Minnesota’s Risky Experiment

Give Minnesota politicians credit for consistency. Their policies have Minnesota ranked #39 in both Economic Freedom of North America and Freedom in the 50 states.

Those are ratings for overall economic freedom.

When looking specifically at fiscal policy, the state is in even worse shape.

The Tax Foundation calculates that Minnesota is only #45 in the State Business Tax Climate Index.

And the state’s governor, Tim Walz, received a failing grade in the Fiscal Policy Report Card on America’s Governors.

All things considered, Minnesota is not in good shape. That being said, it’s always possible to go downhill.

That will probably happen because the left this year is using Minnesota as a laboratory for statist economic policies.

Here’s some right-of-center analysis from the editors of National Review.

Minnesota has long been liberal, but with a frequently divided government that kept its radicalism tethered. …2022 was hardly a sweeping mandate. …The state senate went from a 34–33 Republican majority to a 34–33 DFL majority. On that slim basis, the DFL set out to turn the state overnight into a frozen California. The legislature, with the eager connivance of Governor Tim Walz, voted routinely in partisan lockstep to enact a wish list of left-wing radicalism. …a massive budget spree, blowing in a single session Minnesota’s $17.5 billion surplus, most of it on spending and the rest on one-time “tax rebates” that will do nothing to improve the state’s tax climate going forward. The state’s $72 billion budget increases spending by 38 percent over 2022 levels, plus $2.6 billion in additional infrastructure spending that is heavily financed by debt. Pricey new programs were created, such as free public college (subject to a means test), universal free breakfasts and lunches for all students, up to twelve weeks of state-financed family and medical leave, expanded free-housing vouchers, and free menstrual products in schools. …Taxes on most Minnesotans will be going up to pay for all this. Gas taxes will be hiked by as much as five cents a gallon over the next four years. Sales taxes will increase by one percentage point. A payroll tax will be added to finance the family- and medical-leave program.

Not everyone is unhappy about these developments.

Here’s a left-of-center perspective from E.J.Dionne of the Washington Post. He cites many of the same policies, but he argues that the state is moving in the right direction.

The avalanche of progressive legislation that the state’s two-vote Democratic majority in the Minnesota House and one-vote advantage in the state Senate have enacted this year is a wonder to behold. …former president Barack Obama tweeted recently: “If you need a reminder that elections have consequences, check out what’s happening in Minnesota.” …while a two-year budget surplus of $17.5 billion set expectations “very high” for what could be done, $10 billion of it was “one-time money,” meaning that programs had to be funded and revenue raised for the long term. …What makes Minnesota’s experience this year unusual? State Democratic leaders said in interviews that as soon as they learned in November that they would have their first trifecta in a decade — meaning control of both chambers and the governorship — they decided they would not hold back to calculate the politics of every move.

So who is right, National Review of Mr. Dionne?

Regular readers won’t be surprised to learn that I agree that it is a mistake to turn Minnesota into a “frozen California.”

There are plenty of states with better tax policy, including neighbors with no income tax (South Dakota) or low-rate flat taxes (Iowa), so I expect we will see an increase in the rate of out-migration.

And if the productive people want warm weather as well, there are even more zero-tax options (Texas, Florida, etc) and flat-tax options (Arizona, North Carolina, etc).

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Singapore vs. Hong Kong

I have written very favorably about Hong Kong and I have also sung the praises of Singapore. But if you want to know which jurisdiction has a brighter future, it certainly seems like Singapore will be the long-run winner.

The above video is a segment from my recent interview with the Soul of Enterprise, which mostly focused on fiscal issues such the debt limit and spending caps.

I was glad, however, that we briefly detoured to a discussion of the two Asian city states.

Neither jurisdiction is perfect, of course, but both Singapore and Hong Kong have very pro-market policies by global standards.

And they both showed that it is possible to escape the “middle-income trap.”

But which one is doing the best?

According to the Maddison data shown in this chart, Singapore has vaulted ahead in the past two decades.

I included the United States for purposes of comparison. And it is remarkable how both Singapore and Hong Kong used to be very poor by comparison.

But let’s get back to the main focus of today’s column.

A recent article in the U.K.-based Economist compares Singapore and Hong Kong.

In economic dynamism, the state of the urban fabric and the vibrancy of civic life, which city comes top: Hong Kong or Singapore? Until not long ago, it was obvious…that Hong Kong won hands down. But recently the balance shifted. There is clearly no contest anymore. It is game over in favour of Singapore. …Hong Kong and Singapore, once dirt-poor, have astonishing success stories to tell. Both are hubs for international finance, trade, transport and tourism. Both have attracted the brightest professional minds. …The imposition of a draconian national-security law in 2020 marked the obvious break in Hong Kong’s trajectory. …Some 200,000 expatriates have left Hong Kong in the past three years, along with even more Hong Kongers. By contrast, in 2022 the number of foreign professionals in Singapore grew by 16%… In 1997, the year of Hong Kong’s return to China, the two cities’ GDP per person was remarkably similar ($26,376 in Singapore, $27,330 in Hong Kong). Today Singapore’s is 1.7 times higher than Hong Kong’s. Singapore’s economy has grown by one-seventh since 2017; Hong Kong’s not at all. …Singapore is at a crossroads. Hong Kong has hit a dead end.

The bottom line is that China’s takeover of Hong Kong has had a negative effect.

As I noted in the video clip, economic policy has not moved significantly in the wrong direction, but entrepreneurs and investors do not trust Beijing.

That skepticism may be warranted.

P.S. As part of my anti-convergence club, I’ve compared Hong Kong and Cuba, along with Singapore and Jamaica.

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Blue-to-Red Migration, Part I

I realize it’s not nice to take pleasure in the misfortune of others, but that rule does not apply when bad things happen to greedy politicians.

As such, I greatly enjoy reading about when taxpayers “vote with their feet” by moving from high-tax jurisdictions to low-tax jurisdictions.

I enjoy when there is tax-motivated migration between nations.

And I enjoy when there is tax-motivated migration between states.

Regarding the latter version, there’s a must-read editorial in the Wall Street Journal about the ongoing exodus from fiscal hellholes such as Illinois, New York, and California.

The IRS each spring publishes data on the movement of adjusted gross income (AGI) and taxpayers across state lines from year to year. …the IRS data shows blue states are losing taxpayers and income at an increasing clip. …a net 105,000 people left Illinois in 2021, taking with them some $10.9 billion in AGI. That’s up from $8.5 billion in 2020 and $6 billion in 2019. New York’s income loss increased to $24.5 billion in 2021 from $19.5 billion in 2020 and $9 billion in 2019. California lost $29.1 billion in 2021, more than triple what it did in 2019. By contrast, the lowest tax states added some $100 billion of income during the pandemic. Zero-income-tax Florida gained $39.2 billion—up from $23.7 billion in 2020 and $17.7 billion in 2019. About $9.8 billion of the total arrived from New York, $3.9 billion from Illinois, $3.7 billion from New Jersey and $3.5 billion from California. Texas was another winner, attracting a net $10.9 billion in 2021, which follows a gain of $6.3 billion in 2020 and $4 billion in 2019. Californians represented more than half of Texas’s income gain in 2021.

Congratulations to Texas and Florida. Having no income tax is definitely a smart step.

Here is a chart that accompanied the editorial.

By the way, migration is the headline event, but it is also important to pay attention to who is migrating.

The WSJ‘s editorial notes that the people leaving high-tax states tend to be economically successful.

The IRS data shows that the taxpayers leaving Illinois and New York typically made about $30,000 to $40,000 more than those arriving. Of Illinois’s total out-migration, 28% of the leavers made between $100,000 to $200,000 and 23% made $200,000 or more. By contrast, the average return of a Florida newcomer in 2021 was about $150,000—more than double that of taxpayers who left. High earners spend more, which yields higher sales tax revenue. This helped Florida post a record $22 billion budget surplus last year. California is forecasting a $29.5 billion deficit.

In other words, the geese with the golden eggs are flying away.

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The Negative Economic Effects of State Death Taxes

I’ve written many times about the harmful consequences of the federal death tax. Simply stated, it is both immoral and foolish for the IRS to grab as much as 40 percent of someone’s assets simply because they die.

That drains private capital from the economy and is a de facto heavy tax on those who save and invest (triple or quadruple taxation!).

That’s the bad news.

The worse news is that some states augment the damage with their own death taxes. Here’s a map from the Tax Foundation showing which states shoot themselves in the foot.

For those curious, the estate tax is imposed on the dead person’s assets and an inheritance tax is imposed on the the people who inherit the dead person’s assets.

In both cases, it’s bad news.

How bad?

There’s some new research from a couple of scholars examining this topic. Enrico Moretti of Berkeley and Daniel J. Wilson of the San Francisco Federal Reserve have a study published by the American Economic Journal that quantifies the impact of state death taxes on location choices.

In this paper, we contribute to the literature on the effect of state taxes on the locational choices of wealthy individuals by studying how estate taxes affect the state of residence of the American ultra-rich and the implications for tax policy. …Specifically, we estimate the effects of state-level estate taxes on the geographical location of the Forbes 400 richest Americans between 1981 and 2017. We then use the estimated tax mobility elasticity to quantify the revenue costs and benefits for each state of having an estate tax. We find that billionaires’ geographical location is highly sensitive to state estate taxes. Billionaires tend to leave states with an estate tax, especially as they get old. …On average, estate tax states lose 2.35 Forbes 400 individuals relative to non–estate tax states. …—21.4 percent of individuals who originally were in an estate tax state had moved to a non–estate tax state, while only 1.2 percent of individuals who originally were in a non–estate tax state had moved to an estate tax state. The difference is significantly more pronounced for individuals 65 or older… Overall, we conclude that billionaires’ geographical location is highly sensitive to state estate taxes. …We estimate that tax-induced mobility resulted in 23.6 fewer Forbes 400 billionaires and $80.7 billion less in Forbes 400 wealth exposed to state estate taxes.

What makes the study especially persuasive is that state death taxes suddenly no longer could be offset against federal death taxes because of a policy change in 2001.

That meant post-2001 data should look different. And that’s exactly what the authors found, as illustrated in Figure 6 of the study.

Here are some final excerpts from the conclusion.

The 2001 federal tax reform introduced stark cross-state variation in estate tax liabilities for wealthy taxpayers. Our findings indicate that the ultra-wealthy are keenly sensitive to this variation. Specifically, we find that billionaires responded strongly to geographical differences in estate taxes by increasingly moving to states without estate taxes, especially as they grew older. Our estimated elasticity implies that $80.7 billion of 2001 Forbes 400 wealth escaped estate taxation in the subsequent years due to billionaires moving away from estate tax states.

By the way, the study said that most states still wind up collecting net revenue because of death taxes.

In other words, the death tax revenue from remaining rich people is generally greater than the foregone income tax revenue because of those who left.

But I wonder if those findings would be true if the authors had been able to measure the secondary effects such as lost sales tax revenue, lost property tax revenues, and (perhaps most important) lost income tax revenue from people who did business with escaping rich people.

But, regardless of the findings, it is always immoral and wrong for politicians to impose taxes simply because someone dies.

P.S. In Australia, people changed when they died because of the death tax.

P.P.S. In France, people changed who they were because of the death tax.

P.P.P.S. In Ireland, people pretended to change their sexual orientation because of the death tax.

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France, Taxes, and Math

I normally write a column every year (2021, 2020, 2019, etc) when the Tax Foundation releases its International Tax Competitiveness Index, in part because I’m curious to see how the United States compares to other developed nations.

I somehow overlooked the 2022 version, but there’s a very good reason to cite the Index today. In the latest version, Estonia retains its #1 ranking, which is no surprise.

And, as you can see from the map, France is #38, giving it the worst tax system among industrialized nations.

I want to focus on France because the nation is in the midst of a massive political controversy over President Macron’s plan to increase the retirement age from 62 to 64.

That’s too little and too late from my perspective, given the country’s terrible fiscal outlook.

Some people, however, don’t understand this reality. In a column for the New York Review, Madeleine Schwartz writes that Macron’s plan “has few supporters among French economists.” Here are some excerpts.

Macron and his defenders have called the reform a necessity. …But one group of voices has been missing among the commentators advocating for the change. “You won’t find many economists defending this reform,” says the economist Mathieu Plane, who works at the French Observatory of Economic Indicators… Patrick Artus, a well-known economist who currently works as an advisor to the French bank Natixis, told me that the government has several tools at its disposal… They might increase taxes. “The government has a complete block on raising taxes,” he says. “And yet there are some tax increases that would be legitimate.” …Instead the government has forced forward a law that many economists consider both inequitable and ineffective. …“It’s a pretty brutal measure,” says Camille Landais, chairman of the French Council of Economic Advisers.

Wow, what an indictment of French economists. Are they really that clueless? Are they the ones who are bad at math?

It’s hard to answer those question.

But I can say with certainty that big tax increases are not the solution when France already has the developed world’s worst tax system, with terrible grades in all but one category.

What’s especially amazing is that some of the French economists inadvertently confirm my argument that Macron did not go far enough.

A number of economists have questioned whether the reform would do much to solve the larger issue, which is that the population is aging and productivity levels do not balance the cost of demographic change. By making older workers work longer, the reform will only raise the employment rate by about one point, says Artus, even though France’s employment rate is about nine points less than, for example, Germany’s.

Yet, amazingly, their view is to do nothing other than double down on the policies that have produced low levels of employment.

I’ve joked in the past that economists are untrustworthy, and perhaps even despicable and loathsome. In France, it appears that my satire is reality.

P.S. Today’s column focused on France. For those interested in other nations, here’s the full Index.

The United States ranked #22, which is bad but not as bad as it used to be. Kudos to the Baltic nations, as well as New Zealand and Switzerland. Sympathy for the mistreated taxpayers of Italy and Portugal (as well as Ireland, where the benefits of a low corporate rate are offset by very bad scores in other areas).

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The Case Against Biden’s Class-Warfare Tax Policy, Part VI

Last week, I wrote about Biden’s proposed budget, focusing on the aggregate increase in the fiscal burden.

Today, let’s take a closer look at his class-warfare tax proposals. Consider this Part VI in a series (Parts I-V can be found here, here, here, here, and here), and we’ll use data from the folks at the Tax Foundation.

We’ll start with this map, which shows each state’s top marginal tax rate on household income if Biden’s budget is enacted.

The main takeaway is that five state would have combined top tax rates of greater than 50 percent if Biden is successful in pushing the top federal rate from 37 percent to 39.6 percent.

At the risk of understatement, that’s not a recipe for robust entrepreneurship.

While it is a very bad idea to have high marginal tax rates, it’s also important to look at whether the government is taxing some types of income more than one time.

That’s already a pervasive problem.

Yet the Tax Foundation shows that Biden wants to make the problem worse. Much worse.

His proposed increase in the corporate tax rate is awful, but his proposal to nearly double the tax burden on capital gains is incomprehensibly foolish.

I guess we should be happy that Biden didn’t propose to also increase the 40 percent rate imposed by the death tax.

But that’s not much solace considering what Biden would do to American competitiveness. Here’s our final visual for today.

As you can see, the president wants to make the US slightly worse than average for personal income taxes, significantly worse than average for the corporate income tax, and absurdly worse than average for taxes on capital gains and dividends.

I’ll close by observing that some of my leftist friends defend these taxes since they target the “evil rich.”

I have a moral disagreement with their view that people should be punished simply because they are successful investors, entrepreneurs, or business owners.

But the bigger problem is that they don’t understand economics. Academic research shows that ordinary workers benefit when top tax rates are low, and there’s even more evidence that workers are hurt when there is punitive double taxation on saving and investment.

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A Case Study on Corporate Tax and Competitiveness

Last year’s three-part series on corporate tax rates (here, here, and here) primarily focused on the case for low rates in the United States.

Today, we’re going to look at why the United Kingdom should have a low corporate tax rate.

Though the arguments don’t change simply because we cross the Atlantic Ocean.

A low corporate tax rate is a good idea because it means more investment, higher productivity, and better wages.

That’s true in the U.S., it’s true in the U.K., and its true in every other nation.

If you want evidence, Phil Radford’s article for CapX explains why the U.K.’s pharmaceutical industry has contracted while Ireland’s has expanded.

AstraZeneca’s plan to build a $350m pharmaceuticals factory in Ireland rather than the UK was 100% predictable. …the long-term failure of UK pharma highlights how UK policy discussion is light years behind our competitors when it comes to understanding what drives prosperity. …The trend kicked off back in 2011, when US-based Pfizer shifted its Viagra-making plant from Sandwich in Kent to Ringaskiddy, near Cork. This event marked the start of a five-year plunge in UK pharma manufacturing and exports… According to ONS, output in UK pharma manufacturing declined by roughly one-third from 2010 to 2015. Gross value added actually halved. Where did the manufacturing go? Ireland… What’s caused this malady? In a word: taxation. …corporate taxation levels appear to exert a dominating effect on where pharmaceuticals companies locate their factories. …Ireland’s corporate tax rate fell from 40% in 1996 to 12.5%n 2003, and it has stayed at that level for the past 19 years. Meanwhile, the UK’s corporate taxation rate was 30% 20 years ago, and from 2008 it began a gentle drift downwards to 19% where it will remain until April this year, when it will increase to 25%. This means, from AstraZeneca’s point of view, the investment equation is a no-brainer. Even if Ireland is forced to raise its rate to 15%, the country will shortly regain its general comparative level of between one-half and two-thirds the UK rate.

The data in Radford’s article is a damning indictment of the supposedly conservative government in the United Kingdom.

A few years ago, the corporate tax rate was 19 percent and expected to drop to 17 percent. Now, thanks to an unwillingness to control spending, the rate is jumping to 25 percent.

And, as noted in the article, the U.K. lost a $350 million factory. As well as all the jobs and taxable income that it would have generated.

Politicians are winning and people are losing.

P.S. Biden wants to make the same mistake.

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New York vs. Florida, Round #5

The first four rounds of my New York vs. Florida contest (available here, here, here, and here) largely focused on Florida’s superior economic policies and superior economic results.

So you won’t be surprised to learn that Round #5 continues that tradition.

We’ll start today’s column with a remarkable comparison put together by the Wall Street Journal.

Notice that Florida now has more population (thanks in large part to interstate migration), yet New York’s budget is twice as big.

That means a much higher tax burden.

And New York’s onerous fiscal burden doubtlessly helps to explain why Florida has been growing so much faster, and also has a much lower unemployment rate.

The Wall Street Journal connected the dots as part of its editorial.

Comparative governance is a useful course of study, not least because bad governance is so costly to people and prosperity. We often write about the migration from the Northeast to Florida and other states, but sometimes the contrast is best illuminated with some data. …As recently as 2013 the two states had similar populations, but so many people have moved to the Sunshine State that it’s now roughly 2.6 million people larger. Yet, believe it or not, Florida’s state budget as measured in the latest proposals from the two governors, is only half the size of New York’s. This is in part a reflection of their tax burden, which in Florida is much smaller. …Florida has no state income tax, while New York’s top tax rate is 10.9%. In New York City, the top rate is 14.8%, while in Miami it’s zero. …Florida’s jobless rate was 2.5% in December, well below the January national 3.4% rate. New York’s rate was 4.3%, tied with Alaska and Michigan for fifth worst in the country… State GDP growth in Florida in 2012 dollars from 2016-2021 was more than double New York’s—17% to 8%. These comparative statistics…show that better governance yields better fiscal and economic results.

Amen.

I’ve written that there’s a link between national policy and national prosperity.

The same is true for state policy and state prosperity.

P.S. A reader sent me a fill-in-the-blanks essay generator for leaving New York. It focuses on quality of life rather than public policy, but I nonetheless made some choices.

P.P.S. Another Florida advantage is a lower cost of living.

P.P.P.S. New York’s absurd Medicaid spending (presumably enabled by this type of scam) is yet another reason to reform that money-pit program.

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Assessing North Carolina’s Fiscal Policy

When I first started citing the Tax Foundation’s State Business Tax Climate Index back in 2013, North Carolina was one of the 10 worst states.

In a remarkable turnaround, North Carolina is now one of the 10 best states.

The big improvement is partly because the state joined the flat tax club.

But there were other tax cuts as well, along with some much-needed spending restraint.

Sounds like great news, but you won’t be surprised to learn that not everyone is happy about what’s happened in the Tarheel State.

In a column for the Raleigh News & Observer, Ned Barnett opined yesterday against tax cuts – both the ones that already have occurred and the new ones that the state legislature is considering.

Republican state lawmakers think cutting taxes makes North Carolina more attractive to new businesses, but cutting taxes too much has the opposite effect. …Now, with the General Assembly back in session, they’re looking to cut some more. It’s a reckless path… Since Republicans began aggressively cutting taxes in 2013, the state has lost billions of dollars in revenue. …North Carolina has excess revenue because the state has reduced what it has historically spent as a share of the state economy – a drop from 5.8 percent to 4 percent… The state corporate tax has fallen from 6.9 percent to 2.5 percent and will be phased out by 2030. The personal income tax has been stepped down from a two-tier progressive tax with a top rate of 7.75 percent to a flat tax of 4.75 percent today. Now state Senate leader Phil Berger says the legislature should consider cutting the personal income tax to 2.5 percent.

The most important data cited above is that the burden of state government spending has dropped from 5.8 percent to 4 percent of the state economy.

This upsets Mr. Barnett, but the rest of us should view this as a major triumph for genuine fiscal responsibility.

And by imposing genuine spending restraint, North Carolina lawmakers created the “fiscal space” for meaningful tax cuts.

So why is Mr. Barnett upset? In the column, he complains that some parts of the budget are not increasing as fast as he would like. But he never offers any evidence that the state is suffering economic harm.

I suspect he offered no evidence because he has no evidence.

Or perhaps he offered no evidence because the data shows that he’s wrong.

And that’s exactly what I discovered when I checked the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank’s per-capita income data. Lo and behold, incomes in North Carolina are growing faster than the national average and faster than the regional average.

The differences are not huge, but it’s nonetheless better to have faster income growth rather than slower income growth.

Some of my more sophisticated friends on the left doubtlessly will point out that states in other regions still have higher overall levels of average income, which is a fair point, but it’s also fair for me to respond by noting that the cost-of-living is generally much lower in North Carolina.

The bottom line is that North Carolina’s better tax policy has the state moving in the right direction while high-tax states are moving in the wrong direction.

P.S. North Carolina also is close to being among the 10 best states for educational freedom.

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The Most Economically Free State Is…?

According to the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World, New Hampshire was the most economically free state in America in 2017, 2018, and 2019.

But the state famous for “Live Free or Die” has now been replaced by the Sunshine State.

The most-recent edition, which is based on 2020 data, informs us that Florida now enjoys more economic liberty than any other state.

New Hampshire still is ranked very high, coming in at #2, followed by South Dakota at #3. Texas and Tennessee are tied for #4.

What’s the one thing they all have in common? No state income tax.

Meanwhile, the report also highlights the states that (predictably) dominate the bottom of the rankings.

For the purpose of comparing jurisdictions within the same country, the subnational indices are the appropriate choice. …In the United States, the most economically free state was Florida at 7.94, followed by New Hampshire at 7.84, South Dakota at 7.75, and Texas and Tennessee at 7.66. (Note that since the indexes were calculated separately for each country, the numeric scores on the subnational indices are not directly comparable across countries.) The least-free state was again New York at 4.25, following California at 4.59, Hawaii at 4.65, Vermont at 4.70, and Oregon at 4.92. For the first time, we have made a preliminary attempt to include the US territory of Puerto Rico in the US subnational index. It came in with a score of 2.04. The next lowest score was more than twice as high.

Here are the full rankings at the subnational level (i.e., measuring the policies that are under the control of state lawmakers).

For the first time, the report assesses Puerto Rico. Hardly a surprise to see where it ranks.

The report also has an “all-government” ranking, which includes the effect of both national and subnational governments.

On that basis, New Hampshire is in first place.

The all-government index includes…comparisons among Canadian, Mexican, and US subnational jurisdictions that take into account national policies affecting all jurisdictions within each country. …The top jurisdiction is New Hampshire at 8.10, followed by Florida (8.05), Utah (8.03), and then Idaho and South Carolina, tied for fourth (8.02).

The all-government scores allow comparison of all the state and provinces in the US, Canada, and Mexico.

The one clear takeaway is that Mexico desperately needs pro-market reforms.

I’ll close by observing that almost every US state ranks above every Canadian province.

But that wasn’t always the case. Which shows that Justin Trudeau is pushing Canada in the wrong direction even faster than American politicians are pushing the US in the wrong direction.

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Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, What State Has the Best Tax Policy of All?

Because I dedicated last week to European fiscal policy, I didn’t get a chance to write about the Tax Foundation’s latest version of the State Business Tax Climate Index, which was released October 25.

Last year, the top-4 states were Wyoming, South Dakota, Alaska, and Florida. This year’s report, authored by Janelle Fritts and Jared Walczak, says the top-4 states are… (drum roll, please) …exactly the same.

Here’s the map showing how states rank. The best states are blue and the worst states are dark grey.

Coincidentally, the bottom-4 states also stayed constant. New Jersey is in last place, followed by New York, California, and Connecticut.

But there were some very interesting changes if you look at the other 42 states.

Thanks to pro-growth tax reforms, Arizona and Oklahoma both jumped 5 spots in the past year.

The state of Washington suffered a huge fall, dropping 13 spots thanks to the imposition of a capital gains tax (the state constitution supposedly bars any taxes on income – and voters last fall overwhelmingly voted against the capital gains tax – but it appears the state’s politicians and a negligent judiciary may combine to put the state on a very bad path).

It’s also interesting to look at long-run trends. If you compare this year’s Index with the original 2014 Index, you’ll find that three states have jumped by at least 10 spots and three states have dropped by at least 10 spots.

Since I’m a Virginia resident, this is not encouraging news.

P.S. As I’ve noted before, the rankings for Alaska and Wyoming are somewhat misleading. Both states have lots of energy production and their state governments collect enormous amounts of taxes from that sector. This allows them to keep other taxes low while still financing bloated state budgets.

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European Fiscal Policy Week, Part V: The European Union, Centralization, and Redistribution

The European Union started as a good idea (unfettered free trade between member nations) and has morphed into a troubling idea (a super-state based on centralization, harmonization, and bureaucratization).

And I fear it is heading further in the wrong direction since many European politicians want European-wide taxes and spending to facilitate more redistribution (on top of all the taxes and spending by member nations!).

Even if it means breaking existing EU rules in order to make government bigger.

Today, as part of “European Fiscal Policy Week,” let’s assess whether the EU is a positive or negative force.

And I’ll start by observing that the economic data is unfavorable when compared to the United States. Not only are living standards lower in EU nations, but those countries also are continually falling further behind.

It’s possible, of course, that these countries would be even further behind if there was no European Union, but the academic evidence points in the other direction.

In an article for Law & Liberty, Douglas Carswell questions the very existence of the European Union.

Instead of asking if Europe can hold together, we should be asking if Europe should be held together at all. Why is it felt necessary to unify Europe’s disparate peoples in the first place? What is it that compels European leaders to support pan-European systems of governance at all? It is not as if European integration has been a success. …If the Euro was supposed to give Europe a competitive edge, how come the Eurozone lags behind the rest of the world by almost every measure of output and innovation? …The urge to integrate came about, it is often suggested, to prevent Germany from becoming overbearing… Seriously? Does anyone really believe that if it was not for an army of bureaucrats in Brussels these past thirty years, Germany might have invaded France again? …Maastricht, and indeed the various subsequent EU treaties, need to be seen for what they are: a power grab by Europe’s political elites. …Thirty years after Maastricht, the European Union is no more capable of making the kind of reforms it needs to save itself than it was back then. Rather like the Habsburg Empire, to which it is in many ways the successor, the European Union will stumble on, lurching from crisis to crisis, bits of it breaking away from time to time, as a once-great civilization becomes a cultural and economic backwater.

In a way that appeals to me, Liam Warner explains in National Review that the European Union represents the wrong type of globalism.

The 1957 Treaty of Rome established the European Economic Community, for example, was a customs union by which member countries agreed to trade freely with one another and maintain common external tariffs. With the 1993 Treaty of Maastricht, which established the EU, and its subsequent amendments, European integration began to look less like a cooperation of equals and more like a submission to a supranational authority. …internationalism in its modern form has often been a means of…imposing on the world a stultifying monotony… The deep flaws of the present system having been exposed, European leaders must give up their dream…and revisit their ancestors’ healthier forms of globalism.

That “healthier form of globalism” should be based on jurisdictional competition and mutual recognition.

Is that remotely feasible?

A few European leaders realize that there’s too much centralization. Kai Weiss highlighted the views of the Dutch Prime Minster in a column for CapX.

In his Strasbourg speech on the future of Europe, Mark Rutte struck a markedly different tone and delivered an entirely different message to Macron and others. The Prime Minister of the Netherlands has recently come to the fore as one of Europe’s more sceptical voices. Speaking in front of the European Parliament, he once again made it clear that for him, more and more EU is simply not the answer to today’s problems. “For some, ‘ever closer union’ is still a goal in itself. Not for me,” Rutte said… Instead of finding ever new competences and tasks, Rutte argued that Brussels should hold onto the “original promise of Europe”, the “promise of sovereign member states working together to help each other achieve greater prosperity…” For Rutte, this means focusing on the core benefit of the EU: free trade. …the emergence of the Netherlands, as well as Nordic and Baltic states, as vocal critics of Macron’s federalist plans should be the source of much hope for Europe’s future.

I applaud that there are a few leaders and a few governments trying to block further centralization.

But I have three reasons for being a pessimist about the European Union.

• First, I don’t think there’s any hope for achieving any decentralization. Indeed, the more sensible people in Europe will face endless battles to stop bad ideas.
• Second, Europe’s demographics are terrible. And that will specifically mean lots of pressure for redistribution by imposing EU-wide taxes and spending.
• Third, public policy is moving in the wrong direction at the national level. This compounds the damage of bad policies imposed by EU bureaucrats in Brussels.

Here’s a chart, based on the latest edition of Economic Freedom of the World, showing how economic liberty is declining in the nations that dominate the European Union.

P.S. For amusement value, here’s a cartoon showing the future of the European Union.

P.P.S. If you like European-themed satire, click here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

P.P.P.S. On a related note, Brexit-themed humor can be found here, here, here, and here.

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Congratulations to Estonia (Again)

There is not a lot of suspense when the Tax Foundation releases its annual International Tax Competitiveness Index.

The “improbable success” of Estonia once again ranks #1. Just like in 2021, 2020, 2019, etc, etc.

Its Baltic neighbor Latvia is #2, followed by New Zealand and Switzerland.

It’s also worth noting that France is continuing its proud tradition of being in last place.

The United States, for what it is worth, has a mediocre #22 rank, dragged down by a horrible score – last among developed nations – for “cross-border tax rules” (but helped by a good score for consumption taxes since the U.S. has not made the mistake of imposing a value-added tax).

If you want to understand the Tax Foundation’s methodology, here’s a description from the report.

The structure of a country’s tax code is a determining factor of its economic performance. …The International Tax Competitiveness Index (ITCI) seeks to measure the extent to which a country’s tax system adheres to two important aspects of tax policy: competitiveness and neutrality. A competitive tax code is one that keeps marginal tax rates low. …businesses will look for countries with lower tax rates on investment to maximize their after-tax rate of return. If a country’s tax rate is too high, it will drive investment elsewhere, leading to slower economic growth. In addition, high marginal tax rates can impede domestic investment and lead to tax avoidance. …Separately, a neutral tax code…means that it doesn’t favor consumption over saving, as happens with investment taxes and wealth taxes. It also means few or no targeted tax breaks for specific activities carried out by businesses or individuals.

If you’re interested in which nations got better and worse over the past year, Greece and Turkey tied for the biggest improvement, both climbing four spots (easier for Greece since it started near the bottom of the rankings).

Ireland suffered the biggest decline, dropping seven spots, in part because of depreciation laws that penalize investment.

I’ll close with a wish that the report eventually gets expanded to include jurisdictions such Bermuda, Hong Kong, Monaco, Liechtenstein, Singapore, and the Cayman Islands. It would be very interesting to see if all of those places are ahead of Estonia.

It also would be interesting if the Tax Foundation augmented the report by speculating about potential big developments. For instance, how much would the U.S. score have declined if Biden’s tax plan had been adopted? And how much would the U.K. score have increased if Prime Minister Truss’ original tax plan was approved?

P.S. The Tax Foundation has very interesting comparative data showing international tax burdens on saving and investment.

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What Can We Learn by Comparing Relative Living Standards in OECD Nations?

Because of my libertarian proclivities, I don’t like when people assert that the United States should have European-sized government.

But this is not merely a question of ideology.

I’ve repeatedly pointed out that there is a relationship between national prosperity and economic liberty. And I’ve shared plenty of data showing that ordinary Americans have significantly higher living standards that their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

So why “catch up” with countries that are lagging behind?

One of my favorite ways of illustrating the gap is the “actual individual consumption” data from the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Here are the latest numbers, with show that the United States is more than 50 percent above the average for OECD nations.

I’m not surprised that Luxembourg ranks second since it is a tax haven. And it’s also not surprising that oil-rich Norway is in third place or that market-friendly Switzerland is in fourth place.

But notice that Europe’s most famous welfare states, France (102.5) and Sweden (104.7), are barely above average.

More important, notice that the United States is nearly 50 percent higher than those supposedly more enlightened nations.

Seems like there’s a lesson to be learned about what type of economic policy delivers the best results for ordinary people.

P.S. The United States has been at the top of these rankings for as long as I’ve been sharing the OECD’s AIC data, but other countries have suffered big falls or enjoyed big increases.

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A Prosperity Contest: The United States vs. Europe

Many people are stunned by the data I shared early last year showing that ordinary people in the United States tend to be much richer than their peers in advanced European nations.

Here’s some more evidence, courtesy of the Manhattan Institute’s Chris Pope.

As you can see, the poorest people in America are about equal to the poorest people in Germany, France, Canada, and the United Kingdom, but Americans are ahead of their peers when looking at the top 90 percent of the population.

For the top 70 percent, Americans are comfortably ahead.

But not everybody agrees.

Here’s a tweet from John Burn-Murdoch of the U.K.-based Financial Times. He has a very negative portrayal of the United States (and the United Kingdom).

The tweet from Burn-Murdoch includes a link to an article he wrote.

Here are some excerpts.

…one good way to evaluate which countries are better places to live than others is to ask: is life good for everyone there, or is it only good for rich people? …If you’re a proud Brit or American, you may want to look away now. …Norway is a good place to live, whether you are rich or poor. …The rich in the US are exceptionally rich — the top 10 per cent have the highest top-decile disposable incomes in the world, 50 per cent above their British counterparts. But the bottom decile struggle by with a standard of living that is worse than the poorest in 14 European countries including Slovenia. …transpose Norway’s inequality gradient on to the US, and the poorest decile of Americans would be a further 40 per cent better off while the top decile would remain richer than the top of almost every other country on the planet. …Until those gradients are made less steep, the UK and US will remain poor societies with pockets of rich people.

The United States is a poor society with some very rich people?!?

Is that possibly true?

As you might expect, that is utter hogwash. Here’s a chart, based on data from the Paris-based (and left-leaning) Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

It shows “actual individual consumption” in the OECD’s member nations, and people in the United States are far better off than people in any other nations.

Indeed, they have 50 percent more consumption than the average person in other OECD countries.

All you need to know is that Burn-Murdoch took some data about America’s poorest people and wants to mislead readers into thinking it also applies to the general population.

And he doesn’t even show his calculations. For what it’s worth, his numbers are not very consistent with some other data sources that are publicly accessible.

Professor Noah Smith also debunks the FT‘s report.

…when we look at how Americans in the middle of the distribution are doing, we see that America is not a “poor society” at all — in fact, it’s one of the richest on Earth. …the median American has a higher income than the median resident of almost any other country… Some people argue that because European countries buy health care for their citizens via the government — which is not counted in disposable income — that it’s not fair to use disposable income as the comparison measure here. But this isn’t right. The U.S. has a relatively low percentage of out-of-pocket health spending — our employers and our government pick up most of the tab. In fact, when we look at “adjusted disposable income”, which includes the value of government services like health care, we find out that the U.S. comes out even more ahead relative to other countries. …someone at around the 18th percentile of income in America in 2019 — a working-class person on the edge of being considered poor — lived in a household making $21,400 a year. That’s about the same as the median income of households in Japan, and about 84% of the median income of households in the UK. In other words, a working-class American on the edge of poverty makes as much as a middle-class person in some rich countries.

I’ll close by noting something else that was misleading in the FT report. Burn-Murdoch compares Norway to the U.S. and U.K., but that nation’s oil wealth makes it very unrepresentative.

Since the report concludes by endorsing more redistribution, it would be more honest and appropriate to compare American living standards to the performance of Europe’s other welfare states.

But Burn-Murdoch did not do that because his already flimsy case would look even weaker.

Also, note that he did not highlight Switzerland. After all, it is richer than Norway, even though it does not enjoy abundant natural resources.

I suspect that’s because Switzerland is a libertarian-oriented nation with a comparatively small welfare state. In other words, it’s a role model for good policy, whereas the reporter seems interested in promoting dirigisme.

P.S. Speaking of libertarians, the Burn-Murcoch story in the Financial Times begins with this passage.

Where would you rather live? A society where the rich are extraordinarily rich and the poor are very poor, or one where the rich are merely very well off but even those on the lowest incomes also enjoy a decent standard of living? For all but the most ardent free-market libertarians, the answer would be the latter.

At the risk of stating the obvious, libertarians want a society with the smallest-possible government. Limiting coercion (the non-aggression principle) is the main motive.

Libertarians will view the resulting distribution of income as just, but they also will point out that freer societies do a much better job of generating broadly shared prosperity than government-dominated societies.

The bottom line is that Burn-Murdoch is either extraordinarily ignorant about libertarianism or he suffers from Nancy MacLean levels of bad faith and dishonesty.

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Visualizing the Difference Between Switzerland and Europe’s Welfare States

What accounts for Switzerland’s “improbable success“? How did a small, land-locked nation with few natural resources become so successful?

Switzerland routinely ranks very high in international comparisons of economic liberty, so that means that there are many good policies.

But since I’m a public finance economist, I think this map from the Tax Foundation helps to explain why Switzerland is a role model. As you can see, the tax burden on workers is dramatically lower than in other European nations. Indeed, Switzerland is almost 10 percentage points lower than the next-closest country.

The map shows the tax burden on a single worker with no dependents, but you find a similarly large gap when looking at the tax burden on a four-person household.

By the way, Switzerland’s value-added tax is far lower than any other European nation, so ordinary workers aren’t being indirectly pillaged (and tax “progressivity” is very low in Switzerland, so high-income workers are not being pillaged, either).

How does Switzerland succeed in maintaining a relatively low tax burden?

Well, it’s easy to keep taxes under control when there are limits on the burden of government spending.

And, thanks to the nation’s very effective spending cap, you can see from this OECD chart that Switzerland is in a far stronger position than most European nations.

So kudos to Switzerland, which is sometimes thought to be the world’s most libertarian nation.

P.S. The Swiss also deserve praise for maintaining federalism, as well as their private retirement system.

P.P.S. Ireland also is a success story, but it’s not as good as suggested by the above chart.

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Evidence for Lower Corporate Tax Rates, Part III

To begin Part III of this series (here’s Part I and Part II), let’s dig into the archives for this video I narrated back in 2007.

At the risk of patting myself on the back, all of the points hold up very well. Indeed, the past 15 years have produced more evidence that my main arguments were correct.

• Lower corporate rates reduce double taxation
• Lower corporate rates reduce taxes on people
• Lower corporate rates boost worker income
• Lower corporate rates boost competitiveness
• Lower corporate rates generate revenue feedback

The good news is that all these arguments helped produce a tax bill that dropped America’s federal corporate tax rate by 14 percentage points, from 35 percent to 21 percent.

The bad news is that Biden and most Democrats in Congress want to raise the corporate rate.

In a column for CapX, Professor Tyler Goodspeed explains why higher corporate tax rates are a bad idea. He’s writing about what’s happening in the United Kingdom, but his arguments equally apply in the United States.

…the more you tax something, the less of it you get. …plans to raise Corporation Tax and end relief on new plant and machinery will result in less business investment – and steep costs for households. …Treasury’s current plans to raise the corporate income tax rate to 25% and end a temporary 130% ‘super-deduction’ for new investment in qualifying plant and machinery would lower UK investment by nearly 8%, and reduce the size of the UK economy by more than 2%, compared to making the current rules permanent. …because the economic costs of corporate taxation are ultimately borne both by shareholders and workers, raising the rate to 25% would permanently lower average household wages by £2,500. …the macroeconomic effects of raising the Corporation Tax rate to 25% would alone offset 40% of the static revenue gain over a 10-year period, and as much as 90% over the long run.

To bolster his argument for good policy on that side of the Atlantic Ocean, he then explains that America’s lower corporate tax rate has been a big success.

Critics of corporate tax reform should look to the recent experience of the United States… At the time, I predicted that these changes would raise business investment in new plant and equipment by 9%, and raise average household earnings by $4,000 in real, inflation-adjusted terms. …By the end of 2019, investment had risen to 9.4% above its pre-2017 level. Investment by corporate businesses specifically was up even more, rising to 14.2% above its pre-2017 trend in real, inflation-adjusted terms. Meanwhile, in 2018 and 2019 real median household income in the United States rose by $5,000 – a bigger increase in just two years than in the entire 20 preceding years combined. …What about corporate income tax revenues? …corporate tax revenue as a share of the US economy was substantially higher than projected, at 1.7% versus 1.4%.

If you want more evidence about what happened to corporate tax revenue in America after the Trump tax reform, click here.

Another victory for the Laffer Curve.

Not that we should be surprised. Even pro-tax bureaucracies such as the International Monetary Fund and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have found that lower corporate rates produce substantial revenue feedback.

So let’s hope neither the United States nor the United Kingdom make the mistake of undoing progress.

P.S. The specter of a higher corporate tax in the United Kingdom is especially bizarre. Voters chose Brexit in part to give the nation a chance to break free of the European Union’s dirigiste approach. But instead of adopting pro-growth policies (the Singapore-on-Thames approach), former Prime Minister Boris Johnson opted to increase the burden of taxes and spending. Hopefully the Conservative Party will return to Thatcherism with a new Prime Minister (and hopefully American Republicans will return to Reaganism!).

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Illinois and Fiscal Suicide, Part II

Yesterday’s column discussed Caterpillar’s decision to move its headquarters from high-tax Illinois to low-tax Texas.

Today, we have more bad news for the Prairie State.

A major investment fund, Citadel, also has decided to leave Illinois.

Is the company moving to a different high-tax state, perhaps California or New York? Maybe Connecticut or New Jersey?

Nope. Citadel is going to Florida, a state famous for having no income tax.

The Wall Street Journal opined this morning about Citadel’s move.

The first step to recovery is supposed to be admitting you have a problem. But Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker still won’t, even after billionaire Ken Griffin on Thursday said he’s moving his Citadel hedge fund and securities trading firm to Miami from Chicago. …Meantime, Democrats in Springfield continue to threaten businesses and citizens with higher taxes… It’s no wonder so many companies and people are leaving, and mostly to low-tax states. …In 2020, $2.4 billion in net adjusted gross income moved to Florida from Illinois, about $298,000 per tax filer. …Mr. Griffin has spent tens of millions of his personal fortune trying to rescue Illinois from bad progressive governance. Maybe he figures it’s time to cut his losses.

Other (former) Illinois residents cut their losses last decade.

Scott Shackford of Reason shared grim data at the end of 2020 about the ongoing exodus from Illinois.

For the seventh year in a row, census figures show residents moving out of Illinois in significant numbers. …Perhaps demanding that your excessively taxed residents give the government even more money is not the best way to keep those residents in your state… Over the course of the last decade, Illinois lost more than a quarter-million people…not even California…has seen Illinois’ population loss. …Government leaders have responded not with better fiscal management (the state’s powerful unions blocked pension reforms), but with more taxes and fees, even as residents leave.

The bottom line is that Illinois is currently losing people and businesses.

Just as it lost people and businesses last decade.

And you can see from this map that taxpayers also were fleeing the state earlier this century.

I’m guessing the state’s hypocritical governor probably thinks this is a good thing because the people who left probably didn’t vote for tax-and-spend politicians.

But that’s a very short-sighted viewpoint.

After all, parasites need a healthy host. If you’re a flea or a tick, it’s bad news if you’re on a dog that dies.

As Michael Barone noted many years ago, that’s a lesson that Illinois politicians haven’t learned.

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Illinois and Fiscal Suicide, Part I

I wrote a couple of days ago about California’s grim future.

But now I’ll share some good news. No matter how bad California gets, the Golden State probably won’t have to worry about people and businesses fleeing to Illinois.

That’s because the Prairie State is an even bigger mess. If California is committing “slow motion suicide,” Illinois is opting for the quickest-possible fiscal demise.

Politicians in Springfield (the Illinois capital) have a love affair with higher taxes. A very passionate love affair.

But the state’s productive people have a different point of view. More and more of them have been escaping.

And they are now being joined by the state’s most-famous company, as Matt Paprocki of the Illinois Policy Institute explains in a column for the Washington Post.

When Boeing announced last month that it was moving its headquarters from Chicago to Arlington, Va., it sent shudders through the Illinois business community and state capital. But last week, when the heavy-equipment manufacturer Caterpillar said it was moving its headquarters to Texas, it felt more like a bulldozer ramming into the news. …If you’re an Illinois business owner or resident, as I am, the economics of staying are tough and the enticements to move away are many. …According to the U.S. Census Bureau, last year the state had the third-largest loss of residents due to domestic migration in the nation (-122,460), trailing only California and New York.

It’s easy to understand why people and businesses are leaving.

In 2017, Illinois lawmakers raised the personal income tax rate to 4.95 percent, from 3.75 percent, and hiked the corporate rate to 7 percent, from 5.25 percent. When J.B. Pritzker took office as governor in 2019, he passed another 24 tax and fee hikes costing taxpayers over $5 billion. …With 278,475 regulatory restrictions and requirements — double the national average — Illinois has the third most heavily regulated environment in the country. …Illinois owes over $139 billion in state pension debt as of last year, and local governments owe about $75 billion, which is the primary driver for Illinois’ spiraling property taxes, second-highest in the nation.

Mr. Paprocki offers all sorts of suggestions for reform, including a spending cap.

But the chances of pro-growth reform are effectively zero. The governor is a hard-core leftist (as well as a hypocrite) and the state legislature is controlled by government employee unions.

So if you’re hoping for a TABOR-style spending cap, there’s little reason to be optimistic.

And if you’re hoping for reforms that will improve the state’s “least friendly” tax climate, don’t hold your breath.

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California’s Grim Future

I’ve been warning for many years that California is committing “slow-motion suicide.” I discussed the not-so-golden future of the Golden State as part of a longer interview with Chile’s Axel Kaiser.

If you don’t want to spend a couple of minutes to watch the interview, the key takeaway is that California has lots of natural advantages, but the state is suffering from too much government.

Both fiscal policy and regulatory policy are a nightmare, and the net result is that people and business are now leaving the state.

I wrote about the state’s problems back in January, and I also addressed the link with California’s bad policy in columns in 2016 and 2020.

So instead of regurgitating some of my thoughts, let’s use today’s column to see what others have written.

For instance, Joel Kotkin wrote a very depressing assessment of California for Real Clear Investigations.

…most Californians, according to recent surveys, see things differently. They point to rising poverty and inequality, believe the state is in recession and that it is headed in the wrong direction. …Reality may well be worse… In a new report for Chapman University, my colleagues and I find California in a state of existential crisis, losing both its middle-aged and middle class, while its poor population faces dimming prospects. …Worse than just a case of progressive policies creating regressive outcomes, it appears California is descending into something resembling modern-day feudalism… California also suffers the widest gap between middle- and upper-middle-income earners of any state. …California lags all peer competitors – Texas, Arizona, Tennessee, Nevada, Washington and Colorado – in creating high wage jobs in fields like business and professional services… California’s “renewable energy” push has generated high energy prices and the nation’s least-reliable power grid… The state now ranks 49th in homeownership rate… California ranked 49th in the performance of poor, largely minority, students. …since 2000, California has lost 2.6 million net domestic migrants… In 2020, California accounted for 28 percent of all net domestic outmigration in the nation.

In a column for the Washington Examiner, Cole Lauterbach shares some of the findings from a new study published by the Hoover Institution.

A report studying business headquarter migration says California’s businesses are moving their centers of operations at a much higher rate in 2021 compared to previous years. …The authors use several different sources to track business migration out of the state, finding the number of companies who either announce or file that they’re in another state has risen sharply… The authors stress that the numbers are likely understated since smaller companies aren’t required to disclose a move. In their research, the authors found “high tax rates, punitive regulations, high labor costs, high utility and energy costs, and declining quality of life for many Californians which reflects the cost of living and housing affordability,” as reasons for the moves. …The most common destinations for states leaving California are Texas, Arizona and Nevada.

Notice, by the way, that Texas and Nevada have no income tax and Arizona has a low-rate flat tax.

But let’s keep the focus on California’s overall problems.

Conor Friedersdorf, in an article for the Atlantic, offers a grim assessment of the Golden State.

This place inspires awe. If I close my eyes I can see silhouettes of Joshua trees against a desert sunrise; seals playing in La Jolla’s craggy coves of sun-spangled, emerald seawater; fog rolling over the rugged Sonoma County coast at sunset into primeval groves of redwoods that John Steinbeck called “ambassadors from another time.” …Yet I fear for California’s future. …the state’s leaders and residents shut the door on economic opportunity… Indeed, blue America’s model faces its most consequential stress test… the Institute for Justice, a public-interest law firm, released a report on barriers to work that disproportionately affect the middle and working classes. “California is the most broadly and onerously licensed state,” the report found, and is also “the worst licensing environment for workers in lower-income occupations.” …a survey of 383 CEOs by Chief Executive magazine, which weighed regulations and tax policy above all other metrics, ranked California the worst state for business, and Forbes ranked it among the worst for its high business costs and stifling regulatory environment.

Speaking of regulatory environment, California’s screwy approach to marijuana legalization/taxation tells you everything you need to know about the state.

P.S. If you want to laugh about California’s plight, click here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

P.P.S. My seven-part series comparing Texas and California appeared in March 2010, February 2013, April 2013, October 2018, June 2019, December 2020, and February 2021.

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Biden Wants America to be #1…in a Bad Way

Based on research from the Congressional Budget Office, I’ve shared estimates of the potential economic damage from the fiscal plan Joe Biden unveiled last year.

But now he has a new budget. So what if we simply focus on the tax portion of that plan and ignore all the new spending?

The Tax Foundation has crunched the numbers from Biden’s tax agenda and has published some very sobering numbers about this latest version of the President’s class-warfare proposals.

What caught my attention was this chart showing the United States (light-blue bars) already is out of whack with major competitors and trading partners (green bars) – and Joe Biden wants to make a bad situation much worse (red bars).

And when I write “out of whack,” that’s not an idle statement.

it turns out that the United States would have the highest income tax rates in the world.

Higher than Greece. Higher than France. Higher than Italy. Here are some of the grim details.

…the tax increases in the Build Back Better Act (BBBA)…would raise revenues by $4 trillion on a gross basis over the next decade. The Biden tax increases in the budget and BBBA would come at the cost of economic growth, harming investment incentives and productive capacity… The budget proposes several new tax increases on high-income individuals and businesses, which combined with the BBBA would give the U.S. the highest top tax rates on individual and corporate income in the developed world… Taxing capital gains at ordinary income tax rates would bring the combined top marginal rate in the U.S. to 48.9 percent, up from 29.2 percent under current law and well-above the OECD average of 18.9 percent. …Raising the corporate income tax rate to 28 percent would once again bring the U.S. near the top of the OECD at a combined rate of 32.3 percent, versus 25.8 percent under current law and an OECD average (excluding the U.S.) of 22.8 percent.

The good news, relatively speaking, is that the United States would not have the highest aggregate tax burden (taxes as a share of economic output).

And the U.S. would not have the highest tax burden on consumption (no value-added tax in America, fortunately).

But with all of Biden’s new spending (along with the built-in expansions of government that already have been legislated), it may just be a matter of time before the U.S. copies those features of Europe’s stagnant welfare states.

The net result is lower living standards for the American people. The only open question is how far we drop.

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The Feel-Good Map of 2022

I’ve already shared the “feel-good story” for 2022, so today I’m going to share this year’s feel-good map.

Courtesy of the Tax Foundation, here are the states that have lowered personal income tax rates and/or corporate income tax rates in 2021 and 2022. I’ve previously written about these reforms (both this year and last year), but more and more states and lowering tax burdens, giving us a new reason to write about this topic.

The map is actually even better than it looks because there are several states that don’t have any income taxes, so it’s impossible for them to lower rates. I’ve labelled them with a red zero.

And when you add together the states with no income tax with the states that are reducing income tax rates, more than half of them are either at the right destination (zero) or moving in that direction.

That’s very good news.

And here’s more good news from the Tax Foundation. The flat tax club is expanding.

I prefer the states with no income taxes, but low-rate flat taxes are the next best approach.

P.S. According to the Tax Foundation, New York and Washington, D.C. have moved in the wrong direction. Both increased income tax burdens in 2021. No wonder people are moving away.

P.P.S. If I had to pick the states with the best reforms, I think Iowa and Arizona belong at the top of the list.

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Biden’s Anti-Competitiveness Tax Grab

I wrote a few days ago about Biden’s plan to impose punitive double taxation on dividends.

But that’s not an outlier in his budget. As you can see from this table from the Tax Foundation, he wants to violate the principles of sensible fiscal policy by having high tax rates on all types of income.

What’s especially disappointing is that he wants tax rates in the United States to be much higher than in other developed nations.

At the risk of understatement, that’s not a recipe for jobs and investment.

The Wall Street Journal editorialized about Biden’s taxaholic preferences.

Mr. Biden…is proposing $2.5 trillion in new taxes that would give the U.S. the highest or near-highest tax rates in the developed world. …The biggest jump is in taxes on capital gains, as the top combined rate would rise to 48.9% from 29.2% today. That’s a 67% increase in the government’s take on long-term capital investments. The new top rate would be more than 2.5 times the OECD average of 18.9%. Nothing like reducing the U.S. return on capital to get people to invest elsewhere. Mr. Biden would also lift the top combined tax rate on corporate income to 32.3% from 25.8%. That would leap over Australia and Germany, which have top rates of 30% and 29.9% respectively, and it would crush the 22.8% OECD average. …Mr. Biden would also put the U.S. at the top of the noncompetitive list for personal income taxes, with multiple increases that would put the combined American rate at 57.3%. Compare that with 42.9% today and an average of 42.6% across the OECD.

The WSJ‘s editorial contained this chart.

The United States would be on top for corporate tax rates if Biden’s plan is adopted (which actually means on the bottom for competitiveness).

The bottom line is that Biden wants the U.S. to have the highest corporate rate, highest double taxation of dividends, and highest double taxation of capital gains.

To reiterate, not a smart way of trying to get more jobs and investment.

P.S. The “good news” is that the United States would not be at the absolute bottom for international tax competitiveness.

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Dividend Taxation in Europe and the United States

Modern tax systems tend to have three major deviations from good fiscal policy.

1. High marginal tax rates on productive behavior like work and entrepreneurship.
2. Multiple layers of taxation on income that is saved and invested.
3. Distortionary loopholes that reward inefficiency and promote corruption.

Today, let’s focus on an aspect of item #2.

The Tax Foundation has just released a very interesting map (at least for wonks) showing the total tax rate on dividends in European nations, including both the corporate income tax and the double-tax on dividends.

Because it has a reasonably modest corporate income tax rate, some of you may be surprised that Ireland has the most onerous overall burden on dividends. But that’s because there are high tax rates on personal income and households have to pay those high rates on any dividends they receive (even though companies already paid tax on that income).

It’s less surprising that Denmark is the second worst and France is the third worst.

Meanwhile, Estonia and Latvia have the least-onerous systems thanks to low rates and no double taxation.

But what about the United States?

There’s a different publication from the Tax Foundation that shows the extent – a maximum rate of 47.47 percent – of America’s double taxation.

The bottom line is that the United States would rank #7, between high-tax Belgium and high-tax Germany, if it was included in the above map.

That’s not a very good spot, at least if the goal is more jobs and more competitiveness.

To make matters worse, Joe Biden wants America to be #1 on the list. I’m not joking.

I’ve already written about his plan for a higher corporate tax rate.

But he wants an even-bigger increases in the second layer of tax on dividends.

How much bigger?

Pinar Cebi Wilber of the American Council for Capital Formation shared the unpleasant details in a column last year for the Wall Street Journal.

The Biden administration has released a flurry of tax proposals, including a headline-grabbing tax hike on capital gains that would apply retroactively from April. Dividends would be subject to the same treatment, according to a recently released Treasury Department document. …the proposal would tax qualified dividends—dividends from shares in domestic corporations and certain foreign corporations that are held for at least a specified minimum period of time—at income-tax rates (currently up to 40.8%) rather than the lower capital-gains rates (23.8%).

I also like that the column includes references to some academic research.

A 2005 paper by economists Raj Chetty and Emmanuel Saez looked at the effect of the 2003 dividend tax cuts on dividend payments in the U.S. The authors “find a sharp and widespread surge in dividend distributions following the tax cut,” after a continuous two-decade decrease in distributions. …Princeton’s Adrien Matray and co-author Charles Boissel looked at the issue the other way around. In a 2019 study, they found that an increase in French dividend taxes led to decreased dividend payments. …Another study from 2011, looking at America’s major competitor, reached the same directional conclusion: A 2005 reduction in China’s dividend tax rate led to an increase in dividend payments.

Not that anyone should be surprised by these results. The academic literature clearly shows that it’s not smart to impose high tax rates on productive behavior such as work, saving, investment, and entrepreneurship.

Unless, of course, you want more people dependent on government.

P.S. Biden also wants American to be #1 for capital gains taxation. So at least he is consistent, albeit in a very perverse way.

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People Are Voting with Their Feet Against Statism

How do we know people don’t like taxes?

• They tend to reject candidates who support higher taxes, as George H.W. Bush and other politicians have learned.
• Then tend to vote against higher taxes when given an opportunity (though they sometimes will vote to tax other people)
• They tend to migrate from high-tax jurisdictions to low-tax jurisdictions for direct and indirect reasons.

Today, we’re going to elaborate on the final reason.

Let’s start with this chart from one of the daily missives from the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. As you can see, it’s not just people that move. It’s their money as well.

The bottom line is that the two states – California and New York – with ultra-high tax rates are losing the most taxable income.

Let’s call this the revenge of the Laffer Curve because it shows us that high tax rates can backfire.

Jon Miltimore addressed this topic in a new column for the Foundation for Economic Education.

Here are some of the highlights, starting with some data on how some poorly governed cities are losing residents.

Three of the top five metros that saw sharp declines between July 1, 2020, and July 1, 2021 were in California. Leading the way was the Los Angeles-Long Beach metropolitan area, which lost 176,000 residents, a 1.3 percent drop. Next was the San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley metro, which saw a decline of 116,000 residents (2.5 percent decline), followed by San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, which shed some 43,000 residents (2.2 percent drop). …The New York-Newark-New Jersey metropolitan area saw a decline of 328,000 residents, the highest in the nation in raw numbers. The Chicago area, meanwhile, saw a decline of some 92,000 residents.

Here’s a chart from his article.

I’m definitely not surprised to see New York, San Francisco, and Chicago on the list. After all those cities have crummy governments.

The other two cities, by contrast, just have the misfortune of being in a poorly governed state.

Jon explains a big reason why this domestic migration is taking place.

…the reasons people choose to migrate tend to be complex and varied… However, we can see the US flight from its largest metropolitan is part of a bigger trend. North American Van Lines (NAVL), a trucking company based in Indiana, puts out an annual report that tracks migration patterns in the United States. The states with the most inbound migration in 2021 were South Carolina, Idaho, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Florida. The leading outbound states were Illinois, California, New Jersey, Michigan, and New York. The pattern here is clear. Americans are fleeing highly-regulated, highly taxed states. They are flocking to freer states. …We heard a great deal about “the Great Reset” during the pandemic. …It may be that “the reset” involves Americans abandoning high-tax, high-regulatory cities and states for freer ones.

To be sure, there are factors other than taxation. And there are factors other than government policy (people really like California’s wonderful climate, for instance, but they will escape when policy becomes unbearable).

The bottom line is that people are slowly but surely voting with their feet against statism. They are choosing red states over blue states. There’s a lesson for Joe Biden, though he’s probably not listening.

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In a Tweet, Everything You Need to Know about Living Standards in the United States and Europe

When debating big issues such as the size and scope of government, I like to think that facts matter. Maybe I’m being naive, but people should look at evidence before deciding whether to make government bigger or smaller.

And with Biden proposing a big expansion in the size of the welfare state, this is why I regularly compare the economic performance of the United States and various European nations.

After all, if we’re going to make America more like Europe, shouldn’t we try to understand what that might mean for the well being of the citizenry?

With this in mind, I want to share this tweet (based on this data) from Stefan Schubert at the London School of Economics.

The obvious takeaway is that the average person in the United States enjoys much higher living standards (more than 50 percent higher) than the average person in the European Union.

Even more astounding, the United States even has a big 20-percent advantage of the wealthy tax haven of Luxembourg.

By the way, the above data may understate the gap if you make apples-to-apples comparisons.

Nima Sanandaji compared the economic output of Scandinavians who emigrated to the United States with Scandinavians who stayed home.

He found even bigger gaps, one example of which is the data about Swedes in this chart.

Let’s look at one more bit of data.

Another way of illustrating the gap is see how European nations no longer are converging with the United States (and may actually be diverging).

The only good news for Europeans (if we’re grading on a curve) is that there’s been a decline in both the relative and absolute levels of economic freedom in the United States during the 21st century.

If that continues, the U.S. may “catch up” to Europe at some point in the future. Joe Biden certainly is working for that outcome.

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Tax Policy, Tax Reform, and State Competitiveness

I wrote two months ago about Iowa lawmakers voting for a simple and fair flat tax.

I explained how this reform would make the state more competitive, but I want to build upon that argument with some of the Tax Foundation’s data.

Starting with this map from the State Business Tax Climate Index, which shows Iowa in 38th place for individual income taxes.

That low ranking is where the state’s tax code was as of July 1, 2021, so it obviously doesn’t reflect the reforms enacted earlier this year.

So where will the state rank with the new flat tax?

The Tax Foundation crunched the data and shows the state will jump to #15 in the rankings.

The above table shows that the jump is even more impressive when you factor in some modest pro-growth changes that took place a few years ago.

What a huge improvement over just a few years. The only state that may beat Iowa for fastest and biggest increase in tax competitiveness is North Carolina, which jumped 30 spots in just one year.

P.S. Politicians in New York must be upset that there’s no way for them to drop lower than #50. But at least they can take comfort in the fact that they are worse than California.

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Diminishing Economic Freedom in the United States

When I first wrote about the Index of Economic Freedom back in 2010, the United States was comfortably among the world’s 10-freest nations with a score of 78 out of 100.

By last year, America had dropped to #20, with a very mediocre score of 74.8.

Sadly, the United States is continuing to decline. The Heritage Foundation recently released the 2022 version of the Index and the United States is now down to #25, with an even-more-mediocre score of 72.1.

As you can see, the biggest reason for the decline is bad fiscal policy (we can assume that Biden’s so-called stimulus deserves much of the blame).

So what nations got the best scores?

Our next visual shows that Singapore has the world’s freest economy, narrowly edging out Switzerland.

Notice, though, that Singapore’s score dropped and Switzerland’s improved. So it will be interesting to see if the “sensible nation” takes the top spot next year.

Also notice that only 7 nations qualified as “Free,” meaning scores of 80 or above.

The United States is in the “Mostly Free” category, which is for nations with scores between 70 and 80.

By the way, notice that the United States trails all the Nordic nations. Indeed, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, and Norway get scores in the upper-70s.

How is this possible when those countries have high-tax welfare states? Because they follow a very laissez-faire approach for all of their other policies (trade, regulation, monetary policy, etc).

I’ll close with a depressing look at how the United States has declined over the past two decades. I already mentioned that the U.S. gets a score of 72.1 in the 2022 version. That’s far below 81.2, which is where America was back in 2006.

P.S. The Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World shows a similar decline for the United States.

P.P.S. Taiwan is an under-appreciated success story.

P.P.P.S. New Zealand is still in the “Free” group, but it’s decline is worrisome.

P.P.P.P.S. Kudos to Estonia for climbing into the top group.

P.P.P.P.P.S. The bottom three nations are Cuba, Venezuela, and North Korea.

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Comparing Economic Growth: United States vs. Europe

A key principle of economics is convergence, which is the notion that poorer nations generally grow faster than richer nations.

For instance, battle-damaged European nations grew faster than the United States in the first few decades after World War II.

But, starting in the 1980s, that convergence stopped. And not because Europe reached American levels of prosperity. Even the nations of Western Europe never came close to U.S. levels of per-capita economic output.

Moreover, European countries then began to lose ground for the rest of the 20th century.

And that process is continuing. Here’s a recent tweet from Robin Brooks, the Chief Economist of the Institute of International Finance, which shows that the United States was growing faster than Europe before the pandemic and is now growing faster than Europe after the pandemic.

In other words, we’re seeing divergence.

Sven Larson addressed this same issue in a new article on this topic for European Conservative.

Over the 20 years from 2000 to 2019, the U.S. economy outgrew the 27-member European Union by a solid 19%, adjusted for inflation. These numbers…are quite impressive, especially considering that during President Obama’s eight years in office, annual growth in gross domestic product, GDP, never reached 3%. …From 2010 to 2019, U.S. unemployment averaged 6.3%, dropping below 3.7% in the last year before the pandemic. By contrast, the EU economy never dropped below 6.7% unemployment (in 2019) with an average of 9.5% for the entire decade. …These differences between America and Europe are significant, and should be the subject of debate in Europe: what is it that the Americans are doing that Europeans could do better? Over time, even small differences in economic growth compound into large differences in the standard of living.

Here’s his chart showing the divergence.

So why is Europe falling behind the United States when it should be growing faster because of lower living standards?

Sven has a very good explanation.

There are many candidates for explaining this difference, but there is one that stands out compared to all the others: the size of government. Between 2010 and 2019, government spending in the European Union was equal to 48.3% of GDP, on average, compared to 37.1% in the U.S. economy. …The most hard-hitting impact does not come through taxes, as conventional wisdom suggests, but through spending. …government operates under a form of central economic planning. Its outlays are not based on the mechanisms and prices of free markets: instead, its spending is governed by ideological preferences… While government spending inflicts the most damage on the economy, taxes are not insignificant. Here, again, the U.S. comes out more competitive than its European counterpart, and it is not a new problem. …For the past 20 years, European governments in general have taxed their economies 10-12 percentage points higher, as a share of GDP, than is the case in America.

Having crunched the data from Economic Freedom of the World, I think Sven is correct.

With regards to factors other than fiscal policy, European nations have just as much economic liberty (or, if you’re a glass-half-empty type, just as little economic liberty) as the United States. Heck, many of them rank above the United States when just considering factors such as trade, red tape, monetary policy, and rule of law.

Yet the United States nonetheless earns a better overall score.

Why? Because the United States does much better on fiscal policy (or, to be more accurate, doesn’t do as poorly).

P.S. Both Europe and the United States are moving in the wrong direction with regard to fiscal policy. Almost as if there’s a contest to see who can be the most profligate. Let’s call it the Keynesian Olympics. Whoever wins a gold medal is the first to suffer a fiscal crisis.

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World Bank Data: Comparing the U.S. and Europe

As I warned a few days ago, Biden’s so-called Build Back Better plan is not dead.

There’s still a significant risk that this economy-sapping plan will get enacted, resulting in big tax increases and a larger burden of government spending.

Proponents of a bigger welfare state say the President’s plan should be approved so that the United States can be more like Europe.

This argument is baffling because it doesn’t make sense to copy countries where living standards are significantly lower.

In some cases dramatically lower.

Let’s explore this issue in greater detail.

In a column for Bloomberg, Allison Schrager analyzes America’s supply-chain problems and the impact on consumption patterns.

But what caught my eye were the numbers comparing the United States and Europe.

Americans can’t spend like they used to. Store shelves are emptying, and it can take months to find a car, refrigerator or sofa. If this continues, we may need to learn to do without — and, horrors, live more like the Europeans. That actually might not be a bad thing, because the U.S. economy could be healthier if it were less reliant on consumption. …We consume much more than we used to and more than other countries.  Consumption per capita grew about 65% from 1990 to 2015, compared with about 35% growth in Europe. …What would that mean for the U.S. economy? European levels of consumption coexist with lower levels of growth.

Here’s the chart that accompanied her article.

As you can see, consumption in the United States is far higher than it is in major European nations – about $15,000-per-year higher than the United Kingdom and about double the levels in Germany, Belgium, and France.

So when someone says we should expand the welfare state and be more like Europe, what they’re really saying is that we should copy nations that are far behind the United States.

Some of you may have noticed that Ms. Schrager is citing per-capita consumption data from the World Bank and you may be wondering whether other numbers tell a different story.

After all, if higher levels of consumption in America are simply the result of borrowing from overseas, that would be a negative rather than a positive.

So I went to the same website and downloaded the data for per-capita gross domestic product instead. I then created this chart (going all the way back to 1971). As you can see, it shows that Americans not only consume more, but we also produce more.

For those interested, I also included Japan and China, as well as the average for the entire world.

The bottom line is that it’s good to be part of western civilization. But it’s especially good to be in the United States.

Since we’re on the topic of comparative economics, David Harsanyi of National Review recently wrote about the gap between the United States and Europe.

More than anything, it is the ingrained American entrepreneurial spirit and work ethic that separates us from Europe and the rest of the world. …Europe, despite its wealth, its relatively stable institutions, its giant marketplace, and its intellectual firepower, is home to only one of the top 30 global Internet companies in the world (Spotify), while the United States is home to 18 of the top 30. …One of the most underrated traits we hold, for instance, is our relative comfort with risk — a behavior embedded in the American character. …Americans, self-selected risk-takers, created an individual and communal independence that engendered creativity. …Because of a preoccupation with “inequality” — one shared by the modern American Left — European rules and taxation for stock-option remuneration make it difficult for start-up employees to enjoy the benefits of innovation — and make it harder for new companies to attract talent. …But the deeper problem is that European culture values stability over success, security over invention…in Europe, hard work is less likely to guarantee results because policies that allow people to keep the fruits of their labor and compete matter far less.

In other words, there’s less economic dynamism because the reward for being productive is lower in Europe (which is simply another way of saying taxes are higher in Europe).

P.S. The main forcus of Ms. Schrager’s Bloomberg article was whether the U.S. economy is too dependent on consumption.

It feels like our voracious consumption is what fuels the economy. But that needn’t be the case. Long-term, sustainable growth doesn’t come from going deep into debt to buy stuff we don’t really need. It comes from technology and innovation, where we come up with new products and better ways of doing things. An economy based on consumption is not sustainable.

I sort of agree with her point.

Simply stated high levels of consumption don’t cause a strong economy. It’s the other way around. A strong economy enables high levels of consumption.

But this doesn’t mean consumption is bad, or that it would be good for America to be more like Europe.

Instead, the real lesson is that you want the types of policies (free markets and limited government) that will produce innovation and investment.

That results in higher levels of income, which then allows higher levels of consumption.

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