The Value-Added Tax Is a Precursor for a Bigger Burden of Government Spending

I wrote yesterday about Japan’s experience with the value-added tax, mostly to criticize the International Monetary Fund.

The statist bureaucrats at the IMF are urging a big increase in Japan’s VAT even though the last increase was only imposed two months ago (in a perverse way, I admire their ability to stay on message).

Today, I want to focus on a broader lesson regarding the political economy of the value-added tax. Because what’s happened in Japan is further confirmation that a VAT would be a terrible idea for the United States.

Simply stated, the levy would be a recipe for bigger government and more red ink.

Let’s look at three charts. First, here’s a look at how politicians in Japan have been pushing the VAT burden ever higher.

What’s been the result? Have politicians used the money to lower other taxes? Have they used the money to reduce government debt?

Hardly. As was the case in Europe, the value-added tax in Japan is associated with an increase in the burden of spending.

Here’s a chart (based on the IMF’s own data) showing that government is now consuming almost 35 percent of economic output, up from about 30 percent of GDP when the VAT was first imposed.

I’ve added a trend line (automatically generated by Excel) to illustrate what’s been happening. It’s not a big effect, but keep in mind the VAT never climbed above 5 percent until 2014.

Now let’s look at some numbers that are very unambiguous.

Japan’s politicians imposed the VAT in part because they claimed it was a way of averting more red ink.

Yet our final chart shows what’s happened to both gross debt and net debt since the VAT was imposed.

To be sure, the VAT was only one piece of a large economic puzzle. If you want to finger the main culprits for all this red ink, look first at Keynesian spending binges and economic stagnation.

But we also know the politicians were wrong when they said a VAT would keep debt under control

I’ll close with a political observation.

The left wants a value-added tax for the simple reason that it’s the only way to finance European-type levels of redistribution (yes, they also want class-warfare taxes on the rich, but that’s mostly for reasons of spite since even they recognize that such levies don’t actually generate much revenue).

But it’s very unlikely that a VAT will be imposed on the United States by the left. At least not acting alone.

The real danger is that we’ll wind up with a VAT because some folks on the right offer their support. These people don’t particularly want European-type levels of redistribution, but they think that’s going to happen. So one of their motives is to figure out ways to finance a large welfare state without completely tanking the economy.

They are right that a VAT doesn’t impose the same amount of damage, on a per-dollar-collected basis, as higher income tax rates. Or increases in double taxation (though it’s important to realize that it would still penalize productive behavior by increasing the wedge between pre-tax income and post-tax consumption).

But their willingness to surrender is nonetheless very distressing.

The bottom line is that the most important fiscal issue facing America is the need for genuine entitlement reform. Achieving that goal is an uphill battle. But if politicians get a big new source of revenue, that uphill battle becomes an impossible battle.

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The IMF Proposes Ever-Increasing Tax Hikes for Japan

It seems that the International Monetary Fund and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have an ongoing contest to see which bureaucracy can be the biggest cheerleader for bad fiscal policy.

• They compete (OECD vs IMF) to promote more spending.
• They compete (OECD vs IMF) to push higher tax burdens.
• They compete (OECD vs IMF) to advocate class warfare.

You can even see them competing to encourage bad policy in various nations.

In Japan, for instance, the OECD has been pushing for higher taxes while the IMF has been pushing for Keynesian spending.

But now the IMF is upping the ante by adding its bad advice on tax policy.

Japan’s politicians raised the value-added tax just two months ago.

But that’s not enough for the IMF. The bureaucrats already are urging a far bigger increase in the levy.

Japan needs to raise its consumption tax further to fund growing social security costs, the International Monetary Fund recommended… The tax “would need to increase gradually” to 15% by 2030 and 20% by 2050, the IMF said in a report. …IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva praised the smooth implementation of the Oct. 1 hike that took the consumption tax to 10% from 8%.

Needless to say, one of the main lessons from this sordid experience is that it’s never a good idea to give politicians a new source of revenue.

Look at what’s happened ever since the VAT was first imposed in 1989.

And now the IMF wants to push the rate up to 15 percent. And then 20 percent.

By the way, it’s worth noting that Japan’s politicians actually welcome this bad advice.

The nation faces a big demographic crunch (increasing life expectancy and low birth rates), and that means entitlement spending is on track to consume an ever-larger share of economic output.

To give you an idea of what’s happening, here’s a chart from the IMF’s report on Japan. It only looks at health-related spending, so keep in mind that the red line would be significantly hihger if Japan’s version of Social Security was included.

The bottom line is that Japan’s politicians want options to finance a growing burden of government spending.

And since decades of failed Keynesian policy have saddled the nation with record levels of debt, ever-larger sources of tax revenue are their preferred choice.

Sadly, the IMF is more than happy to rationalize that bad approach.

P.S. Japan’s politicians could reform entitlements, of course, but don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen. Instead, expect this “depressing chart” to get even more depressing.

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Thanksgiving, Socialism, and Free Enterprise

By global standards, the United States is a bulwark of capitalism. Yes, government is too big and there’s far too much intervention, but we have enough private property and free enterprise to be ranked #5 for economic liberty. Which helps to explain why Americans enjoy higher living standards than Europeans.

But capitalism had to be learned. One of the first European settlements in North America, the Plymouth Plantation in Massachusetts, was based on socialism.

And it was real socialism, with common ownership of the means of production.

Unsurprisingly, it was not a rousing success. Indeed, it was a miserable failure.

Here’s Larry Reed’s analysis of what happened.

We should never forget that the Plymouth colony was headed straight for oblivion under a communal, socialist plan… Land was held in common. Crops were brought to a common storehouse and distributed equally. For two years, every person had to work for everybody else (the community), not for themselves as individuals or families. Did they live happily ever after in this socialist utopia? Hardly. The “common property” approach killed off about half the settlers. Governor Bradford recorded in his diary that everybody was happy to claim their equal share of production, but production only shrank. Slackers showed up late for work in the fields, and the hard workers resented it. …The disincentives of the socialist scheme bred impoverishment and conflict until, facing starvation and extinction, Bradford altered the system. He divided common property into private plots… Communal socialist failure was transformed into private property/capitalist success, something that’s happened so often historically it’s almost monotonous.

And here are some excerpts from a column that Professor Ben Powell wrote back in 2004.

Bad weather or lack of farming knowledge did not cause the pilgrims’ shortages. Bad economic incentives did. In 1620 Plymouth Plantation was founded with a system of communal property rights. Food and supplies were held in common and then distributed based on “equality” and “need” as determined by Plantation officials. People received the same rations whether or not they contributed to producing the food, and residents were forbidden from producing their own food. …Because of the poor incentives, little food was produced. Faced with potential starvation in the spring of 1623, the colony decided to implement a new economic system. Every family was assigned a private parcel of land. They could then keep all they grew for themselves, but now they alone were responsible for feeding themselves. …This change, Bradford wrote, “had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.” Giving people economic incentives changed their behavior. …Once the Pilgrims in the Plymouth Plantation abandoned their communal economic system and adopted one with greater individual property rights, they never again faced the starvation and food shortages of the first three years.

By the way, the settlement in Jamestown, Virginia, also had a very unsuccessful experiment with socialism.

Every Thanksgiving, I like to remind people about America’s failed experiment with big government.

This year, I want to build on that history lesson by looking at how capitalism’s invisible hand is making our modern holidays ever-more affordable.

We’ll start with Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute, who explains how free enterprise makes Thanksgiving possible.

…most of you probably didn’t call your local supermarket ahead of time and order a Thanksgiving turkey this year. Why not? Because you automatically assumed that a turkey would be there when you showed up, and it probably was there when you appeared “unannounced” at your local grocery store and selected your Thanksgiving bird. Or it will be there…when you “skip the trip” to the grocery store and get free 2-hour delivery from Amazon Prime Now… The reason your Thanksgiving turkey was waiting for you without an advance order? Because of the economic concepts of “spontaneous order,” “self-interest,” and the “invisible hand” of the free market. Turkeys appeared in your local grocery stores primarily because of the “self-interest” (greed?) of thousands of turkey farmers, truck drivers, and supermarket owners and employees who are complete strangers to you and your family. But all of those strangers throughout the turkey supply chain co-operated on your behalf and were led by the “invisible hand” to make sure your family had a turkey (or two) on the table to celebrate Thanksgiving.

By the way, just imagine what would happen if a government bureaucracy (like the Department of Agriculture) was in charge of Thanksgiving. Everything would cost more and have lower quality.

And the entire experience would be like a trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles.

But this isn’t just a story about how food appears on store shelves because of market forces rather than central planning.

It’s also a story about the competitive forces of capitalism make that food ever-more affordable. As shown in this chart from Marian Tupy of Human Progress, the cost of a Thanksgiving dinner is dropping over time.

But even that’s not the full story.

We’re also getting richer over time thanks to free enterprise.

So the amount of work that is required to buy Thanksgiving dinner is falling even faster. Here’s a chart from Mark Perry.

Now you know what to be thankful for.

P.S. I embedded a couple of humorous anti-libertarian memes in the column. If you want some more Thanksgiving-themed humor, you can click here and here for some mockery of Obama. And here’s a satirical look at a future Thanksgiving in a nation controlled by our friends on the left.

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Government-Run Companies vs. Private-Run Companies

In pure socialist systems, governments own and operate companies (the “means of production“). Such an approach also requires central planning and price controls.

But you don’t need socialism to have government-controlled companies. There are plenty of “state-owned enterprises” that exist in supposedly market-oriented nations.

Including in the United States. The federal government, for instance, owns and operates the air traffic control system and the postal service, to cite two big examples.

So what happens when politicians are de facto shareholders?

Today, thanks to some new research from the Asian Development Bank Institute, we’re going to look at the economic consequences of such firms.

Throughout history, and especially since the end of World War II, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have been created in much of the world… Although private companies play a dominant role in market-based societies, enterprises with government ownership are still key players in the global economy, making their performance important for economic growth and competitiveness… Thus, scholars and policymakers around the world have been left with a task of reassessing the efficiency of state ownership. …In this paper, we aim to investigate whether certain ownership types consistently show superior economic performance relative to others when controlling for other economic factors. …we aim to fill in this gap and report further empirical evidence on the relative efficiency of public and private companies.

According to the study, state-run companies play a very large role in some countries.

The authors consider some of the theoretical reasons why state-run firms might not be very efficient, including “public choice.”

Agency theory…states that in a corporation, managers (or agents) may follow a personal agenda rather than work on behalf of, and for the interest of, the principals who own the corporation. Within a SOE, in particular, …the managers of SOEs are those who are appointed by the government…and seek firm-specific rents, such as high pay, fringe benefits, and low effort levels. Unlike their peers who operate in private-owned enterprises and may face the risk of replacement and dismissal due to their firms’ low performance…, the chief executive officers (CEOs) of SOEs are put under little financial constraint, and their compensation is not necessarily linked to firm performance… Public choice theory…also provides a cornerstone conceptual framework on which SOEs’ underperformance can be explained. This framework assumes that…special interests affect…governments’ own objectives.

They put together a dataset of more than 25,000 companies, both government and private, and then looked at key performance metrics.

Not surprisingly, government-run firms are not very efficient compared to their private counterparts.

…we find significant evidence that SOEs are outperformed by their POEs counterparts. The findings are consistent over both simple univariate comparisons and multivariate regressions. Government firms appear to be less profitable than POEs. They are also more dependent on debt and financial support from outside sources rather than equity. Hence, we provide support for the view that public firms are less efficient than private firms… The cross-sectional comparisons also show that government firms tend to be more labor intensive and have higher labor costs than non-government ones. …The differences in profitability appear to be economically important. The average return on assets for private firms is 8.010, almost twice that for SOEs. …SOEs have a higher liabilities-to-assets ratio, meaning that they tend to rely more on debt than shareholder funds. … state-owned companies…generate smaller sales volumes and have a higher cost per one employee. In other words, firms owned by private sectors are more labor efficient than government ones. …our findings suggest that privatization could be considered as a driver for firm efficiency.

For those that like perusing quantitative results, here are the results of their statistical regressions.

I’ve highlighted the key difference.

As already noted, government-run firms accumulate more debt.

This is presumably because investors assume that government-run companies won’t default.

Not because they don’t lose money, but rather because the political pressures that led to their creation also will prevent their demise.

SOEs can enjoy a “soft” budget constraint since they are backed by the government for their funding… They have the advantage of borrowing funds at a lower rate rather than accessing the equity market to raise capital… Thus, the discipline that capital markets impose on state-held firms and the threat of financial distress for them is less important than their private counterparts. …it is worth noting that such “soft” budget constraints, to a certain extent, could also be a source of inefficiency in government firms.

In other words, the growth-enhancing process of “creative destruction” is blocked when governments are in charge of companies.

For what it’s worth, this is a big problem in nations such as China.

Though we also saw a version of this in the United States, with the big bailouts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, both of which are government-sponsored enterprises (private ownership, but created by government and controlled by government).

And there are many other examples of bad results when the federal government has intervened in the business world.

The bottom line is that government should not be owning, operating, controlling, or directing private companies. These forms of intervention inevitably produce inefficiency, subsidies, cronyism, corruption, and waste.

And it means that people like you and me wind up with less income and lower living standards because politicians are misallocating labor and capital.

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Fight on the Right, Part II: Debating “Common-Good Capitalism”

I’m a big fan of Marco Rubio. The Florida Senator has been very good on some big issues and on some small issues. And he’s willing to fight important philosophical battles.

No politician is perfect (for instance, Rubio defends sugar subsidies), so I’ve always judged them by whether – on net – they’re on the side of more freedom or more statism.

Which is the ideal framework for today’s column.

Earlier this month, Rubio wrote a column for National Review asserting it is time for “common-good capitalism.”

Pope Leo XIII wrote that the ultimate goal for any society should be to “make men better” by providing people the opportunity to attain the dignity that comes from hard work, ownership, and raising a family. …What makes this society possible is the rights of both workers and businesses, but also their obligations to each other. …In the economy Pope Leo described, workers and businesses are not competitors for their share of limited resources, but partners in an effort that strengthens the entire nation. …This…doesn’t describe the economy we actually have today. Large corporations have become vehicles for shareholders and banks to assert claims to cash flows, rather than engines of productive innovation. Over the past 40 years, the financial sector’s share of corporate profits increased from about 10 to nearly 30 percent. The share of profits sent to shareholders increased by 300 percent. This occurred while investment of those profits back into the companies’ workers — and future — dropped 20 percent. …This is what it looks like when, as Pope Francis warned, “finance overwhelms the real economy.” …Diagnosing the problem is something we should be able to achieve… Ultimately, deciding what the government should do about it must be the core question of our politics. …What we need to do is restore common-good capitalism. …our nation does not exist to serve the interests of the market; the market exists to serve our nation.

Some of this rhetoric rubs me the wrong way (and citing an economic illiterate like Pope Francis is appalling), but what really matters is whether Rubio is proposing more power for government or less power for government.

That’s hard to say because he doesn’t offer much in terms of policy.

Though I’m not overly impressed by the handful of ideas that were mentioned.

…we’ve allowed ourselves to become almost completely dependent on China for rare-earth minerals… That’s why I have filed legislation to support investment in this critical sector.It is also possible to reform the Small Business Administration to reinvigorate the legacy of business innovation… I’ve worked to expand the federal per-child tax credit, as well as proposed creating an option for paid parental leave.

I don’t pretend to know anything about rare-earth minerals, but it’s laughable to think the Small Business Administration is a wellspring of innovation, and there’s plenty of evidence that paid parental leave is bad policy (child tax credits aren’t bad, but there are other tax policies that are far better for families).

On the other hand, Rubio also has been making the case for “full expensing,” which is a very good policy.

Since we don’t have any additional details, I don’t know whether his new agenda is a net plus or a net negative.

Kevin Williamson of National Review, by contrast, is definitely not a fan of Rubio’s approach. Here’s some of what he wrote last week.

Senator Rubio…joins the ranks of those who propose to reinvent capitalism — “common-good capitalism,” he calls it. …Senator Rubio, working from remarks originally delivered in a speech at Catholic University, references a series of popes — Leo XIII, mostly, but also Benedict and Francis — to describe (whether the senator understands this or not) the familiar moral basis of fascist economic thinking… I write this as a fellow Catholic: God defend us from these backward, primitive-minded Catholic social reformers. …power is what is at issue. Men such as Senator Rubio desire for themselves the power to overrule markets — to limit trade and property rights, enterprise and exchange — in the service of what Senator Rubio describes as the “common good.” The problems with that are…Senator Rubio does not know what the common good is and has no way of knowing. …What we need from men in government is not the quasi-metaphysical project of reinventing capitalism in the name of the “common good.” …This is not a brief for anarchism. …We need stability and predictability from a government that secures our liberty and our property in the least obtrusive way that can be managed.

And he followed up two days later with another critical column, even equating Rubio’s agenda to Elizabeth Warren’s loony proposal.

From Senator Marco Rubio and his “common-good capitalism” to Senator Elizabeth Warren and her “accountable capitalism,” politicians right and left who want politicians to have more power over private economic decisions assume a dilemma in which something called “capitalism” must be balanced against or made subordinate to something called the “common good.” This is the great forgetful stupidity of our time. …Capitalism, meaning security in one’s own property and in the right to work and to trade, is the common good… What is contemplated by Senator Rubio and Senator Warren — along with a few batty adherents of the primitive nonidea known in Catholic circles as “integralism” and everywhere else more forthrightly as “totalitarianism” — is to invert the purpose of the U.S. government. …We’re supposed to give up our property rights so that these two and their ilk can use corporate welfare to fortify their own political interests? …The “stakeholder” thesis put forward by Rubio and Warren would strip shareholders of control of their own property and use that property in the service of interests of other parties, who are not its rightful owners. …the great prosperity currently enjoyed by North Americans and Western Europeans — and, increasingly, by the rest of the world — is a product…of capitalism… It wasn’t magic. It wasn’t the cleverness of Senator Rubio or Senator Warren. It wasn’t the big ideas of Pope Francis, to the modest extent that he has any economic ideas worth identifying as such.

Oren Cass argues that Williamson is both unfair and wrong about Rubio.

Williamson believes that Rubio wants to “be . . . the bandit, taking control of other people’s property”; “strip shareholders of control of their own property,” which “is robbery”; “redefine away the property rights of millions of Americans”; “limit . . . property rights”; and “run Apple or Facebook or Ford.” …I’ve read the Rubio speech carefully and can find none of this. …Rubio’s project is to explore the vast gray expanse between the white of liberty and the black of property theft. …This is the terrain on which many of American history’s great public deliberations have unfolded, yielding policies from Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures to the “internal improvements” of the early 1800s, the tariff debates between McKinley and Bryan, Teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busting, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, Kennedy’s space race, and Reagan’s import quotas. Property theft all of it, at gunpoint no less, if I understand Williamson correctly. …Someone will have to make a value judgment as to what “goods” are in fact “good” and thus worthy of providing publicly.

Cass is right that there’s a lot of space between pure capitalism and awful statism. I’ve made the same point.

But it does worry me that he favorably cites a bunch of historical policy mistakes, such as protectionism, antitrust laws, and the New Deal.

Jonah Goldberg makes the should-be-obvious point that the United States is hardly a laissez-faire paradise.

For as long as I can remember, people on the left have complained about “unfettered capitalism.” …Senator Bernie Sanders said earlier this year that “we have to talk about democratic socialism as an alternative to unfettered capitalism.” …Recently, the concern with capitalism’s unfetteredness has become bipartisan. Senators Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio have taken up the cause in a series of speeches and policy proposals. Conservative intellectuals such as Patrick Deneen and Yoram Hazony have taken dead aim at unrestrained capitalism. J. D. Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy, and Tucker Carlson of Fox News have suggested that economic policy is run by . . . libertarians. My response to this dismaying development is: What on earth are these people talking about? …If you think there are no restraints on the market or on economic activity, why on earth do we have the Department of Labor, HHS, HUD, FDA, EPA, OSHA, or IRS? The United States has one of the most progressive tax systems in the world (i.e., the share of taxes paid by the rich versus everyone else). If you take into account all social-welfare spending, we spend more on entitlements than plenty of rich countries. Now, if you think we don’t spend, regulate, or tax enough, fine. Make your case. If you think we should spend and tax differently, I’m right there with you. But the notion that the United States is a libertarian fantasyland is itself a fantasy.

Amen.

And this brings me to my modest contribution to this discussion.

I’ve already admitted that Rubio hasn’t provided enough details to assess whether he wants more liberty or more statism.

That being said, I’m skeptical of “common-good capitalism” in the same way I’m suspicious about “nationalist conservatism” and “reform conservatism” (and we know for a fact that “kinder-and-gentler conservatism” and “compassionate conservatism” meant more statism).

So here’s my challenge to Rubio and Cass (as well as everyone else who proposes an alternative to Reagan-style small-government conservatism). Please specifically identify how much government you want. Yes, there is a “vast gray expanse” between pure laissez-faire and pure statism, as Cass noted. But he didn’t say where in that expanse he wants America to be.

To help people respond to this challenge, here’s a chart, based on the data from Economic Freedom of the World. In that “vast gray expanse” between pure capitalism and pure statism, should policy makers try to shift America in the direction of Hong Kong? Or in the direction of Sweden, or even Greece?

The bottom line is that we need to climb the scale (i.e., have more overall economic liberty) if we want more prosperity.

That’s what will help facilitate all the things, such as good jobs and strong communities, that Senator Rubio wants for America.

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Fight on the Right, Part I: Are Tax Cuts Still Economically Desirable and Politically Salient?

I want lower taxes. I want to reform taxes. And I want to abolish existing taxes and block new taxes.

But I also recognize that the biggest fiscal problem, both in America and elsewhere in the world, is that there’s too much government spending.

This creates a bit of a quandary. Given the various pressures and trade-offs in the world of fiscal policy, should supporters of limited government embrace additional tax relief?

Steve Moore opines in the Washington Times that it’s time for further tax cuts.

Every single plausible Democratic candidate for president has endorsed tax increases as centerpieces of their economic agenda. …Meanwhile, Mr. Trump and the Republicans in Congress have the 2017 tax cut to trumpet… Middle class incomes have hit an all-time high as has the stock market and employment. …Mr. Trump and the Republicans need a new tax cut plan… Mr. Trump has said he wants any new tax cut to be aimed at the middle class. …Let the liberals spend the next 11 months trying to explain why higher taxes and lower take home pay is better for families than lower taxes and MORE take home pay.  That should be fascinating to watch.

Steve specifically mentions some good ideas, such as lower marginal tax rates, a lower tax burden on capital gains, protecting more savings from double taxation, and allowing workers to shift some of their payroll taxes to personal retirement accounts.

But are these ideas smart policy?

Robert Verbruggen of National Review is very skeptical.

…it’s shocking that anyone is even thinking about tax cuts as a smart policy right now. …Our deficit has grown by a quarter since the 2018 fiscal year to hit nearly a trillion dollars in 2019, Baby Boomers are retiring, and the president has consistently said he has no intention of cutting the old-age entitlements that drive our spending. …tax cuts at this point would just add to the debt and hasten the day of our fiscal reckoning. We have a bunch of bills piling up. Let’s start paying them. …We need some mix of spending cuts and tax hikes to survive this. …Politicians almost certainly don’t have the guts to get serious about all this until a true crisis forces them to. But at very least, they should stop making matters worse.

So who is right?

The answer may depend on the goal.

If the objective is to simply get more votes in 2020, I’m not the right person to judge the effectiveness of that approach. After all, I’m a policy wonk, not a political strategist.

So let’s focus on the narrower issue of whether further tax relief would be good policy. Here are five things to consider, starting with two points about taxes and the economy.

1. Will tax cuts improve long-run economic performance? It’s impossible to answer this question without knowing what kind of tax cut. Increasing child credits may or may not be desirable, but that kind of tax relief doesn’t boost incentives for additional economic activity. Other types of tax reforms, by contrast, can have a very positive effect on incentives for work, saving, investment, and entrepreneurship.

2. Will tax cuts improve short-run economic performance? This is actually the wrong way to analyze fiscal policy. Advocates of Keynesian economics are fixated on trying to tinker with the economy’s short-run performance. That being said, some types of tax cuts – particularly reforms designed to attract global capital – may generate quicker positive effects.

Now let’s broaden our scope and consider tax cuts as part of overall fiscal policy.

3. Should policy makers focus on deficit reduction? Excessive government borrowing is undesirable, but it’s important to understand that red ink is the symptom and government spending is the underlying disease. Treat the disease and the symptoms automatically begin to go away.

4. Will tax cuts interfere with a bipartisan deal? Some people imagine that America’s fiscal problems can be addressed only if there’s a package deal of tax increases and spending cuts (dishonestly defined). Such an outcome is theoretically possible, but entirely unrealistic. Tax increases almost surely would be a recipe for additional spending.

5. Is there a starve-the-beast constraint on spending? There’s a theory, known as “starve the beast,” that suggests lower taxes can help constrain government spending. Given that Trump has simultaneously lowered the tax burden and increased the spending burden, that’s obviously not true in the short run. But the evidence suggests a firm commitment to lower taxes can inhibit long-run spending.

Based on these five points, I side with Steve Moore. It’s always a good idea to push for lower taxes.

And I definitely disagree with Robert Verbruggen’s willingness to put tax increases on the table. A huge mistake.

That being said, the Trump Administration’s reckless approach to discretionary spending and feckless approach to entitlement spending makes any discussion of further tax relief completely pointless.

So, at the risk of sounding like a politician, I also disagree with Steve. Instead of writing a column discussing additional tax cuts, he should have used the opportunity to condemn big-spending GOPers.

P.S. For what it’s worth, more than 100 percent (yes, that’s mathematically possible) of America’s long-run fiscal problem is excessive spending.

P.P.S. If you doubt my assertion that higher taxes will lead to more spending, I invite you to come up with another explanation for what’s happened in Europe.

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Elizabeth Warren’s Reprehensible Hypocrisy

If I had to identify the most economically destructive part of Senator Elizabeth Warren’s agenda, I’d have a hard time picking between her confiscatory wealth tax and her so-called Medicare-for-All scheme.

The former would dampen wages and hinder growth by penalizing saving and investment, while the latter would hasten America’s path to Greece.

By contrast, it’s easy to identify the most ethically offensive part of her platform.

Just like President Obama, she’s a hypocrite who wants to deny poor families any escape from bad government schools, even though her family has benefited from private education.

To make matters worse, she’s even lied about the topic.

Corey DeAngelis of the Reason Foundation has been on top of this issue. I recommend his article. And if you like exposing dishonest politicians, here’s a very snarky PG-13-rated tweet.

Holy shit. I have Warren on video lying about where she sent her kids to school.

Sarah Carpenter: "I read that your children went to private schools"

Warren: "No my children went to public schools" pic.twitter.com/PEHr3jNvjx

— Corey A. DeAngelis (@DeAngelisCorey) November 22, 2019

The Washington Free Beacon has some additional details.

Sarah Carpenter, a pro-school choice activist who organized a protest of Warren’s Thursday speech in Atlanta, told Warren that she had read news reports indicating the candidate had sent her kids to private school. Though Warren once favored school choice and was an advocate for charter schools, she changed her views while seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. …Warren denied the claim, telling Carpenter, “My children went to public schools.” …however, …Warren’s son, Alex Warren, attended the Kirby Hall School for at least the 1986-1987 school year… The college preparatory school is known for its “academically advanced curriculum” and offers small class sizes for students in grades K-12. …Carpenter pressed Warren to reconsider her education plan, which would place stringent regulations on both charter and private schools. She told the candidate that she simply didn’t have the resources to exercise the same choices for her children that Warren appears to have made for her son.

Moreover, private schools are a family tradition, as the Daily Caller revealed.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat representing Massachusetts, has a granddaughter who rubs shoulders with the children of movie stars at the trendy Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles, California. Tuition at Harvard-Westlake costs $35,900 each year. There’s also a $2,000 fee for new students. Harvard-Westlake offers a bevy of amazing opportunities for students including study-abroad programs in Spain, France, China, Italy and India. There’s also the Mountain School, “an independent semester program that provides high school juniors the opportunity to live and work on an organic farm in rural Vermont.”

If you want to learn more about Warren’s disingenuous posture, I also recommend this article by Chrissy Clark of the Federalist.

Anyhow, what makes her hypocrisy especially odious is that she was semi-good on the issue. At least back before political ambition caused here discard her moral compass.

Education Week looked at Warren’s record and confirmed she used to be sympathetic to school choice, albeit only for parents who wanted to choose among various types of government schools.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s education..plan’s contention that the nation must “stop the privatization and corruption of our public education system” and keep money from being “diverted” away from public schools through vouchers. …supporters of school choice cried foul. They pointed to what Warren and her daughter Amelia Warren Tyagi wrote in The Two-Income Trap, a book they authored in 2003, as evidence that she once backed a voucher system for parents seeking education options for their children, but has now abandoned that position for political expediency and to please teachers’ unions. …In 2003, Warren and Tyagi wrote that while…many schools might technically be public, they said, many parents effectively paid tuition for good public schools through their ability to purchase a home in their attendance zones. …So how to solve it? “A well-designed voucher program would fit the bill neatly,” the two authors stated, adding that “fully funded” vouchers would “relieve parents from the terrible choice of leaving their kids in lousy schools or bankrupting themselves to escape those schools.” …Essentially, what Warren and Tyagi wanted was an open enrollment system of public schools.

So why has her position “evolved”?

She’s decided that getting to the White House is more important than the best interests of poor children. The Daily Caller reports on Warren’s kowtowing to union bosses.

Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren is pledging to crack down on school choice if elected, despite the fact that she sent her own son to an elite private school, publicly available records show. The 2020 presidential candidate’s public education plan would ban for-profit charter schools…and eliminate government incentives for opening new non-profit charter schools, even though Warren has praised charter schools in the past. …Warren has pledged to reduce education options for families, but she chose to send her son Alexander to Kirby Hall, an elite private school near Austin. Tuition for Kirby Hall’s lower and middle schools — kindergarten through eighth grade — is $14,995 for the 2019-2020 school year. A year of high school costs $17,875. …“I do not blame Alex one bit for attending a private school in 5th grade. Good for him,” said Reason Foundation director of school choice Corey DeAngelis, who first flagged Alexander’s private schooling Monday. “This is about Warren exercising school choice for her own kids while fighting hard to prevent other families from having that option.” …Warren’s crackdown on elite charter schools would leave elite private schools like Kirby Hall unscathed, while greatly eliminating charter schools as a parallel option for lower-income families.

It’s important to note that this is an issue where honest people on the left are on the right side.

Here’s a recent editorial from the Washington Post.

…when it comes to education, Ms. Warren has a plan that seems aimed more at winning the support of the powerful teachers unions than in advancing policies that would help improve student learning. …Ms. Warren took a page from the union playbook in calling for a clampdown on public charter schools. In addition to banning for-profit charter schools (which make up about 15 percent of the sector), she would subject existing charters to more scrutiny and red tape and make it harder for new charters to open… Ms. Warren’s change of heart (which started in 2016, when she opposed a referendum that would have lifted caps on charter schools in Massachusetts), along with the silence of other Democrats who once championed charter schools (New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and former vice president Joe Biden come to mind), is no mystery. The teachers unions wield outsize influence in the Democratic Party, and they revile the mostly non-unionized charter sector. …The losers in these political calculations are the children whom charters help. Charters at their best offer options to parents whose children would have been consigned to failing traditional schools. They spur reform in public school systems in such places as the District and Chicago. And high-quality charters lift the achievement of students of color, children from low-income families and English language learners. Research from Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes found, for example, that African American students in charter schools gained an additional 59 days of learning in math and 44 days in reading per year compared with their traditional school counterparts. More than 3.2 million children already attend charter schools, and 5 million more would choose a charter school if one could open near them.

And Jonathan Chait of New York magazine is certainly not a conservative or libertarian, but he’s part of the honest left. As you might imagine, he’s also disappointed that Warren chose union bosses over poor children.

Warren has changed her views on education, which are now aligned with the interests of the tenured workforce, at the expense of educating low-income children https://t.co/xfrkbJnZNa

— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) October 29, 2019

To be fair, there are plenty of other folks on the left who have sold their souls to the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers – including, most disappointingly, the NAACP.

P.S. Some Republicans are hypocrites on the issue as well.

P.P.S. Speaking of hypocrites, President Obama’s Secretary of Education sent his kids to private schools, yet he fought to deny that opportunity to poor families. The modern version of standing in the schoolhouse door.

P.P.P.S. If you want to learn more about school choice, I recommend this column and this video.

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The OECD’s Recipe for Continuing Poverty in Africa

Free markets and limited government are a tried-and-true recipe for growth and prosperity.

Indeed, it’s the only way for a poor nation to become a rich nation. Those are the policies that helpd North America and Western Europe become rich in the 1800s and it’s how East Asia became rich in the second half of the 1900s.

By contrast, there’s no poor country that has implemented statist policies and then become rich (which is why none of my left-wing friends have ever come up with a good answer to my two-question challenge).

But that doesn’t stop some international bureaucracies from pushing bad policies on poor nations.

I wrote last year about the International Monetary Fund’s pernicious efforts to impose higher tax burdens in Africa.

Now the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is seeking to perpetuate poverty in the world’s poorest continent. The Paris-based bureaucracy actually is arguing that “urgent action” is need to impose higher taxes.

The average tax-to-GDP ratio for the 26 countries participating in the new edition of Revenue Statistics in Africa was…17.2% for the third consecutive year in 2017. …underlining the need for urgent action to enhance domestic revenue mobilisation in Africa. …Overall, the tax structure across participating countries has evolved over the past decade, with VAT and personal income tax (PIT) accounting for a higher proportion of revenue generation in 2017 relative to 2008, on average. However, PIT (15.4% of total tax revenues) and social security contributions (8.1% of total tax revenues) remain low in Africa. Reforms to broaden the personal tax base…and expand social insurance coverage can assist in domestic resource mobilisation efforts while contributing to inclusive growth. …Property taxes are shown to be much lower in Africa than in LAC and in the OECD but have the potential to play a key role.

Before explaining why the OECD’s analysis is wrong, here are a couple of charts for those who want some country-specific details.

Here’s a look at the aggregate tax burdens in various nations.

I’m not surprised that South Africa’snumbers are so bad.

And here’s a look at how tax burdens have changed over the past 10 years.

Kudos to Botswana.

The big question to consider, of course, is why the OECD is pushing for higher taxes in poor nations.

The real reason is that the OECD represents the interest of governments and politicians instinctively want more revenue.

The official reason, though, is that the bureaucrats want people to believe – notwithstanding reams of evidence – that higher taxes are good for prosperity. And it’s not just the OECD pushing this bizarre theory. It’s now routine for international bureaucracies to push this upside-down analysis, based on the anti-empirical notion that economies will prosper if governments can finance more spending.

P.S. Africa’s big economic challenge is not bad fiscal policy. If you peruse the data from Economic Freedom of the World, the continent has huge problems with excessive regulation and poor quality of governance. What’s tragic, though, is that the OECD doesn’t push for good reforms in those area. Instead, it wants to make fiscal policy worse.

P.P.S. To be fair, the OECD doesn’t discriminate. The bureaucrats also advocate higher taxes in other poor regions, such as Latin America and Asia.

July 29, 2021 Addendum: If the OECD actually wanted to help, they would send Africa politicians this chart showing how Botswana more market-oriented approach has paid big dividends.

In the interest of good health, don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen.

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Education Week, Part V: The Home Schooling Phenomenon

So far, our acknowledgement of National Education week has addressed the following topics.

• Part I looked at the deteriorating performance of government schools.
• Part II reviewed the evidence for school choice.
• Part III explained how government subsidies make higher education more costly.
• Part IV addressed the controversy over teacher compensation.

Today, let’s look at home schooling, which is what occurs when parents take responsibility for directing the education of their children. For general background on this issue, I recommend this article on “100 Reasons to Homeschool Your Kids” and this article on “7 Persistent Myths about Homeschoolers Debunked.”

And for those interested, here’s a map showing if and how home schooling is regulated across the United States.

I want to focus on whether home schooling produces good results.

J.D. Tuccille looks at the data in an article for Reason.

Based on such evidence, homeschooling is enjoying a boom, as growing numbers of families with diverse backgrounds, philosophies, and approaches abandon government-controlled schools in favor of taking responsibility for their own children’s education. …”From 1999 to 2012, the percentage of students who were homeschooled doubled, from an estimated 1.7 percent to 3.4 percent,” reports the National Center for Education Statistics. …In 2014, SAT “test scores of college-bound homeschool students were higher than the national average of all college-bound seniors that same year,” according to NHERI. “Mean ACT Composite scores for homeschooled students were consistently higher than those for public school students” from 2001 through 2014, according (PDF) to that testing organization, although private school students scored higher still.

As reported by USA Today, home-schooled students are better educated.

…children who are home-schooled often face classic stereotypes of being strange or different than children educated in traditional schools when they enter college. …While the most common reason for homeschooling remains to be religious or moral beliefs, the number of secular homeschooling groups in the United States is growing, as is the overall number of home-schooled children. …According to a 2007 survey, more than 1.5 million children in the United States are home-schooled, which represents about 2.9% of school-aged children. …home-schooled students generally score slightly above the national average on both the SAT and the ACT and often enter college with more college credits. Studies have also shown that on average home-schooled students have higher grade point averages in their freshman years and have higher graduation rates than their peers. …studies have begun chipping away at the conception of home-schooling as socially stunting students – research shows that on average home-schooled students routinely participate in eight social activities outside of the home, and typically consume considerably less television than do traditionally-educated students. They are also…less susceptible to peer pressure.

The good news isn’t limited to the United States.

Home-schooled kids also outperform their peers in the U.K., as reported by the Guardian.

Children taught at home significantly outperform their contemporaries who go to school, the first comparative study has found. It discovered that home-educated children of working-class parents achieved considerably higher marks in tests than the children of professional, middle-class parents and that gender differences in exam results disappear among home-taught children. …The number of home-educated children in Britain has grown from practically none 20 years ago to about 150,000 today – around 1 per cent of the school age population. By the end of the decade, the figure is expected to have tripled. …Paula Rothermel, a lecturer in learning in early childhood at the University of Durham, who spent three years conducting the survey…said: ‘This study is the first evidence we have proving that home education is a huge benefit to large numbers of children….” She found that 65 per cent of home-educated children scored more than 75 per cent in a general mathematics and literacy test, compared to a national figure of only 5.1 per cent. The average national score for school-educated pupils in the same test was 45 per cent, while that of the home-educated children was 81 per cent. …Rothermel found that the children of working-class, poorly-educated parents significantly outperformed their middle-class contemporaries. While the five- to six-year old children of professional parents scored only 55.2 per cent in the test, children far lower down the social scale scored 71 per cent.

By the way, this isn’t a new issue. Here are some passages from a column that Professor Don Boudreaux wrote more than 20 years ago.

Americans are increasingly aware that government education specialists in charge of K-12 government schools are lousy educators. …these alleged specialists are so bad that non-specialist parents outperform them at the task of education. The average home-schooled child scores in the 85th percentile on standardized achievement tests a full 35 points higher than the score registered by the average public-school student. …it isn’t the case that K-12 education bureaucrats have no specialized skills. Indeed, they are exquisitely specialized. The problem is that their specialty isn’t education; it’s political lobbying.

Given all these positive results, no wonder ever-greater numbers of parents are opting for homeschooling.

Needless to say, the education monopoly doesn’t like this form of competition.

Home schoolers constantly need to defend their rights in the United States.

At over two million young people, the number of US homeschoolers is comparable to the number of US students enrolled in public charter schools, and it is now considered a worthwhile education option for many families. …In many ways, this freedom, flexibility, and family-centered learning are terrifying to the state. Despite the fact that homeschooling has been legally recognized in all 50 states since 1993, attempts to limit homeschooling freedoms are ongoing. …efforts to tighten homeschooling regulations have been spotlighted in New Hampshire and Iowa, and homeschoolers in the United Kingdom are now dealing with mounting pressure… An underlying theme in these calls for regulating homeschoolers is that parents can’t be trusted… Considering the fact that…homeschooling students continue to outrank their schooled peers in academic performance – we should wonder who really knows best how to educate kids.

Unsurprisingly, California’s politicians are hostile to home schooling.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that there’s effective opposition from home-schooling families.

They came by the hundreds, one newspaper said—“perhaps thousands.” Some traveled hours, others waited hours, all for the opportunity to protest one of the most outrageous homeschooling bills ever introduced: California’s AB 2756. …the bill tried to mandate fire inspections of all homeschooling families (which, not surprisingly, firefighters rejected). Then the proposal was amended—this time to force homeschooling families to give out private information… Hours later, families got the news they’d been waiting for—“no member of the committee was willing to make a motion for a vote.” The bill was dead.

Some nations have a very punitive approach that makes California seem like a libertarian paradise.

Germany, for instance, has a horrid policy of prohibiting home schooling and persecuting families.

In August 2013, more than 30 police officers and social workers stormed the home of the Wunderlich family. The authorities brutally removed the children from their parents and their home, leaving the family traumatized. The children were ultimately returned to their parents but their legal status remained unclear as Germany is one of the few European countries that penalizes families who want to homeschool. After courts in Germany ruled in favour of the government, the European Court of Human Rights agreed to take up the case in August 2016. Now, the Court has ruled against the German family, disregarding their right to private family life. …“This judgement is a huge setback but we will not give up the fight to protect the fundamental right of parents to homeschool their children in Germany and across Europe,” said Mike Donnelly, international homeschooling expert and Director of Global Outreach for the Home School Legal Defense Association which has long supported the family in their legal struggles.

One other point worth sharing is that home schooling is not merely an option for white evangelicals.

Tracy Jan of the Washington Post writes about the benefits of home schooling from a left-of-center, minority perspective.

…we recently began researching educational alternatives for the future — including the idea of home schooling. …As he entered kindergarten as a 5-year-old in August, I wondered what he would learn about the flag, about our country’s history, about the Founding Fathers. I doubted that the public schools, even in progressive D.C., would keep it real. …In addition to worrying about the Eurocentric bias in most schools’ history curriculums, I do not want our son to fall victim to teacher biases. …Home schooling, we thought, could be the answer to many of these concerns. …The concept of schooling as parents see fit — freed from the constraints of bureaucracy and school board politics — appealed to me. So did the tight bonds that I saw develop when parents become not only provider and disciplinarian, but also teacher. …in many ways, the District makes it easy: Parents simply need to submit a one-page form to the Office of the State Superintendent of Education. They also are required to keep a portfolio of instruction… The number of home-schooled students in the city has doubled to roughly 400 since the office began tracking the data in 2008. D.C. does not break the numbers down by race, but, nationally, black home schooling has been on the rise. The number of African American children who are home-schooled grew by roughly 10 percent, to more than 200,000, between 2012 and 2016… DeLise Bernard, a former policy staffer for a previous D.C. mayor, and her husband, Rahsaan, executive director of THEARC, a nonprofit in Southeast Washington that provides educational, cultural and social service programs…decided to home-school their three children because, as Rahsaan puts it, “we refuse to allow the prevailing culture to determine ours.” They wanted to exert maximum influence over their children’s character development, grounded in their Christian faith, teaching them to deeply love their fellow human beings. …Armah, an audio engineer, musician and poet…decided to home-school his twin boys… “I’m not afraid of my children being exposed to everyone else and hearing opposing ideas,” Armah says. “I’m not afraid of my children being okay in public schools. But my goal is for them to be more than okay.”

Wow, lots of encouraging and inspiring information.

And it’s worth noting that many other minority families are choosing to home school their kids (which shouldn’t be a surprise considering the wretched overall performance of government schools).

Let’s close by circling back to the issue of whether home schooling produces good results.

Based on these two charts from Homeschool World, the answer is yes.

The first chart looks at how home-schooled kids perform in college.

And the second chart looks at how they score standardized tests.

P.S. To add a bit of levity, here’s a very funny video about a home-schooled family.

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Education Week, Part IV: The Real Story about Teacher Pay

The worst policy research I’ve ever seen, over nearly four decades in the field, is the OECD’s grotesquely dishonest data on poverty (it even motivated a special page to acknowledge “poverty hucksters”).

But this video from Andrew Biggs suggests that the Economic Policy Institute could give the OECD some real competition.

This video exposing the EPI’s laughable methodology is a perfect introduction to the issue of teacher compensation, which is Part IV of our series to acknowledge National Education Week.

For a closer look at the issue, here are some excerpts from a column published by City Journal that Biggs co-authored with Jason Richwine.

Most commentary on teacher pay begins and ends with the observation that public school teachers earn lower salaries than the average college graduate. This is true, but in what other context do we assume that every occupation requiring a college degree should get paid the same? Engineers make about 25 percent more than accountants, but “underpaid” accountants are not demonstrating in the streets. …About half of teachers major in education, among the least-rigorous fields at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Incoming education majors have lower SAT or GRE scores than candidates in other fields, but—thanks to grade inflation—they enjoy the highest GPAs. …At the lowest skill levels—a GS-6 on the federal scale—teachers earn salaries about 26 percent higher than similar white-collar workers. At GS-11, the highest skill level, teaching pays 17 percent less than other white-collar jobs. This explains how shortages can exist for specialized positions teaching STEM, languages, or students with disabilities, while elementary education postings may receive dozens of applications per job opening. …Teachers enjoy widespread public favor, and their desire for higher pay is understandable. But no nationwide crisis of teacher compensation exists. Most teachers receive market-level salaries and generous retirement benefits.

They also addressed the topic in a piece for the Wall Street Journal.

…the annual reports on public-school teacher pay produced by the Economic Policy Institute…claims the nation’s public-school teachers were underpaid by a record 21.4% in 2018… To measure the teacher pay gap, EPI researchers compare teacher salaries with the salaries of people who have the same number of years of education and the same demographic characteristics. This model assumes that education is interchangeable—that a bachelor’s degree in education has the same market value as a bachelor’s in engineering, and a master’s in education is worth the same as a master’s in business administration. …If you accept the Economic Policy Institute’s findings, ludicrous conclusions follow. …We could complain that aerospace engineers are overpaid by 38%, and we could demand justice for telemarketers who are shortchanged by 26%. …If public-school teachers were truly underpaid, we might expect teachers to reap much higher salaries when they switch to nonteaching jobs. They don’t. We also might expect to see public-school teachers paid less than those in private schools. In fact, public-school teacher salaries are roughly 16% higher than in nonreligious private schools.

Let’s take a look at what’s happening in some major cities.

The L.A. Times reports on how record levels of spending are enriching teacher compensation rather than boosting student outcomes.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s latest budget plan projects $101.8 billion in total spending — which includes both local and statewide operations — for K-12 schools. That’s a $4.6-billion boost from last summer’s enacted budget and an astounding $35-billion increase from what lawmakers approved in 2014. …But at the same time, a few important things have complicated the flow of dollars to the classroom. …School districts are being squeezed…by the rising costs of employee healthcare and pensions. …“When you look at the dollars that reach the actual schools, the increase in overall funding is being outstripped by the increase in mandated costs,” Gordon said. …And while measurements differ, there’s a consensus that California trails almost every other state in per-pupil funding.

Likewise, a column in the N.Y. Post reveals that record levels of spending in New York are driven by teacher compensation, yet kids are under-performing.

The city shelled out a whopping $25,199 per pupil during fiscal 2017, compared to just $12,201 nationwide, according to data from the US Census Bureau. The record amount tops a list of per-pupil spending by the country’s 100 biggest school systems, and exceeds second-place Boston’s $22,292 by 13 percent. But recent state test results indicate that Big Apple taxpayers aren’t getting much of a bang for their bucks, with less than half of the kids in public schools exhibiting a fundamental grasp of English and math skills. …An Empire Center analysis of the latest Census numbers also showed that New York’s educational expenditures are primarily driven by teacher salaries and benefits that are 117 percent above the national average on a per-student basis. “Indeed, New York’s spending in this category alone exceeded the total per-pupil spending of all but six other states,” Empire Center founder E.J. McMahon wrote in a blog post.

The obvious conclusion is that taxpayers are over-compensating teachers, especially when looking at student performance.

But what’s far more important is to look at the deeply flawed system for determining teacher compensation.

Yes, there’s excessive pay and benefits in the contracts concocted by union bosses and politicians, but the bigger problem is that there’s no mechanism to reward good teachers and penalize bad teachers.

Indeed, many of the contracts are specifically designed to ensure that bad teachers can’t be dismissed.

Let’s look at some passages from a Wall Street Journal column by Cami Anderson, a former school administrator in both Newark and New York.

…disheartening lessons I learned regarding teacher’s contracts and labor laws during the five years I served as superintendent of New York City’s Alternative High Schools and Programs…my team and I were charged with improving the lives and academic outcomes of some of our city’s most at-risk young people. About 30,000 students ages 16 to 21, most from low-income families of color… Not long into my term, however, the ugly reality of the dysfunctional systems working against our students hit me. …many teachers and staff reinforced our students’ deepest self-doubts. …Annual performance evaluations are supposed to ensure ongoing quality among tenured teachers, but all too often the system fails. In New York 99% of teachers receive “effective” ratings while fewer than 40% of high-schoolers graduate college-ready. …Even worse, teachers engaging in egregious conduct, like showing up late 40 times in a single year, physically assaulting a child, or falsifying records (actual examples), incurred no consequences… As a huge believer in unions, due process and collective bargaining, I agonized seeing union staff zealously defend a tenure system that essentially traded students’ futures for jobs at all costs. …Meanwhile, our district employed nearly a dozen “principals” and “vice principals”… Lawyers had negotiated settlements to place them “off the radar” rather than attempt to navigate the byzantine tenure-revocation process. …People were quick to tell me there was nothing I could do about it because of labor laws and practices—and that asking questions made you a target.

And here’s some very sobering information from a column in City Journal.

…mayors, governors, and presidents should retain broad powers to remove incompetent, unsavory, or negligent government workers. In this context, the very notion of public-employee unions is contradictory, as Franklin Roosevelt recognized… Consider teachers’ unions. Citing a study by Stanford University researcher Eric Hanushek, Howard notes that bad teachers have a much greater negative effect on student performance than good teachers have a positive effect. Based on student-performance data, Hanushek’s study concluded that dismissing the worst 8 percent of American public school teachers would put American students on par with those of Finland, which has the highest-scoring students in the world. Yet it’s nearly impossible to fire tenured teachers.

American kids do not get good scores compared to kids in other nations, so the notion that we could close the gap by getting rid of the worst teachers is very encouraging.

But that’s effectively impossible because unions are more concerned with protecting the worst teachers than they are with producing the best outcomes.

Since we started with a video from Andrew Biggs, let’s close with his infographic.

The bottom line is that the government’s school monopoly is doing a bad job in large part because it’s being run for the benefit of teachers unions.

With school choice, by contrast, it would be possible to reward the best teachers. Indeed, there would be competitive pressure for that outcome under a decentralized, competition-based system.

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Education Week, Part III: How Subsidies from Washington Are Making Colleges More Expensive and Bureaucratic

As part of National Education Week, I’ve looked at the deterioration of K-12 government schools and also explained why a market-based choice system would be a better alternative.

The good news is that we have a choice system for higher education. Students can choose from thousands of colleges and universities.

The bad news is that federal subsidies are making that system increasingly expensive and bureaucratic.

That’s today’s topic.

The underlying problem is “third-party payer,” which is a wonky term to describe what happens when students are buying education with money from somebody else. When this happens, they tend to not care about the price, which then makes it possible for colleges and universities to increase tuition so they become the real beneficiaries of the subsidies.

So nobody should be surprised that college costs are skyrocketing upwards, both in absolute terms and relative terms.

It’s a bubble, but one that probably won’t pop because of the ongoing stream of subsidies.

Jon Miltimore has a very good summary of the perverse incentives created by government.

Federal loans have made tuition far more expensive. Universities get paid up front—so whether students graduate, drop out, or default on the loan doesn’t matter. Departing students are easily replaced. Confident that students have access to cheap money (which can be expensive in the long run), colleges have no incentive to control or cut back the prices of housing, tuition, fees, and meals. …The best solution is to get the federal government out of the loan business altogether. If universities themselves offered loans, incentives would push them toward controlling costs and maximizing student success after graduation. Another option is income share agreements, which allow potential employers or independent organizations to pay tuition in exchange for a percentage of the students’ future earnings. …When markets seem to falter—recent, painful examples include the student loan bubble and housing crisis—the culprit is often government intervening in a way that warps incentives.

In a study for the Mercatus Center, Veronique de Rugy and Jack Salmon compile numbers and analyze studies.

The evidence broadly suggests that institutions of higher education are capturing need-based federal aid and responding to increased federal aid generosity by reducing institutional aid. …federal and state student aid funding expanding significantly over time, from just under $3 billion in 1970 to just under $160 billion in 2017. …Increased eligibility over time has led to a large and growing proportion of college students who receive federal financial aid. …there is a growing strand of economic literature examining the relationship between federal aid and tuition prices. …A study by Bradley Curs and Luciana Dar…finds that…institutions actually raise tuition levels and reduce their institutional aid when the state increases need-based awards. …A study by Stephanie Cellini and Claudia Goldin…finds that for comparable full-time nondegree programs in the same field over 2005–2009, institutions that are eligible for federal aid raised tuition by about 78 percent more than institutions that are ineligible. …Grey Gordon and Aaron Hedlund…develop a quantitative model for higher education to test explanations for the steep rise in college tuition between 1987 and 2010. …These results reveal that increased federal aid is responsible for more than doubling the cost of tuition over a 23-year period.

Here’s a chart from the study showing the explosion of federal subsidies.

By the way, Paul Krugman actually thinks taxpayers have been “starving” higher education.

Let’s get back to exploring the analysis of more sensible economists. Professor Antony Davies and James Harrigan make two key points in their FEE column.

First, subsidies are producing consumers who don’t make sensible education purchases.

…total student debt in the United States passed the $1.5 trillion mark. …the total has been growing at around $80 billion per year. …Around 11 percent of student debt is either delinquent or in default, which is more than four times the delinquency rates for credit cards and residential mortgages. …the problem with making college “free…” that a student must repay a college loan gives him tremendous incentive to at least consider what jobs he could obtain with the college education he must pay for after graduation. A student who is unencumbered by the need to repay a college loan faces little cost when choosing to major in something with little to no future value. …It’s well worth taking out tens of thousands of dollars in loans to pay for a degree that increases a student’s expected lifetime earnings by millions of dollars. But taking out tens of thousands in loans to pay for a degree that increases a student’s expected lifetime earnings by the same tens of thousands or less is, financially, a terrible investment.

Here’s a chart from their article, which looks at the value of various majors.

Second, the problems are caused by bad government policy.

We are in the midst of a college loan bubble for almost all of the same reasons that, a decade ago, we found ourselves in the midst of a housing loan bubble. …In both bubbles, the government interfered in markets in two critical ways. First, the government stepped in as a lender. Second, it shielded private lenders from the consequences of making bad loans. …Making college “free” will simply double-down on the very problem we already face. With “free” college, not only will colleges not have to care whether students can repay their loans, but the students themselves will also not have to care. Meanwhile, taxpayers will be on the hook for the numerous imprudent decisions by both colleges and students. It will bring about the worst of all possible worlds.

Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution used to be a Classics Professor at California State University. So he’s well positioned to provide a then-now comparison.

Here’s what he experienced in his early years.

Overwhelmingly liberal and often hippish in appearance, American faculty of the early 1970s still only rarely indoctrinated students or bullied them to mimic their own progressivism. Rather, in both the humanities and sciences, students were taught the inductive method of evaluating evidence… As an undergraduate and graduate student at hotbeds of prior 1960s protests at UC Santa Cruz and Stanford, I don’t think I had a single conservative professor. Yet there were few faculty members, in Western Civilization, history, classics, or mandatory general education science and math classes, who either sought to indoctrinate us with their liberal world view or punished us for remaining conservative. …Administrators in the 1960s and 1970s were relatively few. Most faculty saw administration as a temporary if necessary evil that took precious time away from teaching and research and so were admired for putting up with it. …Professors taught large loads—four or five classes a semester for California State University faculty. …The result was that both college tuition and room and board stayed relatively inexpensive.

And here’s what it’s become.

What went wrong? …Politics increasingly infected courses as competence eroded—logical for faculty and students since the former required far less of the latter. Across the curriculum, race, class, and gender studies found their way into art, music, literature, philosophy and history classes. Deduction now replaced the old empiricism. Grades inflated… Universities emulated the ethos of loan sharks and shake-down businesses. The con was as simple as it was insidiously brilliant. Academic lobbyists pressed the government for billions in guaranteed student loans… The federal government-backed student loans. That guarantee greenlighted cash-flush universities to pay inter alia for diversity czars, assistant provosts of “inclusion,” and armies of woke aides and facilitators, to reduce teaching loads, and to open more race/class/gender “centers” on campus—by jacking up college costs higher than the rate of inflation. Student debt soared. …A new generation owes $1.5 trillion in student debt… One’s 20s are now redefined as the lost decade, as marriage, child-rearing, and home buying are put off, to the extent they still occur, into one’s 30s. …The result was reduced teaching, a bonanza of release time, administrative bloat, Club Med dorms, gyms, and student unions, and epidemics of highly paid but non-teaching careerist advisors, and counselors.

So what’s his solution?

Universities should be held responsible for repaying a large percentage of the loans they issued and yet in advance knew well could not and would not be repaid. The government should get out of the campus loan insurance business.

Amen.

As I said at the end of this recent TV interview, colleges and universities need to have some skin in the game.

Daniel Kowalski explains for FEE that government policy is causing ever-higher costs.

Student loans did not exist in their present form until the federal government passed the Higher Education Act of 1965, which had taxpayers guaranteeing loans made by private lenders to students. While the program might have had good intentions, it has had unforeseen harmful consequences. …Secured financing of student loans resulted in a surge of students applying for college. This increase in demand was, in turn, met with an increase in price because university administrators would charge more if people were willing to pay it… According to Forbes, the average price of tuition has increased eight times faster than wages since the 1980s. …The government’s backing of student loans has caused the price of higher education to artificially rise…the current system of student loan financing needs to be reformed. Schools should not be given a blank check, and the government-guaranteed loans should only cover a partial amount of tuition. Schools should also be responsible for directly lending a portion of student loans so that it’s in their financial interest to make sure graduates enter the job market with the skills and requirements needed to get a well-paying job. If a student fails to pay back their loan, then the college or university should also share in the taxpayer’s loss.

All this government-fueled debt has real consequences. Three economists from the Federal Reserve found it hinders home ownership.

To estimate the effect of the increased student loan debt on homeownership, we tracked student loan and mortgage borrowing for individuals who were between 24 and 32 years old in 2005. Using these data, we constructed a model to estimate the impact of increased student loan borrowing on the likelihood of students becoming homeowners during this period of their lives. We found that a $1,000 increase in student loan debt (accumulated during the prime college-going years and measured in 2014 dollars) causes a 1 to 2 percentage point drop in the homeownership rate for student loan borrowers during their late 20s and early 30s. …According to our calculations, the increase in student loan debt between 2005 and 2014 reduced the homeownership rate among young adults by 2 percentage points. The homeownership rate for this group fell 9 percentage points over this period (figure 2), implying that a little over 20 percent of the overall decline in homeownership among the young can be attributed to the rise in student loan debt.

For those interested, here are some of their empirical findings.

By the way, I discussed the negative interaction of student debt and housing in the second half of this TV interview.

Professor Richard Vedder explains for the Wall Street Journal that this subsidized system has resulted in an environment in which neither students nor faculty work very hard.

One reason college is so costly and so little real learning occurs is that collegiate resources are vastly underused. Students don’t study much, professors teach little, few people read most of the obscure papers the professors write, and even the buildings are empty most of the time. …Surveys of student work habits find that the average amount of time spent in class and otherwise studying is about 27 hours a week. The typical student takes classes only 32 weeks a year, so he spends fewer than 900 hours annually on academics—less time than a typical eighth-grader… As economists Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks have demonstrated, students in the middle of the 20th century spent nearly 50% more time—around 40 hours weekly—studying. They now lack incentives to work very hard, since the average grade today—a B or B-plus—is much higher than in 1960… Sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa have demonstrated, using the Collegiate Learning Assessment, that the typical college senior has only marginally better critical reasoning and writing skills than a freshman. Federal Adult Literacy Survey data, admittedly somewhat outdated, shows declining literacy among college grads in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. …the typical professor is in class around one-third fewer hours than his 1965 counterpart. …The litany of underused resources goes on. In 1970 at a typical university there were perhaps two professors for each administrator. Today, there are usually more nonteaching administrators than professors.

Unfortunately, many politicians respond to these government-caused problems by proposing even more government.

That’s what Hillary Clinton did in 2016 and it’s what politicians – most notably Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders – are doing for 2020.

But that will make a bad situation even worse.

Paul Boyce, writing for FEE, explains that free college will lower standards and make college degrees relatively meaningless.

…college enrollment rates reached more than 40 percent in 2017. Of those, nearly one in three (31 percent) drop out entirely. Why should the average taxpayer subsidize this? …If college is free, it is likely that this rate will increase further. Students won’t have any skin in the game because they won’t be picking the tab up at the end. This effects efficient decisionmaking. In France, for example, the dropout rate is as high as 50 percent. …Government has a track record of underfunding. …This is demonstrated in France, which runs a “free” system. Its universities are heavily underfunded and unable to satisfy student enrollment. …As college enrollment has increased, standards have fallen to accommodate for this. …it defeats the goal of creating a well-educated workforce. …it dilutes the importance and value of a degree. …Undergraduate degrees will become the norm, and the financial return will become negligible.

And the experience of other nations isn’t a cause for optimism.

Andrew Hammel, an American who taught for many years at a German university, is not overly impressed by that nation’s free-tuition regime.

…in their early teen years, the brightest German students are sent to the most prestigious form of German high school, the Gymnasium. Currently, over 50 percent of German students earn this privilege (this number has jumped in the last 30 years, prompting charges of grade inflation). Gymnasium graduates with reasonable grades are guaranteed a place in a German university; there is no entrance exam. 95 percent of German students attend public universities, where they are charged fees, but not formal tuition. All professors at public universities are civil servants. …Supporters of the tuition-free system note that 65 percent of Germans say university should be tuition-free, “even if this means the quality of education is slightly worse.” …The system also gives students extra freedom: you can study art history or sociology, knowing that you won’t be hounded by creditors if you later find only spotty employment. …one-third of all students who enroll in German universities never finish. A recent OECD study found that only 28.6 percent of Germans aged between 25 and 64 had a tertiary education degree… German universities punch below their weight in international rankings… Gather any group of German professors, and talk will immediately turn to the burgeoning bureaucracy which distracts them from teaching and research. …Americans who teach ordinary classes in Germany find average German students somewhat less motivated than their dues-paying American counterparts. The top third of motivated students would succeed anywhere, and the bottom third, as we have seen, drop out.

I’ll close with an observation about inefficiency in higher education.

Here’s a chart I shared a few years ago. I’m sure the problem is even worse today.

The bottom line is that student debt, administrative bloat, and expensive tuition are all predictable consequences of federal subsidies.

P.S. If you’re worried about political correctness in higher education (and you have the appropriate subscriptions), I recommend this column in the Wall Street Journal and this George Will column in the Washington Post.

P.P.S. Here’s a video interview with Richard Vedder about high costs and inefficiency in higher education. And I also recommend this video explanation by Professor Daniel Lin.

P.P.P.S. It also turns that all these subsidies have a negative correlation with private-sector employment.

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Education Week, Part II: The Case for School Choice

School choice is based on the simple premise that we’ll get better results if school budgets are distributed to parents so they can pick from schools that compete for their kids (and dollars).

The current system, by contrast, is an inefficient monopoly that largely caters to the interests of teacher unions and school bureaucrats. Which is why more money and more money and more money and more money and more money (you get the point) never translates into better outcomes.

This is why even the Washington Post has editorialized for choice-based reform.

A few years ago, I shared a bunch of data showing that school choice boosts academic results for kids.

As part of our recognition of National Education Week, let’s augment those results with some more-recent findings.

There’s new evidence, for instance, that Florida’s choice system is producing good results.

…new evidence from the Urban Institute, which…examined a larger data set of some 89,000 students. The researchers compared those who used school vouchers to public-school students with comparable math and reading scores, ethnicity, gender and disability status. …High school voucher students attend either two-year or four-year institutions at a rate of 64%, according to the report, compared to 54% for non-voucher students. For four-year colleges only, some 27% of voucher students attend compared to 19% for public-school peers. …About 12% of voucher students attended private universities, double the rate of non-voucher students. …Voucher students who entered the program in elementary or middle school were 11% more likely to get a bachelor’s degree, while students who entered in high school were 20% more likely. …High schoolers who stayed in the voucher program for at least three years “were about 5 percentage points more likely to earn a bachelor’s degree, a 50 percent increase.”

A column published by the Foundation for Economic Education notes the positive outcomes in Wisconsin.

Private schools and independent public charter schools are more productive than district public schools, …according to report author Corey DeAngelis… DeAngelis compares the productivity of schools in cities throughout Wisconsin based on per-pupil funding and student achievement. Wisconsin’s four private-school parental choice programs currently enroll over 40,000 students combined, and more than 43,000 students are enrolled in charter schools. …Compared to Wisconsin district public schools, private schools participating in parental choice programs receive 27 percent less per-pupil funding, and charter schools receive 22 percent less. Yet these schools get more bang for every education buck, according to DeAngelis: “I find that private schools produce 2.27 more points on the Accountability Report Card for every $1,000 invested than district-run public schools [across 26 cities], demonstrating a 36 percent cost-effectiveness advantage for private schools. Independent charter schools produce 3.02 more points on the Accountability Report Card for every $1,000 invested than district-run public schools [throughout Milwaukee and Racine], demonstrating a 54 percent cost-effectiveness advantage for independent charter schools.”

A study looking at 11 school choice programs found very positive results.

Today 26 states and the District of Columbia have some private school choice program, and the trend is for more: Half of the programs have been established in the past five years. …a new study from the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas shows…that voucher students show “statistically significant” improvement in math and reading test scores. The researchers found that vouchers on average increase the reading scores of students who get them by about 0.27 standard deviations and their math scores by about 0.15 standard deviations. In laymen’s terms, this means that on average voucher students enjoy the equivalent of several months of additional learning compared to non-voucher students. …“When you do the math, students achieve more when they have access to private school choice,” says Patrick J. Wolf, who conducted the study with M. Danish Shakeel and Kaitlin P. Anderson. …The Arkansas results aren’t likely to change union minds because vouchers are a mortal threat to their public-school monopoly. But for anyone who cares about how much kids learn, especially the poorest kids, the Arkansas study is welcome news that school choice delivers.

Even if choice is just limited to charter schools, there are positive outcomes, as seen from research on Michigan’s program.

Charter students in Detroit on average score 60% more proficient on state tests than kids attending the city’s traditional public schools. Eighteen of the top 25 schools in Detroit are charters while 23 of the bottom 25 are traditional schools. Two studies from Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (2013, 2015) found that students attending Michigan charters gained on average an additional two months of learning every year over their traditional school counterparts. Charter school students in Detroit gained three months.

Back in 2016, Jason Riley of the Wall Street Journal shared some evidence about the benefits of choice.

Barack Obama…spent his entire presidency trying to shut down a school voucher program in Washington, D.C., that gives poor black and brown children access to private schools and, according to the Education Department’s own evaluation, improves their chances of graduating by as much as 21 percentage points. …Democrats continue to throw ever-increasing amounts of taxpayer money at the problem in return for political support from the teachers unions that control public education. …Harvard professor Martin West describes some of the more recent school-choice research. Students at Boston charter high schools “are more likely to take and pass Advance Placement courses and to enroll in a four-year rather than a two-year college,” writes Mr. West. Attending a charter middle school in Harlem “sharply reduced the chances of teen pregnancy (for girls) and incarceration (for boys),” and “a Florida charter school increased students’ earnings as adults.” Mr. West concludes that “attending a school of choice, whether private or charter, is especially beneficial for minority students living in urban areas.”

A study by the World Bank found big benefits from choice in Washington, D.C., with minorities being the biggest beneficiaries.

This paper develops and estimates an equilibrium model of charter school entry and school choice. In the model, households choose among public, private, and charter schools, and a regulator authorizes charter entry and mandates charter exit. The model is estimated for Washington, D.C. According to the estimates, charters generate net social gains by providing additional school options, and they benefit non-white, low-income, and middle-school students the most. Further, policies that raise the supply of prospective charter entrants in combination with high authorization standards enhance social welfare. …In order to quantify the net social gains generated by charter schools, we run a counterfactual consisting of not having charters at all in 2007. …charter students who switch into public schools outside Ward 3 experience lower proficiency, quality and value added than before. Proficiency losses are quite severe at the middle school level and for poor black students, who on average lose 6.4 and 5.3 percentage points out of their baseline average proficiency… On average all student groups lose welfare due to the loss of school options, but losses are the greatest for those previously most likely to attend charters. Middle school students, who gain much from the quantity and quality of options offered by charters, are particularly hurt. Further, poor blacks in middle school experience a loss of about 15 percent of their baseline welfare. …The 25 percent of students most hurt by charter removal are non-white, have an average household income of $27,000 and experience an average welfare loss equivalent to 19 percent of their income. …total social benefits fall by about $77,000,000 when the 59 charters are removed.

This map from the study is worth some careful attention.

It reveals that the rich and white families who live in northwestern D.C. don’t have any big need for choice. It’s the poor families (mostly black) elsewhere in the city who are anxious for alternatives.

(Which is why the NAACP’s decision to side with unions over black children is so reprehensible.)

The good news is that there’s ongoing movement to expand choice in some states.

The Wall Street Journal opined about significant progress in Florida.

With little fanfare this autumn, another 18,000 young Floridians joined the ranks of Americans who enjoy school choice. More than 100,000 students, all from families of modest means, already attend private schools using the state’s main tax-credit scholarship. But the wait list this spring ran to the thousands, so in May the state created a voucher program to clear the backlog. …This is a huge victory for school choice. The first cohort of voucher recipients is 71% black and Hispanic, according to state data. Eighty-seven percent have household incomes at or below 185% of the poverty line, or $47,638 for a family of four. The law gives priority to these students… Mr. DeSantis’s opponent, Democrat Andrew Gillum, said he would wind down the scholarships. CNN’s exit poll says 18% of black women voted for Mr. DeSantis… That’s decisive, since the Governor won by fewer than 40,000 ballots.

The final passage is worth emphasis. Reformers can attract votes from minority families who are ill-served by the government’s education monopoly,

Parents in low-income communities aren’t stupid. Once they figure out that government schools are run for the benefit of unions rather than children, they will respond accordingly.

And here’s some positive news from Tennessee.

Governor Bill Lee fulfilled a campaign promise on Friday when he signed a school voucher bill into law. …its passage is a big victory for the Governor and even more for Tennessee children trapped in failing public schools. Beginning in the 2021-22 school year, the measure will provide debit cards averaging $7,300 each year for low-income families to use for education-related expenses. The money can pay for private-school tuition, textbooks or a tutor, among other things. The program is capped at a disappointingly low 15,000 students. Participation is also restricted to only two of the state’s 95 counties—Shelby and Davidson… This is where the need is greatest, given that these two counties have the most failing public schools.

To be sure, the union bosses are fighting back.

Over the years, we’ve seen setbacks in states where we hoped for progress, such as Colorado and Pennsylvania.

Let’s close with this very simple message…

…and this very persuasive video.

P.S. There’s also evidence that school choice is better for children’s mental health since it’s associated with lower suicide rates. That’s a nice fringe benefit, much like the data on school choice and jobs.

P.P.S. Getting rid of the Department of Education would be a good idea, but the battle for school choice is largely won and lost on the state and local level.

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Education Week, Part I: The Continuing Deterioration of K-12 Government Schooling

According to the union bosses at the National Education Association, November 18-22 is National Education Week and a “wonderful opportunity to celebrate public education.”

I care about facts and I care about kids, and all the evidence shows that government schools do a terrible job. So, instead of celebrating, I’m going to focus this week on government’s destructive impact.

Let’s start with this stunning visual from Mark Perry at the American Enterprise Institute. As you can see, the main takeaways are that costs have soared and bureaucracy has expanded.

And if you look at this chart, you’ll see that test scores have been flat.

Indeed, the unambiguous conclusion is that taxpayers are being asked to cough up ever-growing amounts of cash. Yet we never see any improvements in the quality of government schooling.

Indeed, an article in National Review explains that all this money and this bureaucracy has produced a negative rate of return

A Nation at Risk…revealed, in the words of Ronald Reagan, an education system plagued by “low standards, lack of purpose, ineffective use of resources, and a failure to challenge students to push performance to the boundaries of individual ability.” …Since then the nation has devoted a great deal of attention to getting education right. To little avail. …The results of the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)…, released this month, are dismal. Fewer than half of students are rated “proficient” in each of these subjects.

But it’s not just folks on the right who think the current system is a failure.

An article in left-of-center Vox is even more dour about the effectiveness of government schools.

…cast a cold look at the performance of schools… Consider the trends: Since 2005, SAT reading scores have dropped by 14 points. A writing component was added to the SAT in 2006, and scores have dropped every year since then except for two years when they were flat. Math scores for 2015 were the lowest in 20 years. …On the ACT’s measure of “college readiness” in math, English, reading, and science, slightly more than one-third of test takers met the benchmarks in three subjects, while another one-third did not meet any(!) of the benchmarks. …According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress exams (the “Nation’s Report Card,” administered by the Education Department’s National Center for Educational Statistics), only one-quarter of 12th-graders are proficient in civics, one-fifth in geography, just over one-third (37 percent) in reading, one-fifth (22 percent) in science, and one-eighth (12 percent) in US history. Only one-quarter of them reach proficiency in math. …At the same time, we have another discrepancy, outcomes versus public school funding. …Adjusted for inflation, the national average for per-pupil spending rose steadily…the cost-benefit numbers continue to look bleak.

The fundamental problem is that teacher unions are in bed with politicians.

This doesn’t just mean that government schools are needlessly expensive (and they are). It also means that the government monopoly primarily exists as a tool to serve bureaucracy rather than students.

Consider these scholarly findings.

Does collective bargaining by teachers help or hurt students?Two Cornell academics— Michael Lovenheim, an associate professor of policy analysis and management, and Alexander Willén, a doctoral student—have recently completed a study that tries to answer it. In “A Bad Bargain: How teacher collective bargaining affects students’ employment and earnings later in life,” the professors conclude: “We find strong evidence that teacher collective bargaining has a negative effect on students’ earnings as adults.” …Students who spent all 12 years of their elementary and secondary education in schools with mandatory collective bargain earned $795 less per year as adults than their peers who weren’t in such schools. They also worked on average a half hour less per week, were 0.9% less likely to be employed, and were in occupations requiring lower skills. The authors found that these add up to a large overall loss of $196 billion per year…collective bargaining may be profitable for the teachers and staff of public schools, but the price is being paid by the students.

Washington-driven policies certainly haven’t helped. Bush’s so-called No Child Left Behind scheme failed, and the same is true for Obama’s Common Core.

Indeed, this article from the Federalist documents the failure of Obama’s approach.

…the Obama administration lured states into adopting Common Core sight unseen, with promises it would improve student achievement. Like President Obama’s other big promises — “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” — this one’s been proven a scam. …Race to the Top was a $4 billion money pot inside the 2009 stimulus that helped bribe states into Common Core. …Are American children increasingly prepared…? We’re actually seeing the opposite. They’re increasingly less prepared. And there’s mounting evidence that Common Core deserves some of the blame. …ACT scores released earlier this month show that students’ math achievement is at a 20-year low. The latest English ACT scores are slightly down since 2007, and students’ readiness for college-level English was at its lowest level since ACT’s creators began measuring that item…the latest round of international tests…showed U.S. fourth graders declining on reading achievement. …Common Core sucked all the energy, money, and motivation right out of desperately needed potential reforms to U.S. public schools for a decade, and for nothing. It’s more money right down our nation’s gigantic debt hole, another generation lost to sickening ignorance, another set of corrupt bureaucrats‘ careers and bank accounts built out of the wreckage of American minds.

We can also see the dismal impact of bigger budgets by looking at experiences in various cities.

Throwing more money at the government monopoly didn’t work in New York City.

Mayor Bill de Blasio is canceling one of his signature education initiatives, acknowledging that despite spending $773 million he was unable to turn around many long-struggling public schools in three years after decades of previous interventions had also failed. …the program has been plagued by bureaucratic confusion and uneven academic results… The question of how to fix broken schools is a great unknown in education…no large school system has cracked the code, despite decades of often costly attempts. …the program was based on the union-friendly theory that struggling schools need more resources.

(For some very grim first-hand accounts of New York City’s government schools, click here, here, and here.)

It didn’t work in Newark.

Booker pitched Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg that, with $100 million, they “could flip a whole city!” In September 2010, the troika appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s television show to present and accept the gift. For education reformers convinced that poverty could be solved given the will and the money, it was a dream come true. …the reformers’ dreams turned into a political nightmare. …Hopes for a game-changing teacher contract were quickly dashed, as reformers learned that teacher tenure protections were enshrined in state law. …Newark public schools spend $19,650 per pupil, but only $9,604 reaches the classroom.

And it didn’t work in Denver.

Denver’s once-celebrated ProComp pay system…was jointly developed by the DCTA and Denver Public Schools in 2005. …Back then, ProComp was heralded as a pioneering step forward on pay-for-performance/merit pay… The only problem? This narrative is bunk. For all the talk about “merit” and “performance,” ProComp is almost wholly devoid of any links between pay and teacher performance. …ProComp is mostly designed to reward the usual credentialism… Denver’s situation is so noteworthy because Denver is no laggard. Indeed, for many years, it has been celebrated as a “model” district by reformers. So it’s disheartening how little progress the city has actually made.

And you won’t be surprised to learn it didn’t work in D.C.

The much-celebrated success of education reform in the nation’s capital turns out to have been a lie. …Education reformers used to celebrate D.C.’s dramatic decline in school suspensions. Then a Washington Post investigation revealed that it was fake; administrators had merely taken suspensions off the books. The same reformers used to celebrate D.C.’s sharp increase in high-school graduations. Then an NPR investigation revealed that it, too, was fake; almost half of students who missed more than half the year graduated. …consider Abdullah Zaki, who back in 2013 was named DCPS principal of the year. He was just placed on administrative leave (not fired, mind you) after an audit revealed that 4,000 changes were made to 118 students’ attendance records at his high school. …consider Yetunde Reeves…who took Ballou High School from 57 percent graduation to 100 percent college acceptance in just one year. She was placed on administrative leave (again, not fired) after NPR reported teacher allegations that she leveraged the teacher-evaluation system to coerce teachers to go along with her scheme.

I realize I’m being repetitive, but more money for the government monopoly also didn’t work in Providence.

Rhode Island’s politicians this summer made a show of decrying the shameful condition of Providence public schools…peeling lead paint, vermin, brown water, leaking sewage—from a Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy 93-page report on Providence schools… Student test scores are the worst in Rhode Island and lower than districts in other states with similar demographics. …“the district’s performance is continuing to decline despite increased interventions and funding.” Providence’s school budget has increased by nearly a quarter since 2011.

You can also click here to read about failure in Patterson, N.J., and Los Angeles, CA. The bottom line is that more spending does not lead to better student performance.

It’s also nauseating that government schools try to brainwash kids with leftist pabulum.

Consider what’s happening in California.

California’s Education Department has issued an “Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum”…written by an advisory board of teachers, academics and bureaucrats. It’s as bad as you imagine. …The document is filled with fashionable academic jargon like “positionalities,” “hybridities,” “nepantlas” and “misogynoir.” It includes faddish social-science lingo like “cis-heteropatriarchy”… It is difficult to comprehend the depth and breadth of the ideological bias and misrepresentations without reading the whole curriculum—something few will want to do. Begin with economics. Capitalism is described as a “form of power and oppression,” alongside “patriarchy,” “racism,” “white supremacy” and “ableism.” …Housing policy gets the treatment. The curriculum describes subprime loans as an attack on home buyers with low incomes rather than a misguided attempt by the government to help such home buyers. …This curriculum explicitly aims at encouraging students to become “agents of change, social justice organizers and advocates.”

Seattle is also looking to get in the business of dishing out propaganda.

Seattle’s public-school district has proposed a new math curriculum that would teach its students all about how math has been “appropriated” — and how it “continues to be used to oppress and marginalize people and communities.” …the social-justice approach to teaching math has officially entered the mainstream (and taxpayer-funded!) arena. …this approach to teaching math will only end up harming the very groups it claims it champions. …The minority students, the members of the very groups that this curriculum presumably aims to aid, are actually going to be learning less math than they would have without it — because they will be spending some of that class time learning about how math’s racism has hurt them.

Wow. No wonder young people are sympathetic to socialism. They’re being spoon-fed crazy ideas.

To round out our discussion, here’s a video from Reason.

So what’s the solution?

Writing for Real Clear Politics, Heather Wilhelm says we need to give up on the government monopoly.

…there might not be much left to do but vote with your feet. The term “Go Galt,” which comes from Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” refers to citizens retreating from a political system that basically takes their money and otherwise does them no good. …odds are the public school system isn’t doing you any favors. If you’re a poor kid in the inner city, the damage and injustice is obvious… “If you send your kid to a private school,” Slate’s Allison Benedikt wrote in a 2013 essay-gone-viral, you are “a bad person … ruining one of our nation’s most essential institutions.” News flash: The public school system is already a mess, it’s getting messier, and it can only improve the old-fashioned way — through competition.

If you prefer, this quote from Thomas Sowell is spot on.

If you are serious about wanting to improve education, do not vote more money for the education establishment that has been dumbing down the schools for years. Vote for vouchers, tax credits, or anything else that will transfer decision-making power to parents.

— Thomas Sowell (@ThomasSowell) October 10, 2019

The bottom line is that government has created a bad system. It doesn’t matter that most teachers have noble intentions. It doesn’t matter that most kids are capable of higher achievement. Monopolies simply don’t perform, especially when mixed with special-interest politics.

It goes without saying that shutting down the Department of Education would be a positive step. But that’s only a partial solution. We’ll explore the real answer tomorrow.

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A Case Study of Pointless (but Costly) Financial Regulation

One of the quirkier aspect of Washington policy making is the strategizing that occurs when proposed laws get names such as the “Social Security 2100 Act,” the “PATRIOT Act” or the “Affordable Care Act“.

The obvious goal is to put pressure on other lawmakers, who don’t want to go on record for…gasp…being unpatriotic or for…heaven forbid…supporting expensive care.

I was reminded of this when reading a new study examining the “Corporate Transparency Act” and the “ILLICIT CASH Act” (an acronym for “Improving Laundering Laws and Increasing Comprehensive Information Tracking of Criminal Activity in Shell Holdings Act”).

Who could be for secretive companies, or for criminal activity?

Well, as David Burton explains, these pieces of legislation would be all costs and no benefits.

Both bills…would impose a new, burdensome beneficial owner-ship reporting requirement on the smallest businesses in America, while exempting those most able to abuse the financial system. The Corporate Transparency Act would also burden “exempt” entities, including not-for-profit organizations. Moreover, both reporting regimes would be easily and lawfully avoided by criminal elements with even a rudimentary knowledge of business. Better, more comprehensive information is available from tax forms already provided to government—but jurisdictional turf jealousies in Congress have made it difficult to adopt less burdensome approaches using this tax information.

The report has plenty of details about how these proposals would impose onerous regulatory requirements on small businesses and non-profit organizations – including the fact that there are extremely harsh penalties for inadvertent failure (or inability) to comply with the vague legislative language.

Every small business in America would need to either file the beneficial ownership report or, if the business is in an exempt category, file a certification with FinCEN asserting the exemption. Most would not be exempt. In the case of small firms that have other entities as investors or have any-thing other than entirely conventional corporate governance, the reporting burden may be quite high. …roughly 13 million corporations or LLCs would likely be subject to the new reporting regime and required to either report or seek an exemption. Of those, about 11.2 million are small businesses that are not exempt. If even 9 percent were unaware of this new requirement and fail to file with FinCEN, two years after enactment there would be over 1 million small business owners, religious congregations, and charities in non-compliance, subject to fines and imprisonment. …the likely cost will be over $1 billion annually, and perhaps many billions of dollars each year.

Sadly, congressional supporters presumably don’t care about billions of dollars of costs being imposed on the private sector.

They don’t think beyond the fact that they can issue press releases saying they’re against “dirty money.”

What makes this particular case so disgusting is that the federal government already has all the information that would be collected by the two proposed laws. And it would be relatively simple to make it accessible for financial regulators.

The alternative approach would require the Internal Revenue Service to compile a beneficial ownership database ( based on information already provided to the agency in the ordinary course of tax administration) and to share the information in this database with FinCEN. …This approach would provide more comprehensive information to FinCEN than the proposed reporting regime. Furthermore, the social cost of this approach—creating a database based on information already provided to the IRS—would be a very small fraction of the approach contemplated in the proposed reporting regime. The increase in private compliance costs would be negligible… To implement this approach, Internal Revenue Code § 6103(i)…would need to be amended to allow the IRS to share the information with FinCEN.

So why aren’t politicians choosing this simple, low-cost, and non-intrusive approach?

The answer may cause your jaw to drop.

…this approach involves changes to the tax law (notably Internal Revenue Code § 6103), it falls with the jurisdiction of the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance Committees. …Because the primary congressional proponents of beneficial ownership reporting are on the Financial Services and Banking Committees and are not willing to relinquish control of the issue, the less burdensome, more effective approach has not moved forward.

Not that it would be a good idea to go with the alternative approach.

Yes, it would be a less-misguided way of achieving the goal, but David’s concluding analysis points out that that the entire anti-money laundering regime fails any sort of cost-benefit analysis.

The current U.S. framework is overly complex and burdensome, and its ad hoc nature has likely impeded efforts to combat terrorism, enforce laws, and collect taxes.The proposed beneficial ownership reporting regime would add substantially to the complexity and burden of the existing AML and tax information reporting regime. It would, however, do little to further law enforcement objectives. …there is no actual evidence (as opposed to bare assertions or anecdotes) that the beneficial ownership reporting regimes in other countries have had any material effect on money laundering or terrorism. …The existing AML regime is extraordinary expensive. The AML regime costs an estimated $4.8 billion to $8 billion annually.87 Yet this AML system results in fewer than 700 convictions annually, a substantial proportion (probably most) of which are simply additional counts against persons charged with other predicate crimes. …There is a need to engage in a serious cost-benefit analysis of the AML regime and its constituent parts before adding yet another poorly conceived requirement that burdens the smallest businesses in the country.

Amen.

At the risk of understatement, I’m not a big fan of these laws and regulations.

• They are pointless.
• They are expensive.
• They are intrusive.
• They are discriminatory.
• They are ineffective.
• They disproportionately hurt poor people.

But Democrats don’t care since they see anti-money laundering laws as a way of destroying financial privacy, which they think is necessary to collect more tax revenue.

And Republicans don’t care because they mindlessly support a tough-on-crime approach, regardless of whether it actually produces positive results.

Gee, isn’t bipartisanship wonderful?

P.S. It’s not relevant to big-picture issues such as regulatory burden and cost-benefit analysis, but I want to share one final passage about the The ILLICIT CASH Act from David’s study.

The bill would raise FinCEN salaries to the level of the Federal Reserve. While it is unsurprising that FinCEN personnel want a raise, this is war-ranted only if it is established that FinCEN is systematically having difficulty attracting qualified, competent personnel. Since only five individuals out of 285 (1.8 percent) quit the agency in fiscal year 2018, it is unlikely that its compensation packages are uncompetitive. In contrast, the annual quit rate in the private sector in 2018 was 30 percent; it was 13 percent in the finance and insurance sector.

In other words, the legislation is also a back-door vehicle to further enrich a portion of the already-overpaid federal bureaucracy.

P.P.S. For what it’s worth, I have a 1-1 record in my inadvertent career as a global money launderer.

P.P.P.S. You may not think AML policy lends itself to humor, but here’s an amusing anecdote involving a former President.

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Socialism Humor

The Babylon Bee is America’s best site for political satire, with several appearances in my collection of libertarian humor.

The site is great even when libertarians get mocked.

Check out the following three stories.

We’ll start with one about a vapid millennial (who presumably took part in this poll).

Local socialist millennial man Matthew Hatter lamented Monday that there are no concrete examples of socialism he can point to in order to have some kind of idea how it would turn out. “If only there were other countries that have tried socialism before,” Hatter said to a friend at an ethical coffee shop… “Like, say some countries in South America tried socialism before and everybody starved to death,” he said. “Or if there were major superpowers who implemented socialism and then, like, 100 million people died—that would be really bad. We could look to these ‘books of history’ and decide that wouldn’t be the route for us.” …Hatter said he’s just glad that if socialism turns out to be terrible, no other country would be dumb enough to follow in our footsteps.

Some people are familiar with socialism, of course.

And this next bit of satire from Babylon Bee indicates that they’re planning ahead.

The nation’s Democratic leaders announced Tuesday they are reversing course on Trump’s proposed border wall, since “it will keep people in once we switch to socialism.” “We thought the border wall was a bad, racist idea,” said Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. …But that got me thinking…when we switch to socialism, everyone’s gonna try to run away. But what if there’s a big, solid object along the border? Then they can’t run away. I mean, they could try to climb, but we could shoot them.” Senator Bernie Sanders said in his experience, walls are “absolutely necessary” to keep a socialist country’s citizens from fleeing. “The Soviets had it right: big wall in Berlin, the symbolic Iron Curtain, shooting people who try to flee. It’s all necessary to a healthy socialist state.”

Sounds like they read the advice that Walter Williams gave – tongue in cheek – to California’s politicians.

Our third and final example from Babylon Bee involves the Democrats’ electoral plan.

Laying their cards on the table with the midterms approaching, the nation’s Democrats have united to send a clear message: socialism is America’s only hope of ending the current nightmare of economic prosperity. “We’re living in a hellscape—but there is an escape,” 2020 presidential hopeful Joe Biden said… “democratic socialism is what’s going to free us from our horrific, flourishing, present conditions. You do the math.” …“Kill anyone who disagrees!” Maxine Waters bellowed from the background.

The Foundation for Economic Education just published a column with 10 of the jokes that East Germans told about their dictatorial government.

Here are my three favorites.

• Why do Stasi officers make such good taxi drivers? — You get in the car and they already know your name and where you live.
• What’s the best feature of a Trabant? — There’s a heater at the back to keep your hands warm when you’re pushing it.
• What would happen if the desert became a socialist country? — Nothing for a while… then the sand becomes scarce.

Speaking of satire, Hasbro apparently has produced a socialist version of their famous Monopoly board game.

Sounds fake, but you can find it on Amazon.

John Ellis of PJ Media is quite amused.

Hasbro’s new “Monopoly: Socialism,” though, sounds like a hoot and a great way to continue to teach my kids why socialism is for the math-, economics-, and history-challenged among us. …the game sounds awesome! …the only game played in my house on game night henceforth will be Hasbro’s Monopoly: Socialism. …I get to incorporate both fun and education into family game night.

We’ll close out with another appearance by Libertarian Jesus.

Very appropriate given what I wrote about two weeks ago.

If you’re interested, other examples of Libertarian Jesus can be found here, here, and here.

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Wealth Taxation and Confiscatory Effective Tax Rates

With their punitive proposals for wealth taxes, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are leading the who-can-be-craziest debate in the Democratic Party.

But what would happen if either “Crazy Bernie” or “Looney Liz” actually had the opportunity to impose such levies?

At the risk of gross understatement, the effect won’t be pretty.

Based on what’s happened elsewhere in Europe, the Wall Street Journal opined that America’s economy would suffer.

Bernie Sanders often points to Europe as his economic model, but there’s one lesson from the Continent that he and Elizabeth Warren want to ignore. Europe has tried and mostly rejected the wealth taxes that the two presidential candidates are now promising for America. …Sweden…had a wealth tax for most of the 20th century, though its revenue never accounted for more than 0.4% of gross domestic product in the postwar era. …The relatively small Swedish tax still was enough of a burden to drive out some of the country’s brightest citizens. …In 2007 the government repealed its 1.5% tax on personal wealth over $200,000. …Germany…imposed levies of 0.5% and 0.7% on personal and corporate wealth in 1978. The rate rose to 1% in 1995, but the Federal Constitutional Court struck down the wealth tax that year, and it was effectively abolished by 1997. …The German left occasionally proposes resurrecting the old system, and in 2018 the Ifo Institute for Economic Research analyzed how that would affect the German economy. The authors’ baseline scenario suggests that long-run GDP would be 5% lower with a wealth tax, while employment would shrink 2%. …The best argument against a wealth tax is moral. It is a confiscatory tax on the assets from work, thrift and investment that have already been taxed at least once as individual or corporate income, and perhaps again as a capital gain or death tax. The European experience shows that it also fails in practice.

Karl Smith’s Bloomberg column warns that wealth taxes would undermine the entrepreneurial capitalism that has made the United States so successful.

…a wealth tax…would allow the federal government to undermine a central animating idea of American capitalism. …The U.S. probably could design a wealth tax that works. …If a country was harboring runaway billionaires, the U.S. could effectively lock it out of the international financial system. That would make it practically impossible for high-net-worth people to have control over their wealth, even if it they could keep the U.S. government from collecting it. The necessity of this type of harsh enforcement points to a much larger flaw in the wealth tax… Billionaires…accumulate wealth…it allows them to control the destiny of the enterprises they founded. A wealth tax stands in the way of this by requiring billionaires to sell off stakes in their companies to pay the tax. …One of the things that makes capitalism work is the way it makes economic resources available to those who have demonstrated an ability to deploy them effectively. It’s the upside of billionaires. …A wealth tax designed to democratize control over companies would strike directly at this strength. …a wealth tax would penalize the founders with the most dedication to their businesses. Entrepreneurs would be less likely to start businesses, in Silicon Valley or elsewhere, if they think their success will result in the loss of their ability to guide their company.

The bottom line, given the importance of “super entrepreneurs” to a nation’s economy, is that wealth taxes would do considerable long-run damage.

Andy Kessler, in a column for the Wall Street Journal, explains that wealth taxes directly harm growth by penalizing income that is saved and invested.

Even setting comical revenue projections aside, the wealth-tax idea doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Never mind that it’s likely unconstitutional. Or that a wealth tax is triple taxation… The most preposterous part of the wealth-tax plans is their supporters’ insistence that they would be good for the economy. …a wealth tax would suck money away from productive investments. …liberals in favor of taxation always trot out the tired trope that the poor drive growth by spending their money while the rich hoard it, tossing gold coins in the air in their basement vaults. …So just tax the rich and government spending will create great jobs for the poor and middle class. This couldn’t be more wrong. As anyone with $1 billion—or $1,000—knows, people don’t stuff their mattresses with Benjamins. They invest them. …most likely…in stocks or invested directly in job-creating companies… A wealth tax takes money out of the hands of some of the most productive members of society and directs it toward the least productive uses. …existing taxes on interest, dividends and capital gains discourage the healthy savings that create jobs in the economy. These are effectively taxes on wealth—and we don’t need another one.

Professor Noah Smith leans to the left. But that doesn’t stop him, in a column for Bloomberg, from looking at what happened in France and then warning that wealth taxes have some big downsides.

Studies on the effects of taxation when rates are moderate might not be a good guide to what happens when rates are very high. Economic theories tend to make a host of simplifying assumptions that might break down under a very high-tax regime. …One way to predict the possible effects of the taxes is to look at a country that tried something similar: France, where Piketty, Saez and Zucman all hail from. …France…shows that inequality, at least to some degree, is a choice. Taxes and spending really can make a big difference. But there’s probably a limit to how much even France can do in this regard. The country has experimented with…wealth taxes…with disappointing results. France had a wealth tax from 1982 to 1986 and again from 1988 to 2017. …The wealth tax might have generated social solidarity, but as a practical matter it was a disappointment. The revenue it raised was rather paltry; only a few billion euros at its peak, or about 1% of France’s total revenue from all taxes. At least 10,000 wealthy people left the country to avoid paying the tax; most moved to neighboring Belgium… France lost not only their wealth tax revenue but their income taxes and other taxes as well. French economist Eric Pichet estimates that this ended up costing the French government almost twice as much revenue as the total yielded by the wealth tax.

In other words, the much-maligned Laffer Curve is very real. When looking at total tax collections from the rich, the wealth tax resulted in less money for France’s greedy politicians.

And this chart from the column shows that French lawmakers are experts at extracting money from the private sector.

The dirty little secret, of course, is that lower-income and middle-class taxpayers are the ones being mistreated.

By the way, Professor Smith’s column also notes that President Hollande’s 75 percent tax rate on the rich also backfired.

Let’s close with a report from the Wall Street Journal about one of the grim implications of Senator Warren’s proposed tax.

Elizabeth Warren has unveiled sweeping tax proposals that would push federal tax rates on some billionaires and multimillionaires above 100%. That prospect raises questions for taxpayers and the broader economy… How might that change their behavior? And would investment and economic growth suffer? …The rate would vary according to the investor’s circumstances, any state taxes, the profitability of his investments and as-yet-unspecified policy details, but tax rates of over 100% on investment income would be typical, especially for billionaires. …After Ms. Warren’s one-two punch, some billionaires who generate pretax returns could pay annual taxes that would leave them with less money than they started with.

Here’s a chart from the story (which I’ve modified in red for emphasis) showing that investors would face effective tax rates of more than 100 percent unless they somehow managed to earn very high returns.

For what it’s worth, I’ve been making this same point for many years, starting in 2012.

Nonetheless, I’m glad to see it’s finally getting traction. Hopefully this will deter lawmakers from ever imposing such a catastrophically bad policy.

Remember, a tax that discourages saving and investment is a tax that results in lower wages for workers.

P.S. Switzerland has the world’s best-functioning wealth tax (basically as an alternative to other forms of double taxation), but even that levy is destructive and should be abolished.

P.P.S. Sadly, because their chief motive is envy, I don’t think my left-leaning friends can be convinced by data about economic damage.

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Sweatshops, Robber Barons, and Capitalist Exploitation

The hard part about being a libertarian is that there are endless opportunities to be frustrated. Especially if you’re job is trying to convince politicians to restrain the size and scope of government when that’s not in their self interest.

One of my special frustrations, though, is that many people don’t understand economic history.

• They blame the Great Depression on capitalism when it was largely the result of bad government policy.
• They blame the financial crisis on capitalism when it was largely the result of bad government policy.

Today, let’s talk about another example of bad economic history. Many people think corporations are rapacious entities that – in the absence of wise government – will create monopolies that screw workers with sweatshop conditions and screw consumers with ever-higher prices.

Much of this mythology goes back to the era of supposed “Robber Barons” in the late 1800s.

Fortunately, in a column for FEE, Professor Burton Folsom shared an excerpt from his book on the topic. He notes that there was considerable economic liberty – and considerable economic progress – during that era.

The years…from 1865 to the early 1900s, saw the U.S. encourage entrepreneurs indirectly by limiting government. Slavery was abolished and so was the income tax. Federal spending was slashed… American politicians learned from the past. They had dabbled in federal subsidies from steamships to transcontinental railroads, and those experiments dismally failed. Politicians then turned to free markets as a better strategy for economic development. The world-dominating achievements of Cornelius Vanderbilt, James J. Hill, John D. Rockefeller, and Charles Schwab validated America’s unprecedented limited government.

Yet that’s not the story you find in most history books.

Professor Folsom explores why there’s such a poor understanding and finds bias in the academy, as well as an inability to understand the difference between honest wealth and politically connected wealth.

Why is it, then, that for so many years, most historians have been teaching the opposite lesson? …most historians have preached that many, if not all, entrepreneurs were “robber barons.” They did not enrich the U.S. with their investments; instead, they bilked the public and corrupted political and economic life in America. The catalyst for this negative view of American entrepreneurs was historian Matthew Josephson, who wrote a landmark book, The Robber Barons. …Josephson began research for his book in 1932, the nadir of the Great Depression. Businessmen were a handy scapegoat for that crisis, and Josephson embraced a Marxist view that the Great Depression was perhaps the last phase in the fall of capitalism and the triumph of communism. …“I am not a complete Marxist,” Josephson insisted, “But what I took to heart for my own project was his theory of the process of industrial concentration… Josephson missed the distinction between market entrepreneurs like Vanderbilt, Hill, and Rockefeller and political entrepreneurs like Collins, Villard, and Gould. …Most of Josephson’s ire is directed toward political entrepreneurs. The subsidized Henry Villard of the Northern Pacific Railroad, with his “bad grades and high interest charges”… But it never occurs to Josephson that the subsidies government gave these railroads created the incentives. …If Josephson’s research was so sloppy, and his interpretation so biased, how did his Robber Baron view come to prevail in the writing of U.S. history? …Progressive historians had begun to dominate the writing of history and they were eager to blame a new generation of robber barons for the collapse of the American economy.

Now let’s take a closer look at two infamous companies.

We’ll begin with Standard Oil, which has a modern-day reputation of being a greedy monopolist.

Yet as David Weinberger explained for FEE, that’s an odd way of describing a company that continuously lowered prices.

In 1870, when it was in its early years, Standard Oil owned just 4 percent of the petroleum market. John D. Rockefeller, however, obsessed over improving efficiency and cutting costs. Through economies of scale and vertical integration, he vastly improved oil-refining efficiency. His business grew as a result. By 1874, his share of the petroleum market jumped to 25 percent, and by 1880 it skyrocketed to about 85 percent. Meanwhile, the price of oil plummeted from 30 cents per gallon in 1869 to eight cents in 1885. …His business was a model of free-market efficiency.

The government ultimately used antitrust laws to dismantle the company, but it’s worth noting that the courts never found any evidence of actual monopolistic behavior.

In 1911, the court declared Standard Oil a monopoly and ordered its breakup. …economist John S. McGee reviewed over 11,000 pages of trial testimony, including the charges brought by Standard Oil’s competitors. Publishing his findings in the Journal of Law and Economics, he concluded that there was “little to no evidence” of wrongdoing, adding that “Standard Oil did not use predatory price cutting to acquire or keep monopoly power.” Furthermore, and also in contradiction to monopoly theory, Standard Oil’s share of the market had declined from close to 90 percent in the late 1800s to about 65 percent at the time of the court’s ruling. …In other words, Standard Oil did precisely the opposite of what monopoly theory maintains—it reduced rather than raised prices, it increased rather than cut production, it lost rather than “controlled” market share, and it paid its employees more rather than less than its competitors—yet the theory that Standard Oil engaged in “predatory practices” and “exploited” consumers has prevailed in our history books.

Now let’s look at the United Fruit Corporation, which history tells us was a master of brutal exploitation.

Yet a new academic study by Esteban Mendez-Chacon and Diana Van Patten discovered that the workers of Costa Rica were beneficiaries (h/t: Alex Tabarrok).

These excerpts from the abstract provide a very good summary of what really happened.

The United Fruit Company (UFC)…was given a large land concession in Costa Rica — one of the so-called “Banana Republics”— from 1889 to 1984. Using administrative census data with census-block geo-references from 1973 to 2011, we implement a geographic regression discontinuity (RD) design that exploits a quasi-random assignment of land. We find that the firm had a positive and persistent effect on living standards. Regions within the UFC were 26% less likely to be poor in 1973 than nearby counterfactual locations, with only 63% of the gap closing over the following 3 decades. Company documents explain that a key concern at the time was to attract and maintain a sizable workforce, which induced the firm to invest heavily in local amenities that likely account for our result. We then build a dynamic spatial model in which a firm’s labor market power within a region depends on how mobile workers are across locations and run couterfactual exercises. The model is consistent with observable spatial frictions and the RD estimates, and shows that the firm increases aggregate welfare
by 2.9%.

Here’s a look at the data showing lower poverty rates based on proximity to company lands.

And here are other measures of well-being for populations on either side of those boundaries.

What’s especially interesting is that the benefits have remained even several decades after the company’s concession ended.

By the way, I’m not saying that the United Fruit Company was motivated by anything other than profits.

Nor am I saying that Standard Oil was guided by anything beyond making money.

What I am saying, however, is that Adam Smith was right. The pursuit of self interest (whether by companies, workers, entrepreneurs, etc) is what creates mass prosperity. And what enabled an end to child labor.

Here are two videos for those who want further background. Here’s Professor Brian Domitrovic analyzing the “Gilded Age.”

And here’s an excerpt of the great Milton Friedman discussing the so-called Robber Barons.

P.S. By today’s standards, workers didn’t have great lives in the 1800s. But it’s important to understand that what we perceive today as “sweatshop conditions” were actually a big improvement over the grinding poverty of subsistence agriculture. Similarly, working conditions in modern-era third world sweatshops seem awful, but they are an avenue of upward mobility for people who otherwise would suffer unimaginable material deprivation.

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The Paris-Based OECD’s Ongoing Effort to Replace Tax Competition with Tax Harmonization

Ever since the bureaucrats at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development launched their attack on so-called harmful tax competition back in the 1990s, I’ve warned that the goal has been to create a global tax cartel.

Sort of an “OPEC for politicians.”

Supporters of the initiative said I was exaggerating, and that the OECD, acting on behalf of the high-tax nations that dominate its membership, simply wanted to reduce tax evasion. Indeed, some advocates even said that the effort could lead to lower tax rates.

That was a nonsensical claim. I actually read the various reports issued by the Paris-based bureaucracy. It was abundantly clear that the effort was based on a pro-tax harmonization theory known as “capital export neutrality.”

And, as I documented in my first study on the topic back in 2000, the OECD basically admitted the goal of the project was to enable higher taxes and bigger government.

• Low-tax policies “unfairly erode the tax bases of other countries and distort the location of capital and services.”
• Tax competition is “re-shaping the desired level and mix of taxes and public spending.”
• Tax competition “may hamper the application of progressive tax rates and the achievement of redistributive goals.”

The OECD’s agenda was so radical that it even threatened low-tax jurisdiction with financial protectionism if they didn’t agree to help welfare states enforce their punitive tax laws.

At first, there was an effort to push back against the OECD’s tax imperialism – thanks in large part to the creation of the pro-competition Center for Freedom and Prosperity, which helped low-tax jurisdictions fight back (I almost got thrown in a Mexican jail as part of the fight!).

But then Obama got to the White House and sided with Europe’s big welfare states. Lacking the ability to resist the world’s most powerful nations, low-tax jurisdictions around the world were forced to weaken their human rights laws on privacy so it would be easier for high-tax countries to track and tax flight capital.

Once that happened, was the OECD satisfied?

Hardly. Any victory for statism merely serves as a springboard for the next campaign to weaken tax competition and prop up big government.

Indeed, the bureaucrats are now trying to impose minimum corporate tax rates. Let’s look at some excerpts from a report in the U.K.-based Financial Times.

…large multinationals could soon face a global minimum level of corporate taxation under new proposals from the OECD… The Paris-based organization called…for the introduction of a safety net to enable home countries to ensure their multinationals cannot escape taxation, even if other countries have offered them extremely low tax rates. …The proposals would…reduce incentives for countries to lower their tax rates… The OECD said: “A minimum tax rate on all income reduces the incentive for…tax competition among jurisdictions.”

Sadly, the Trump Administration is not fighting this pernicious effort.

Indeed, Trump’s Treasury Department is largely siding with the OECD, ostensibly because a one-size-fits-all approach is less bad than the tax increases that would be imposed by individual governments (but also because the U.S. has a bad worldwide tax system and our tax collectors also want to reach across borders to grab more money).

In any event, we can safely (and sadly) assume that this effort will lead to a net increase in the tax burden on businesses.

And that means bad news for workers, consumers, and shareholders.

Moreover, if this effort succeeds, then the OECD will move the goalposts once again and push for further forms of tax harmonization.

I’ll conclude by recycling a couple of videos produced by the Center for Freedom and Prosperity. Here’s my analysis of the OECD.

By the way, the OECD bureaucrats, who relentlessly push for higher taxes on you and me, get tax-free salaries!

And here’s my explanation of why tax competition should be celebrated rather than persecuted.

I also recommend this short speech that I delivered earlier this year in Europe, as well as this 2017 TV interview.

Last but not least, here are two visuals that help to explain why the OECD’s project is economically misguided.

First, here’s the sensible way to think about the wonky issue of “capital export neutrality.”

Yes, it would be nice if people could make economic decisions without having to worry about taxes. And sometimes people make inefficient decisions that only make sense because they don’t want governments to grab too much of their money.

But the potential inefficiencies associated with tax planning are trivial compared to the economic damage caused by higher tax rates, more double taxation, and a bigger burden of government spending.

Now let’s consider marginal tax rates. Good policy says they should be low. The OECD says they should be high.

Needless to say, people will be less prosperous if the OECD succeeds.

That’s why I fight on this issue, notwithstanding personal attacks.

P.S. Senator Rand Paul is one of the few lawmakers in Washington fighting on the right side of this issue.

P.P.S. If you want even more information, about 10 years ago, I narrated a three-part video series on tax havens, and even a video debunking some of Obama’s demagoguery on the topic.

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The Deadly Impact of Pharma Price Controls

Yesterday, I shared part of an interview that focused on Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s scheme to give more subsidies to colleges, thus transferring money from poorer taxpayers to richer taxpayers.

Here’s the other part of the interview, which revolved around a very bad idea to copy nations that impose price controls on prescription drugs.

In some sense, this is a debate on price controls, which have a long history (going all the way back to Ancient Rome) of failure.

But my comments focused primarily on the adverse consequences of Pelosi’s approach.

And if you want more details, Doug Badger explained how Pelosi’s approach would backfire in a report for the Heritage Foundation. He starts with an explanation of the legislation.

The Lower Drug Costs Now Act of 2019 (H.R. 3), introduced last week with the backing of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., would double down on the failures of existing government policies that have distorted prescription drug prices and contributed to higher health care costs. …H.R. 3 would establish a system in which the U.S. government bases prices for cutting-edge drug treatments on those set by foreign governments. The measure would set an upper price limit at 1.2 times a drug’s average price in six other countries (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom). The secretary of health and human services then would seek to “negotiate” prices below that upper limit for at least 25—and as many as 250—drugs each year. …A manufacturer that declined to negotiate the price of any of its products would incur an excise tax of up to 95% of the revenues it derived from that product in the preceding year.

Doug then warns against an expansion of government power.

The bill represents an unprecedented exercise of raw government power. The federal government already imposes price curbs across a range of programs, requiring manufacturers to pay the government rebates… These provisions all are confined to federal programs, but nonetheless have distorted drug prices throughout the health sector. It’s one thing for the government to dictate the prices it pays in programs it finances. It is quite another for the government to impose a price for a product’s private sale and to extract money from a company on a long-ago settled transaction.

He then concludes by showing some of the negative consequences.

…aggressive government price-setting has damaged innovation and limited access to new treatments in all six of the countries whose price controls the bill would import. If the U.S. adopts price controls, it risks the same results here. Access to new drugs is much greater in the U.S. than in countries with price controls, in part because of having shunned price controls. …This lack of access can have damaging effects. A study by IHS Markit…concluded that Americans gained 201,700 life years as a result of faster access to new medicines. …Countries with price controls also suffer a decline in pharmaceutical research and development. In 1986, European firms led the U.S. in spending on pharmaceutical research and development by 24%. After the imposition of price control regimes, they fell behind. By 2015, they lagged the U.S. by 40%. …the president’s Council of Economic Advisers…concluded that while price controls might save money in the short term, they would cost more money in the long run. Government price-setting, it wrote, “makes better health care costlier in the future by curtailing innovation.”

As you can see, price controls have a deadly effect in the short run (the 201,700 life years).

But as I stated in the interview, the far greater cost – in terms of needless deaths – would become apparent in the long run as new drugs no longer come to market.

By the way, it’s not just me, or folks on the right, who recognize that there will be adverse consequences from price controls.

Writing for left-leaning Vox, Sarah Kliff acknowledges that there are trade-offs.

The United States is exceptional in that it does not regulate or negotiate the prices of new prescription drugs when they come onto market. …And the problems that causes are easy to see, from the high copays at the drugstore to the people who can’t afford lifesaving medications. What’s harder to see is that if we did lower drug prices, we would be making a trade-off. Lowering drug profits would make pharmaceuticals a less desirable industry for investors. And less investment in drugs would mean less research toward new and innovative cures. …In other words: Right now, the United States is subsidizing the rest of the world’s drug research by paying out really high prices. If we stopped doing that, it would likely mean fewer dollars spent on pharmaceutical research — and less progress developing new drugs for Americans and everybody else.

Here’s a chart from her article, which I’ve modified (in red) to underscore how other nations are free-riding because American consumers are picking up the tab for research and development.

By the way, I have no idea where the red lines actually belong. I’m just trying to emphasize that consumers who pay the market price (or closer to the market price) are the ones why underwrite the cost of discovering new drugs and treatments.

And Ms. Kliff definitely agrees this trade-off exists.

Every policy decision comes with trade-offs… If the United States began to price regulate drugs, medications would become cheaper. That would mean Americans have more access to drugs but could also expect a decline in research and development of new drugs. We might have fewer biotech firms starting up, or companies deciding it’s worth bringing a new drug to market. …Are we, as a country, comfortable paying higher prices for drugs to get more innovation? Or would we trade some of that innovation to make our drugs more accessible to those of all income levels?

For what it’s worth, I don’t actually think there’s much of a trade-off. I choose markets, both for the moral reason and because I want to maximize long-run health benefits for the American people.

P.S. Because pharmaceutical companies got in bed with the Obama White House to support Obamacare, some people may be tempted to say Pelosi’s legislation is what they deserve. While I fully agree that it’s despicable for big companies to get in bed with big government, please remember that the main victims of Pelosi’s legislation will be sick people who need new treatments.

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Buttigieg’s Greek-Style Fiscal Policy

Candidates such as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders supposedly are competing for hard-left voters, while candidates such as Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg are going after moderate voters. But a review of Buttigieg’s fiscal policy suggests he may belong in the first category.

In the interview, I focused on Buttigieg’s plan to subsidize colleges. Hopefully, I got across my main point is that students won’t be helped.

Based on what’s happened with the “third-party payer” subsidies that already exist, colleges and universities will simply jack up tuition and fees to capture the value of any new handouts.

I’m not the only person to speculate that Buttigieg is simply a watered down version of Warren.

The Wall Street Journal opined today on Mayor Pete’s statist agenda.

Mr. Buttigieg has risen steadily in the Real Clear Politics polling average to a solid fourth place, with about 7% support. …on Friday he released what he called “An Economic Agenda for American Families.” For a candidate who wants to occupy the moderate lane, Mr. Buttigieg’s policy details veer notably left. …$700 billion—presumably over 10 years, but the plan doesn’t specifically say—for “universal, high-quality, and full-day early learning.” …$500 billion “to make college affordable.” That means free tuition at public universities… $430 billion for “affordable housing.” …$400 billion to top off the Earned Income Tax Credit… A $15 national minimum wage.

At the risk of understatement, that’s not a moderate platform.

This isn’t an economic agenda, and there isn’t a pro-growth item anywhere. It’s a social-welfare spending and union wish list. …Don’t forget the billions more he has allocated to green energy, as well as his $1.5 trillion health-care public option, “Medicare for All Who Want It.” So far Mayor Pete’s agenda totals $5.7 trillion… Mayor Pete’s policy wish list is shorter and cheaper than Elizabeth Warren’s, but it still includes gigantic tax increases to finance a huge expansion of the welfare and entitlement state. Call it Warren lite.

Methinks John Stossel needs to update this video. With $5.7 trillion of new outlays, Buttigieg is definitely trying to win the big-spender contest.

No wonder he’s now embracing class-warfare tax policy. One of his giant tax increases, which I should have mentioned in the interview, is a version of Elizabeth Warren’s “nutty idea” to force people to pay taxes on capital gains even if they haven’t sold assets and therefore don’t actually have capital gains!

And the Washington Post reports that he also wants to increase the capital gains tax rate, even though that will make America less competitive.

By the way, Buttigieg is also a hypocrite. He’s joined with other Democratic candidates in embracing a carbon tax on lower-income and middle-class voters, yet the Chicago Tribune reports that he zips around the country on private jets.

Pete Buttigieg has spent roughly $300,000 on private jet travel this year, more than any other Democrat running for the White House, according to an analysis of campaign finance data. …his reliance on charter flights contrasts sharply with his image as a Rust Belt mayor who embodies frugality and Midwestern modesty. …Buttigieg’s campaign says the distance between its South Bend headquarters and major airports sometimes makes private jet travel necessary. “We are careful with how we spend our money, and we fly commercial as often as possible,” Buttigieg spokesman Chris Meagher said Wednesday. “We only fly noncommercial when the schedule dictates.”

In other words, one set of rules for ordinary people, but exemptions for the political elite.

Though at least he hasn’t proposed to ban hamburgers. At least not yet.

P.S. If you like this cartoon by Gary Varvel, I very much recommend this Halloween cartoon. And he is among the best at exposing the spending-cut hoax in DC, as you can see from this sequester cartoon and this deficit reduction cartoon. This cartoon about Bernie Madoff and Social Security, however, is probably my favorite.

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Honest Leftist Openly Acknowledges a Bigger Welfare State Requires Giant Tax Increases on Lower-Income and Middle-Class Taxpayers

I give Bernie Sanders and Andrew Yang credit for a bit of honesty. Both of them have proposals to significantly – indeed, dramatically – expand the burden of government spending, and they actually admit their plans will require big tax increases on lower-income and middle-class voters.

Their numbers are still wrong, but at least they recognize you can’t have French-sized government financed by just a tiny sliver of rich people.

This makes them far more honest than other candidates such as Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris.

In the past, I’ve pointed out that there’s no nation in the world that finances a big welfare state without high tax burdens on ordinary people – generally steep value-added taxes, along with onerous payroll taxes and high income tax rates on middle-income earners (see, for instanced, this horrifying story from Spain).

And I’ve also periodically shared analysis from honest leftists who admit major tax hikes on the broader population will be inevitable if politicians in the U.S. create European-sized redistribution programs.

• The editors at the New York Times endorsed higher taxes on the middle class in 2010.
• The then-House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer also gave a green light that year to higher taxes on the middle class.
• In 2012, MIT professor and former IMF official Simon Johnson argued that the middle class should pay more tax.
• The Washington Post also called for higher taxes on the middle class a few years ago, as did Vice President Joe Biden’s former economist.
• A New York Times columnist also called for broad-based tax hikes on the middle class in 2012.
• A Senior Fellow from Demos also argued for higher taxes on all Americans that year, specifically targeting the middle class.
• In 2013, the New York Times again (!) editorialized in favor of higher tax burdens on the middle class.
• In 2017, two UCLA law professors endorsed big tax increases on ordinary people.
• Also that year, a columnist for US News & World Report urged higher taxes on middle-income people.

Today, we’re going to add to this collection of honest leftists.

There’s an explicitly pro-socialist magazine called Jacobin, in which Doug Henwood has a lengthy article explaining – from his statist perspective – that it’s necessary to have higher taxes on everybody.

We should be clear about what it will take to fund a decent welfare state: not just soaking the rich, but raising taxes across the board… I’m defining social democracy as a large and robust welfare state that socializes a lot of consumption through taxation and spending, compressing the income distribution, …insulating people from the risks of sickness and unemployment, and…it’s a lot bigger than Medicare for All and free college.

He compares the U.S. to other nations, especially the Nordic nations.

For those who want bigger government, America doesn’t spend nearly enough.

In 2017 (the vintage of most of these stats), the US government at all levels (aka general government in fiscal jargon) took in 34 percent of GDP in taxes and spent 38 percent. …Denmark, Norway, and Sweden — spend an average of 50 percent of GDP and take in 53 percent. None is very far from those averages, which are twelve and nineteen points above US levels, respectively. …The fourth graph is where American exceptionalism really comes in — the share of GDP spent on “social protection,” that is, classic welfare state programs. In the OECD’s words, these include “sickness and disability; old age (i.e. pensions); survivors; family and children; unemployment; housing; social exclusion n.e.c. [not elsewhere classified]; [and] R&D social protection.” The United States spends under 8 percent of GDP on these things, less than half the OECD average and a third what the Scandinavians spend.

Here’s a chart from the article showing how the U.S. doesn’t keep pace.

And how do the northern Europeans finance their big welfare states?

Henwood is very honest about the implications. You can tax the rich, but the rest of us need to have our wallets lightened.

How do the Scandinavian states — and others that are more generous social spenders than the United States — finance that spending? Not…by borrowing. Countries with more generous welfare states than ours borrow far less. Instead, they tax. …On some things, like Social Security and personal and corporate income taxes, the United States isn’t an outlier. On others, we are. …At 5 percent of GDP, our taxes on goods and services — mostly value-added taxes (VATs) in other countries… — are less than a third the Scandinavian share of GDP (16 percent)… The difference between the United States and the Scandinavians is over 10 percent of GDP.

In other words, big government means a punitive value-added tax.

That means higher taxes on the poor, as well as the middle class.

But he argues that’s okay because government will take care of everybody.

Yes, VATs are regressive. They’re taxes on consumption that hit the poor harder than the rich because the further down the income scale you go, the larger a portion of your income you consume. But their regressivity is more than compensated for in the Scandinavian countries by spending, which not only takes from the rich and gives to the poor, but takes from the masses and gives it back… It’s a way of socializing consumption to some degree, of taking things out of competitive markets.

Here’s another chart from the article, this one showing that the United States ostensibly doesn’t collect enough taxes from consumption (“goods and services”).

Now let’s take a closer look at the budgetary numbers.

Henwood points out that the usual class-warfare taxes would only finance a portion of the statism wish list.

Peter Diamond and Emmanuel Saez published a widely cited paper arguing that the optimal top tax rate for soaking the rich is 73 percent — optimal in the sense of pulling in the most revenue. …Bernie Sanders’s freshly released wealth tax plan would raise $435 billion a year, according to its designers, Saez and his Berkeley colleague Gabriel Zucman… Combine those two and you get a revenue increase of $520–755 billion, or 2.4–3.5 percent of GDP. Scandinavian revenues are 19 percentage points higher as a share of GDP than the United States’. …these taxes, which are probably what lots of contemporary American leftists have in mind, come only an eighth to a fifth of the way toward closing the gap with the Scandinavians.

His conclusion is very frank and honest.

Some might find it impolitic of me to say all this, but you have to be honest with people, otherwise they’ll turn on you for selling a bill of goods. …if we want a seriously better society of the sort outlined in the Green New Deal, then it’s going to take a lot more — and it won’t “pay for itself.”

My conclusion is that Henwood has profoundly awful policy preferences (Europeans have much lower living standards, for instance), but doesn’t believe in make-believe budgeting.

P.S. The Democrat presidential candidates have embraced one big levy – the carbon tax – that would grab lots of money from lower-income and middle-class people. But they seem to have successful convinced themselves (and maybe voters) that it doesn’t lead to higher tax burdens (even though proponents of such levies, such as the International Monetary Fund, openly acknowledge that consumers will bear the cost).

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Communism, Reagan, and the 30th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall

Back in 2011, I shared eight short videos that captured the greatness of Ronald Reagan.

One of the videos was this excerpt of his famous tear-down-this-wall speech at Brandenburg Gate.

In a column for the Washington Examiner, Quin Hillyer explains why this was a momentous event.

The greatest climactic event of the 20th century occurred 30 years ago Saturday, as thousands of Germans pushed through, climbed over, and began tearing down the Berlin Wall. Human freedom overcame human evil. Human potential was unleashed. Exuberantly but peaceably, the good guys won. The story needs to be told again and again, because those too young to have lived through the Cold War have trouble feeling viscerally the stakes, the danger, and the drama. …the late William F. Buckley said in his last-ever public speech that The Lives of Others, about life in East Germany under communist domination, should be required viewing in every American high school. The film reminds us that not just in gulags where perceived “troublemakers” were sent but in everyday life: The repression was severe; the fear was palpable; the attempted destruction of the human psyche was pervasive. And there stood the Berlin Wall. Both the real presence of brutality and the era’s most chilling symbol of mass enslavement, the wall was the physical, concrete portion of the figurative Iron Curtain. Also featuring extended barriers of metal-mesh fences, trenches, and 259 vicious-dog runs, and guarded by 186 observation towers manned by machine-gun-toting soldiers, the wall was a monstrosity. The joy that greeted the wall’s fall, not just on-site but around the world, remains almost indescribable.

By the way, I echo Quin’s endorsement of The Lives of Others. It really does capture the day-to-day horror of statism, and has a really nice twist at the end.

Returning to the issue of the Wall and communism, Reagan deserves considerable credit for this victory over evil.

Part of Reagan’s genius is that he attacked the moral foundations of communism. Or the lack of any moral foundation, to be more precise.

Here are some observations about his speech at Moscow State University in 1988.

Ronald Reagan, in the last year of his presidency, delivered one of his most magnificent speeches. …It was the last day of his fourth and final summit with Mikhail Gorbachev. …Reagan never regarded his meetings with Mr. Gorbachev as pertaining solely to arms control. Arms control was merely the pretext for a more fundamental challenge. …If the theme is diplomacy, the underlying purpose is liberty. …He did…understand that victory would belong in the end not to one nation over another, but to one political-moral idea over another. Freedom must triumph over totalitarianism. Reagan had always abominated communism. …Reagan’s ultimate aim was to plant the seed of freedom in the newly receptive furrows of a cracking totalitarianism. “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” he cried at the Brandenburg Gate in 1987. “Isn’t it strange,” he mused to reporters, “that there’s only one part of the world and one philosophy where they have to build walls to keep their people in.” …Reagan delivered his Moscow speech standing before a gigantic scowling bust of Lenin and a mural of the Russian Revolution. He incorporated them as props in his address. “Standing here before a mural of your revolution,” he said, “I want to talk about a very different revolution,”… “The key,” Reagan said, “is freedom—freedom of thought, freedom of information, freedom of communication.”

Yes, Reagan’s rejuvenation of the American economy helped lead to the collapse of communism (notwithstanding the fact that some western economists were dupes for Soviet central planning).

And, yes, Reagan’s military buildup helped weaken the Soviet Union’s resolve.

I’m convinced, though, that Reagan’s attack on the core evil of communism made a key difference. Aided and abetted by his relentless mockery of communism’s many failures.

Let’s not forget that history also is the result of random events.

David Frum last year wrote about a bureaucratic snafu that helped hasten the downfall of East Germany’s evil regime.

At an evening news conference on November 9, 1989, a spokesman for the East German Communist government made a history-altering mistake. The spokesman had been authorized to say that travel restrictions on East German citizens would be lifted the next day, November 10. Instead, he said that the restrictions were lifted effective immediately. Within minutes, hundreds of thousands of East Berliners rushed to the checkpoints of the Berlin Wall. Since the erection of the wall in 1961, border guards had killed more than 750 people seeking to escape East Germany. That night, the border guards had heard the same news as everyone else. Their license to kill had been withdrawn. They stood aside. The long-imprisoned citizens of East Berlin rushed out into West Berlin that night, in what became the greatest and best street party in the history of the world. Soon, Berliners east and west began to attack the hated wall, smash it, rip it apart.

Here’s a video that describes the same event.

By the way, we can’t write about the Berlin Wall without taking the opportunity to reflect on the failure of socialism.

Writing for the U.K.-based Spectator, Kristian Niemietz points out that big government failed in East Germany, just like it fails everywhere.

Thirty years on from the fall of the Berlin Wall, socialism is back in fashion. The anniversary is a good occasion to reflect on some of the lessons that we have collectively un-learned, or perhaps never learned properly in the first place from the fall of Communism. The division of Germany into a broadly capitalist West, and a broadly socialist East, represented a natural experiment, and did so in two ways. It was, first of all, a gigantic economic experiment about the viability of socialism, and it produced conclusive results. Around the time of Reunification, West Germany’s GDP per capita was about three times that of East Germany’s. There was also around a three-year-gap in average life expectancy.

Amen.

I invite people to compare the numbers on East German vs. West German economic performance.

Last but not least, let’s close by adding an item to our collection of socialism/communism humor.

To be sure, this is dark humor. Hundreds of people were killed trying to escape into West Berlin. That may seem like an asterisk compared to communism’s horrendous death toll, but every needless death is a tragedy.

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How the Welfare State Undermines Support for Immigration

When non-libertarian audiences ask my opinion about immigration, I generally point out that it is a very good sign that so many people want to come to the United States.

Almost everyone agrees with that statement, but that doesn’t put them in the pro-immigration camp. Instead, I find that many people have a “what’s in it for us” attitude.

1. They like the underlying concept of programs such as the EB-5 visa that attract immigrants with money, and they are broadly sympathetic to immigrants with skills and education. At the risk of over-simplifying, they want immigrants who won’t rely on handouts and they like immigrants who presumably will increase the nation’s per-capita GDP (and there certainly is strong evidence that this happens).
2. They’re skeptical of mass immigration by people with low incomes. This is mostly because they fear such migrants will impose higher costs on taxpayers, though Republican types also seem motivated by concerns about future voting patterns. The notable exception to this pattern is that business audiences are somewhat sympathetic to mass migration because they believe labor costs will fall.

When I deal with people in category #2, I sometimes ask them about Tyler Cowen’s idea of allowing limitless migration from nations with bigger welfare states. After all, I doubt people such as “Lazy Robert” will move from Denmark to the United States.

But what about poor people from poor nations? Would they like to migrate to rich nations to get handouts, rather than for economic opportunity?

Taxpayers in many nations are worried about that possibility and are not very welcoming to immigrants who will collect benefits.

Indeed, that’s motivated the Trump Administration to consider tightening rules for who gets in the country.

The Trump administration announced long-awaited “public charge” immigration regulations this week, and the furor immediately kicked up to derangement level. …But immigration regulation of this sort has been a part of our laws for more than a century…the 1882 act declared that “any convict, lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge…shall not be permitted to land.” …The 1952 revisions to immigration law maintained the idea that the government may exclude “paupers, professional beggars, or vagrants” and those who are “are likely at any time to become public charges.” …In 1996, Congress strengthened the public charge provisions…why would anyone call the Trump administration’s interpretation “un-American?” …the regulations—which do not apply to refugees, asylum-seekers, and various other groups—propose guidance to determine if an immigrant would be likely to use the welfare system for more than 12 months during a three-year period.

But it’s not just a controversy in the United States.

Taxpayers in the Netherlands, for instance, are becoming less tolerant of immigrants who want handouts rather than work.

Non-Western immigrants and their descendants also depend on welfare to a much greater extent than the native Dutch. They are half of all welfare recipients but only 11% of the total population. Among recent Somali refugees granted asylum, 80% are on welfare. Holland is truly a welfare state, and the Dutch are proud of it. …This type of open and yet highly regulated society can function only if it is carried by a disciplined and well-educated citizenry… That is what the fuss is about. To put it in abstract terms: Can a welfare state become an immigration state? You know the answer: A welfare state with open borders will one day run out of money.

I can’t imagine that stories like this make German taxpayers happy.

As early as 2016, German newspapers have been reporting on migrants with recognized refugee status having holidays in countries that they “fled,” such as Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Syria. Because Hartz IV, the welfare system that certain migrants granted refugee status receive, permits 21 days per year of “local absence,” those who have recognized refugee status and have no income or assets simply leave Germany for vacation and continue to receive money from German taxpayers.

There are also concerns that welfare spending hinders economic integration and independence in Sweden.

…only 20 percent of the Somali immigrants in Sweden have jobs, according to a report released on Monday by the government’s Commission… In an opinion article published in the Expressen newspaper, the author of the report, Benny Carlsson of Lund University, explained that Sweden would be well served to let community-based organizations do more…rather than relying on public agencies… Carlsson explained that…Sweden’s rigid labour market and labour protection laws also create “higher risks” for employees which amount to “higher thresholds” for Somali jobseekers. …Carlsson also cited Sweden’s social safety net which “lets people live at a decent level even if they don’t work, while the same can’t be said of the United States”.

Speaking of Sweden, stories of welfare dependency help to explain this report in the New York Times.

…four years after the influx, growing numbers of native-born Swedes have come to see the refugees as a drain on public finances. …Antipathy for immigrants now threatens to erode support for Sweden’s social welfare state. “People don’t want to pay taxes to support people who don’t work,” says Urban Pettersson, 62, a member of the local council here in Filipstad, a town set in lake country west of Stockholm. “Ninety percent of the refugees don’t contribute to society. These people are going to have a lifelong dependence on social welfare. This is a huge problem.” …Under the Nordic model, governments typically furnish health care, education and pensions to everyone. The state delivers subsidized housing and child care. When people lose jobs, they gain unemployment benefits… But the endurance of the Nordic model has long depended on two crucial elements — the public’s willingness to pay some of the highest taxes on earth, and the understanding that everyone is supposed to work. …Sweden’s sharp influx of immigrants — the largest of any European nation, as a share of the overall population — directly tests this proposition. …The unemployment rate was only 3.8 percent among the Swedish-born populace last year, but 15 percent among foreign-born… Roughly half of all jobless people in Sweden were foreign-born. …these sorts of numbers are cited as evidence that refugees have flocked here to enjoy lives of state-financed sloth. …The average refugee in Sweden receives about 74,000 Swedish kronor (about $7,800) more in government services than they pay into the system, Joakim Ruist, an economist at the University of Gothenburg, concluded in a report released last year and commissioned by the Ministry of Finance. Over all, the cost of social programs for refugees runs about 1 percent of Sweden’s annual national economic output

But is it true that migrants are looking for handouts? Are the afore-cited stories just random anecdotes, or do they suggest some countries are “welfare magnets”?

I’ve already shared some evidence that welfare recipients inside the United States gravitate to places that provide bigger benefits.

And this seems to be the case for migrants that cross national borders. Here are some findings from some new academic research showing that the generosity of Denmark’s welfare state has a significant impact on migration choices.

We study the effects of welfare generosity on international migration using a series of large changes in welfare benefits for immigrants in Denmark. The first change, implemented in 2002,lowered benefits for immigrants from outside the EU by about 50%, with no changes for natives or immigrants from inside the EU. The policy was later repealed and re-introduced. The differential treatment of immigrants from inside and outside the EU, and of different types of non-EU immigrants, allows for a quasi-experimental research design. We find sizeable effects:the benefit reduction reduced the net flow of immigrants by about 5,000 people per year, or 3.7percent of the stock of treated immigrants, and the subsequent repeal of the policy reversed the effect almost exactly. Our study provides some of the first causal evidence on the widely debated “welfare magnet” hypothesis. …our evidence implies that, conditional on moving, the generosity of the welfare system is important for destination choices.

Here’s the relevant graph from the study, based on two different ways of slicing the data.

As you can see from the red lines, migration fell when benefits were reduced, then immediately jumped when benefits were increased, and then immediately fell again when they were again lowered.

For what it’s worth, scholars believe that support for the welfare state in Europe is declining for these reasons. Taxpayers are tolerant of subsidizing their long-time neighbors, but are much less sympathetic when giving away money to newcomers.

From my perspective, the solution is obvious. I generally like immigration and generally don’t like redistribution.

So why not reduce benefits, ideally for everyone, but just to migrants if that’s the only possible outcome. That way nations are more likely to attract people (especially from low-income societies) who are seeking economic opportunity.

P.S. If you want to enjoy some immigration-related humor, we have a video about Americans migrating to Peru and a story about American leftists escaping to Canada.

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Senator Warren’s “Nutty Idea” to Tax Unrealized Capital Gains

Last month, I accused Elizabeth Warren of being a “fiscal fraud” for proposing a multi-trillion dollar government takeover of healthcare.

She then unveiled a plethora of class-warfare taxes. As I discussed yesterday on CNBC, she even wants to tax capital gains even if the gains are only on paper.

By the way, I’m disappointed that I forgot to mention in my final soundbite that school choice would be a very specific and very effective way of helping poor people climb the ladder of opportunity.

But let’s set that aside and focus on Senator Warren’s radical proposal.

Because the idea would be such a nightmare of complexity, I joked in the interview that the Senator must own shares in firms that do tax accounting.

That’s not a novel observation on my part. Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal opined why this was a bad idea. Not just a bad idea, a ridiculously foolish idea.

Under current law, long-term capital gains are taxed at rates up to 20%—plus a 3.8% ObamaCare surcharge on investment income—only after the asset is sold. Mr. Wyden calls this a loophole. …Mr. Wyden…proposes an annual “mark to market” scheme… As an asset rises in value, its owners would pay tax each year on the incremental gain. This would create an enormous new accounting burden. Mr. Wyden may say that his mark-to-market rule will apply only to the top 1% or 0.1%, but it would still be a bonanza for tax attorneys. How will people in the top 2% know whether they’ve passed the threshold, and how far will they go to avoid it? …Mr. Wyden’s plan would tax gains that exist merely on paper. …And what about illiquid investments, such as private companies or real estate? As with Ms. Warren’s suggested wealth tax, no one knows how Mr. Wyden would go about valuing them. …Would the owner of an apartment building be asked to revalue it every year? Will an art investor be told to mark that Picasso to market? Good luck.

I’ve already written about Senator Wyden’s proposal.

It’s not just absurdly complex. It’s also bad tax policy, as the WSJ noted.

…there are good reasons to tax capital gains at preferential rates, which is why the U.S. has done it for decades under Democrats and Republicans. The lower rate…reduces the harm from double taxation after corporations already pay income taxes. …A lower tax rate is also a matter of fairness. If investors have capital losses, they aren’t allowed to deduct more than $3,000 a year. There’s no inflation adjustment either: If $100 of stock bought in 1999 is sold for $150 today, the difference is taxed even though much of it is an illusory gain caused by dollar erosion.

The final sentence should be emphasized.

Under the Wyden – now Warren – plan, you can have illusory gains that only reflect inflation, and then you can get taxed on those illusory gains even if you don’t actually get them because you haven’t sold the asset.

David Bahnsen, writing for National Review, says the idea is simply nutty.

Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon is the top-ranking member of the Senate’s tax committee... And his recent policy proposal to tax unrealized capital gains is just as extreme, silly, impractical, dangerous, and inane as any of the aforementioned policy whiffs floating around in the leftist hemisphere. …The problems here are almost as severe as the problems with getting a wind-powered ride across the Pacific Ocean in the Green New Deal. First and foremost, the compliance costs would be the biggest boondoggle our nation’s financial system has ever seen. How in the world is illiquid real estate that has not sold supposed to be “valued” each and every year, let alone illiquid businesses, private debt, venture capital, and the wide array of capital assets that make up our nation’s economy but do not fit in the cozy box of “mutual funds”? …Another problem exists for this delusional plan: How do smaller investors pay the tax on an investment that has not yet returned the cash to them? …Underlying all of the mess of this silly proposal from Senator Wyden is the Democrats’ continued lack of understanding about what is most needed in our economy — business investment. The war on capital is a war on jobs, on productivity, on growth, and on wages. Taking bold actions to disincentivize productivity, investment, risk-taking, and capital formation is akin to discouraging diet and exercise for someone trying to lose weight.

Amen.

I’ve repeatedly tried to explain that it is economically self-destructive to impose high – and discriminatory – taxes on income that is saved and invested.

Which is why the right capital gains tax rate is zero.

In other words, instead of worsening the bias against capital, we should be copying nations such as Switzerland, Singapore, Luxembourg, and New Zealand by abolishing the capital gains tax.

For more on that, I recommend this video.

P.S. Don’t forget that Senator Warren also has misguided proposals on many other issues, such as Social Security, corporate governance, federal spending, corporate taxation, Wall Street, etc.

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Chile’s Pro-Market Reforms Have Been Especially Beneficial for Low-Income Citizens

Last month, I criticized the New York Times for a very inaccurate attack against Chile’s successful pro-market reforms.

The paper’s editorial asserted that only the rich have gained, a view that is utterly nonsensical and inaccurate.

Indeed, I visited Chile about a year ago and finished a three-part series (here, here, and here) showing how the less fortunate have been the biggest winners.

But numbers and facts are no match for ideology at the NYT.

We now have a new story, written by Amanda Taub, asserting that free markets have failed in Chile.

For three weeks, Chile has been in upheaval. …Perhaps the only people not shocked are Chileans. …The promise that political leaders…have made for decades — that free markets would lead to prosperity, and prosperity would take care of other problems — has failed them. …Inequality is still deeply entrenched. Chile’s middle class is struggling… There is broad agreement, among protesters and experts alike, that the country needs structural reforms.

This view is echoed by a Chilean professor in a column for the U.K.’s left-leaning Guardian.

Inequality in Chile is scandalous and most middle-class Chileans live in precarity. …the country has a structural problem with a clear name: inequality. The per capita income of the bottom quintile of Chileans is less than $140 a month. Half the population earns about $550. …This crisis is, at heart, an urgent message to the Chilean elite: profound changes are needed to rebuild the social contract.

But if Chile is a failure, then other nations in Latin America must be in a far worse category.

Look at what’s happened to average incomes over the past three decades.

Viva Chile!!! 🇨🇱🇨🇱🇨🇱💪💪💪🚀🚀🚀✌️✌️✌️ pic.twitter.com/TezePGhFc9

— José Piñera (@josepinera) November 3, 2019

It’s also worth noting Argentina’s decline and Venezuela’s collapse. Does Ms. Taub prefer those outcomes over Chile’s growing prosperity?

Speaking of which, here’s a powerful video comparing Chile and Venezuela.

Capitalism vs. Socialism: the Latin American story. pic.twitter.com/0T2e5AUVZr

— Prof. Steve Hanke (@steve_hanke) October 30, 2019

So why is there discontent when Chile has been so successful?

In her Wall Street Journal column, Mary Anastasia O’Grady worries that the left controls the narrative in Chile.

…the hard left has spent years planting socialism in the Chilean psyche via secondary schools, universities, the media and politics. Even as the country has grown richer than any of its neighbors by defending private property, competition and the rule of law, Chileans marinate in anticapitalist propaganda. The millennials who poured into the streets to promote class warfare reflect that influence. The Chilean right has largely abandoned its obligation to engage in the battle of ideas in the public square. Mr. Piñera isn’t an economic liberal and makes no attempt to defend the morality of the market. He hasn’t even reversed the antigrowth policies of his predecessor, Socialist Michelle Bachelet. Chileans have one side of the story pounded into their heads. As living standards rise, so do expectations. When reality doesn’t keep up, the ground is already fertile for socialists to plow.

Incidentally, even the center-left Economist doesn’t agree with the argument that Chile is a failure.

In Chile, free-marketeers’ favourite economy in the region, protests against a rise in fares on the Santiago metro descended into rioting and then became a 1.2m-person march against inequality… Despite its flaws, Chile is a success story. Its income per person is the second-highest in Latin America and close to that of Portugal and Greece. Since the end of a brutal dictatorship in 1990 Chile’s poverty rate has dropped from 40% to less than 10%. Inflation is consistently low and public finances are well managed. …This is no argument for complacency in Chile. …Chileans still feel underserved by the state. They save for their own pensions, but many have not contributed long enough to provide for a tolerable retirement. Waiting times in the public health service are long. So people pay extra for care.

Sadly, the article then goes on to endorse bigger government and more redistribution – policies which would erode Chile’s competitiveness and prosperity.

Unfortunately, the President of Chile seems willing to embrace these bad policies.

In another column for the WSJ, Ms. O’Grady warns about the possible consequences.

The pain for Latin America’s most successful economy is only beginning. …Mr. Piñera…has opened the door to rewriting Chile’s Constitution to meet the demands of socialists, communists and others on the left. If Latin American history is any guide, a constitutional rewrite will strip away political and economic rights, concentrate power and leave the nation poorer and more unjust. The biggest losers would be the aspirational poor, who will be denied access to a better life in what has become one of the world’s most socially mobile economies. …Mr. Piñera has agreed to talks with the “citizens” whose interests are presumably represented by the firebombers and looters. …This is a stunning surrender and it is hardly surprising that it seems only to have whet the appetite of the radical left.

She points out that Chile’s market reforms have been hugely successful.

What isn’t debatable is the economic gains, across the board, that the market model has created. Less than 9% of the nation now lives below the poverty level. In a 2018 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development report titled “A Broken Social Elevator? How to Promote Social Mobility,” Chile stands out for its social mobility. According to the data, 23% of sons whose fathers were in the bottom quartile of earners make it to the top quartile. By this measure, Chile had the highest social mobility among 16 OECD countries in the study. …inequality in Chile has been falling for 20 years. …That’s something for Mr. Piñera to think about before he helps the left destroy a model that works.

Amen.

It would be a tragedy if politicians wrecked Latin America’s biggest success story.

Let’s close with some analysis in Harvard’s Latin America Policy Journal by Rodrigo Valdés, who was a finance minister under the previous center-left government.

What are the facts? Chile’s per capita GDP increased almost threefold between 1990 and 2015, with short-lived and shallow recessions in 1999 and 2009 only. More precisely, per capita GDP increased a cumulative 280 percent, or 5.3 percent per year (at PPP and constant dollars). At the same time, the distribution of income improved. …Remarkably, all but the top quintile (actually, all but the top decile) improved their share of total income after taxes and transfers. …For the middle 20 percent or “middle class,” growth explained more than 10 times what they gained through better income distribution. For the bottom 20 percent, the redistribution effort was more relevant, though growth was still dominant, explaining six times more than redistribution. Second, what Chile accomplished in the last 25 years is impressive. For the middle class, even a sudden transformation to the Nordics in terms of income distribution (without changes in aggregate GDP) produces less than one-tenth of what the combination of actual growth and better distribution produced for this segment. The bottom 20 percent gained in these two and half decades more than four times what they would achieve with a sudden Nordic distribution.

I suppose I should highlight the fact that a high-level official for a left-leaning government is pointing out that Chile’s reforms have been very successful.

But what really matters is the point he makes about how growth being far more important than redistribution – assuming the goal is to actually help low-income people live better lives.

The third column shows how much income has expanded for each segment of the population. And you can see (highlighted in red) that the bottom 10 percent has enjoyed more than twice the income gains as the top 10 percent.

But pay extra attention to the first and second columns. Economic growth far and away is the most important factor in boosting prosperity for the less fortunate.

Which shouldn’t be a surprise. I’ve shared lots of evidence (over and over and over again) showing that market-driven growth is the best way of helping low-income people.

Indeed, even the World Bank agrees the Chilean model is vastly superior to the Venezuelan approach.

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Capitalism vs. Statism

Many libertarians support capitalism because of ethics and morality. Simply stated, they want an economic system based on voluntary exchange compared to statist alternatives (socialism, fascism, communism, etc) that rely on government coercion.

I also like the non-aggression principle, so I certainly don’t want to dissuade anyone from supporting free markets for that reason.

But one of my main goals is to show people that economic liberty also is the best approach from the utilitarian perspective.

This is why I share so many examples showing how market-oriented jurisdictions out-perform statist nations over multi-decade periods.

I want to build on this empirical foundation by sharing some 2009 research from Professor Peter Leeson. Here’s the abstract from his study.

According to a popular view that I call “two cheers for capitalism,” capitalism’s effect on development is ambiguous and mixed. This paper empirically investigates that view. I find that it’s wrong. Citizens in countries that became more capitalist over the last quarter century became wealthier, healthier, more educated, and politically freer. Citizens in countries that became significantly less capitalist over this period endured stagnating income, shortening life spans, smaller gains in education, and increasingly oppressive political regimes. The data unequivocally evidence capitalism’s superiority for development. Full-force cheerleading for capitalism is well deserved and three cheers are in order instead of two.

Here are his data sources.

I consider the trajectory of capitalism and four “core” development indicators in countries that have embraced and rejected capitalism over the past quarter century. These categories are average income, life expectancy, years of schooling, and democracy. …My data are drawn from several sources. The first is the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World Project (2008), which provides data on the extent of capitalism across countries and over time. …I get data for my development indicators from Shleifer (2009), who collects his information from several standard sources. His data on countries’ GDP per capita and life expectancies are from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators (2006). His data on education and democracy are from the Barro-Lee (2000) dataset and the Polity IV Database (2000) respectively.

He then compares nations that moved toward free markets with those that gravitated to statism.

The results are unambiguous.

The data are clear: countries that became more capitalist became much wealthier. The average country that became more capitalist over the last 25 years saw its GDP per capita (PPP) rise from about $7600 to nearly $11,800—a 43% increase. If rapidly rising wealth deserves cheering, so does capitalism. What about longevity? All the money in the world doesn’t mean anything if you’re not alive to spend it on things that improve your life. Figure 2b charts the movement of average life expectancy at birth in countries that became more capitalist over the last quarter century at 5-year intervals. Growing capitalism is clearly associated with growing life expectancy. In the average country that became more capitalist over the last 25 years, the average citizen gained nearly half a decade in life expectancy. … In the average country that became more capitalist, the average number of years of schooling in the population rose from 4.7 to just over 6. …Countries that became more capitalist over the last 20 years became dramatically more democratic.

Here are the charts showing great results from capitalism.

Now let’s look at what Professor Lesson discovered about nations that moved in the wrong direction.

The good news is that there weren’t that many since this was the era when the “Washington Consensus” held sway.

Although most countries became more capitalist over the past quarter century, not every country did. …Fortunately, only five countries became significantly less capitalist over the last quarter century when most everyone else was busy reaping the rewards of becoming more capitalist. These countries are: Myanmar, Rwanda, Ukraine, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe. Each of these countries lost more than 1 point of economic freedom over the period on Fraser’s 10-point scale. This decline translates into a 20–40% loss of economic freedom depending on the country one considers.

Unsurprisingly, bad things happen when nations suffer a decline in economic liberty.

Here’s what happened to the four key indicators in countries that moved toward statism.

Professor Leeson’s conclusions are very blunt…and very accurate.

Unless one prefers poverty, premature death, ignorance, and political oppression to wealth, longevity, knowledge, and freedom, less capitalism deserve no cheers. …Global capitalism’s effect is clear to the point of smacking one in the face: it has made the world unequivocally better off.

Amen.

We know the recipe for growth and prosperity. The challenge is convincing self-interested politicians to reduce their power and control over the economy.

P.S. I’m still waiting for any of my left-leaning friends to provide an answer – even just a partial answer – to my two-question challenge.

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The Most Important Ballot Initiative of 2019

Last November, voters in some states had the opportunity to accept or reject some very important initiatives, including votes on Colorado’s flat tax, Arizona’s school choice system, and a carbon tax in the state of Washington.

Since 2019 is an off-year election, there aren’t as many initiatives and referendums. But one of them is vitally important. Politicians in Colorado are hoping voters will approve Proposition CC, which would gut the Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR) and thus allow more government spending.

Why is TABOR worth defending? Because it’s far and away the most effective and well-designed fiscal rule in the United States.

It’s basically a spending cap, which is the ideal fiscal policy, and here’s a description of how it works that I shared last year.

Colorado voters adopted The Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights in 1992. TABOR allows government spending to grow each year at the rate of inflation-plus-population. Government can increase faster whenever voters consent. Likewise, tax rates can be increased whenever voters consent. …The Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights requires that excess government revenues be refunded to taxpayers, unless taxpayers vote to let the government keep the revenue.

Proposition CC doesn’t fully repeal TABOR, but it allows politicians to keep – and spend – excess tax revenues.

Thomas Aiello of the National Taxpayers Union wrote last month for the Colorado Springs Gazette about TABOR. He explains why it has been successful.

By guaranteeing refunds of excessive taxes, restricting spending to sensible growth rates, and giving Coloradans the ability to vote on tax increases, TABOR has been instrumental in the state’s booming economy. …Since TABOR limits the amount of money the state is allowed to spend, surplus revenue in excess of the cap must be refunded to Colorado taxpayers. Generally, the revenue cap on the state level grows with inflation plus population increases. …TABOR is working as designed: limiting the growth of government, protecting taxpayers, and ensuring working Coloradans keep more of their hard-earned money. …since 1992 more than $3 billion has been refunded back to taxpayers in the form of lower property, sales, and income taxes.

And he warns about the adverse consequences of Proposition CC.

…in the 2019 legislative session, the Democratic-controlled legislature agreed to place Proposition CC onto the November ballot. If approved by voters, TABOR’s provision for refunds would be gutted, thereby allowing the treasury to retain all excess revenue it is required to return to taxpayers. That means taxpayers would forfeit future refunds from 2019 on. Just put that into perspective: taxpayers will send an extra $1.3 billion to the treasury than what would normally be spent. Instead of giving that money back to you as required by TABOR, lawmakers want Coloradans to forget about overpayments so they can just spend it on other things in the budget.

Writing for the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, Jay Stooksbury also opines against Proposition CC.

They lied to us in 2005, and they are doubling down on this lie in 2019. Colorado voters were sold a bill of goods with Referendum C in 2005, and it is of the utmost importance that we aren’t fooled again with Proposition CC in 2019. Proponents of Referendum C originally claimed that their measure was “temporary.” The measure was supposed to offer a five-year reprieve from the constitutional limitations created by the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR)… Referendum C proved to be anything but “temporary.” The referendum allowed Colorado’s spendthrift government to permanently augment its spending cap, shortchanging taxpayers on their potential refund year after year since its passing.

He explains that Proposition CC would be far worse.

If passed, this 2019 ballot measure would permanently abolish the state government’s obligation to refund taxpayers. I repeat: permanently. At least this time around, legislators have dropped the pretense that they are bluffing with “temporary” half-measures; when it comes to keeping all of your hard-earned income, these legislators are going all-in, baby. …TABOR is, unfortunately, a shell of its former self. Its effectiveness has been chipped away by a decades-long rebranding campaign that laundered tax revenue by using terms like “fees” and “enterprises.” …Regardless, TABOR is still a vital, one-of-a-kind safeguard that empowers Coloradans against the wastefulness of government. Come November, let’s be certain to keep it that way. Fool us once with C, shame on you; fool us twice with CC, shame on all of us.

I don’t have much to add to these analyses. The real gold standard for good fiscal policy is to make sure government doesn’t grow faster than the private sector, and that’s what TABOR is designed to achieve.

It’s basically the closest thing we have in America to Switzerland’s “debt brake” and Hong Kong’s Article 107.

My only contribution to the discussion is this chart, based on data from the St. Louis Federal Reserve, showing how Coloradans now enjoy more than $4,000 of additional personal income compared to the national average – up from just $526 when TABOR was enacted.

While it’s impossible to precisely explain why income has grown faster in Colorado, I don’t think it is a coincidence that the state gets high scores for economic liberty.

P.S. To see the real-world impact of TABOR, look at what happened after pot legalization produced additional tax revenue.

P.P.S. I’m also paying close attention to Proposition 4 in Texas, which would amend the state constitution to prohibit consideration of a personal income tax.

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Taxpayer-Subsidized Corruption in Europe

The Department of Agriculture should be abolished. Yesterday, if possible.

It’s basically a welfare scam for politically connected farmers and it undermines the efficiency of America’s agriculture sector.

Some of the specific handouts – such as those for milk, corn, sugar, and even cranberries – are unbelievably wasteful.

But the European Union’s system of subsidies may be even worse. As reported by the New York Times, it is a toxic brew of waste, fraud, sleaze, and corruption.

…children toil for new overlords, a group of oligarchs and political patrons…a feudal system…financed and emboldened by the European Union. Every year, the 28-country bloc pays out $65 billion in farm subsidies… But across…much of Central and Eastern Europe, the bulk goes to a connected and powerful few. The prime minister of the Czech Republic collected tens of millions of dollars in subsidies just last year. Subsidies have underwritten Mafia-style land grabs in Slovakia and Bulgaria. …a subsidy system that is deliberately opaque, grossly undermines the European Union’s environmental goals and is warped by corruption and self-dealing. …The program is the biggest item in the European Union’s central budget, accounting for 40 percent of expenditures. It’s one of the largest subsidy programs in the world. …The European Union spends three times as much as the United States on farm subsidies each year, but as the system has expanded, accountability has not kept up. …Even as the European Union champions the subsidy program as an essential safety net for hardworking farmers, studies have repeatedly shown that 80 percent of the money goes to the biggest 20 percent of recipients. …It is a type of modern feudalism, where small farmers live in the shadows of huge, politically powerful interests — and European Union subsidies help finance it.

Is anyone surprised that big government leads to big corruption?

By the way, the article focused on the sleaze in Eastern Europe.

The problem, however, is not regional. Here’s a nice visual showing how there’s also plenty of graft lining pockets in Western Europe.

P.S. I imagine British politicians will concoct their own system of foolish subsidies, but the CAP handouts are another reason why voters were smart to vote for Brexit.

P.P.S. The CAP subsidies are one of many reasons why the European Union has been a net negative for national economies.

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Senator Warren’s Looney Medicare-for-All Scheme

I’ve always considered Senator Bernie Sanders to be the most clueless and misguided of all presidential candidates.

But I also think “Crazy Bernie” is actually sincere. He really believes in socialism.

Elizabeth Warren, by contrast, seems more calculating. Her positions (on issues such as Social Security, corporate governance, federal spending, taxation, Wall Street, etc).) are radical, but it’s an open question whether she’s a true believer in statism. It’s possible that she simply sees a left-wing agenda as the best route to winning the Democratic nomination.

Regardless of motive, though, her proposals are economic lunacy. So maybe it’s time to give her “Looney Liz” as a nickname.

Consider, for instance, her new Medicare-for-All scheme. She got hammered for promising trillions of dollars of new goodies without specifying how it would be financed, so she’s put forward a plan that ostensibly fits the square peg in a round hole.

But as Chuck Blahous of the Mercatus Center explains, her plan is a farce.

…presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren released her proposal to ostensibly pay for the costs of Medicare for All (M4A) without raising taxes on the middle class. As published, the plan would not actually finance the costs of M4A. …the Warren proposal understates M4A’s costs, as quantified by multiple credible studies, by about 34.2%. Another 11.2% of the cost would be met by cutting payments to health providers such as physicians and hospitals. Approximately 20% of the financing is sought by tapping sources that are unavailable for various reasons, for example because she has already committed that funding to other priorities, or because the savings from them was already assumed in the top-line cost estimate. The remaining 34.6% would be met by an array of new and previous tax proposals, most of it consisting of new taxes affecting everyone now carrying employer-provided health insurance, including the middle class.

Here’s a pie chart showing that Warren is relying on smoke and mirrors for more than 50 percent of the financing.

By the way, the supposedly real parts of her plan, such as the new taxes, are a very bad idea.

Brian Riedl of the Manhattan Institute unleashed a flurry of tweets exposing flaws in her proposal.

Since I’m a tax wonk, here’s the one that grabbed my attention.

Combination of 35% corporate rate (worldwide, no deferral), “Real corporate profits tax,” curtail depreciation, huge capital gains taxes, financial transactions tax, bank tax, and 6% wealth tax is economic fantasyland. Taxes on capital would be through the roof. 9/

— Brian Riedl (@Brian_Riedl) November 1, 2019

Wow. Higher taxes on domestic business income, higher taxes on foreign-source business income, higher taxes on business investment, more double taxation of capital gains, a tax on financial transactions, and a very punitive wealth tax (which would be a huge indirect tax on all saving and investment).

If ever enacted, the United States presumably would drop to last place in the Tax Foundation’s competitiveness ranking.

And let’s not forget that Medicare-for-All would dramatically increase the burden of government spending. In one fell swoop, we’d become Greece.

Actually, that probably overstates the damage. Based on my Lassez-Faire Index, I’m guessing we’d be more akin to Spain or Belgium (in other words, falling from #6 in the rankings to the #35-#40 range according to Economic Freedom of the World).

P.S. Don’t forget that Medicare has a massive shortfall already.

P.P.S. Looney Liz’s plan is terrible fiscal policy, but keep in mind it’s also terrible health policy since it would exacerbate the third-party payer problem.

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Full Socialism vs. Full Stomachs

Lord Acton famously noted that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

I need to develop something similar about socialism. Based on the statism spectrum, it could be something like “socialism deprives and absolute socialism deprives absolutely.”

In other words, the bigger the government, the worse the results.

And when the government controls everything, the consequences can be catastrophic. Horrifyingly catastrophic, as Marian Tupy explains.

America’s college-educated youth…are too young to remember the Cold War and few study history. It is, therefore, timely to remind the millennials of what socialism wrought – especially in some of the world’s poorest countries. Those of us who remember the early 1980s will always remember the images of starving Ethiopian children. …these were the innocent victims of the Derg – a group of Marxist militants who took over the Ethiopian government… Between 1983 and 1985, some 400,000 people starved to death. …in 1999, Robert Mugabe, the 92-year-old Marxist dictator who came to power in 1980, embarked on a catastrophic “land reform” program. The program saw the nationalization of privately-held farmland and the expulsion of non-African farmers and businessmen. The result was a collapse of agricultural output, the second highest hyperinflation in recorded history that peaked at 89.7 sextillion or 89,700,000,000,000,000,000,000 percent per year and an unemployment rate of 94 percent. Thousands of Zimbabweans died of hunger and disease despite massive international help.

It turns out that governments have played big roles in some of the worst famines in recent memory.

Benjamin Zycher’s table of the greatest famines of the 20th century. …six out of the 10 worst famines happened in socialist countries. Other famines, including those in Nigeria, Somalia and Bangladesh, were partly a result of war and partly a result of a government’s economic mismanagement.

Here’s a table with some of the grim totals. Unsurprisingly, Pol Pot’s Cambodia is at the top of the list.

In some cases, such as Cambodia and Ukraine, starvation was a policy choice by evil communist governments (are there any other kinds?).

In other cases, the total state control of economic life produced famine as a byproduct.

In either case, Marian has a suggestion for some of today’s vapid millennials.

Wherever it has been tried, from the Soviet Union in 1917 to Venezuela in 2015, socialism has failed. Socialists have promised a utopia marked by equality and abundance. Instead, they have delivered tyranny and starvation. Young Americans should keep that in mind.

And if they forget, here’s an excellent cartoon from Pat Cross that may be easier to remember (h/t: Mark Perry).

P.S. The table looks at starvation in the 20th century. Let’s not forget that people currently are dying of malnutrition in the socialist hellhole of Venezuela (the lucky ones raid zoos and eat household pets for food).

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