers and states’ budgets, you, my friend, have been duped. Nothing could be further from the truth. …Most state lawmakers want to see Quill overturned, allowing them to force out-of-state companies to collect sales taxes on their behalf. This argument was just heard by the Supreme Court… If the states were to win, they would be able to reach into the pockets of that mom selling her paintings on Etsy, even though she may live on the other side of the country, didn’t elect other states’ officials, and never agreed to those states’ tax laws. …tax competition among states would also be lost if Quill were overturned. Under the new regime, online consumers—no matter where they shop or what they buy—would lose the ability to shop around for a better tax system. Without the competitive pressure and the fear of losing consumers to lower-tax states, lawmakers would not feel the need to try to rein in their sales tax burden. It’s that pressure, which limits their tax grabbing abilities, that these lawmakers resent and want the Supreme Court to put an end to. …There is a lot to be lost in the Wayfair case. If Quill were to be overturned, compliance costs could skyrocket for many retailers, and good principles of taxation would be thrown out the window. Healthy tax competition is at stake. Let’s hope the highest court in the land makes the right decision.

In a column for the Wall Street Journal, Chris Cox, former Congressman and former Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, debunks the notion that states are suffering for a loss of tax revenue.

‘Our states are losing massive sales-tax revenues that we need for education, health care, and infrastructure,” South Dakota’s Attorney General Marty Jackley told the U.S. Supreme Court… His state’s Supreme Court opined that sales tax revenues have “declined.” The state Legislature, citing its own “finding” to this effect, enacted a law requiring out-of-state retailers to collect sales tax on purchases shipped to South Dakota.

Here’s the data debunking Jackley’s claim about South Dakota “losing massive sales-tax revenues.”

…the law is based on a false premise. The state’s own data show that sales and use tax revenue grew from $787.7 million in 2013 to $974.7 in 2017—considerably faster than the state’s rate of economic growth. The governor’s budget for 2018 projects the state’s sales and use tax revenue will be more than $1 billion, 4% higher than last year, with no change in rate. That’s 29% higher than five years earlier. Sales-tax revenues have been booming in other states, too.

In other words, politicians are greedy and they’re willing to prevaricate. They want more and more revenue and they don’t want to face competitive pressure that might limit their ability to extract more money that can be used to buy votes.

Is anyone shocked?

P.S. The fight between “origin-based” and “destination-based” approaches to consumption taxation is very analogous to the fight between “territorial” and “worldwide” approaches to income taxation.

P.P.S. Given that it arguably has the best (or least-destructive) tax system of any state, it’s disappointing to see South Dakota politicians taking a lead role in an effort that would undermine tax competition.

Read Full Post »

More Anti-Libertarian Humor

My collection of “Libertarian Humor” is very ecumenical since I have “pro” jokes and “con” jokes.

Today, we’re going to add to the latter collection with three new items.

We’ll start with some satire about the theoretical Libertarian Party vs the real-world Libertarian Party. I get the feeling the guy on the right is an older version of Libertarian Doofus 1 or Libertarian Doofus 2.

Maybe this means we have to create a new type of libertarian. After all, the guy on the right doesn’t fit any of the 24 categories in this collection. Well, maybe three rows down and second from the right, but I don’t want to be judgemental.

For our second item, here’s some great satire from Babylon Bee about a libertarian driver’s heroic effort to avoid government-funded roads.

In a calculated move intended to demonstrate the power of the free market, libertarian man Patrick Wallace drove his SUV through dozens of other peoples’ back yards, across several open fields, over a stretch of rocky terrain, and even off a cliff into a small ravine in order to avoid using any government-funded roads, sources confirmed Thursday. According to witnesses, the man got into his vehicle to head to work, started it up, and immediately barreled across his lawn, down his neighbor’s side yard, through a row of back yards, and right into an adjacent wood, all while carefully preventing his tires from ever touching any road built by tax dollars. “What would we do without roads funded by government coercion? That’s easy,” the man told reporters later as he attempted to push his car out of a creek. “We’d be able to drive straight to work through any obstacles we wanted, without the state telling us we’re not allowed to launch over a gully to get to the office on time.” …After getting his car moving again, Wallace reportedly hurtled down the brook, across a steep ski slope, and burst through a cemetery, waving at the groundskeeper to get out of the way, before launching off a homemade ramp over a county road to his office. At publishing time, Wallace had fashioned a rope swing at the office in order to help him get to the Dunkin’ Donuts across the street without walking on “roads funded by theft.”

Reminds me of the libertarian police officer who tried to chase a criminal without stepping on government sidewalks.

Another example of why it ain’t easy being libertarian. We need a Nirvana where all infrastructure is private!

Lastly, we have an observation about the ongoing challenge of trying to stop statism.

There’s a lot of truth to this image. Most libertarians in the real world don’t worry too much about theory. They just want more freedom.

But in the world of professional libertarians, there are sectarian fights between Randians, Austrians, anarcho-capitalists, Rothbardians, liberaltarians, and many other niche groups. And they oftentimes don’t get along with each other.

No wonder we have a hard time getting others to agree with our agenda.

Read Full Post »

Deconstructing David Hogg’s Proposed Anti-Gun Boycott

After the horrific school shooting in Parkland, Florida, I explained that the gun-control policies being pushed by left-leaning students such as David Hogg would be utterly ineffective at deterring evil people.

But give the kid credit. He’s fully exploiting his 15 minutes of fame (in a way that makes Sandra Fluke look like an amateur).

His latest idea is to somehow boycott financial firms that do business with gun manufacturers.

Dana Loesch asked me to appear on her show to discuss the economics of this issue. It’s a Skype interview, so the quality on my end leaves something to be desired, but I hopefully got across my main point that boycotts only work if consumers change their buying patterns. And, to be blunt, David Hogg is not going to change the minds of people who appreciate the 2nd Amendment.

I also explained that Hogg’s proposed boycott is a private version of Obama’s reprehensible Operation Chokepoint.

Except it won’t work because Hogg’s hyperbole isn’t nearly as effective as the coercive power of government.

Indeed, Hogg is far more likely to increase gun sales, which is the point of this bit of satire.

Though I don’t want to imply that the leftist students from Parkland, Florida, have been completely ineffective.

They demanded change. And the school gave it to them in the form of a preposterous requirement for see-through backpacks. Here are some details from a CNN story.

Survivors of a school shooting in Parkland, Florida, returned from spring break Monday to new security measures that some students said made them feel like they were in prison. Marjory Stoneman Douglas students encountered security barriers and bag check lines as they entered campus Monday morning. Inside the school, administrators handed out the students’ newest mandatory accessories: a see-through backpack much like the ones required at some stadiums and arenas… Now, with the bags, they’re sacrificing their privacy for what he and others consider an ineffective security measure.

Of course these clear backpacks are a joke.

But, as illustrated by this bit of satire, it’s rather naive to expect good results when you ask for more government.

And since students such as Hogg make a big deal about “assault rifles” that are functionally the same as other rifles, it’s poetic justice that he’s now being deprived of an “assault backpack.”

But why stop there?

Surely we don’t want to run the risk of a student hiding a gun under their clothes. We need to ban “assault clothing”!

But David Hogg isn’t meekly acquiescing to see-through backpacks. At least according to this final bit of satire.

Ouch. I thought some of the anti-Fluke humor was hard hitting, but both “hold my sippy cup” and “from my damp soft hands” are rather brutal.

Read Full Post »

Who Deserves Blame for the Oppressive Tax System, the IRS or Politicians?

For the past 30 years, I’ve been criticizing both the tax code and the IRS. Which raises an interesting chicken-or-egg question about who should be blamed for our nightmarish tax system.

Should we blame IRS bureaucrats, who have a dismal track record of abusing taxpayers? Or should we blame politicians, who have been making the tax code more onerous ever since that dark day in 1913 when the income tax was adopted?

In this exchange with Stuart Varney, I take an ecumenical approach and blame both.

As you can see, I am slightly conflicted on this debate.

There are plenty of reasons to condemn the IRS, and not just because of what I mentioned in the interview about its deplorable campaign to suppress political speech by Tea Party organizations.

• It also has thieving employees.
• It has incompetent employees.
• It has thuggish employees.
• It has brainless employees.
• It has protectionist employees.
• It has wasteful employees.
• And it has victimizing employees.

Yet there is an equally strong case to be made that politicians are the real problem. They are the ones who created the tax system. They are the ones who make it more complex with each passing year.

And they are the ones who constantly give more power and money to the IRS in hopes of generating more cash that can be used to buy votes.

Indeed, the most important thing I said in the interview is that the IRS budget has dramatically increased over the past few decades. And that’s after adjusting for inflation!

So while I’m surely not a fan of the IRS, I’m probably even more critical of politicians since they’re the ones responsible for the bad laws that empower bureaucrats.

But that doesn’t really matter because the solution is the same regardless of whether one blames politicians or the IRS. Throw the tax code in the garbage and replace it with a simple and fair flat tax (or, if there are ever sufficient votes to undo the 16th Amendment, replace the internal revenue code with a national consumption tax).*

Let’s close with some humor. First, here’s a painful reminder (h/t: Reddit‘s libertarian page) of the relationship between taxpayers and politicians, though it’s worth noting that they want to grab your income regardless of whether there’s a lot or a little. In other words, the taxpayer could be holding a minnow and nothing would change.

Maybe I should add this image to my archive of IRS humor, which already features a new Obama 1040 form, a death tax cartoon, a list of tax day tips from David Letterman, a Reason video, a cartoon of how GPS would work if operated by the IRS, an IRS-designed pencil sharpener, two Obamacare/IRS cartoons (here and here), a collection of IRS jokes, a sale on 1040-form toilet paper (a real product), a song about the tax agency, the IRS’s version of the quadratic formula, and (my favorite) a joke about a Rabbi and an IRS agent.

*In my libertarian fantasy world, we would return to the limited government created by the Founding Fathers, thus eliminating the need for any broad-based tax.

Read Full Post »

Great Moments in British Government

While much of my analysis focuses on the mess created by Washington, I periodically show my ecumenical nature by sharing “Great Moments in State Government” and “Great Moments in Local Government.”

And in keeping with the title of this page, I even occasionally share “Great Moments in Foreign Government.”

Today, though we’re going to get very specific and look at Great Moments in British Government. I did the same thing back in February and there’s so much new material that it’s time for an encore.

We’ll start with this story from the Daily Mail about an elderly man who was arrested for defending his home.

A 78-year-old homeowner has been arrested by murder detectives after a suspected burglar he fought with in his own kitchen died of a stab wound. …The homeowner was initially detained on suspicion of causing grievous bodily harm but was later arrested on suspicion of murder. The case has been compared to that of Tony Martin, who was jailed for killing an intruder at his home in 1999. The break-in comes amid a surge in violence in the capital, with 49 people already having died in crimes in London in 2018. …The homeowner suffered bruising to his arms but police said his injuries are not life threatening.  He remains in custody at a south London police station.

Wow, this might be even more outrageous than the story about the woman who got arrested for merely brandishing a knife in her own home.

But Americans shouldn’t laugh too much about these stories since cops on this side of the Atlantic have arrested citizens for injuring burglars.

Next is a story from the Evening Standard about so-called political correctness run amok.

Mansfield College was forced to cancel a “420 themed” bop scheduled for this Friday – April 4 – after students complained. In an email sent to students…, organisers explained that the party would be a celebration of the “internationally recognised day of protest for the legalisation of Marijuana” on April 20. It invited undergraduates to “dress up as their favourite stoner.” …It also warned: “If you’re white, don’t try to go as Snoop Dogg or Bob Marley. Blackface isn’t cool.” …The invite sparked backlash from some students who said they felt the event encouraged “cultural appropriation.” One undergraduate said the college’s elected welfare representatives were worried that the event could be exclusionary. “Anyone who might have negative experiences of drugs or addiction might be affected by it,”… Within hours the entertainment team sent round an email cancelling the event and apologising for anyone they offended. They said: “We understand that this was met with offence and we want to apologise dearly to those who were offended,” they said.

I don’t know what’s more depressing, the fact that people complained or the fact that organizers cravenly apologized.

But maybe I’m not thinking about this the right way. I had a “negative experience” that “affected” me when Alabama beat Georgia for the national championship back in January. Maybe I should demand to remove the Yellowhammer State from all maps so I don’t get “triggered”.

Our final story might belong in a column about “Great Moments in Government-Run Healthcare“, but it seems to fit well with today’s collection.

A humanist will lead a team of priests as the first atheist head chaplain in the history of the NHS. …Lindsay van Dijk is one of the youngest chaplains in the NHS and will lead three priests from the Church of England, Baptist and evangelical denominations… As a humanist, Ms van Dijk believes life is giving meaning by seeking happiness and helping others find happiness too. Humanists do not believe in God or an afterlife. …Ms van Dijk told the Times at Stoke Mandeville Hospital: ‘Anyone within the chaplaincy team goes to patients to lend a listening ear, to provide spiritual and emotional support, and doesn’t specifically say “I’m from this faith” as it’s not important. …She added that in her new role she has experienced ‘mostly curiousity’ rather than objections. …The chief executive of Christian Concern Andrea Williams said: …’Putting a humanist in charge of the chaplaincy team shows how far we have come from the Christian roots of the NHS.’

I never realized that there were “Christian roots” to government-run healthcare (if so, God must like needless death and terrible suffering).

But let’s set that aside and focus on the main story. I assume that NHS chaplains are actually government bureaucrats rather than local volunteers, so part of me is thinking this is a waste of money.

But I also am a bit perplexed by the notion of having an atheist chaplain. Isn’t that a contradiction in terms? Why not hire the woman as “head grief counselor” or something like that?

Maybe it’s time to resuscitate my “U.S. vs U.K. inane-government-policy contest“.

P.S. The U.K. might have the lead in that contest because it actually has proven that a government can be so incompetent that it can’t even give away money.

Read Full Post »

Genuine Free Markets Easily Out-Perform “State-Led Capitalism”

The good news is that some honest leftists have thrown in the towel and now openly admit that capitalism generates more prosperity.

They still don’t want free markets, of course. For ideological reasons, they continue to push for a big welfare state. But at least they admit their redistributionist policies lead to weaker economic performance. Perversely, they are willing to reduce living standards for poor people so long as rich people suffer even bigger drops in their income (in other words, Thatcher was right).

Many statists, though, realize that this is not a compelling agenda.

So they try to claim – notwithstanding reams of evidence – that bigger government somehow enables more growth.

And they’re crafty. Most of them are clever enough that they don’t embrace full-scale socialism. Instead, they push for an ad hoc approach based on subsidies, bailouts, social engineering, price controls, and other forms of intervention.

If you want to get technical, they’re actually pushing a variant of fascism, with nominal private ownership but government direction and control.

But let’s avoid that loaded term and simply call it cronyism.

In a column for the Washington Post, Nicholas Borroz observes that this approach exists all over the world.

China’s consolidation of its state-owned enterprises (SOEs), Russia’s oligarch-led economy, the proliferation of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) and growing government intervention in the West are clear indicators of state-led capitalism… Controlling market activity gives governments obvious advantages when it comes to advancing political agendas at home and foreign policy abroad. …SWFs are an important feature of today’s global economic landscape; governments also use them as agents of statecraft. …State-led capitalism is even finding support in the West. …President Trump has bragged that he personally influences firms’ decisions about where to place their factories. …we have entered an era when state-led capitalism is firmly entrenched.

Unfortunately, I think Mr. Borroz is correct.

Though “state-led capitalism” an oxymoronic phrase.

Borroz also notes that the shift to cronyism reverses some of the progress that occurred at the end of the 20th century.

This is a dramatic reversal of the trend from two decades ago. In the 1990s, there was a rush around the world to liberalize economies. Capitalism’s defeat of communism made it seem that unfettered market activity was the key to success.

If you look at the data from Economic Freedom of the World, the period of liberalization actually began in the 1980s, but I’m being a nit-picker.

So let’s shift to parts of his column where I have substantive disagreements.

First, my jaw hit the proverbial floor when I read the part about the International Monetary Fund supposedly being a beacon of free-market reform.

Developing countries signed up with the International Monetary Fund’s structural adjustment programs (SAPs), gaining access to loans in exchange for adopting neoliberal economic prescriptions.

Since I’ve referred to the IMF as the “dumpster fire” or “Dr. Kevorkian” of the global economy, I obviously have a different perspective.

Though, to be fair, the bureaucrats at the IMF generally do advocate for deregulation and free trade. But they are bad news on fiscal policy and oftentimes misguided on monetary policy as well.

But here’s the part of the column that is even more galling. Borroz defends cronyism because free markets allegedly failed.

…a number of factors led to skepticism about free markets. One was the underwhelming developmental effect of SAPs and liberalization. …A further blow to the neoliberal model was a series of financial disasters caused by unrestricted flows of capital, notably the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the 2008 global financial crisis. Perhaps the factor that has most undermined neoliberalism’s attractiveness, though, is…countries with state-led economies, such as China and Russia…remain relevant not despite state intervention but because of it.

This is remarkably wrong. Three big mistakes in a handful of sentences.

1. When IMF structural adjustment programs fail, that’s an unsurprising consequence of big tax increases, not the fault of capitalism.
2. Government monetary policy deserves the bulk of the blame for financial crises with Fannie and Freddie also playing a role in the case of America.
3. China and Russia are relevant from a geopolitical perspective, but their economies could be far more prosperous if government played a smaller role.

Heck, per-capita output in both China and Russia is far below U.S. levels, so the notion that they are role models is amazingly oblivious to reality.

Now let’s review some evidence about the downside of “state-led” economic policy.

The Economist notes that cronyism does not have a very successful track record.

Some argue it makes no sense for a government to place VC bets, directly or otherwise. …Massimo Colombo, an academic who studies government VC in Europe at the Polytechnic University of Milan, …admits that, when results are measured by jobs created or productivity boosted, the private sector is far better at deploying capital. Studying 25,000 government VC investments in 28 countries, between 2000 and 2014, he and colleagues concluded that they worked only when they did not compete directly with the private sector.

And research from three economists at Italy’s central bank specifically measured the loss of economic efficiency when governments operate and control businesses.

In OECD countries public services, especially at local level, are often provided by public enterprises (Saussier and Klien, 2014). Therefore, the efficiency of LPEs is important for the overall efficiency of the economy and the sustainability of public finances. …we are able to build a very detailed dataset that allows us to compare firms that are observationally equivalent, apart from the ownership indicator, thus making possible the definition of the appropriate set of comparison firms. …Although we focus on Italy, which represents a particularly interesting case to analyze for several reasons, the approach we have followed in this paper may be easily adapted to other countries. We find that the performance of Italian LPEs, measured in terms of total factor productivity, is on average lower than that of private enterprises by about 8%… our results show that the ownership structure is more important than the market structure in explaining the performance of LPEs with respect to their private sector counterparts. …Our results imply that policy measures aimed at privatizing LPEs (totally or, at least, partially) can improve their performance, by reducing the level of public control and promoting cost-benefit analysis for investments.

In other words, the type of statism doesn’t really matter.

The inevitable result is less growth and prosperity.

Which is why I advocate “separation of business and state.”

Simply stated, I want to reverse the data in this chart because I understand the data in this video and this chart.

P.S. If my statist friends disagree, accept my challenge and please show me a cronyist nation that is outperforming a market-oriented nation.

Read Full Post »

Another State Joins the Flat Tax Club

The best policy for a state (assuming it wants growth and competitiveness) is to have no income tax. Along with a modest burden of government spending, of course.

The next-best approach is for a state to have a flat tax. If nothing else, a flat tax inevitably will have a reasonable rate since it’s politically difficult to pillage everyone (though Illinois is trying very hard to be an exception to that rule).

Moreover, a flat tax also sends a signal that politicians in the state don’t (or can’t) play the divide-and-conquer game of periodically raising taxes on different income groups.

Today, we have some good news. Kentucky has ditched its so-called progressive income tax and joined the flat tax club. The Tax Foundation has the details (including the changes in the state’s ranking).

…legislators in Kentucky overrode Governor Matt Bevin’s veto to pass HB 366, a tax reform package, in the last few days of the session. Ultimately, HB 366…increases Kentucky’s ranking on the State Business Tax Climate Index from 33rd to 18th. …Here’s how HB 366 changes Kentucky’s tax code: Replacing the current six-bracket individual income tax, which has a top rate of 6.0 percent, with a 5 percent single rate individual income tax; …Replacing the current three-bracket corporate income tax, with its top rate of 6.0 percent, with a 5 percent flat rate; …Expanding the sales tax base to include select services…; and Raising the cigarette tax from 60 cents to $1.10 per pack. …the changes in this tax reform package dramatically improve the state’s tax climate. By broadening bases while lowering rates, starting to correct the inequities in the sales tax base, and taking steps to make the state more friendly to investment, policymakers in the state took a responsible approach to comprehensive tax reform.

Kentucky will have a better tax system, but there is a dark lining to the silver cloud of reform.

The legislation is a net tax increase, meaning state politicians will have more money to spend (which is a variable that is not included in the Tax Foundation’s Business Tax Climate Index).

As a big fan of the no-tax-hike pledge, that makes me sympathetic to some of those who opposed the legislation.

But I confess that I’m nonetheless happy that there’s now another state with a flat tax.

Which motivated me to create a five-column ranking for states with regards to the issue of personal income tax.

The best states are in the first column, since they don’t impose any income tax. The second-best option is a flat tax, and then I have three options for so-called progressive tax regimes. A “low-rate” state means the top bracket is less than 5 percent and a “class-warfare” state means the top bracket is higher than 8 percent (with other states in a middle group).

Kentucky has moved from the fourth column to the second column, which is a nice step. Very similar to what North Carolina did a few years ago.

Kansas, by contrast, recently went from the fourth column to the third column and then back to the fourth column.

And I may have to create a special sixth column for states such as California.

Read Full Post »

The Looming Fiscal Nightmare of Extravagant Unfunded Pensions for State and Local Bureaucrats

Back in 2013, I shared a poll to see who people would pick as their “favorite political cartoonist.” Michael Ramirez currently has the lead, which doesn’t surprise me when you look at options (here, here, here, and here) I provided.

But if there was a prize for the most depressingly accurate political cartoon, he also would win the prize for his depiction of what happens when state and local politicians “negotiate” compensation packages for bureaucrats.

Simply stated, politicians have a giant incentive to provide lavish benefits to interest groups that then recycle some of the loot back to elected officials in the form of campaign contributions.

But the real key to the scam is that the bill gets imposed on future generations.

The American Legislative Exchange Council has a must-read report on the giant funding gaps that this has produced in the pension plans for state and local government bureaucrats.

If net pension assets are determined using more realistic investment return assumptions, pension funding gaps are much wider than even the large sums reported in state financial documents. Unfunded liabilities (using a risk-free rate of return assumption) of state-administered pension plans now exceed $6 trillion—an increase of $433 billion since our 2016 report. The national average funding ratio is a mere 33.7 percent, amounting to $18,676 dollars of unfunded liabilities for every resident of the United States. …the personal share of liability for every resident in each state, an indicator of the severity of the taxes to be borne now or in the future by each taxpayer for promises made but not funded. In Alaska, each resident is on the hook for a staggering $45,689, the highest in the nation. Connecticut, Ohio, Illinois, and New Mexico follow for the five highest per person unfunded pension liabilities.

This map is the most important takeaway from the report. It shows which states have the highest per-capita unfunded liabilities.

I’m not surprised to see Alaska, Illinois, Connecticut, and New Jersey near the bottom of the rankings. All of them were choices in my poll on which state was “most likely to collapse.”

But perhaps New Mexico, Hawaii, and Ohio should have been on that list as well.

For further background on the issue, here are some passages from a pension primer published by Forbes.

Years ago, as an actuarial student, …I remember…first, the eye-popping idea that state constitutions promised state and local employees that they could keep their existing benefits, not just for past service accruals, but for all future years of employment; and, second, the notion that it was generally accepted for public plans to be un- or underfunded… this is the story that’s repeated over and over again.  Pensions are made more generous — with high accrual rates, low retirement eligibility ages, generous cost of living provisions — as a means of providing more generous compensation to state and local employees, without actually needing to pay anything from the current year’s budget.  Costs are deferred until well after current legislators have themselves retired. …pension debt is even worse than ordinary state debts, for instance, bond issues for building up infrastructure.  Pension debt is nothing other than borrowing to pay for present-day employee salaries.

In other words, bureaucrat pensions are a scam, an opportunity for politicians to buy off a powerful voting bloc today while imposing the bill on the future.

Bureaucrats are making out like bandits, as the New York Times recently reported.

A public university president in Oregon gives new meaning to the idea of a pensioner. Joseph Robertson, …who retired as head of the Oregon Health & Science University last fall, receives the state’s largest government pension. It is $76,111. Per month. That is considerably more than the average Oregon family earns in a year. Oregon — like many other states and cities, including New Jersey, Kentucky and Connecticut — is caught in a fiscal squeeze of its own making. Its economy is growing, but the cost of its state-run pension system is growing faster. More government workers are retiring, including more than 2,000, like Dr. Robertson, who get pensions exceeding $100,000 a year. The state is not the most profligate pension payer in America… “It’s an affront to everybody who pays taxes,” said Bruce Dennis, a retired carpenter from outside Portland who earned a $54,000-a-year pension by swinging a hammer for 45 years. No one gives him extra money.

But there’s a problem with this scam.

As Margaret Thatcher famously noted, sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.

And we’re getting to that point, as illustrated by this article for the Wall Street Journal. It cites what’s happening on the state level in Connecticut.

Connecticut has just 31.7% of what it needs to pay its employees’ future retirement benefits, according to state financial reports. A fund for teachers has 52.3%. Together, that adds up to more than $37 billion in unfunded pension liabilities, or about $10,300 per Connecticut resident. Connecticut’s unfunded pension liabilities resulted from nearly 40 years of politicians making promises about benefits without adequately funding them, according to a 2015 study by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

And it gives an example of trouble at the local level from a city in Michigan.

East Lansing, home of Michigan State University…is struggling with almost $125 million in unfunded pension and retiree health-care liabilities, has been cutting services… East Lansing asked MSU to pony up $100 million over 20 years to help shore up the city’s underfunded pension plan. The alternative, the city said, was asking voters to approve a 1% income tax that would hit university employees and working students. After negotiations went nowhere, the city brought the income-tax proposal before voters in a referendum last November. …On Nov. 7, East Lansing residents shot down the income-tax referendum, forcing the city to debate what services to cut to save money for the pension obligations. …The city hopes to shed another 17 police and fire positions over the next two years… Altmann suggested a long list of potential cuts to make more room in the budget for increased pension payments: closing the fire station on MSU’s campus, shuttering the city’s pool, aquatic center, dog park and soccer complex, suspending bulk leaf pickup and plowing of public sidewalks and ending annual jazz, folk, film and art festivals.

This is not going to end well.

And the problem seems to get worse every year.

Doesn’t matter who is slicing and dicing the data. The numbers always look grim.

When the next recession hits, many of these simmering problems are going to explode.

P.S. In addition to extravagant and unfunded pensions, don’t forget that state and local bureaucrats (and their federal cousins) are overpaid.

P.P.S. And if you don’t believe that they’re overpaid, then please explain why they don’t voluntarily leave their jobs for positions in the economy’s productive sector?

P.P.P.S. Also keep in mind that there are negative macroeconomic repercussions when bureaucrats are overpaid.

Read Full Post »

A Painful Lesson for German Taxpayers

I’ve been in Prague the past few days for a meeting of the European Resource Bank. I spoke today about a relatively unknown international bureaucracy called the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and I warned that it is going through a process of OECD-ization, which is simply my way of saying it is pursuing bad policy.

I’ll write about that issue in the near future, but today’s topic is based on a presentation from Michael Jäger of the Barvarian Taxpayers Association. He shared some depressing data on how the German government imposed a surtax for the ostensibly limited purpose of helping the finance the reunification of West Germany and East Germany.

But limited apparently means forever.

You’ll notice two things in the chart he shared..

• First, the German government has been the big winner from this new levy, collecting €214 billion euros over the past 15 years and spending less than €157 billion euros. In other words, the politicians now have a lot of extra loot to spend elsewhere.
• Second, revenues continue to rise even though the ostensible purpose of the tax is disappearing. Herr Jäger is pressuring the German government to eliminate the tax, but Frau Merkel apparently has little interest in reducing the nation’s tax burden.

To save non-German speakers from having to translate, the dark blue bars are “federal allocations to new states” and the light blue bars are “revenues from the solidarity surcharge.”

The big lesson to learn from this data is that temporary taxes are like temporary programs. They will last forever unless politicians somehow can br pressured to reduce their grip on the economy.

And that’s not easy, though I told some participants in the conference that it could be done. The United States government actually repealed a temporary telephone tax that was imposed to help finance the Spanish-American War.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that the tax wasn’t repealed until last decade, more than 100 years after that war ended. I’m not joking.

Another painful lesson is that taxes on the rich often wind up penalizing other people. The Spanish-American War telephone tax was supposed to hit rich people since they were the ones who first utilized telephone technology.

But then the rest of us eventually got telephones as well, and we also had to pay the tax.

Just as the income tax was first imposed on just a tiny handful of very wealthy people, but it eventually morphed into a malignant tax code that now bedevils tens of millions of households with modest incomes.

Something to keep in mind when the crowd in Washington says we should have a value-added tax. Based on what’s happened in Europe, I guarantee it would just be a matter of time before that tax became more onerous to finance an ever-expanding burden of government spending.

Read Full Post »

Socialism: A Dreary Failure, Malignantly Evil, or Both?

When trying to convince someone about the downsides of socialism, I generally make a practical argument. I point out that socialism has universally failed, whether looking at totalitarian versions in places such as North Korea and Cuba or democratic versions in places such as Venezuela and Greece.

Simply stated, the particular strain of socialism doesn’t make a difference. At the end of the day, the greater the level of statism, the greater the level of economic damage.

But our friends on the left aren’t discouraged. Indeed, the support for cranks like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn is a sign that socialist policies still have appeal to some people.

Writing for CapX, Kristian Niemietz of London’s Institute for Economic Affairs contemplates the resurgence of socialism. He starts by citing examples of pro-socialist writings.

Opinion pieces which tell us to stop obsessing over socialism’s past failures…have almost become a genre… Nathan Robinson, the editor of Current Affairs, wrote…that socialism has not “failed”. It has just never been done properly… Closer to home, Owen Jones wrote that Cuba’s current version of socialism was not “real” socialism… And Washington Post columnist Elizabeth Bruenig wrote an article with the self-explanatory title ‘It’s time to give socialism a try’.

Kristian provides three reasons why the we’ll-do-better-next-time theory of socialism is very impractical.

…articles in this genre share a number of common flaws. First, as much as the authors insist that previous examples of socialism were not “really” socialist, none of them can tell us what exactly they would do differently. …Secondly, the authors do not seem to realise that there is nothing remotely new about the lofty aspirations they talk about, and the buzzphrases they use. Giving “the people” democratic control over economic life has always been the aspiration, and the promise, of socialism. …Thirdly, contemporary socialists completely fail to address the deficiencies of socialism in the economic sphere. They talk a lot about how their version of socialism would be democratic, participatory, non-authoritarian, nice and cuddly. Suppose they could…magically make that work. What then? They would then be able to avoid the Gulags, the show trials and the secret police… But we would still be left with a dysfunctional economy.

Amen to the last point.

I wrote last year that Marxist socialism is disgusting and brutal compared to liberal socialism, but both versions lead to economic malaise.

Which leads to the conclusion of Kristian’s column.

Ultimately, the contemporary argument for socialism boils down to: “next time will be different, because we say so.” After more than two dozen failed attempts, that is just not good enough.

Of course, some people instinctively knew that socialism was a pre-determined recipe for failure. Here’s the great Winston Churchill speaking about statism shortly after World War II.

Spot on. You can’t control an economy without controlling people.

And here’s another voice from the past, courtesy of Reddit‘s libertarian page.

And here’s Mr. Rogers imagining a fantasy world where socialism might work.

Last but not least, let’s close with this gem from Reddit‘s Libertarian Meme page.

Though when you think about people starving to death in places like Venezuela and North Korea, I suppose we shouldn’t laugh too much.

P.S. Other examples of socialism humor can be enjoyed here, here, and here.

Read Full Post »

The “Buffett Rule” and the Taxation of Labor and Capital

Politicians routinely assert that they want more economic growth. That’s a laudable sentiment, although I doubt their sincerity for the simple reason that these are the same people who frequently impose policies that discourage productive economic activity.

Growth occurs when there’s an increase in the quantity and/or quality of labor and capital. These so-called factors of production determine how efficiently we produce and how much we produce.

Which is why there should be low taxes on labor and capital.

And it’s also a good idea for these factors of production to be taxed at the same rate so government policy isn’t tilting the playing field.

Unfortunately, we don’t have low taxes and we also don’t have neutral taxes.

Indeed, Timothy Egan argues in the New York Times that these two factors of production are not taxed equally. I agree.

Except Egan completely bungles the analysis and preposterously claims that labor is taxed at a higher rate.

Dear Government: Enclosed please find my 2017 tax form, and a check for the amount I owe, just ahead of the deadline. …you’re still punishing me for working — taxing wages and business income at a much higher rate than the money I make doing nothing, like holding stocks. Plus, you’re still taxing Warren Buffett at a lower rate than his secretary, despite his plea for fairness.

Wow, he manages to cram a lot of inaccuracy into a couple of sentences.

In reality, the current tax code is very biased against saving and investment.

Here’s some of what I wrote when I debunked Warren Buffett’s deeply flawed claim about relative tax burdens back in 2011.

…dividends and capital gains are both forms of double taxation. …if he wants honest effective tax rate numbers, he needs to show the…corporate tax rate. …Moreover, …Buffett completely ignores the impact of the death tax

For years, I’ve been recycling a chart showing how the American tax code mistreats saving and investment. But that chart became outdated by the fiscal cliff deal, then became even more inaccurate because of Obamacare tax hikes, and most recently became even more inaccurate thanks to the Trump tax plan.

So here’s an up-to-date version.

And for purposes of today’s issue, the top side and left side of the flowchart combine to show how labor income is taxed and the top side and right side of the flowchart combine to show how capital is taxed.

The problem with Egan’s analysis is that he compares taxes on labor income (as high as 37 percent) with the 23.8 percent rate on dividends and/or capital gains. Yet that’s either incredibly sloppy or grievously dishonest because that income also gets hit by the corporate income tax.

And it’s worth pointing out that stocks and other financial assets are purchased with after-tax dollars (captured by the top portion of the chart).

P.S. Adding payroll taxes to the flowchart doesn’t change anything. There would be an additional levy at the top of the chart, leading to a lower level of after-tax earning. So the net result is simply that people have less money to either spend or invest.

P.P.S. Warren Buffett periodically – and inaccurately – asserts that his tax rate in higher than his secretary’s tax rate. Yet his theoretical support for higher tax burdens crashes into the reality of his professional tax-minimization behavior.

Read Full Post »

Economic Freedom in Europe

I periodically share data comparing the United States and Europe, usually because I want to convince people that America’s medium-sized welfare state is better (less worse) than Europe’s bloated welfare states.

In other words, Bernie Sanders is wrong.

But I sometimes feel guilty when making these unflattering comparisons because Europe – at least by world standards – actually deserves a good bit of praise.

If you look at Economic Freedom of the World, you’ll find that the 28 nations of the European Union (outlined in red) have relatively strong scores. Indeed, 27 of them rank in the top half, with Greece being the embarrassing exception.

And 17 EU nations rank in the top quartile, three of them above the U.S.

If you dig into the data, you’ll find that EU nations generally get crummy scores for fiscal policy, but misguided policies on taxes and spending are more than offset by superior scores for trade, monetary policy, regulatory policy, and quality of governance.

Now let’s look at some recent trends. I mentioned yesterday that I’m at the European Parliament in Brussels for a conference on economic freedom.

My friend Martin Agerup from Denmark gave an overview of economic freedom in EU nations, and I want to highlight some of his slides.

We’ll start with this modified ranking of economic freedom, which looks at where a hypothetical European nation would rank if it cherry-picked the best real-world scores (for the five major indices) of the various EU countries.

This hypothetical country, based on the best practices of various EU nations, would have the third-highest score for economic liberty – trailing only Hong Kong and Singapore.

This underscores my point about considerable economic liberty in Europe.

Martin also looked at trends in the European Union.

Here’s a slide looking at the evolution of economic freedom in Western Europe and Eastern Europe.

Three things are worth noting about this chart.

• First, there was a dramatic improvement in economic freedom in Western Europe (blue line) from 1975-2000. Many people know about Thatchernomics, but there was a lot of pro-market reform in the rest of Europe.
• Second, you’ll notice the giant jump in economic freedom in Eastern Europe (red line) from 1995-2005. The collapse of communism has resulted in vast improvements in economic liberty.
• Third, the overall continent has seen comparatively little progress in recent years.

But averages can be deceiving. This next chart shows that some nations did rise and fall over the past decade. Many Eastern European nations boosted their scores by a modest degree, and Sweden also deserves a special mention.

Greece stands out for the worst performance in the past 10 years.

Which gives me an excuse to share one final chart from Martin’s presentation. Sweden suffered a deep crisis at the start of the 1990s, somewhat akin to what Greece suffered in 2008. But the two countries responded in radically different ways. Sweden shrank government and boosted economic liberty while Greece increased the size and scope of the state (aided and abetted by bailouts!).

This video has more details on the comparison of the two countries.

P.S. Notwithstanding the relatively nice things I just wrote about Europe, the continent faces some major fiscal challenges. And middle-class taxpayers, who already are being suffocated by high taxes, will probably get further pillaged.

Read Full Post »

More Government Spending = Weaker Economic Performance

I’m in Brussels, where I’m participating in an “Economic Freedom Summit” on the unfriendly turf of the European Parliament.

My role was to chair a panel earlier today about whether Venezuela can recover from socialism. I obviously have an opinion on that topic, but I want to write today about some information that was shared on the panel about transition economies.

Andrei Illarionov, a former adviser to Vladimir Putin, gave a talk about economic reform in Russia. I also have an opinion on that topic, but that’s also not today’s issue.

Instead, I want to share some of his charts on the broader topic of government spending and economic growth.

As you might expect, he showed the negative correlation between the size of government and economic performance in Russia.

He also had numbers for the United States, though for a much longer period of time.

He also had the data for Germany.

And also the numbers for Japan.

Since the panel’s main focus was countries making the transition from communism, Andrei also looked at the relationship between government spending and growth rates in those nations.

Last but not least, here are his calculations based on 56 years of data in developed countries, on the impact of government spending on economic growth.

This is powerful data, even when you factor in the caveats Andrei mentioned in the discussion.

For all intents and purposes, the lines in Andrei’s various charts are measures of the downward sloping portion of the Rahn Cure. I explain in this video.

I’ve shared research on government spending and economic performance on any occasions, including some findings from a very good book published by London’s Institute for Economic Affairs.

And it’s worth noting that even the left-leaning OECD has produced findings very similar to Andrei’s data.

• The OECD admitted in one study that “a reduction in the size of the government could increase long-term GDP by about 10%, with much larger effects in some countries.”
• The OECD admitted in another study that “a cut in the tax-to-GDP ratio by 10 percentage points of GDP (accompanied by a deficit-neutral cut in transfers) may increase annual growth by ½ to 1 percentage points.”
• The OECD admitted in a different study that “an increase of about one percentage point in the tax pressure (or, equivalently one half of a percentage point in government consumption, taken as a proxy for government size)…could be associated with a direct reduction of about 0.3 per cent in output per capita. If the investment effect is taken into account, the overall reduction would be about 0.6-0.7 per cent.”

And the IMF also has a statist orientation, but it also has confessed that larger governments hinder growth, writing that “A tax cut for the middle-class, financed from a lump-sum reduction in government spending, …raises the steady state GDP by just under 1 percent after 5 years… 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.”

In other words, the research clearly shows that shrinking the burden of government spending is a great recipe to promote greater prosperity. Andrei’s data is simply another layer of evidence.

Read Full Post »

In a Single Image, Everything You Need to Know about the New CBO Budget Numbers

The Congressional Budget Office just released its annual Economic and Budget Outlook, and almost everyone in Washington is agitated (or pretending to be agitated) about annual deficits exceeding $1 trillion starting in the 2020 fiscal year.

All that red ink isn’t good news, but I’m much more concerned (and genuinely so) about this line from CBO’s forecast. In just 10 years, the burden of federal spending is going to jump from 20.6 percent of GDP to 23.6 percent!

Simply stated, we’ve entered the era of baby boomer retirement. And because we have some very poorly designed entitlement programs, that means the federal budget – assuming we leave it on autopilot – is going to consume an ever-growing share of our national economic output.

The bottom line is that Washington is violating my Golden Rule.

Let’s look at the underlying numbers. Federal spending is projected by CBO to grow by an average of about 5.5 percent per year over the next decade while nominal GDP is estimated to grow by just 4.0  percent annually.

And that unfortunate trend isn’t limited to the nest 10 years. CBO’s latest long-run forecast, which I discussed last year, shows a never-ending deterioration of America’s fiscal position.

Hello Greece.

Fortunately, there is a solution to this mess.

A modest amount of spending restraint can quickly reverse our fiscal troubles and put us on a path to a balanced budget. More importantly, limits on the growth of spending can slowly reduce the size of the federal government relative to the private sector.

Here’s a chart, based on CBO’s numbers, that shows how much Uncle Sam is spending this year (a bit over $4.1 trillion), along with a blue line showing projected tax revenues over the next 10 years (blue line). And I’ve shown what happens if spending is “only” allowed to increase by either 2 percent annually (orange line) or 3 percent annually (grey line) over the next decade.

This chart is basically everything you need to know. It shows that our fiscal situation is not hopeless. All we have to do is make sure government is growing slower than the productive sector of the economy.

A good rule of thumb, as suggested in the chart title, is that government shouldn’t grow faster than the rate of inflation.

And we’ve done it before.

• During the Clinton years, the United States enjoyed a multi-year period of spending restraint. We got a balanced budget because of that frugality. More important, spending fell as a share of GDP.
• During the Obama years, we benefited from a five-year de facto spending freeze. Deficits dropped dramatically and the nation experienced the biggest drop in the relative burden of spending since the end of World War II.

And many other nations also have also managed multi-year periods of spending restraint.

Let’s close with a video I narrated which illustrates how modest spending discipline generates good outcomes.

It’s from 2010, so the numbers are no longer relevant, but otherwise the analysis applies just as strongly today.

P.S. I’m not overly optimistic that President Trump is serious about solving this problem. His proposed a semi-decent amount of spending restraint in last year’s budget, but then he signed into law a grotesque budget-busting appropriations bill.

Read Full Post »

A Deceptive and Inaccurate Call for Higher Taxes

Five former Democratic appointees to the Council of Economic Advisers have a column in today’s Washington Post asserting that we should not blame entitlements for America’s future fiscal problems.

The good news is that they at least recognize that there’s a future problem.

The bad news is that their analysis is sloppy, inaccurate, and deceptive.

They start with an observation about red ink that is generally true, though I think the link between government borrowing and interest rates is rather weak (at least until a government – like Greece – gets to the point where investors no longer trust its ability to repay).

The federal budget deficit is on track to exceed $1 trillion next year and get worse over time. Eventually, ever-rising debt and deficits will cause interest rates to rise. …the growing debt will take an increasing toll.

But the authors don’t want us to blame entitlements for ever-rising levels of red ink.

It is dishonest to single out entitlements for blame.

That’s a remarkable claim since the Congressional Budget Office (which is not a small government-oriented bureaucracy, to put it mildly) unambiguously shows that rising levels of so-called mandatory spending are driving our long-run fiscal problems.

CBO’s own charts make this abundantly clear (click on the image to see the original column with the full-size chart).

So how do the authors get around this problem?

First, they try to confuse the issue by myopically focusing on the short run.

The primary reason the deficit in coming years will now be higher than had been expected is the reduction in tax revenue from last year’s tax cuts, not an increase in spending.

Okay, fair enough. There will be a short-run tax cut because of the recent tax legislation. But the column is supposed to be about the future debt crisis. And that’s a medium-term and long-term issue.

Well, it turns out that they have to focus on the short run because their arguments become very weak – or completely false – when we look at the overall fiscal situation.

For instance, they make an inaccurate observation about the recent tax reform legislation.

…the tax cuts passed last year actually added an amount to America’s long-run fiscal challenge that is roughly the same size as the preexisting shortfalls in Social Security and Medicare.

That’s wrong. The legislation actually increases the long-run tax burden.

And that’s in addition to the long-understood reality that the tax burden already is scheduled to gradually increase, even measured as a share of economic output.

Once again, the CBO has a chart with the relevant data. Note especially the steady rise in the burden of the income tax (once again, feel free to click on the image to see the original column with the full-size chart).

The authors do pay lip service to the notion that there should be some spending restraint.

There is some room for…spending reductions in these programs, but not to an extent large enough to solve the long-run debt problem.

But even that admission is deceptive.

We don’t actually need spending reductions. We simply need to slow down the growth of government. Indeed, our long-run debt problem would be solved if imposed some sort of Swiss-style or Hong Kong-style spending cap so that the budget couldn’t grow faster than 3 percent yearly.

In any event, they wrap up their column by unveiling their main agenda. They want higher taxes.

Additional revenue is critical…responding to the looming fiscal challenge required a balanced approach that combined increased revenue with reduced spending. Two bipartisan commissions, Simpson-Bowles and Domenici-Rivlin, proposed such approaches that called for tax reform to raise revenue as a percent of GDP…set tax policy to realize adequate revenue.

As I already noted, the tax burden already is going to climb as a share of GDP. But the authors want an increase on top of the built-in increase.

And it’s very revealing that they cite Simpson-Bowles, which is basically a left-wing proposal of higher taxes combined with the wrong type of entitlement reform. To be fair, the Domenici-Rivlin plan  has the right kind of entitlement reform, but that proposal is nonetheless bad news since it contains a value-added tax.

The bottom line if that the five Democratic CEA appointees who put together the column (I’m wondering why Austan Goolsbee didn’t add his name) do not make a compelling case for higher taxes.

Unless, of course, the goal is to enable a bigger burden of government.

Which is the message of this very appropriate cartoon.

Needless to say, this belongs in my “Government in Cartoons” collection.

P.S. Entitlement spending is not only to blame for our future spending problems. It’s also the cause of our current spending problems.

P.P.S. In a perverse way, I actually like the column we discussed today. Five top economists on the left put their heads together and tried to figure out the most compelling argument for higher taxes. Yet what they produced is shoddy and deceptive. In other words, they didn’t make a strong argument because they don’t have a strong argument. Reminds me of Robert Rubin’s anemic argument last year against the GOP tax plan.

P.P.P.S. Four former presidents offer good advice on the topic of taxation.

Read Full Post »

Gun Control Satire

It’s time to augment the satirical columns about gun control that I shared in February and March.

Let’s start with a very useful set of definitions, sort of like this Republican-to-English dictionary, for anyone who follows what the establishment media writes about gun control.

By the way, I don’t blame many columnists and reporters fro being unfamiliar with guns. My knowledge also is rather limited.

But shouldn’t they do a bit of research before spouting off on the topic? Heck, just read this Larry Correia column. They don’t have to agree with him, but at least they should know the basics.

Our next item is from Reddit‘s Libertarian Meme page. It’s sort of a combination of this real sign and this satirical video. But it sadly captures the left’s mentality.

Speaking of the left-wing mentality on the issue of guns, I wonder how many of them would volunteer to be philosophically consistent and take this step to fight rape?

If they think full amputation is too much, perhaps they can follow the advice in the image at the bottom of this post.

This next gem is basically the Twitter version of my column last month on the 2nd Amendment, addressing the fact that most advocates of gun control, if you press them on the issue, really do want to confiscate all guns and eviscerate part of the Bill of Rights.

Last but not least, we have an expanded version of the anti-rape image from above.

The line about drunk drivers is nicely captured by the bottom image in this column.

I also can’t resist also calling attention to the bottom image in this column. It’s perfect for your lefty friends who argue that “assault weapons” aren’t covered by the 2nd Amendment.

Read Full Post »

Good News on Unemployment, but So-So News on Jobs and Dependency

There is a lot of good news about the job market in America.

The official unemployment rate, released just yesterday, is down to 4.1 percent, which is the lowest its been since the end of the Clinton years. Even more impressive, the number of people getting unemployment benefits (i.e., getting paid not to work) has dropped to the lowest level since the early 1970s.

I don’t want to rain on this parade, but the numbers aren’t as good as they seem.

Back during the Obama years, I repeatedly pointed out the real health of the labor market should be measured by looking at either the rate of labor force participation or the employment-population ratio.

These are the numbers that give us a more accurate picture of the extent to which labor is being productively utilized (remember, national income is determined by the quality and quantity of labor and capital in the economy).

So let’s dig into the government’s database on labor force statistics and see where we stand when examining these more-insightful numbers.

We’ll start with the data on the rate of labor force participation, which is basically a measure of those working and looking for work as a share of the adult population. As you can see, that rate dropped significantly at the end of the Bush years/beginning of the Obama years. And it hasn’t recovered even though the recession ended back in 2009.

By the way, we shouldn’t expect this rate to be 100 percent, or even anywhere close to that high. After all, the 16-and-up population includes plenty of full-time students, retired people, disabled, stay-at-home moms (or dads), and others.

But I worry about the downward trend.

Now let’s look at the employment-population ratio, which is slightly more encouraging. We see a precipitous drop during the recession, but at least the number has been trending in the right direction for several years.

Though it’s nonetheless semi-depressing that the increase has been rather slow and we haven’t come anywhere close to recovering from the downturn.

To help understand the rate of joblessness, here’s a video from the Mercatus Center.

And to better understand the rate of employment, here’s a video from Nicholas Eberstadt at the American Enterprise Institute.

As far as I’m concerned, the key factoid is near the end, where he points out that we would have 10 million additional working-age men productively employed if the rate of employment today was the same as it was in 1965.

And that’s largely the fault of government programs – such as unemployment insurance, disability, Obamacare, licensing, etc – that make it easier for people to choose to be unproductive.

Speaking of which, let’s close with some excerpts from one of Jason Riley’s columns in the Wall Street Journal.

Peter Cove dropped out of a graduate program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison more than 50 years ago to enlist in Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. These days, he’s fighting a war on dependency. …Mr. Cove moved to New York in 1965 to work for the city’s new Anti-Poverty Operations Board… Mr. Cove…noticed… “The government’s unprecedented expenditures failed to bring about the decline in poverty that Johnson had promised. Instead, they made things worse.” Between 1962 and 2012, the percentage of the U.S. population receiving government assistance in the form of cash transfers almost doubled to 21% from 11.7%. …Between 1965 and 2011, the official poverty rate was essentially flat, while government spending per person on poverty programs rose by more than 900% after inflation. “…But as welfare spending soared, the decline in poverty came to a grinding halt.” …Mr. Cove…came to understand that the answer to poverty is prosperity, that the private sector is the better generator of prosperity, and that the best antipoverty program is a job. “Not only does big government get in the way when it provides disincentives to work, it also has a profoundly negative effect on community,”… The increase in government dependency that Mr. Cove laments predates President Obama by decades, but it did accelerate on Mr. Obama’s watch.

Great points, particularly about how the welfare state actually undermined progress on reducing poverty and also eroded societal capital.

All of which is captured in this Wizard-of-Id satire.

P.S. Some honest leftists admit that the welfare state has caused collateral damage.

Read Full Post »

Swamp-Creature Republicans Think They Can Atone for a Spending Binge with a Hollow (and Sure-to-Lose) Vote for the Wrong Version of a Constitutional Amendment

My major long-run project during Obama’s presidency was to educate Republicans in Washington about the need for genuine entitlement reform. I explained to them that the United States was doomed, largely because of demographics, to suffer a Greek-style fiscal future if we left policy on autopilot.

Needless to say, I didn’t expect any positive reforms while Obama was in the White House.

Instead, I proselytized for fiscal sanity in hopes that the GOP might be willing to fix our fiscal mess if they had total control of the White House and Congress after the 2016 election.

And it seemed like things were moving in the right direction.

After they took power in 2010, House Republicans repeatedly voted for budget resolutions that included meaningful changes to Medicaid, Medicare, and Obamacare, as well as reductions in wasteful pork-barrel spending. And after the 2014 GOP landslide, Senate Republicans also voted for a budget resolution that assumed good reform.

Then we got the unexpected Trump victory in 2016 and Republicans held all the levers of power starting in 2017.

Sounds like good news for advocates of spending restraint, right?

That may be true in some alternative universe, but that’s definitely not the case in Washington.

As I warned before the election, President Trump is a big-government Republican. And a majority of congressional GOPers, after years of chest beating about the importance of spending restraint, suddenly have decided that the swamp is really a hot tub.

In 2017, my main gripe was that Republicans committed a sin of omission. They had power and didn’t adopt good reforms.

In 2018, they shifted to a sin of commission, voting to bust the spending caps as part of an orgy of new spending.

And guess what they want to do for an encore?

In the ultimate add-insult-to-injury gesture, Republicans (at least the ones in the House) are hoping voters will overlook their profligacy because they’re going to have a symbolic vote on a poorly drafted version of a balanced budget amendment.

The House is slated to vote next week on a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution… The decision to bring the measure — which would require Congress not to spend more than it brings in — to the floor comes just weeks after the passage of a $1.3 trillion spending package that is projected to add billions to the deficit. …The measure has virtually no chance of becoming law as it would need Democratic support in the Senate and ratification from the majority of states.

This is insulting.

These clowns vote to expand the burden of spending and now they want to hoodwink voters with a sham vote for something that has no chance of happening (an amendment requires two-thirds support from both the House and Senate, and then would require ratification from three-fourths of state legislatures).

Do they really think we’re that stupid?!?

To make matters worse, they’re not even proposing a good version of an amendment. Here’s the core provision of H.J. Res 2.

Section 1. Total outlays for any fiscal year shall not exceed total receipts for that fiscal year, unless three-fifths of the whole number of each House of Congress shall provide by law for a specific excess of outlays over receipts by a rollcall vote.

Sound reasonable and innocuous, but I’ve been telling folks on Capitol Hill this is the wrong approach. I pointed out that 49 out of 50 states have some form of balanced budget requirement, yet that doesn’t stop states such as Illinois, California, and New Jersey from over-taxing and over-spending, or from accumulating more debt.

I also explained that the so-called Maastricht rules in the European Union operate in a similar fashion, yet that hasn’t stopped nations such as Greece, France, and Italy from over-taxing and over-spending, or from accumulating more debt.

The problem, I explained, is that anti-deficit rules simply give politicians an excuse to raise taxes (which leads to more spending and more red ink, but I don’t think that causes many sleepless nights for elected officials).

If Republicans are going to go through the trouble of having a phony and symbolic vote, they should at least craft a good amendment. In other words, they should rally behind some sort of spending cap modeled after what exists in Switzerland and Hong Kong. They could even use Representative Kevin Brady’s widely praised MAP Act as a template.

A spending cap is far superior to a balanced-budget rule for two reasons.

1. A spending cap puts the focus on the real problem of excessive growth of government. And if you impose some sort of cap that complies with the Golden Rule, you simultaneously address the real problem of too much spending and the symptom of red ink.
2. A spending cap is much easier to enforce since politicians know that spending can only increase each year by, say 2 percent. A balanced-budget rule, by contrast, is inherently unstable and unworkable because annual revenues can jump or fall significantly depending on economic conditions.

And it’s not just me saying this. Even left-leaning international bureaucracies such as the International Monetary Fund (twice), the European Central Bank, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (twice) have acknowledged that spending caps are the only effective fiscal rule.

At the risk of stating the obvious, Republican politicians are behaving in a despicable fashion.

So you can understand my caustic and frustrated responses in this recent interview with Charles Payne. I’m upset because it’s quite likely that Trump’s spending splurge eventually is going to lead to higher taxes.

I pointed out in the interview that Trump was in a position of power. He could have won the budget fight if he was willing to play hardball with a shutdown.

And I also explained that there shouldn’t be a Washington infrastructure plan for the simple reason that we shouldn’t have a federal Department of Transportation.

Let’s conclude with some sarcasm. I don’t know if the former leader of Tanzania ever uttered this quote I saw on Reddit‘s Libertarian Meme page. But if he did say it, he was spot on.

And here’s a clever bit of humor that I saw on Reddit‘s Libertarian page.

Except the image is unfair. I’ve crunched the numbers. Democrats generally don’t increase spending as fast as Republicans.

With one impressive exception.

Read Full Post »

Which State Will Be the First to Suffer Fiscal Collapse?

I’m a big fan of federalism because states have the flexibility to choose good policy or bad policy.

And that’s good news for me since I get to write about the consequences.

One of the main lessons we learn (see here, here, here, here, and here) is that high-earning taxpayers tend to migrate from states with onerous tax burdens and they tend to land in places where there is no state income tax (we also learn that welfare recipients move to states with bigger handouts, but that’s an issue for another day).

In this interview with Stuart Varney, we discuss whether this trend of tax-motivated migration is going to accelerate.

I mentioned in the interview that restricting the state and local tax deduction is going to accelerate the flight from high-tax states, which underscores what I wrote earlier this year about that provision of the tax bill being a “big [expletive deleted] deal.”

I suggested that Stuart create a poll on which state will be the first to go bankrupt.

And there’s a lot of data to help people choose.

• Freedom in the 50 States.
• Death Spiral states.
• State spending growth.
• Welfare generosity.
• State tax burden.
• State Business Tax Climate.
• State Fiscal Report Card.
• Bureaucrat pension liabilities.
• Even my Moocher Index.

Technically, I don’t think bankruptcy is even possible since there’s no provision for such a step in federal law.

But it’s still an interesting issue, so I decided to create a poll on the question. To make it manageable, I limited the selection to 10 states, all of which rank poorly in one of more of the surveys listed above. And, to avoid technical quibbles, the question is about “fiscal collapse” rather than bankruptcy, default, or bailouts. Anyhow, as they say in Chicago, vote early and vote often.

P.S. I asked a similar question about bankruptcies in developed nations back in 2011. Back then, it appeared Portugal might be the right answer. Today, I’d pick Italy.

Read Full Post »

Keynesian Economics and Transitory, Beggar-Thy-Neighbor Stimulus

When I give speeches on Keynesian economics, I usually begin with a theoretical discussion on why consumer spending is a consequence of growth rather than the cause of growth.

I then focus on two reasons to be skeptical about borrow-and-spend schemes to artificially boost growth.

• In the short run, it makes no sense to “stimulate” an economy by borrowing from one group of people and giving the money to another group of people. It’s like trying to become richer by taking money out of your left pocket and putting it in your right pocket.
• In the long run, so-called stimulus creates a ratchet effect for larger government since politicians rarely obey Keynes’ admonition to cut back on government spending and run surpluses when the economy is in an expansion phase.

But I oftentimes include a caveat when discussing the first point.

It is possible, I hypothesize, to increase your short-run consumption if you take money out of a foreigner’s left pocket and put it in your right pocket.

I hasten to add that this is probably not be a wise course of action since the money may be squandered and you simply wind up further in debt, but I admit that the short-run consumption data will be better.

Well, there’s a new academic study on exactly this issue from the European Stability Mechanism (sort of an IMF for eurozone countries).

Here’s what the authors decided to investigate.

In this paper, we argue that there is a natural and largely unexplored connection between fiscal multipliers and the foreign holdings of public debt. The intuition is simple….fiscal expansions can…have crowding-out effects on the domestic private sector. Probably the most important among the latter is that the resources used by the domestic private sector to acquire public debt can detract from consumption and investment. This implies that the crowding-out effect of fiscal expansions is likely to be stronger when they are financed by selling public debt to domestic (as opposed to foreign) residents.

Here’s some of the data on foreign holdings of national debt.

Our data on foreign holdings of public debt reveals interesting patterns. First of all, there is significant variation across countries: in some countries, such as Canada and Japan, the share of public debt held by foreigners is consistently low, whereas in others, such as Finland and Austria, foreigners hold more than 75% of public debt towards the end of the sample. Over time, in line with the rise of financial globalization, the general pattern is one of increasing public debt in the hands of foreigners. In the United States, for instance, the share of public debt held by foreigners has increased from less than 5% in the 1950s to close to 50% today.

And here’s a chart from the study showing how foreign holdings of U.S. government debt have increased over time.

And their conclusions, after crunching all the numbers, is that nations can boost short-run consumption if a significant share of new debt is financed by foreigners.

Our main result is that, consistent with the previous argument, the estimated size of fiscal multipliers is increasing in the share of public debt that is in the hands of foreigners. This result holds both for the United States during the postwar period, and for a panel of advanced (OECD) economies over the last few decades. …We find that the average foreign share, i.e., the share of public debt held by foreigners before a fiscal shock, …reflect capital inflows, which help finance fiscal expansions thereby minimizing their crowding-out effects on domestic investment.

Incidentally, the authors acknowledge that this creates a beggar-thy-neighbor effect.

Our findings…point to a potentially negative spillover: to the extent that fiscal expansions are financed via foreign borrowing, their crowding-out effects are exported and consumption and investment are reduced elsewhere.

In other words, any transitory benefit one country experiences will be offset by losses elsewhere.

But politicians barely care about their own voters, much less those who live in other countries, so that certainly would not be an effective argument against Keynesian spending binges.

For what it’s worth, I still think the most persuasive argument is that Keynesian economics has an awful track record, even if there’s some ability to shift part of the short-run cost onto foreigners. After all, ask Keynesians to identify an example of successful government stimulus.

• They certainly can’t pick the big-spending era of Hoover and Roosevelt. That was a flop.
• Japan is another example of Keynesian economics producing debt rather than growth.
• And the Obama stimulus also bombed. Indeed, the unemployment rate didn’t drop until afterwards.

And let’s not forget that the long-run costs are always negative because larger government sectors necessarily lead to smaller productive sectors.

P.S. I feel somewhat guilty for writing a column that acknowledges a potential benefit (albeit transitory and unneighborly) of Keynesian economics, so allow me to expiate my sins by sharing this comparison of Keynesian economics and Austrian economics.

For what it’s worth, I think the Austrians over-emphasize the importance of interest rates. But there’s no question they are much closer to the truth than the Keynesians.

P.P.S. If you want to enjoy some cartoons about Keynesian economics, click here, here, here, and here. Here’s some clever mockery of Keynesianism. And here’s the famous video showing the Keynes v. Hayek rap contest, followed by the equally enjoyable sequel, which features a boxing match between Keynes and Hayek. And even though it’s not the right time of year, here’s the satirical commercial for Keynesian Christmas carols.

Read Full Post »

Trump’s Failing Grade on Trade Threatens His Overall GPA on Economic Policy

I explained last month that the World Trade Organization’s dispute-resolution mechanism is the best way of discouraging China from short-sighted mercantilist and cronyist trade policies.

The Trump Administration, though, thinks that the best response to bad Chinese trade policy is to adopt bad American trade policy.

In this interview, I fret that tit-for-tax protectionism is bad, and might even lead to a 1930s-style trade war.

The Wall Street Journal also is concerned, opining this morning about Trump’s self-destructive protectionism.

Stocks have given up their earlier gains since the President unveiled his protectionist trade agenda…the main policy concern is the new uncertainty from rising trade tension. China slapped punitive tariffs on 128 categories of American goods on Monday in retaliation for the Trump Administration’s national-security levies on steel (25%) and aluminum (10%) imports last month. …it sends a pointed message that a larger trade war would hurt American businesses, farmers in particular. …China’s retaliation is best understood as an economic and political demonstration, hitting a small number of products to signal where future blows could fall if the Trump Administration imposes punitive tariffs on $60 billion in Chinese goods to punish the theft of intellectual property. It’s notable that both Republican-leaning and Democratic states were hit. Tariffs on America’s biggest exports to China, such as soybeans and Boeing aircraft, were held in reserve. But don’t be surprised if they’re on the list if the President imposes Section 301 tariffs as he has vowed to do. …there will be significant collateral damage to innocent business bystanders, American consumers, and the overall U.S. economy. Mr. Trump risks undermining the policy gains from tax reform and deregulation that have teed up the economy for faster growth.

Amen, especially that last sentence.

As I warned in the interview, Trump is sabotaging the progress he made on tax policy and regulation.

Not a smart move since he likes to use the stock market as a report card on his performance. Live by the Dow Jones, die by the Dow Jones. Though, in this case, his protectionism means he wants to commit suicide by the Dow Jones.

Speaking of report cards, here’s a mock report card I created for the President. It’s not as amusing as the mock college transcript from Obama’s time at Columbia, but it highlights how bad policy – on spending as well as trade – is offsetting good policy.

It’s a bit different from the grades I gave on the one-year anniversary of Trump’s inauguration, but more time has passed.

P.S. In the section for “teacher comments,” I suggested that the President needs extra tutoring to understand that a capital surplus (the flip side of a trade deficit) is generally a very positive indicator.

P.P.S. Let’s not forget that Trump is also threatening to deep-six NAFTA, so there are multiple threats to open global trade.

P.P.P.S. Makes me miss the Gipper even more. Heck, makes me miss Clinton, since he was in office and played a positive role when NAFTA and the WTO were ratified.

Read Full Post »

Privatization Options for the Scandal-Plagued Veterans Administration

I try not to pay much attention to the staffing decisions of President Trump’s “Boston-phone-book presidency.” Yes, I realize those choices are important, but my focus is policy.

As such, I don’t have any strong opinions on the ouster of David Shulkin, the now-former Secretary at the Department of Veterans Affairs. But I definitely have something to say about whether America’s military vets should be consigned to an inefficient (at best) and costly form of government-run healthcare.

We should never forget that the VA put vets on secret – and sometimes fatal – waiting lists. And then the bureaucrats awarded themselves big bonuses. That is horribly disgusting.

By the way, the VA scandals haven’t stopped.

Here are some excerpts from a report in USA Today.

A USA TODAY investigation found the VA — the nation’s largest employer of health care workers — has for years concealed mistakes and misdeeds by staff members entrusted with the care of veterans. …In some cases, agency managers do not report troubled practitioners to the National Practitioner Data Bank, making it easier for them to keep working with patients elsewhere. The agency also failed to ensure VA hospitals reported disciplined providers to state licensing boards. In other cases, veterans’ hospitals signed secret settlement deals with dozens of doctors, nurses and health care workers that included promises to conceal serious mistakes — from inappropriate relationships and breakdowns in supervision to dangerous medical errors – even after forcing them out of the VA. …The VA has been under fire in recent years for serious problems, including revelations of life-threatening delays in treating veterans in 2014 and efforts to cover up shortfalls by falsifying records.

So what’s the answer? How can we fix a dysfunctional bureaucracy?

The honest answer is that we can’t. Inefficiency, sloth, and failure are inherent parts of government (yes, the free market also is far from perfect, but at least there’s a profit-and-loss incentive that rewards good firms and punishes bad ones).

So it’s time to get the private sector involved. Though I noted in the TV discussion that not all privatization is created equal. If the government simply contracts with selected healthcare providers, that could be a recipe for cronyism since politicians would try to help their campaign contributors.

I much prefer the advance-funding model developed by Chris Preble and Michael Cannon, which would give active-duty service members added money, up front, to purchase a benefits package to cover future costs related to their military service.

For what it’s worth, former VA Secretary Shulkin, in a recent column for the New York Times, was very critical of privatization. But it isn’t clear whether he was referring to the contracted-out version or the advance-funding version.

I am convinced that privatization is a political issue aimed at rewarding select people and companies with profits, even if it undermines care for veterans. …individuals, who seek to privatize veteran health care as an alternative to government-run V.A. care, unfortunately fail to engage in realistic plans regarding who will care for the more than 9 million veterans who rely on the department for life-sustaining care. …privatization leading to the dismantling of the department’s extensive health care system is a terrible idea.

But even if you accept that he’s criticizing the less-preferred from or privatization, he definitely likes throwing rocks in a giant glass house considering the VA received ever-larger amounts of money and generated a horrible track record.

As I said at the end of my interview, a private healthcare provider might get a contract via cronyism, but it still would be a better option for vets since that company presumably wouldn’t let them die on secret waiting lists.

And since the advance-funding option obviously would be for future veterans, we do need a better market-based approach for current veterans.

I’ll close by sharing a Politico article on the infamous boondoggle that got Shulkin in trouble.

Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin’s chief of staff altered an email to create a pretext for taxpayers to pay for Shulkin’s wife to accompany him on a 10-day trip to Europe last summer, the agency’s inspector general reported… The report by Inspector General Michael Missal also claims that Shulkin improperly accepted a gift of Wimbledon tickets during the trip, and a VA employee’s time was misused planning tourist activities for Shulkin and his entourage. …the VA paid for Shulkin’s wife’s airfare, which cost more than $4,300.

This obviously does not reflect well on Shulkin. But the real scandal almost certainly is that the trip to Europe occurred. We don’t know how many bureaucrats participated and what supposedly was going to be achieved by this junked, but I’m guessing the total tab was enormous and the total value was zero. The fact that taxpayers also were saddled with the cost of Shulkin’s wife’s trip merely added insult to injury.

P.S. Since money isn’t unlimited, I think the focus should be on helping veterans injured in battle rather than providing lavish benefits to anyone and everyone who ever wore a uniform.

P.P.S. I mentioned in the interview that the VA is run for the benefit of its bureaucrats. If you doubt me, check out this double-dipping bureaucrat with the triple-dipping scam.

Read Full Post »

The Statism-Generated Misery of Venezuela, Captured in Four Videos

Yesterday’s column looked at the continued government-caused decay of Venezuelan society. To put it mildly, it’s a very sad story of how pervasive statism can destroy a country.

I also wondered whether leftists such as Bernie Sanders, Michael Moore, and Jeremy Corbyn will ever change their minds and (hopefully) apologize for giving aid and comfort to the evil Chavez-Maduro regime. (I’m not holding my breath.)

Today, let’s revisit the issue.

But instead of citing news reports, let’s look at four videos on the tragedy in Venezuela. We’ll start with Reason‘s excellent summary.

I like how the video concludes with a warning that America should avoid the same mistakes.

And that’s not just a throwaway line. Venezuela did not become a basket case overnight. There wasn’t an on-off switch that Chavez or Maduro used to turn the country from capitalism to statism.

Instead, it was the combined effect of decades of bad policy decisions.

In other words, gradual deterioration eventually turned into major disaster. Which may help explain why I’m so distressed about the creeping statism of the Bush and Obama (and perhaps Trump) years.

But I’m digressing. Let’s get back to the videos. Our next item is a report from the New York Times. It’s disappointing (but not overly surprising) that there’s no mention of the big-government policies that have reduced people to scouring for garbage, but you will learn about the horror of daily life for the poor.

Our next video, from Prager University, is a very straightforward description of how socialism has destroyed Venezuela.

I especially like how she concludes with a warning about how big government erodes societal capital, which then makes it very hard to restored liberty.

And the part about classifying involuntary weight loss as the “Maduro Diet” also was a highlight, at least if you like dark humor.

Our last video is an excerpt from a speech by a Venezuelan economist.

The part that grabbed my attention was the downward cycle of government-created inflation and government-imposed minimum-wage hikes. One bad policy leading to another bad policy, over and over again. Lather, rinse, repeat.

And while he doubtlessly exaggerated when he said that every single person in Venezuela would be happy to eat out of America’s trash cans, it’s still horrifying that a big chunk of the population would welcome such an opportunity.

So where will all this lead? At the start of the year, I expressed hope that the people of Venezuela would rise up and overthrow their tyrannical government. I don’t know if I should turn that hope into a prediction, but it certainly seems like it is only a matter of time before something dramatic happens.

Read Full Post »