Thatcher, Lawson, and Pro-Growth Tax Policy

As documented in Commanding Heights: The Battle of Ideas, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan saved their nations from economic malaise and decline.

Today, let’s focus on what happened in the United Kingdom.

Economic liberty greatly increased during the Thatcher years.

She deserves the lion’s share of the credit for the U.K.’s economic rebirth and renaissance, but she also had the wisdom to appoint some very principled and very capable people to her cabinet.

Such as Nigel Lawson, who served as her Chancellor of the Exchequer (akin to a combined Treasury Secretary/OMB Director in the U.S.).

Lawson died last week, leading to many tributes to his role is resuscitating the U.K. economy.

The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial summarized his achievements.

…our problems are solvable, as they were a half century ago. One of those crucial problem solvers was British politician Nigel Lawson, who died this week at age 91. …the 1970s…was even more miserable in the United Kingdom than it was in the U.S. By the time Margaret Thatcher led the Tories into office in May 1979, inflation was raging and the country had been wracked by strikes in its “winter of discontent”… Lawson entered Thatcher’s administration… He made his historic mark as Chancellor of the Exchequer starting in 1983. He’s best known for his tax reforms, which reduced the top personal income-tax rate to 40% from 60% and brought the top corporate rate to 35% from a 1970s high of 52%. He also was a steward of the Thatcher administration’s privatizations of large state-owned firms and the “Big Bang” financial reforms that would transform London into a global financial center.

In a column for CapX, Madsen Pirie examines Lawson’s work.

Nigel Lawson left a huge legacy. Under his stewardship Britain went from being the sick man of Europe into becoming an economic powerhouse and one of the world’s leading economies. He is regarded by many as the finest Chancellor of the 20th century… Lord Lawson held the firm conviction that lower taxes created space for enterprise and opportunity, and made it his policy that in every Budget he would lower the burden of taxation and abolish at least one tax. …During his tenure, Britain was transformed from being an economy in which most major businesses and services were owned and run by the state, into one in which they became private businesses, paying taxes instead of receiving taxpayer subsidies. Failing and outdated state enterprises became modern, successful private ones. …His 1988 Budget…announced that all taxes above 40% would be abolished, and that the basic rate would be cut to 25%, its lowest for 50 years… Within a very short time, more money was coming into the Treasury from the lower rates than it had been taking in from the higher ones. It was a vindication of the Laffer Curve. …The top 10% of earners had been paying 35% of the total income tax take. Under Lawson’s lower rate that went up to 48%. In rough terms this meant that the top 10% went from paying just over a third to just under a half of total income taxes.

In other words, the lower tax rates in the U.K. had the same positive impact as the lower tax rates in the U.S., both in terms of encouraging growth and confirming the Laffer Curve.

But let’s not forget that there also was spending restraint during the Thatcher years, particularly when Lawson was Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Just like we got spending restraint during the Reagan years.

The moral of the story is that it’s great to have good leaders, and it’s great when those leaders appoint good people.

P.S. If you want the U.S. equivalent of Nigel Lawson, the best historical example would be Andrew Mellon.

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Prosperity and Taxation: What Can We Learn from the 1960s?

Back in 2010, I shared a comparison of Obama and JFK on tax policy. For an update, here’s a comparison of Biden’s class-warfare agenda with JFK’s supply-side agenda.

I’m sharing this video for two reasons.

The first reason is that it shows that some Democrats in the past were very sensible about tax policy.

The second reason is that it gives me a good excuse to discuss what we can learn from tax policy in the 1960s, thus adding to our collection.

• Tax Lessons from the 1920s
• Tax Lessons from the 1930s
• Tax Lessons from the 1950s
• Tax Lessons from the 1980s

I’ll start with the caveat that tax policy does not necessarily overlap with 10-year periods. But we can learn by examining significant tax policy changes that occurred (or, in the case of the 1950s, did not occur) during various eras.

For the 1960s, the key change was the Revenue Act of 1964, generally known as the Kennedy tax cuts (proposed by President Kennedy in 1963 and then adopted in 1964 after his assassination).

Here’s what Kennedy proposed, as explained by the JFK library.

Declaring that the absence of recession is not tantamount to economic growth, the president proposed in 1963 to cut income taxes from a range of 20-91% to 14-65% He also proposed a cut in the corporate tax rate from 52% to 47%. …arguing that “a rising tide lifts all boats” and that strong economic growth would not continue without lower taxes.

And here’s what was enacted, as summarized by Wikipedia.

The act cut federal income taxes by approximately twenty percent across the board, and the top federal income tax rate fell from 91 percent to 70 percent. The act also reduced the corporate tax from 52 percent to 48 percent and created a minimum standard deduction.

The good news is that the Kennedy tax cuts were the right kind of tax cuts. Marginal tax rates were reduced on work, saving, investment, and entrepreneurship.

The bad news is that the top tax rate was still confiscatory, though 70 percent obviously was not as bad as 91 percent. And a 48 percent corporate rate was not much of an improvement compared to 52 percent.

That being said, moving in the right direction produced good outcomes.

People often talk about the booming economy in the 1960s. And there is some evidence to support that view since inflation-adjusted economic output grew rapidly as the tax cuts were implemented – by 6.5 percent in 1965 and 6.5 percent in 1966.

But I’m cautious about drawing sweeping conclusions from short-run data, especially since we know many other policies also have an impact on economic performance.

So let’s focus instead on some tax-related variables. Here’s a chart that I shared back in 2015, showing that upper-income taxpayers paid more when tax rates were reduced (the same thing happened in the 1980s).

That chart was taken from a report I wrote way back in 1996.

And here’s another chart from the same publication. This one shows that lower tax rates were associated with rising revenues. Especially as the changes were being implemented.

By the way, this does not mean that the tax cut was self-financing.

The core lesson of the Laffer Curve is not that tax cuts “pay for themselves.” That only happens in rare circumstances.

Instead, the lesson is that lower tax rates encourage more productive behavior, which means more taxable income. It then becomes an empirical question of how much of the revenue lost from lower rates is offset by the revenue gained from more taxable income.

And, in the 1960s, we know there was a big Laffer Curve response from upper-income taxpayers. Why? Because they have considerable control over the timing, level, and composition of this income.

Which brings us to the final lesson, which is that class-warfare tax policy was a bad idea in the 1960s and it is still a very bad idea today.

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Michigan Shows the Wrong Way to Cut Taxes

The economics of tax policy is largely the economics of incentives. When governments impose high tax rates on something, you get less of that thing.

My left-leaning friends acknowledge this is true, but only selectively. They openly agitate for higher taxes on things like tobacco (or sugar, or energy) and they correctly argue that higher tax rates will lead to less smoking.

As a libertarian, I don’t want to control other people’s lives, so I’m not a big fan of such taxes, but the underlying economic analysis is correct.

Unfortunately, my friends on the left often forget economic analysis when looking at tax rates on productive behaviors such as work, saving, investment, and entrepreneurship.

It is also important to realize that not all taxes are created equal. Whether politicians are cutting taxes or increasing taxes, the economic consequences will vary depending on the details.

For instance, even though I just stated that I don’t favor higher “sin taxes,” raising the tax burden on things like cigarettes will do less economic damage than increasing marginal tax rates on labor and capital.

There are also good and not-so-good ways of lowering taxes, and we have an example of this from Michigan.

As reported by Craig Mauger and Candice Williams of the Detroit News, there’s a big budget surplus in Michigan and politicians are debating whether to reduce the rate of the state’s flat tax or to give one-time tax rebates. Here are some excerpts from the story.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and the Democratic leaders of the Legislature are preparing a sweeping tax relief proposal they say will reduce tax bills by more than $1 billion and include rebate checks that could be issued directly to residents. The Friday agreement focuses on a plan to ease taxes on retirement income, boost a tax credit for low-wage workers and issue “inflation relief checks” in place of a potential cut in the state’s personal income tax, which was expected to be triggered by growing revenues, according to a source familiar with the plan. …as the state sits on a surplus of more than $9 billion, Republicans in the House and Senate have called for a broad tax cut for Michiganians and the preservation of the potential automatic drop in the personal income tax rate, which is being caused by language in a 2015 law. That policy tied the income tax, currently at 4.25%, to revenues for the state’s general fund. …based on preliminary fiscal year 2022 revenue figures, the revenue trigger would be activated and lower the income tax rate for the 2023 tax year from 4.25% to 4.05%. …“The Democrats’ proposal is a head fake intended to hide their attempt to rob Michigan taxpayers of an income tax cut in favor of funding a corporate welfare slush fund — prioritizing big corporations over Michigan families,” said Sarah Anderson, executive director of the Michigan Freedom Fund.

Michigan Democrats want more than rebates. They also favor “an exemption for public pensions” and “economic development subsidies for businesses.”

At the risk of stating the obvious, a lower rate for the flat tax will be far more beneficial to the state than one-time rebates and special favors for bureaucrats (who already enjoy higher compensation than workers in the private sector).

And a lower rate on the flat tax also would be far preferable to special handouts for businesses (which inevitably translates into corrupt cronyism).

I’ll close with a final point about overall fiscal policy. The Michigan tax fight is also a spending fight. Democrats are focusing on tax rebates in part because they are a one-off event. They’ll return some money to taxpayers this year, but there are no long-run savings.

By contrast, a cut in the state’s flat tax produces long-run savings for people. As the story noted, “Rebates are typically one-time spending bursts, while cuts in the income tax rate usually are kept in place for multiple years.”

Needless to say, politicians who want to spend more money prefer one-time rebates over permanent tax cuts.

P.S. Pursuing sub-optimal tax policy is not just a left-wing problem. Some folks on the right favor things such as child credits. That kind of tax cut will reduce tax liabilities for families, but those families quite likely would be better off in the long run with growth-oriented reductions in marginal tax rates on labor and capital.

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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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Evidence for Lower Corporate Tax Rates, Part I

Here is the argument why corporate tax rates should be as low as possible.

• High corporate tax rates discourage investment.
• Less investment reduces worker productivity.
• Lower rates of productivity result in lower wages.

In an ideal world, there would be no corporate income tax (or any income tax).

But I’ll gladly accept any movement in the right direction, which is why the reduction in the corporate tax rate was the crown jewel of Trump’s 2017 tax plan.

The bad news is that Biden wants to undo much of that progress.

Today, let’s look at some new academic evidence on the issue. A new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research, authored by Professors James Cloyne, Joseba Martinez, Haroon Mumtaz, and Paolo Surico, finds that lower corporate rates are especially beneficial for long-run prosperity.

We use…post-WWII U.S. data on output, taxes, productivity and R&D spending to estimate the dynamic effects of income tax changes…and focus on personal and corporate income tax changes separately. …In Figure 1, we present our first set of main results. The figure contains two columns. On the left, we show the IRFs to a reduction in the average corporate tax rate. On the right, we show the results for a reduction in the average personal tax rate. …The first row in Figure 1 reveals that, following a shock to corporate and personal income taxes, the average tax rates decline temporarily. …The second row in Figure 1 shows the impulse response functions for the percentage response of real GDP. … Looking at the first column it is clear that, despite the transitory nature of the corporate tax reduction, there are very persistent effects on real GDP, whose short-run increase of 0.5% persists throughout the ten year period shown in the figure. In other words, the corporate income tax cut has disappeared after 5 years, but the effect on the level of economic activity is still sizable and significant after 8 years. …A similar picture emerges for productivity, as shown in the third row of Figure 1. Both tax rate cuts boost productivity on impact, with the size of the initial response to a personal income tax cut being much larger than for a cut to corporate taxes. On the other hand, the effects of corporate tax cuts grow over time and remain significant even after 10 years.

Here’s the aforementioned Figure 1 from their research.

I’ll conclude by noting that permanent tax cuts are much better than temporary tax cuts.

But if taxes are being cut, regardless of duration, the goal should be to get the most bang for the buck. And there’s plenty of evidence (from the United States, Australia, Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom) that lowering corporate tax rates is a smart place to start.

P.S. It’s unfortunate that Biden wants a higher corporate tax burden in the United States. It’s even more disturbing that he wants a global tax cartel so the entire world has to follow in his footsteps. But he apparently does not understand the topic.

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The Laffer Curve and Trump’s 21 Percent Corporate Tax Rate

Reducing the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent was the crown jewel of Trump’s 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act (TCJA).

• It was good for workers since a lower rate means more investment, which translates to increased productivity and higher wages.
• And it was good for U.S. competitiveness since the United States corporate tax rate no longer was the highest in the developed world.

Some critics downplayed those benefits and warned that a lower corporate tax rate would deprive the government of too much revenue.

Since I don’t want politicians to have more money, that was not a persuasive argument. Moreover, I argued during the debate in 2017 that a lower corporate tax rate would generate “revenue feedback.”

In other words, there would be a “Laffer Curve” effect as corporations responded to a lower tax rate by earning and reporting more income.

Based on the latest fiscal data from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), I was right.

Corporate tax revenues for the 2021 fiscal year (which ended on September 30) were $370 billion. As shown in this chart, that’s only slightly below CBO’s estimate back in 2017 of how much revenue would be collected – $383 billion – if the rate stayed at 35 percent.

The chart also shows CBO’s 2018 estimate of what revenues would be in 2021 with a 21 percent rate (and if you want more data, the Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that the Trump tax reform would reduce corporate revenues in 2021 by $131 billion).

This leads me to ask two questions.

1. Is this a slam-dunk argument for the Laffer Curve?
2. Did the lower corporate tax revenue generate so much revenue feedback that it was almost self-financing?

The answer to the first question almost certainly is “yes” but “don’t exaggerate” is probably the prudent response to the second question.

Here are a few reasons to be cautious about making bold assertions.

• CBO’s pre-TCJA estimate in 2017 may have been wrong for reasons that have nothing to do with the tax rate.
• CBO’s post-TCJA estimate in 2018 may have been wrong for reasons that have nothing to do with the tax rate.
• The surge of 2021 revenues may have been a one-time blip that will disappear or fade in the next few years.
• The coronoavirus pandemic, or the policy response from Washington, may be distorting the numbers.

These are all legitimate caveats, so presumably it would be an exaggeration to simply look at the above chart and claim Trump’s reduction in the corporate tax rate almost “paid for itself.”

But we can look at the chart and state that there was a lot of revenue feedback, which shows that the lower corporate tax rate did produce good economic results.

Perhaps most important, we now have more evidence that Biden’s plan to increase the corporate tax rate is very misguided. Yes, it’s possible that the President’s plan may generate a bit of additional tax revenue, but at a very steep cost for workers, consumers, and shareholders.

P.S. If you want an example of tax cut that was self-financing, check out the IRS data on how much the rich paid before and after the Reagan tax cuts.

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States Lowering Income Tax Rates

The best news of 2021 almost surely is the big expansion of school choice in several states.

That’s a great development, especially for poor and minority families.

But there’s another positive trend at the state level. As indicated by this map from the Tax Foundation, tax rates have been reduced in several jurisdictions.

I’ve already written about Arizona’s very attractive tax reform, though I also acknowledged that the new law mostly stops the tax system from getting worse (because of a bad 2020 referendum result).

But stopping something bad is an achievement, regardless.

What about other states? The Tax Foundation’s article has all the details you could possibly want, including phase-in times and presence (in some states) of revenue triggers.

For purposes of today’s column, let’s simply focus on what’s happening to top tax rates. Here’s a table with the key results, ranked by the size of the rate reduction.

Kudos to Arizona, of course, but Iowa and Louisiana also deserve praise for significantly dropping their top tax rates.

As these states move in the right direction, keep in mind that some states are shifting (or trying to shift) in the wrong direction.

And bigger differences between sensible states and class-warfare states will increase interstate tax migration – with predictable political consequences.

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The Tradeoff Between Tax Progressivity and Economic Output

Almost everybody (even, apparently, Paul Krugman) agrees that you don’t want to be on the downward-sloping part of the Laffer Curve.

That’s where higher tax rates do so much economic damage that government collects even less revenue.

But I would argue that tax increases that produce more revenue also are a bad idea.

Sometimes they are even a terrible idea. For instance, there are tax increases that would destroy $5 of private income for every $1 of revenue they collect.

That would not be a good deal, at least for those of us who aren’t D.C. insiders.

Heck, according to research from economists at the University of Chicago and Federal Reserve, there are some tax increases that would destroy even greater levels of private income for every additional dollar that politicians got to spend.

The simple way of thinking about this is that you don’t want to be at the revenue-maximizing point of the Laffer Curve.

Because the closer you get to that point, the greater the damage to the private sector compared to any revenue collected.

To help understand this key point, let’s review a new study from Spain’s central bank. Authored by Nezih Guner, Javier López-Segovia and Roberto Ramos, it investigates the impact of higher tax rates.

They first look at what happens when progressivity (τ) is increased.

In the first experiment, we…change…the entire tax schedule, so that all households below the mean labor income face lower average taxes, while those above the mean income face higher average taxes. Since…richer individuals face higher taxes, all else equal, the government collects more taxes. All else, however, is not equal since more progressive taxes lower incentives to work and save. As a result, a higher τ might result in lower, not higher, revenue. The question is where the top of the Laffer curve is. We find that the tax revenue from labor income is maximized with τ = 0 .19. The increase in tax collection is, however, very small: the tax revenue from labor income increases only by 0.82% (or about 0.28% of the GDP). The tax revenue from labor income is, however, only one part of the total tax collection. There are also taxes on capital and consumption. With τ = 0 .19, while the tax collection from labor income is maximized, the total tax collection declines by 1.55%. This happens since with a higher τ, the aggregate labor, capital and output decline significantly. Indeed, the total tax collection falls for any increase in τ, and the level of τ that maximizes total tax revenue is much lower, τ = 0 .025, than its benchmark value.

The key takeaway is that more progressivity puts Spain on the wrong (downward-sloping) side of the Laffer Curve.

Here’s Table 6, which shows big declines in output, labor supply, and investment as progressivity increases.

Here’s some of the accompanying explanation.

The upper panel of Table 6 shows that capital, effective labor and output decline monotonically with τ. Hence, as the economy moves from τ = 0 .1581 to τ = 0 .19, the government is collecting higher taxes from labor, but the aggregate labor supply and output decline. For τ higher than 0.19, the decline in labor supply dominates and tax collection from labor income is lower. …The level of τ that maximizes the total tax collection is 0.025, which implies significantly less progressive taxes than in the benchmark economy. …In the economy with τ = 0 .025, the aggregate capital, labor and output increase significantly. The steady state output, for example, is almost 11 percentage points higher than the benchmark economy. As a result, the government is able to collect higher taxes despite lowering taxes on the top earners.

The authors also put together an estimate of Spain’s Laffer Curve, with the red-dashed line showing total tax revenue.

The authors also looked at what happens if politicians simply increase top tax rates.

They found that there are scenarios that would enable the Spanish government to collect more revenue.

We find that it is possible to generate higher total tax revenue by increasing taxes on the top earners. …The main message of our quantitative exercises is that…the extra revenue is not substantial. Higher progressivity has significant adverse effects on output and labor supply, which limits the room for collecting higher taxes. As a result, the only way to generate substantial revenue is with significant increases in marginal tax rates for a large group

But notice that those higher taxes would have “significant adverse effects on output and labor supply.”

Which brings us back to the earlier discussion about the desirability of causing a lot of damage to the private economy in order to give politicians a bit more money to spend.

The authors have a neutral tone, but the rest of should be able to draw the logical conclusion that higher taxes would be a big mistake for Spain.

And since the underlying economic principles apply in all nations, we also should conclude that higher taxes would be a big mistake for the United States.

P.S. We conducted a very successful experiment in the 1980s involving lower tax rates. Biden now wants to see what happens if we try the opposite approach.

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The Importance of Low Marginal Tax Rates

When studying the economics of taxation, one of the most important lessons is that there should be low marginal tax rates on work, saving, investment, and entrepreneurship.

That’s also the core message of this video from Prof. John Cochrane.

I wrote a primer on marginal tax rates back in 2018. I wanted to help people understand that the incentive to engage in additional productive behavior is impacted by how much people get to keep if they earn additional income.

So what matters isn’t the tax on income that’s already been generated. The key variable is the marginal tax on the additional increment of income. As illustrated by the accompanying visual.

I’ve shared real-life examples of how the American tax system can result in very high marginal tax rates, especially when you include the extra layers of tax on income that is saved and invested (producing extremely high effective marginal tax rates).

For today’s column, let’s look at a real-world example from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

The U.K.-based Telegraph has a story illustrating how marginal tax rates often can be much higher than the official statutory tax rate.

More than a third of a million people now face paying income tax at a rate of 60pc because of government stealth tax policies… 336,000 people earned between £100,000 and £125,000 in 2018-19, the last year for which data was available. …This group is meant to pay income tax at a rate of 40pc, but risks falling foul of a costly trap which results in their earnings being subject to effective income tax rates that are far higher. The trap is sprung once someone starts to earn more than £100,000, as this is the point at which the Government begins to withdraw the £12,570 tax-free personal allowance. For every £1 earned over £100,000, the state reduces the allowance by 50p. The result is that each additional £1 of income effectively incurs 60p of income tax… Once National Insurance is factored in, the true rate is even higher.

Here’s a chart that was part of the article.

It shows that anyone earning £50,000 or above is losing at least 40 percent to the tax authorities. That statutory rate is both punitive and excessive.

But you also can see how the marginal tax rate jumps to 60 percent once taxpayers hit £100,000 on income.

At the risk of understatement, high marginal tax rates are bad news for the economy.

That’s true in the United Kingdom, the United States, and everyplace else in the world.

To use economic jargon, “deadweight losses” grow exponentially as tax rates are increased.

In regular English, this simply means that class-warfare tax policy (ever-higher tax rates on the so-called rich) causes the most economic damage. Even the left-leaning OECD agrees with this analysis.

You may be wondering why a supposedly conservative government in the United Kingdom allows such a destructive policy.

Sadly, there is no good answer. As you can see from this excerpt, Boris Johnson’s government sounds a lot like what the U.K. would have experienced if Jeremy Corbyn won the last election.

The Government said it was aware of the effect of the 60pc tax trap but said it had to take a “balanced approach”. “We want to keep taxes low to support working people to keep more of what they earn, but it’s only fair that those with the broadest shoulders bear the biggest burden as we rebuild the public finances and fund public services,” a spokesman said.

P.S. If President Biden’s tax plan is any indication, our friends on the left seem to be motivated by spite and envy, so they don’t care that high tax rates have negative consequences.

P.P.S. A wealth tax could easily result in marginal tax rates of more than 100 percent.

P.P.P.S. The politicians in Washington also believe in very high implicit tax rates on low-income people.

P.P.P.P.S. The various plans for per-child handouts would create another big spike in marginal tax rates for a large cohort of American taxpayers.

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Prosperity and Taxation: What Can We Learn from the 1930s

The United States conducted an experiment in the 1980s. Reagan dramatically lowered the top tax rate on households, dropping it from 70 percent to 28 percent.

Folks on the left bitterly resisted Reagan’s “supply-side” agenda, arguing that “the rich won’t pay enough” and “the government will be starved of revenue.”

Fortunately, we can look at IRS data to see what happened to tax payments from those making more than $200,000 per year.

Lo and behold, it turns out that Reaganomics was a big success. Uncle Sam collected five times as much money when the rate was slashed.

As I’ve previously written, this was the Laffer Curve on steroids. Even when you consider other factors (population growth, inflation, other reforms, etc), there’s little doubt that we got a big “supply-side effect” from Reagan’s tax reforms.

Now Biden wants to run this experiment in reverse.

Based on basic economics, his approach won’t succeed. But let’s augment theory by examining what actually happened when Hoover and Roosevelt raised tax rates in the 1930s.

Alan Reynolds reviewed tax policy in the 1920s and 1930s, but let’s focus on what he wrote about the latter decade. He starts with some general observations.

Large increases in marginal tax rates on incomes above $50,000 in the 1930s were almost always matched by large reductions in the amount of high income reported and taxed… An earlier generation of economists found that raising tax rates on incomes, profits, and sales in the 1930s was inexcusably destructive. In 1956, MIT economist E. Cary Brown pointed to the “highly deflationary impact” of the Revenue Act of 1932, which pushed up rates virtually across the board, but notably on the lower‐​and middle‐​income groups.

He then gets to the all-important issue of higher tax rates leading to big reductions in taxable income.

In Figure 1, the average marginal tax rate is an unweighted average of statutory tax brackets applying to all income groups reporting more than $50,000 of income. After President Hoover’s June 1932 tax increase (retroactive to January) the number of tax brackets above $50,000 quadrupled from 8 to 32, ranging from 31 percent to 63 percent. The average of many marginal tax rates facing incomes higher than $50,000 increased from 21.5 percent in 1931 to 47 percent in 1932, and 61.9 percent in 1936. One of the most striking facts in Figure 1 is that the amount of reported income above $50,000 was almost cut in half in a single year—from $1.31 billion in 1931 to $776.7 million in 1932.

Here’s the aforementioned Figure 1. You can see that taxable income soared when tax rates were slashed in the 1920s.

But when tax rates were increased in the 1930s, taxable income collapsed and never recovered.

What’s the lesson from this chart? As Alan explained, the lesson is that high tax rates lead to rich people earning and declaring less taxable income (they still have that ability today).

In the eight years from 1932 to 1939, the economy was in cyclical contraction for only 28 months. Even in 1940, after two huge increases in income tax rates, individual income tax receipts remained lower ($1,014 million) than they had been in the 1930 slump ($1,045 million) when the top tax rate was 25 percent rather than 79 percent. Eight years of prolonged weakness in high incomes and personal tax revenue after tax rates were hugely increased in 1932 cannot be easily brushed away as merely cyclical, rather than a behavioral response to much higher tax rates on additional (marginal) income. Just as income (and tax revenue) from high‐​income taxpayers rose spectacularly after top tax rates fell from 1921 to 1928, high incomes and revenue fell just as spectacularly in 1932 when top tax rates rose.

One big takeaway is that Hoover and FDR were two peas in a pod.

Both imposed bad tax policy.

From 1930 to 1937, unlike 1923–25, virtually all federal and state tax rates on incomes and sales were repeatedly increased, and many new taxes were added, such as the Smoot‐​Hawley tariffs in 1930, taxes on alcoholic beverages in December 1933, and a Social Security payroll tax in 1937. Annual growth of per capita GDP from 1929 to 1939 was essentially zero. …To summarize: all the repeated increases in tax rates and reductions of exemptions enacted by presidents Hoover and Roosevelt in 1932–36 did not even manage to keep individual income tax collections as high in 1939–40 (in dollars or as a percent of GDP) as they had been in 1929–30. The experience of 1930 to 1940 decisively repudiated any pretense that doubling or tripling marginal tax rates on a much broader base proved to be a revenue‐​maximizing plan.

Alan closes with an observation that should raise alarm bells.

It turns out that the higher tax rates on the rich were simply the camel’s nose under the tent. The real agenda was extending the income tax to those with more modest incomes.

The most effective and sustained changes in personal taxes after 1931 were not the symbolic attempts to “soak the rich,” but rather the changes deliberately designed to convert the income tax from a class tax to a mass tax. The exemption for married couples was reduced from $3,500 to $2,500 in 1932, $2,000 in 1940, and $1,500 in 1941. Making more low incomes taxable quadrupled the number of tax returns from 3.7 million in 1930 to 14.7 million in 1940… The lowest tax rate was also raised from 1.1 percent to 4 percent in 1932, 4.4 percent in 1940, and 10 percent in 1941.

The same thing will happen today if Biden succeeds in raising taxes on the rich. Those tax hikes won’t collect much revenue, but politicians will increase spending anyhow. They’ll then use high deficits as an excuse for higher taxes on lower-income and middle-class taxpayers (some of the options include financial taxes, carbon taxes, and value-added taxes).

Lather, rinse, repeat. Until the United States is Europe. And that will definitely be bad news for ordinary people.

P.S. Here’s what we can learn about tax policy in the 1920s. And the 1950s.

P.P.S. The 1920s and 1930s also can teach us an important lesson about growth and inequality.

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Big Government vs. “Trickle-Down Economics”

If nothing else, Biden’s big-government agenda is triggering a debate about fundamental issues, such as whether it’s a good idea to make America’s economy more like Singapore or more like Italy.

In making the case for the Italian approach of higher taxes and bigger government during his speech to Congress, President Biden exclaimed that “trickle-down economics has never worked.”

But we need to realize that Biden is using a straw-man definition. In his mind, “trickle-down economics” is giving a tax cut to rich people under the assumption that some of that cash eventually will wind up in other people’s pockets.

However, if you actually ask proponents of pro-growth tax policy what they support, they will explain that they want lower tax rates for everyone in order to reduce penalties on productive behaviors such as work, saving, investment, and entrepreneurship.

And they will be especially interested in getting rid of the tax code’s bias against saving and investment.

Why? Because every economic theory – even socialism, even Marxism – agrees that saving and investment are a key to long-run growth and rising living standards.

Which is why there’s such a strong relationship in the data between the amount of capital and workers’ wages.

Indeed, it’s almost a tautology to say that this form of “trickle-down taxation” leads to higher productivity, which leads to higher wages for workers.

As Stanford Professor John Shoven observed several decades ago:

The mechanism of raising real wages by stimulating investment is sometimes derisively referred to as “trickle-down” economics. But regardless of the label used, no one doubts that the primary mechanism for raising the return to work is providing each worker with better and more numerous tools. One can wonder about the length of time it takes for such a policy of increasing saving and investments to have a pronounced effect on wages, but I know of no one who doubts the correctness of the underlying mechanism. In fact, most economists would state the only way to increase real wages in the long run is through extra investments per worker.

In other words, everyone agrees with the “trickle-down economics” as a concept, but people disagree on other things.

• Such as socialists who say government should be in charge of allocating major investments.
• Such as “supply-siders” who supposedly say lower tax rates are all that is needed for growth.
• Such as honest redistributionists who say we should forgo some growth to have more equality.

So I guess it depends on how the term is defined. If it simply means tax cuts while ignoring other policies (or making those other policies worse, like we saw during the Bush years or Trump years), then you can make an argument that trickle-down economics has a mediocre track record.

But if the term is simply shorthand for a broader agenda of encouraging more saving and investment with an agenda of small government and free markets, then trickle-down economics has a great track record.

For instance, here’s a chart from the most-recent edition of Economic Freedom of the World. Nations with market-oriented economies are far more prosperous than countries with state-controlled economies.

By the way, Biden is not an honest redistributionist.

Instead of admitting that higher taxes and bigger government will lead to less economic output (and justifying that outcome by saying incomes will be more equal), Biden actually wants people to believe that bigger government somehow will lead to more prosperity.

To be fair, he’s not the only one to make this argument. Bureaucracies such as the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development also have claimed that there will be more prosperity if governments get more control over the economy.

I call this the “magic beans” theory of economic development.

Which is why I always ask people making this argument to cite a single example – anywhere in the world, at any point in history – of a nation that has prospered by expanding the burden of government.

In other words, I want a response to my never-answered question.

The response is always deafening silence.

To be sure, I don’t expect Joe Biden to answer the question. Or to understand economics. Heck, I don’t even expect him to care. He’s just trying to buy votes, using other people’s money.

But there are plenty of smart folks on the left, and none of them have a response to the never-answered question, either. Heck, none of them have ever given me a good reason why we should copy Europe when incomes are so much lower on that side of the Atlantic Ocean.

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Milton Friedman on Taxation

Yesterday’s column featured some of Milton Friedman’s wisdom from 50 years ago on how a high level of societal capital (work ethic, spirit of self-reliance, etc) is needed if we want to limit government.

Today, let’s look at what he said back then about that era’s high tax rates.

His core argument is that high marginal tax rates are self-defeating because the affected taxpayers (like Trump and Biden) will change their behavior to protect themselves from being pillaged.

This was in the pre-Reagan era, when the top federal tax rate was 70 percent, and notice that Friedman made a Laffer Curve-type prediction that a flat tax of 19 percent would collect more revenue than the so-called progressive system.

We actually don’t know if that specific prediction would have been accurate, but we do know that Reagan successfully lowered the top tax rate on the rich from 70 percent in 1980 to 28 percent in 1988.

So, by looking at what happened to tax revenues from these taxpayers, we can get a pretty good idea whether Friedman’s prediction was correct.

Well, here’s the IRS data from 1980 and 1988 for taxpayers impacted by the highest tax rate. I’ve circled (in red) the relevant data showing how we got more rich people, more taxable income, and more tax revenue.

The bottom line is that Friedman was right.

Good tax policy (i.e., lower rates on productive behavior) can be a win-win situation. Taxpayers earn more and keep more, while politicians also wind up with more because the economic pie expands.

Something to keep in mind since some politicians in Washington want a return to confiscatory taxes on work, saving, investment, and entrepreneurship.

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OECD Data: Higher Tax Rates Don’t Necessarily Mean Higher Tax Revenue

I participated in a debate yesterday on “tax havens” for the BBC World Service. If you read last month’s two-part series on the topic (here and here), you already know I’m a big defender of low-tax jurisdictions.

But it’s always interesting to interact with people with a different perspective (in this case, former Obama appointee David Carden and U.K. Professor Rita de la Feria).

As you might imagine, critics generally argue that tax havens should be eliminated so politicians have greater leeway to increase tax rates and finance bigger government. And if you listen to the entire interview, that’s an even bigger part of their argument now that there’s lots of coronavirus-related spending.

But for purposes of today’s column, I want to focus on what I said beginning at 49:10 of the interview.

I opined that it’s reasonably to issue debt to finance a temporary emergency and then gradually reduce the debt burden afterwards (similar to what happened during and after World War II, as well as during other points in history).

The most important part of my answer, however, was the discussion about how revenues didn’t decline when tax rates were slashed beginning in 1980.

Let’s first take a look at what happened to top tax rates for 24 industrialized nations from North America, Western Europe, and the Pacific Rim. As you can see, there’s been a big reduction in tax rates since 1980.

In the interview, I mentioned OECD data about taxes on income and profits, which can be found here (specifically data series 1000). So let’s see what happened to revenues during the period of falling tax rates.

Lo and behold, it turns out that revenue went up. Not just nominal revenues. Not just inflation-adjusted revenues. Tax revenues even increased as a share of gross domestic product.

In part, this is the Laffer Curve in action. Lower tax rates meant better incentives to engage in productive behavior. That meant higher levels of taxable income (the variable that should matter most).

For what it’s worth, I suspect that the lower tax rates – by themselves – did not cause tax revenue to rise. After all, there are many policies that determine the overall vitality of an economy.

But there’s no question that there’s a lot of “revenue feedback” when tax rates are changed.

The bottom line is that the folks advocating higher tax rates shouldn’t expect a windfall of tax revenue if they succeed in imposing class-warfare tax policy.

P.S. For the folks on the left who are motivated by spite rather than greed, it doesn’t matter if higher tax rates generate more money.

P.P.S. Interestingly, both the IMF and OECD have admitted, at least by inference, that lower corporate tax rates don’t result in lower tax revenues.

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The Adverse Economic Consequences of Higher Tax Rates

The good news is that Joe Biden has not embraced many of Bernie Sanders’ worst tax ideas, such as imposing a wealth tax or hiking the top income tax rate to 52 percent..

The bad news is that he nonetheless is supporting a wide range of punitive tax increases.

• Increasing the top income tax rate to 39.6 percent.
• Imposing a 12.4 percent payroll tax on wages above $400,000.
• Increasing the double taxation of dividends and capital gains from 23.8 percent to 43.4 percent.
• Hiking the corporate tax rate to 28 percent.
• Increasing taxes on American companies competing in foreign markets.

The worst news is that Nancy Pelosi, et al, may wind up enacting all these tax increases and then also add some of Crazy Bernie‘s proposals.

This won’t be good for the U.S. economy and national competitiveness.

Simply stated, some people will choose to reduce their levels of work, saving, and investment when the tax penalties on productive behavior increase. These changes give economists the information needed to calculate the “elasticity of taxable income”.

And this, in the jargon of economists, is a measure of “deadweight loss.”

But now there’s a new study published by the Federal Reserve which suggests that these losses are greater than traditionally believed.

Authored by Brendan Epstein, Ryan Nunn, Musa Orak and Elena Patel, the study looks at how best to measure the economic damage associated with higher tax rates. Here’s some of the background analysis.

The personal income tax is one of the most important instruments for raising government revenue. As a consequence, this tax is the focus of a large body of public finance research that seeks a theoretical and empirical understanding of the associated deadweight loss (DWL). …Feldstein (1999) demonstrated that, under very general conditions, the elasticity of taxable income (ETI) is a sufficient statistic for evaluating DWL. …It is well understood that, apart from rarely employed lump-sum taxes and…Pigouvian taxes, revenue-raising tax systems impose efficiency costs by distorting economic outcomes relative to those that would be obtained in the absence of taxation… ETI can potentially serve as a perfect proxy for DWL…this result is consistent with the ETI reflecting all taxpayer responses to changes in marginal tax rates, including behavioral changes (e.g., reductions in hours worked) and tax avoidance (e.g., shifting consumption toward tax-preferred goods). …a large empirical literature has provided estimates of the individual ETI, identified based on variation in tax rates and bunching at kinks in the marginal tax schedule.

And here are the new contributions from the authors.

… researchers have fairly recently come to recognize an important limitation of the finding that the ETI is a sufficient statistic for deadweight loss… we embed labor search frictions into the canonical macroeconomic model…and we show that within this framework, a host of additional information beyond the ETI is needed to infer DWL …once these empirically observable factors are controlled for, DWL can be calculated easily and in a straightforward fashion as the sum of the ETI and additional terms involving these factors. … We find that…once search frictions are introduced, …DWL can be between 7 and 38 percent higher than the ETI under a reasonable calibration.

To give you an idea of what this means, here are some of their estimates of the economic damage associated with a 1 percent increase in tax rates.

As you peruse these estimates, keep in mind that Biden wants to increase the top income tax rate by 2.6 percentage points and the payroll tax by 12.4 percentage points (and don’t forget he wants to nearly double tax rates on dividends, capital gains, and other forms of saving and investment).

Those are all bad choices with traditional estimates of deadweight loss, and they are even worse choices with the new estimates from the Fed’s study.

So what’s the bottom line?

The political impact will be that “the rich” pay more. The economic impact will be less capital formation and entrepreneurship, and those are the changes that hurt the vast majority of us who aren’t rich.

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Taxes and Growth

I’ve explained the economics of taxation, which is based on the common-sense notion that you get less productive economic activity when taxes drive a bigger wedge between pre-tax income and post-tax consumption.

Simply stated, the more you tax of something, the less you get of it, and this applies to taxes on labor and taxes on capital.

Today, let’s examine some empirical evidence. I’ve done that before (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), but it’s always good to expand the collection.

Three Italian professors, in a new working paper for the Centre for Economic and International Studies, investigated the relationship between taxes and growth.

We’ll start with a description of the methodology.

In this paper, we revisit a traditional issue in the empirics of growth and economic policy: whether taxation has long-lasting effects on real GDP dynamics. …we focus on the impact that taxes may have on the rates of physical and human capital accumulation. …our main departure from the existing literature is the use of a semi-parametric technique, which allows for countries’ unobserved heterogeneity in the input effects on per capita GDP. …we test our model, using a sample of 21 OECD countries over the period 1965-2010.

Here are the key findings.

Our main finding is that taxation negatively affect per capita GDP growth rates, both directly and indirectly, via physical and human capital saving rates. …Our cross-country analysis makes a clear point on this, at least for our sample of OECD countries: on average, tax cuts produce a beneficial impact on GDP dynamics but of modest size. In our baseline specification, a cut by 10% in personal income tax rate generates an change in the real per capita GDP growth rate of +1% while a cut by 10% in corporate income tax rate increases the rate of growth of real per capita GDP by 0.9%. …The main message of our empirical exercise is that, across various samples and specifications, taxes are harmful for growth.

These are very strong results.

Though I find it very interesting that the authors say they are “of modest size.”

I guess that depends on expectations and perspective. I’ll simply repeat the point I made two years ago about the importance of even small increases in the long-run growth rate.

The bottom line is that future Americans would enjoy significantly greater prosperity with better tax policy.

That’s a desirable outcome at any point in time, and it’s even more important today as we consider how to recover from the economic wreckage caused by the coronavirus.

Interestingly, the study ends with some interesting estimates on the impact of lower tax rates on labor and capital.

Table 10 reports the results of a “what if”exercise, in which we compute the change in GDP growth rate generated by a ceteris paribus cut by 10 % in τw and τk.

And here is the aforementioned Table 10 (“τw” is the tax rate on labor and “τk” is the tax rate on capital).

There are two big takeaways from this research.

First, it’s further evidence that Trump’s tax reform, which lowered the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, was a very good step for the American economy.

Second, it’s further evidence that it’s a big mistake for Biden and other folks on the left to push for higher tax rates, including big increases in tax rates on personal income.

P.S. Just in case those last two sentences sound overly favorable to Trump, I’ll remind people that reckless spending increases – sooner or later – will lead to punitive tax increases. In other words, if Biden wins and there are big tax hikes, Trump will deserve some of the blame (just as Bush’s irresponsible policies set the stage for some of Obama’s irresponsible policies).

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Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, What Nation Punishes Success Worst of All?

In some cases, politicians actually understand the economics of tax policy.

It’s quite common, for instance, to hear them urging higher taxes on tobacco because they want to discourage smoking.

I don’t think it’s their job to tell people how to live their lives, but I agree with their economic analysis. The more you tax something, the less you get of it.

One of my many frustrations is that those politicians then conveniently forget that lesson when it comes to taxing things that are good, such as work, saving, production, and investment.

And some countries are more punitive than others. There’s some new research from the European Policy Information Center, Timbro, and the Tax Foundation, that estimates the “effective marginal tax rate” for successful taxpayers for 41 major countries.

And they don’t simply look at the top income tax rates. They quite properly include other taxes that contribute to “deadweight loss” by driving a wedge between pre-tax income and post-tax consumption.

The political discussion around taxing high-earners usually revolves around the income tax, but in order to get a complete picture of the tax burden high-income earners face, it is important to consider effective marginal tax rates. The effective marginal tax rate answers the question, “If a worker gets a raise such that the total cost to the employer increases by one dollar, how much of that is appropriated by the government in the form of income tax, social security contributions, and consumption taxes?” …all taxes that affect the return to work should be taken into account. …Combining data mainly from international accounting firms, the OECD, and the European Commission, we are able to calculate marginal tax rates in the 41 members of the OECD and/or EU.

The main message of this research is that you don’t want to live in Sweden, where you only keep 24 percent of any additional income you produce.

And you should also avoid Slovenia, Belgium, Portugal, Finland, France, etc.

Congratulations to Bulgaria for being the anti-class warfare nation. That’s a smart strategy for a nation trying to recover from decades of communist deprivation.

American readers will be happy to see that the United States looks reasonably good, though New Zealand is the best of the rich nations, followed by Switzerland.

Speaking of which, we need a caveat for nations with federalist systems, such as the U.S., Switzerland, and Canada. In these cases, the top income tax rate is calculated by adding the central government’s top rate with the average top rate for sub-national governments.

So successful entrepreneurs in those countries actually have the ability to reduce their tax burdens if they make wise decisions on where to live (such as Texas or Florida in the case of the United States).

Let’s now shift to some economic analysis. The report makes (what should be) an obvious point that high tax rates have negative economic effects.

Countries should be cautious about placing excessive tax burdens on high-income earners, for several reasons. In the short run, high marginal tax rates induce tax avoidance and tax evasion, and can cause high-income earners to reduce their work effort or hours.

I would add another adverse consequence. Successful taxpayers can move.

That’s especially true in Europe, where cross-border tax migration is much easier than it is in the United States.

But even though there are odious exit taxes for people leaving the United States, we’ll see an exodus if we wind up with some of the crazy tax policies being advocated by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

P.S. Today’s column looks at how nations rank based on the taxation of labor income. For taxation of capital income, the rankings look quite different. For instance, because of pervasive double taxation, the United States gets poor scores for over-taxing dividends, capital gains, and businesses.

P.P.S. If you want to see tax rates on middle-income workers (though it omits value-added taxes), here is some OECD data.

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Adverse Consequences of California’s Class-Warfare Tax Policy

California is suffering a slow but steady decline.

Bad economic policy has made the Golden State less attractive for entrepreneurs, investors, and business owners.

Punitive tax laws deserve much of the blame, particularly the 2012 decision to impose a top tax rate of 13.3 percent.

I’ve already shared some anecdotal evidence that this tax increase backfired.

But now we have some scholarly evidence from two Stanford Professors. Here’s what they investigated.

In this paper we study the question of the elasticity of the tax base with respect to taxation using microdata from the California Franchise Tax Board on the universe of California taxpayers around the implementation of Proposition 30 in 2012. This ballot initiative increased marginal income tax rates… These increases came on top of the 9.3% rate that applied to income over $48,942 for singles and $97,884 for married couples, and also in addition to the 1% mental health tax that since 2004 had applied to incomes of over $1 million. The reform therefore brought the top marginal tax rate in California to 13.3% for incomes of over $1 million.

For those not familiar with economic jargon, “elasticity” is simply a term to describe how sensitive taxpayers are when there are changes in tax policy.

A high measure of elasticity means a large “deadweight loss” since taxpayers are choosing to earn and/or report less income.

And that’s what the two scholars discovered.

Some high-income taxpayers responded to the big tax increase by moving.

We first study the extensive margin response to taxation, and document a substantial one-time outflow of high-earning taxpayers from California in response to Proposition 30. Defining a departure as a taxpayer who went from resident to non-resident filing status, the rate of departures in 2013 over 2012 spiked from 1.5% after the 2011 tax year to 2.125% for those primary taxpayers earning over $5 million in 2012, with a similar effect among taxpayers earning $2-5 million in 2012.

By the way, you won’t be surprised to learn that California taxpayers increasingly opted to move to states with no income tax, such as Florida, Nevada, and Texas.

Other taxpayers stayed in California but they chose to earn and/or report less income.

We combine these results on the extensive margin behavioral response with conclusions of analysis of the intensive margin response to Proposition 30. …we use a differences-in-differences design in which we compare upper-income California resident taxpayers to a matched sample of non-resident California filers, for which there is relatively rich data… Our estimates show a substantial intensive margin response to Proposition 30, which appears in 2012 and persists… We find that California top-earners on average report $522,000 less in taxable income than their counterfactuals in 2012, $357,000 less in 2013, and $599,000 less in 2014; this is relative to a baseline mean income of $4.15 million amongst our defined group of California top-earners in 2011. …the estimates imply an elasticity of taxable income with respect to the marginal net of tax rate of 2.5-3.3.

In the world of public finance, that’s a very high measure of elasticity.

Wonky readers may be interested in these charts showing changes in income.

By the way, guess what happens when taxpayers move, or when they decide to earn less income?

The obvious answer is that politicians don’t collect as much revenue. Which is exactly what the study discovered.

A back of the envelope calculation based on our econometric estimates finds that the intensive and extensive margin responses to taxation combined to undo 45.2% of the revenue gains from taxation that otherwise would have accrued to California in the absence of behavioral responses. The intensive margin accounts for the majority of this effect, but the extensive margin comprises a non-trivial 9.5% of this total response.

We can call this the revenge of the Laffer Curve.

By the way, it’s quite likely that there has been a resurgence of both the “extensive” and “intensive” responses to California’s punitive tax regime because the 2017 tax reform restricted the deductibility of state and local taxes. This means that the federal government – for all intents and purposes – is no longer subsidizing California’s backwards fiscal system.

P.S. Makes me wonder if California politicians will turn Walter Williams’ joke into reality.

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The Real Motive for Class-Warfare Taxation

In addition to being a contest over expanding the burden of government spending, the Democratic primary also is a contest to see who wants the biggest tax increases.

Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have made class-warfare taxation an integral part of their campaigns, but even some of the supposedly reasonable Democrats are pushing big increases in tax rates.

James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute opines about the anti-growth effect of these proposed tax hikes, particularly with regard to entrepreneurship and successful new firms.

The Democratic presidential candidates have plenty of ideas about taxes. Wealth taxes. Wall Street taxes. Inequality taxes. And probably more to come. So lots of creative thinking about wealth redistribution. Wealth creation? Not so much. …one way to look at boosting GDP growth is thinking about specific policies to boost labor force and productivity growth. But there’s another way of approaching the issue: How many fast-growing growing new firms would need to be generated each year to lift the economy-wide growth rate each year by one percent? …a rough calculation by analyst Robert Litan figures there about 15 billion-dollar (in sales) companies formed every year. But what if the American entrepreneurial ecosystem were so vibrant that it produced 60 such companies annually? …The big point here is that the American private sector is key to growth. No other large economy is as proficient as the US in creating high-impact startups. But it doesn’t appear that the Democratic enthusiasm for big and bold tax plans is matched by concern about unwanted trade-offs.

If you want a substantive economic critique of class-warfare tax policy, Alan Reynolds has a must-read article on the topic.

He starts by explaining why it’s important to measure how sensitive taxpayers are (the “elasticity of taxable income”) to changes in tax rates.

Elasticity of taxable income estimates are simply a relatively new summary statistic used to illustrate observed behavioral responses to past variations in marginal tax rates. They do so by examining what happened to the amount of income reported on individual tax returns, in total and at different levels of income, before and after major tax changes. …For example, if a reduced marginal tax rate produces a substantial increase in the amount of taxable income reported to the IRS, the elasticity of taxable income is high. If not, the elasticity is low. ETI incorporates effects of tax avoidance as well as effects on incentives for productive activity such as work effort, research, new business start-ups, and investment in physical and human capital.

Alan then looks at some of the ETI estimates and what they imply for tax rates, though he notes that the revenue-maximizing rate is not the optimal rate.

Diamond and Saez claim that, if the relevant ETI is 0.25, then the revenue-maximizing top tax rate is 73 percent. Such estimates, however, do not refer to the top federal income tax rate, …but to the combined marginal rate on income, payrolls, and sales at the federal, state, and local level. …with empirically credible changes in parameters, the Diamond-Saez formula can more easily be used to show that top U.S. federal, state, and local tax rates are already too high rather than too low. By also incorporating dynamic effects — such as incentives to invest in human capital and new ideas — more recent models estimate that the long-term revenue-maximizing top tax rate is between 22 and 49 percent… Elasticity of taxable, or perhaps gross income…can be “a sufficient statistic to approximate the deadweight loss” from tax disincentives and distortions. Although recent studies define revenue-maximization as “optimal,” Goolsbee…rightly emphasizes, “The fact that efficiency costs rise with the square of the tax rate are likely to make the optimal rate well below the revenue-maximizing rate.”

These excerpts only scratch the surface.

Alan’s article extensively discusses how high-income taxpayers are especially sensitive to high tax rates, in part because they have considerable control over the timing, level, and composition of their income.

He also reviews the empirical evidence from major shifts in tax rates last century.

All told, his article is a devastating take-down of the left-of-center economists who have tried to justify extortionary tax rates. Simply stated, high tax rates hinder the economy, create deadweight loss, and don’t produce revenue windfalls.

That being said, I wonder whether his article will have any impact. As Kevin Williamson points out is a column for National Review, the left isn’t primarily motivated by a desire for more tax money.

Perhaps the strangest utterance of Barack Obama’s career in public office…was his 2008 claim that raising taxes on the wealthy is a moral imperative, even if the tax increase in question ended up reducing overall federal revenue. Which is to say, Obama argued that it did not matter whether a tax increase hurt the Treasury, so long as it also hurt, at least in theory and on paper, certain wealthy people. …ideally, you want a tax system with low transaction costs (meaning a low cost of compliance) and one that doesn’t distort a lot of economic activity. You want to get enough money to fund your government programs with as little disruption to life as possible. …Punitive taxes aren’t about the taxes — they’re about the punishment. That taxation should have been converted from a technical question into a moral crusade speaks to the basic failure of the progressive enterprise in the United States…the progressive demand for a Scandinavian welfare state at no cost to anybody they care about…ends up being a very difficult equation to balance, probably an impossible one. And when the numbers don’t work, there’s always cheap moralistic histrionics.

So what leads our friends on the left to pursue such misguided policies? What drives their support for punitive taxation?

Is is that they’re overflowing with compassion and concern for the poor?

Hardly.

Writing for the Federalist, Emily Ekins shares some in-depth polling data that discovers that envy is the real motive.

Supporters often contend their motivation is compassion for the dispossessed… In a new study, I examine…competing explanations and ask whether envy and resentment of the successful or compassion for the needy better explain support for socialism, raising taxes on the rich, redistribution, and the like. …Statistical tests reveal resentment of the successful has about twice the effect of compassion in predicting support for increasing top marginal tax rates, wealth redistribution, hostility to capitalism, and believing billionaires should not exist. …people who agree that “very successful people sometimes need to be brought down a peg or two even if they’ve done nothing wrong” were more likely to want to raise taxes on the rich than people who agree that “I suffer from others’ sorrows.” …I ran another series of statistical tests to investigate the motivations behind the following beliefs: 1) It’s immoral for our system to allow the creation of billionaires, 2) billionaires threaten democracy, and 3) the distribution of wealth in the United States is “unjust.” Again, the statistical tests find that resentment against successful people is more influential than compassion in predicting each of these three beliefs. In fact, not only is resentment more impactful, but compassionate people are significantly less likely to agree that it’s immoral for our system to allow people to become billionaires.

Here’s one of her charts, showing that resentment is far and away the biggest driver of support for class-warfare proposals.

These numbers are quite depressing.

They suggest that no amount of factual analysis or hard data will have any effect on the debate.

And there is polling data to back up Emily’s statistical analysis. Heck, some folks on the left openly assert that envy should be the basis for tax policy.

In other words, Deroy Murdock and Margaret Thatcher weren’t creating imaginary enemies.

P.S. If you think Kevin Williamson was somehow mischaracterizing or exaggerating Obama’s spiteful position on tax policy, just watch this video.

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More Sloppy Analysis from the New York Times

The New York Times is going overboard with disingenuous columns.

A few days ago, I pointed out the many errors in David Leonhardt’s column extolling the wealth tax.

I also explained back in August how Steven Greenhouse butchered the data when he condemned the American economy.

And Paul Krugman is infamous for his creative writing.

But Mr. Leonhardt is on a roll. He has a new column promoting class warfare tax policy.

Almost a decade ago, Warren Buffett made a claim that would become famous. He said that he paid a lower tax rate than his secretary, thanks to the many loopholes and deductions that benefit the wealthy. …“Is it the norm?” the fact-checking outfit Politifact asked. “No.” Time for an update: It’s the norm now. …the 400 wealthiest Americans last year paid a lower total tax rate — spanning federal, state and local taxes — than any other income group, according to newly released data. …That’s a sharp change from the 1950s and 1960s, when the wealthy paid vastly higher tax rates than the middle class or poor.

Here’s the supposed proof for Leonhardt’s claim, which is based on a new book from two professors at the University of California at Berkeley, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman.

Here are the tax rates from 1950.

And here are the tax rates from last year, showing the combined effect of the Kennedy tax cut, the Reagan tax cuts, the Bush tax cuts, and the Trump tax cut (as well as the Nixon tax increase, the Clinton tax increase, and the Obama tax increase).

So is Leonhardt (channeling Saez and Zucman) correct?

Are these charts evidence of a horrid and unfair system?

Nope, not in the slightest.

But this data is evidence of dodgy analysis by Leonhardt and the people he cites.

First and foremost, the charts conveniently omit the fact that dividends and capital gains earned by high-income taxpayers also are subject to the corporate income tax.

Even the left-leaning Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development acknowledges that both layers of tax should be included when measuring the effective tax rate on households.

Indeed, this is why Warren Buffett was grossly wrong when claiming he paid a lower tax rate than his secretary.

But there’s also another big problem. There’s a huge difference between high tax rates and high tax revenues.

Simply stated, the rich didn’t pay a lot of tax when rates were extortionary because they can choose not to earn and declare much income.

Indeed, there were only eight taxpayers in 1960 who paid the top tax rates of 91 percent.

Today, by contrast, upper-income taxpayers are paying an overwhelming share of the tax burden.

It’s especially worth noting that tax collections from the rich skyrocketed when Reagan slashed the top tax rate in the 1980s.

Let’s close by pointing out that Saez and Zucman are promoting a very radical tax agenda.

Saez and Zucman sketch out a modern progressive tax code. The overall tax rate on the richest 1 percent would roughly double, to about 60 percent. The tax increases would bring in about $750 billion a year, or 4 percent of G.D.P…. One crucial part of the agenda is a minimum global corporate tax of at least 25 percent. …Saez and Zucman also favor a wealth tax

Punitive income tax rates, higher corporate tax rates, and a confiscatory wealth tax.

Does anybody think copying France is a recipe for success?

P.S. I pointed out that Zucman and Saez make some untenable assumptions when trying to justify how a wealth tax won’t hurt the economy.

P.P.S. It’s also worth remembering that the income of rich taxpayers will be subject to the death tax as well, which means Leonhardt’s charts are doubly misleading.

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Spain and Lessons on Supply-Side Tax Policy

At the risk of over-simplifying, the difference between “supply-side economics” and “demand-side economics” is that the former is based on microeconomics (incentives, price theory) while the latter is based on macroeconomics (aggregate demand, Keynesianism).

When discussing the incentive-driven supply-side approach, I often focus on two key points.

• Marginal tax rates matter more than average tax rates because the incentive to earn additional income (rather than enjoying leisure) is determined by whether the government grabs a small, medium, or large share of any extra earnings.
• Some taxpayers such as investors, entrepreneurs, and business owners are especially sensitive to changes in marginal tax rates because they have considerable control over the timing, level, and composition of their income.

Today, let’s review some new research from Spain’s central bank confirms these supply-side insights.

Here’s what the authors investigated.

The impact of personal income taxes on the economic decisions of individuals is a key empirical question with important implications for the optimal design of tax policy. …the modern public finance literature has devoted significant efforts to study behavioral responses to changes in taxes on reported taxable income… Most of this work focuses on the elasticity of taxable income (ETI), which captures a broad set of real and reporting behavioral responses to taxation. Indeed, reported taxable income reflects not only individuals’ decisions on hours worked, but also work effort and career choices as well as the results of investment and entrepreneurship activities. Besides these real responses, the ETI also captures tax evasion and avoidance decisions of individuals to reduce their tax bill.

By the way, “elasticity” is econ-speak for sensitivity. In other words, if there’s high elasticity, it means taxpayers are very responsive to a change in tax rates.

Anyhow, here’s how authors designed their study.

In this paper, we estimate the elasticity of taxable income in Spain, an interesting country to study because during the last two decades it has implemented several major personal income tax reforms… In the empirical analysis, we use an administrative panel dataset of income tax returns… We calculate the MTR as a weighted average of the MTR applicable to each income source (labor, financial capital, real-estate capital, business income and capital gains).

You can see in Figure 1 that the 2003 reform was good for taxpayers and the 2012 reform was bad for taxpayers.

If nothing else, though, these changes created the opportunity for scholars to measure how taxpayers respond.

And here are the results.

We obtain estimates of the ETI around 0.35 using the Gruberand Saez (2002) estimation method, 0.54 using Kleven and Schultz (2014)’s method and 0.64 using Weber (2014)’s method. …In addition to the average estimates of the ETI, we analyze heterogeneous responses across groups of taxpayers and sources of income. …As expected, stronger responses are documented for groups of taxpayers with higher ability to respond. In particular, self-employed taxpayers have a higher ETI than wage employees, while real-estate capital and business income respond more strongly than labor income. …we find large responses on the tax deductions margin, especially private pension contributions.

In other words, taxpayers do respond to changes in tax policy.

And some taxpayers are very sensitive (high elasticity) to those changes.

Here’s Table 6 from the study. Much of it will be incomprehensible if you’re not familiar with econometrics. But all that matters is that I circled (in red) the measures of how elasticities vary based on the type of income (larger numbers mean more sensitive).

I’ll close with a very relevant observation about American fiscal policy.

Currently, upper-income taxpayers finance the vast majority of America’s medium-sized welfare state.

But what if the United States had a large-sized welfare state, like the ones that burden many European nations?

If you review the data, those large-sized welfare states are financed with stifling tax burdens on lower-income and middle-class taxpayers. Politicians in Europe learned that they couldn’t squeeze enough money out of the rich (in large part because of high elasticities).

Indeed, I wrote early this year about how taxes are confiscating the lion’s share of the income earned by ordinary workers in Spain.

And if we adopt the expanded welfare state envisioned by Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Kamala Harris, the same thing will happen to American workers.

P.S. I admire how Spanish taxpayers have figured out ways of escaping the tax net.

P.P.S. There’s also evidence about the impact of Spain’s corporate tax.

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More Real-World Evidence for “Supply-Side Economics”

Assuming the goal is faster growth and higher living standards, there are three core principles of good tax policy.

• Low marginal tax rates on productive activity such as work and entrepreneurship.
• No tax bias (i.e., extra layers of tax) against saving and investment.
• No preferences and loopholes that encourage inefficient economic choices.

You could call this list the Holy Trinity of supply-side economics. Simply stated, incentives matter, so it makes no sense for government to discourage the things that make a nation more prosperous.

Regarding low marginal tax rates, my left-leaning friends sometimes dismiss the importance of this principle by pointing out that they don’t pay much attention to their marginal tax rates.

I can sympathize with their skepticism. When I was first learning about public finance and studying supply-and-demand curves showing deadweight loss, I also wondered about the supply-side claim that marginal tax rates mattered. Even after I started working, I had doubts. Would I somehow work harder if my tax rate fell? Or goof off if my tax rate went up? It didn’t make much sense.

What I didn’t recognize, however, is that I was looking at the issue from the perspective of someone working a standard, 9-to-5 job with a modest income. And it is true that such workers are not very responsive (especially in the short run) to changes in tax rates.

In the real world, though, there are lots of people who don’t fit that profile. They have jobs that give them substantial control over the timing, level, and composition of their income.

And these people – such as business owners, professionals, second earners, investors, and entrepreneurs – often are very responsive to changes in marginal tax rates.

We have a new example of this phenomenon. Check out these excerpts from a story in the U.K.-based Times.

About three quarters of GPs and hospital consultants have cut or are planning to cut their hours… About 42 per cent of family doctors and 30 per cent of consultants have reduced their working times already, claiming that they are being financially penalised the more they work. A further 34 per cent and 40 per cent respectively have confirmed that they plan to reduce their hours in the coming months… The government has launched an urgent consultation over the issue, which is the result of changes to pension rules limiting the amount that those earning £110,000 or more can pay into their pensions before they are hit with a large tax bill.

In other words, high tax rates have made leisure more attractive than work. Why work long hours, after all, if the tax authority is the biggest beneficiary?

There are also indirect victims of these high tax rates.

Last month figures from NHS Providers, which represents hospitals, showed that waiting lists had climbed by up to 50 per cent since April as doctors stopped taking on extra shifts to avoid the financial penalties. Richard Vautrey, chairman of the BMA GPs’ committee, said: “These results show the extent to which GPs are being forced to reduce their hours or indeed leave the profession altogether because of pension taxes. …swift and decisive action is needed from the government to end this shambolic situation and to limit the damage that a punitive pensions taxation system is inflicting on doctors, their patients and across the NHS as a whole.”

The U.K.’s government-run health system already has plenty of problems, including long wait times and denial of care. The last thing it needs is for doctors and other professionals to cut back their hours because politicians are too greedy.

The moral of the story is that tax rates matter. Depending on the type of person, they can matter a lot.

This doesn’t mean tax rates need to be zero (though I like that idea).

It simply means that taxes impose costs, and those costs become increasingly apparent as tax rates climb.

P.S. If you want a horror story about marginal tax rates, check out what happened to Cam Newton, the quarterback of the Carolina Panthers.

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The Satirical Version of Supply-Side Jesus vs. Socialist Jesus

Yesterday’s column weighed in on the debate whether Jesus was a socialist.

Like Cal Thomas, I don’t think the Bible supports coercive redistribution by government.

Today, let’s look at the same issue, but from a humorous perspective.

For those on the other side of the debate, Socialist Jesus has a very efficient mechanism to collect alms for the poor.

This approach is supported by some parishoners.

From Babylon Bee, we have a story about a disciple of Socialist Jesus.

A lot of Christians are criticized for not being very compassionate to the poor. But you can’t say that about Larry DeManson, a local believer who is so committed to charity for those less fortunate than himself that he always votes for government to steal money from his neighbor and give it to the impoverished. …DeManson no longer has a guilty conscience whenever he sees people in need. “I don’t personally have to do anything,” he said. “The government does it for me.” The man cites the verse “somewhere in James” that says that “true religion before the Father is to forcibly redistribute money from those wealthier than you in order to take care of the poor.”

Now let’s look at an alternative approach.

Except we won’t be sharing insights from Libertarian Jesus.

Instead, courtesy of Imgur, we have the story of Supply-Side Jesus.

And this Supply-Side Jesus is an advocate of trickle-down economics.

He creates lots of jobs.

And he believes in self-sufficiency.

He also opposes class warfare.

Supply-Side Jesus is a fan of the entrepreneur class.

And he understands self-promotion.

But not everyone is happy.

Supply-Side Jesus was in trouble.

But he avoided trouble, thanks to majoritarianism.

Supply-Side Jesus then decided to enter politics.

I don’t know who created this cartoon strip, but kudos for some clever humor (though I imagine practitioners of the “Prosperity Gospel” won’t be amused).

As a general rule, I find that leftists are too dour to create effective political humor (see the Black NRA, for instance). But when they come up with something clever (see here, here, and here), I’m more than willing to applaud.

Even when they mock libertarians!

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The Economic Damage of “Neutral Taxes”

There’s general agreement among public finance experts that personal income taxes and corporate income taxes, on a per-dollar-collected basis, do the most economic damage.

And I suspect there’s a lot of agreement that this is because these levies often have high marginal tax rates and often are accompanied by a significant bias against income that is saved and invested.

Payroll tax and consumption taxes, by contrast, are thought to be less damaging because they generally don’t have “progressive rates” and they are “neutral,” meaning they rarely involve any double taxation of saving and investment.

But “less damaging” is not the same as “no damage.”

Such taxes still drive a wedge between pre-tax income and post-tax consumption, so they do result in less economic activity (what economists refer to as “deadweight loss“).

And the deadweight loss can be significant if the overall tax burden is sufficiently onerous (as is the case in many European nations).

Interestingly, the (normally pro-tax) International Monetary Fund just released a study on this topic. It looked at the impact of taxes on work in the new member states (NMS) of the European Union. Here’s a summary of what the authors wanted to investigate.

Given demographic and pension pressures facing many EU28 countries amidst low labor market participation rates together with still high tax wedges, the call to review public policies has gained renewed prominence in the EU political debate. …tax wedges remain high and participation rates, while having increased importantly in a few countries over 2000-17 , are still around or below 70 percent in many of them. This hints at the need for addressing structural problems to improve economic fortunes. In this paper we focus our attention on hours worked (per working age population). …At country level, hours worked reflect labor supply decisions and could be thought of a measure of labor utilization. Long-run changes in labor supply are driven by incentives, of which taxes are perceived to be central. Assessing the importance of taxation on hours is key to provide new insights for potential policy actions.

And here’s what they found.

We study the role of taxes in accounting for differences in hours worked across NMS over the 1995-17 period… We find that consumption and labor taxes significantly discourage labor supply and can explain close to 21 percent of the observed variation of hours across NMS. …Higher tax rates reduce households’ net labor income and real purchasing power, inducing them to substitute consumption for leisure, which cannot be taxed. …Our findings show that, conditional on other factors, taxes are an important determinant of hours. Point estimates suggest a high elasticity of hours to taxes (close to 0.5), which is robust to the inclusion of other factors.

What’s interesting about the new member states of Eastern Europe is that many of them have flat taxes and low corporate rates.

So the personal and corporate income taxes are not a major burden.

But they so have relatively high payroll taxes (a.k.a., social insurance taxes) and relatively onerous value-added taxes.

So it’s hardly a surprise that these levies are the ones most associated with deadweight loss.

We find that social security contributions deter hours the most, followed by consumption taxes and, to a lesser extent, personal income taxes. …Consumption and personal income taxes are found to affect hours per worker, but not employment rates. On the other hand, social security contributions are negatively associated with employment rates, but do not seem to affect hours per worker. …In line with the literature, we document that women’s employment rate is more sensitive to changes in tax policies. We find the elasticity of employment rate to social security contributions to be 7 percent larger for women vis-à-vis men.

Here’s one of the charts from the study.

And here’s an explanation of what it means.

Figure 4 shows the evolution of hours and effective taxes. Hours worked increased substantially for Group 1, while it remained stable in Group 2 (Panel (a)). In both groups, the effect of the GFC is noticeable as hours sharply declined after 2008. Panel (b) shows the evolution of the average effective tax rate in each group. Interestingly, countries in Group 1, which observed an increase in hours, had lower effective tax rates (below 40 percent) throughout the period. In addition, we observe a negative correlation between hours and taxes for most of the sample. For Group 1, the large increase in hours – between year 2000 and the GFC – happened at the same time taxes declined

Here’s another chart from the IMF report.

And here’s some of the explanatory text.

Figure 5 depicts the relationship between hours worked and taxes across countries. In Panel (a), we observe a negative correlation between hours and taxes in levels for each group, with the negative correlation being stronger in Group 2 than in Group 1 (it has a steeper slope). Panel (b) shows total log changes in hours and taxes throughout the period. It also displays a negative correlation.

Looking at the conclusion, a key takeaway from the study is that there is a substantial loss of economic activity because of theoretically benign (but in reality onerous) taxes on consumption and labor.

Our modelling exercise shows that taxes influence the long-run trend in hours and our econometric exercise shows that the findings are robust to the inclusion of other labor market determinants. Furthermore, we document an elasticity of hours to overall taxes close to 0.5. We find that differences in tax burden can explain up to 21 percent in the variation of hours worked across NMS. The main takeaway of this study is that excessive tax burden, either in the form of consumption or labor taxes, can lead to substantial deadweight losses in terms of labor supply. .. overall tax burden – and not only labor taxes – should be considered when thinking about incentives from tax schemes.

Yes, incentives do matter.

And it’s good that an IMF report is providing good evidence for lower tax rates.

But I’m not optimistic we’ll get pro-growth changes. There’s been a lack of good reform this decade from the new member states from Eastern Europe. Combined with demographic decline (and the associated pressure for higher tax rates), this does not bode well.

P.S. While the professional economists at the IMF often produce good research and sensible advice, the bureaucracy’s political leaders almost always ignore those findings and instead push for bad tax policy. Including in the new member states from Eastern Europe.

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A Tribute to Art Laffer

I’m a big fan of the Laffer Curve, which is simply a graphical representation of the common-sense notion that punitively high tax rates can result in less revenue because of reductions in the economy-wide level of work, saving, investment, and entrepreneurship.

This insight of supply-side economics is so obviously true that even Paul Krugman has acknowledged its veracity.

What’s far more important, though, is that Ronald Reagan grasped the importance of Art’s message. And he dramatically reduced tax rates on productive behavior during his presidency.

And those lower tax rates, combined with similar reforms by Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom, triggered a global reduction in tax rates that has helped boost growth and reduce poverty all around the world.

In other words, Art Laffer was a consequential man.

So it was great news that President Trump yesterday awarded Art with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Let’s look at some commentary on this development, starting with a column in the Washington Examiner by Fred Barnes.

When President Trump announced he was awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to economist Arthur Laffer, there were groans of dismay in Washington… Their reaction was hardly a surprise. Laffer is everything they don’t like in an economist. He’s an evangelist for tax cuts. He believes slashing tax rates is the key to economic growth and prosperity. And more often than not, he’s been right about this. Laffer emerged as an influential figure in the 1970s as the champion of reducing income tax rates. He was a key player in the Reagan cuts of 1981 that touched off an economic boom lasting two decades. …Laffer, 78, is not a favorite of conventional, predominantly liberal economists. Tax cuts leave the job of economic growth to the private sector. Liberal economists prefer to give government that job. Tax cuts are not on their agenda. Tax hikes are. …His critics would never admit to Laffer envy. But they show it by paying attention to what he says and to whom he’s affiliated. They rush to criticize him at any opportunity. …Laffer was right…about tax cuts and prosperity.

And here are some excerpts from a Bloomberg column by Professor Karl Smith of the University of North Carolina.

Most important, he highlights how supply-side economics provided a misery-minimizing way of escaping the inflation of the 1970s.

President Donald Trump’s decision to award Arthur Laffer the Presidential Medal of Freedom has met with no shortage of criticism… Laffer was a policy entrepreneur, and his..boldness was crucial in the development of what came to be known as the “Supply Side Revolution,” which even today is grossly underappreciated. In the 1980s, the U.S. economy avoided the malaise that afflicted Japan and much of Western Europe. The primary reason was supply-side economics. …Reducing inflation with minimal damage to the economy was the central goal of supply-side economics. …most economists agreed that inflation could be brought down with a severe enough recession. …Conservative economists argued that the long-term gain was worth that level of pain. Liberal economists argued that inflation was better contained with price and income controls. Robert Mundell, a future Nobel Laureate, argued that there was third way. Restricting the money supply, he said, would cause demand in the economy to contract, but making large tax cuts would cause demand to expand. If done together, these two strategies would cancel each other out, leaving room for supply-side factors to do their work. …Laffer suggested that permanent reductions in taxes and regulations would increase long-term economic growth. A faster-growing economy would increase foreign demand for U.S. financial assets, further raising the value of the dollar and reducing the price of foreign imports. These effects would speed the fall in inflation by increasing the supply of goods for sale. In the early 1980s, the so-called Mundell-Laffer hypothesis was put to the test — and it was, by and large, successful.

I’ve already written about how taming inflation was one of Reagan’s great accomplishments, and this column adds some meat to the bones of my argument.

And it’s worth noting that left-leaning economists thought it couldn’t be done. Professor Bryan Caplan shared this quote from Paul Samuelson.

Today’s inflation is chronic.  Its roots are deep in the very nature of the welfare state.  [Establishment of price stability through monetary policy would require] abolishing the humane society [and would] reimpose inequality and suffering not tolerated under democracy.  A fascist political state would be required to impose such a regime and preserve it.  Short of a military junta that imprisons trade union activists and terrorizes intellectuals, this solution to inflation is unrealistic–and, to most of us, undesirable.

It’s laughable to read that today, but during the Keynesian era of the 1970s, this kind of nonsense was very common (in addition to the Samuelson’s equally foolish observations on the supposed strength of the Soviet economy).

The bottom line is that Art Laffer and supply-side economics deserve credit for insights on monetary policy in addition to tax policy.

But since Art is most famous for the Laffer Curve, let’s close with a few additional observations on that part of supply-side economics.

Many folks on the left today criticize Art for being too aggressive about the location of the revenue-maximizing point of the Laffer Curve. In other words, they disagree with him on whether certain tax cuts will raise revenue or lose revenue.

While I think there’s very strong evidence that lower tax rates can increase revenue, I also think it doesn’t happen very often.

But I also think that debate doesn’t matter. Simply stated, I don’t want politicians to have more revenue, which means that I don’t want to be at the revenue-maximizing point of the Laffer Curve.

Moreover, there’s a lot of economic damage that occurs as tax rates approach that point, which is why I often cite academic research confirming that one additional dollar of tax revenue is associated with several dollars (or more!) of lost economic output.

Call me crazy, but I’m not willing to destroy $5 or $10 of private-sector income in order to increase Washington’s income by $1.

The bottom line is that the key insight of the Laffer Curve is that there’s a cost to raising tax rates, regardless of whether a nation is on the left side of the curve or the right side of the curve.

P.S. While I’m a huge fan of Art Laffer, that doesn’t mean universal agreement. I think he’s wrong in his analysis of destination-based state sales taxes. And I think he has a blind spot about the danger of a value-added tax.

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Professional Athletes and Supply-Side Economics

My friends on the left hold two impossible-to-reconcile views about taxation.

• First, they say taxes don’t really have any effect on incentives to work, save and invest, and that governments can impose high tax rates and punitive double taxation without causing meaningful economic damage or loss of national competitiveness.
• Second, they say differences in taxes between jurisdictions will cause massive tax-avoidance behavior as jobs and investment migrate to places with lower taxes, and that national and international tax harmonization is required to prevent that ostensibly horrible outcome.

Huh?!? They’re basically asserting that taxes simultaneously have no effect on taxpayer behavior and lots of effect on taxpayer behavior.

Well, they’re half right.

Taxpayers do respond to incentives. And when tax rates are too high, both money and people will escape high-tax regimes.

In other words, people do “vote with their feet.”

And it seems pro athletes are not “dumb jocks” when contemplating the best places to sign contracts.

Looking at baseball, taxes presumably had an effect on Bryce Harper’s decision to play for the Phillies.

For Major League Baseball players, three teams are at the bottom of the standings on state taxes: the Los Angeles Dodgers, San Diego Padres and San Francisco Giants. That’s because California is in a league of its own on personal income taxes. We’ve got by far the highest state rate in the nation, topping out at 13.3%. By contrast, Pennsylvania has a low flat rate for every taxpayer regardless of income. It’s just 3.07%. That’s one reason why superstar slugger Bryce Harper signed an eye-popping 13-year, $330-million contract last week with the Philadelphia Phillies, spurning the Dodgers and Giants. …Harper will save tens of millions in taxes by signing with the Phillies instead of a California team. …“The Giants, Dodgers and Padres are in the worst state income tax jurisdiction in all of baseball,” Boras adds. “Players really get hit.” …To what extent do California’s sky-high taxes drive players away? “It’s a red light,” agent John Boggs says. “I’ve had players in the past say they don’t want to go to certain states because they’re going to get hammered by taxes. Obviously, that affects the bottom line.”

Another argument for states to join the flat tax club!

If we cross the Atlantic Ocean, we find lots of evidence that high tax rates in Europe create major headaches in the world of sports.

For example, I’ve previously written about how the absence of an income tax gives the Monaco team a significant advantage competing in the French soccer league.

And there are many other examples from Europe dealing with soccer and taxation.

According to a BBC report, we should highlight the impact on both players and management in Spain.

Ex-Manchester United boss José Mourinho has agreed a prison term in Spain for tax fraud but will not go to jail. A one-year prison sentence will instead be exchanged for a fine of €182,500 (£160,160). That will be added to a separate fine of €2m. …He was accused of owing €3.3m to Spanish tax authorities from his time managing Real Madrid in 2011-2012. Prosecutors said he had created offshore companies to manage his image rights and hide the earnings from tax officials. …In January, Cristiano Ronaldo accepted a fine of €18.8m and a suspended 23-month jail sentence, in a case which was also centred around tax owed on image rights. …Another former Real Madrid star, Xabi Alonso, is also facing charges over alleged tax fraud amounting to about €2m, though he denies any wrongdoing. Marcelo Vieira, who still plays for the club, accepted a four-month suspended jail sentence last September over his use of foreign firms to handle almost half a million euros in earnings. Barcelona’s Lionel Messi and Neymar have also found themselves embroiled in legal battles with the Spanish tax authorities.

Let’s cross the Atlantic again and look at the National Football League.

Consider Christian Wilkins, who was just drafted in the first round by the NFL’s Miami Dolphins. He’s very aware of how lucky he is to have been picked by a football team in a state with no income tax.

The Miami Dolphins picked Clemson defensive tackle Christian Wilkins with the 13th overall pick in Thursday night’s first round of the NFL draft. …He’ll be counted on to help usher in a new era of Miami football under first-year head coach Brian Flores. …Wilkins said he “knew they were interested” in him and is happy to be headed to Miami. He also joked that he’s happy he’ll be playing football in Florida, where there is no state income tax. “Pretty excited about them taxes,” he said. “A lot of guys who went before me, I might be making just a little bit more, but hey, it is what it is.”

As he noted, his contract may not be as big as some of the players drafted above him, but he may wind up with more take-home pay since Florida is a fiscally responsible state.

College players have no control over which team drafts them, so Wilkins truly is lucky.

Players in free agency, by contrast, can pick and choose their new team.

And if we travel up the Atlantic coast from Miami to Jacksonville, we can read about how the Jaguars – both players and management – understand how they’re net beneficiaries of being in a no-income tax state.

Hayden Hurst got excited after he received a phone call from someone he trusted who told him the Jaguars were targeting him with the No. 29 overall pick. …Though Hurst…was happy when the Baltimore Ravens took him four slots before the Jaguars, he also knew in advance of the financial consequences that most rookies don’t notice. Since Florida is one of four NFL states (Tennessee, Texas and Washington being the others) with no state income tax, Hurst, who played at South Carolina, understood he’d see a big chunk of his $6.1 million signing bonus disappear on the deduction line when he received his first bonus check. …“I thought about how much of my money was going to be impacted depending on which state I played in,” Hurst said. “I’m paying a pretty hefty percent up in Maryland. To see the amount get taken away right off the bat kind of hurt, it was pretty sickening.” With the NFL free agent market set to open Wednesday, Hurst’s situation illustrates a potential competitive advantage for the Jaguars of being in an income tax-free state when they court free agents.

Yes, the flat tax club is good, but the no-income-tax club is even better.

I’ll close with an observation. Way back in 2009, I speculated that high tax rates could actually hurt the performance of teams in high-tax states.

It turns out I was right, as you can see from academic research I cited in 2017 and 2018.

The bottom line is that teams in high-tax states can still sign big-name players, but they have to pay more to compensate for taxes. And this presumably means less money for other players, thus lowering overall quality (and also lowering average win totals).

P.S. I normally only cheer for NFL athletes who played for my beloved Georgia Bulldogs, but I now have a soft spot in my heart for Christian Wilkins (just like Evan Mathis).

P.P.S. I also have plenty of sympathy for Cam Newton, who paid a tax rate of almost 200 percent on the income he earned for playing in the 2016 Super Bowl.

P.P.P.S. Taxes also impact choices on how often to box and where to box.

P.P.P.P.S. And where to run track.

P.P.P.P.P.S. And where to play basketball.

P.P.P.P.P.P.S. While one can argue that there are no meaningful economic consequences if athletes avoid jurisdictions with bad tax law, can the same be said if we have evidence that high tax burdens deter superstar inventors and entrepreneurs?

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The Rich Pay More with Lower Tax Rates

Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute is most famous for his Venn diagrams that expose hypocrisy and inconsistency.

• Taxation and incentives
• The War on Drugs
• Minimum wage
• Food and Drug Administration
• Consenting adults

But he also is famous for his charts.

And since I’m a big fan of sensible tax policy and the Laffer Curve, we’re going to share Mark’s new chart looking at the inverse relationship between the top tax rate and the share of taxes paid by the richest Americans.

Examining the chart, it quickly becomes evident that upper-income taxpayers started paying a much greater share of the tax burden after the Reagan tax cuts.

My left-leaning friends sometimes look at this data and complain that the rich are paying more of the tax burden only because they have grabbed a larger share of national income. And this means we should impose punitive tax rates.

But this argument is flawed for three reasons.

First, there is not a fixed amount of income. The success of a rich entrepreneur does not mean less income for the rest of us. Instead, it’s quite likely that all of us are better off because the entrepreneur created some product of service that we value. Indeed, data from the Census Bureau confirms that all income classes tend to rise and fall simultaneously.

Second, it’s not even accurate to say that the rich are getting richer faster than the poor are getting richer.

Third, one of the big fiscal lessons of the 1980s is that punitive tax rates on upper-income taxpayers backfire because investors, entrepreneurs, and business owners will choose to earn and report less taxable income.

For my contribution to this discussion, I want to elaborate on this final point.

When I give speeches, I sometimes discover that audiences don’t understand why rich taxpayers can easily control the amount of their taxable income.

And I greatly sympathize since I didn’t appreciate this point earlier in my career.

That’s because the vast majority of us get the lion’s share of our income from our employers. And when we get this so-called W-2 income, we don’t have much control over how much tax we pay. And we assume that this must be true for others.

But rich people are different. If you go the IRS’s Statistics of Income website and click on the latest data in Table 1.4, you’ll find that wages and salaries are only a small fraction of the income earned by wealthy taxpayers.

These high-income taxpayers may be tempting targets for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and the other peddlers of resentment, but they’re also very elusive targets.

That’s because it’s relatively easy – and completely legal – for them to control the timing, level, and composition of business and investment income.

When tax rates are low, this type of tax planning doesn’t make much sense. But as tax rates increase, rich people have an ever-growing incentive to reduce their taxable income and that creates a bonanza for lawyers, accountants, and financial planners.

Needless to say, there are many loopholes to exploit in a 75,000-page tax code.

P.S. There’s some very good evidence from Sweden confirming my point.

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OECD Data on Corporate Taxation Inadvertently Provides Strong Evidence for the Laffer Curve

Like most taxpayer-supported international bureaucracies, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has a statist orientation.

The Paris-based OECD is particularly bad on fiscal policy and it is infamous for its efforts to prop up Europe’s welfare states by hindering tax competition.

It even has a relatively new “BEPS” project that is explicitly designed so that politicians can grab more money from corporations.

So it’s safe to say that the OECD is not a hotbed of libertarian thought on tax policy, much less a supporter of pro-growth business taxation.

Which makes it all the more significant that it just announced that supporters of free markets are correct about the Laffer Curve and corporate tax rates.

The OECD doesn’t openly acknowledge that this is the case, of course, but let’s look at key passages from a Tuesday press release.

Taxes paid by companies remain a key source of government revenues, especially in developing countries, despite the worldwide trend of falling corporate tax rates over the past two decades… In 2016, corporate tax revenues accounted for 13.3% of total tax revenues on average across the 88 jurisdictions for which data is available. This figure has increased from 12% in 2000. …OECD analysis shows that a clear trend of falling statutory corporate tax rates – the headline rate faced by companies – over the last two decades. The database shows that the average combined (central and sub-central government) statutory tax rate fell from 28.6% in 2000 to 21.4% in 2018.

So tax rates have dramatically fallen but tax revenue has actually increased. I guess many of the self-styled experts are wrong on the Laffer Curve.

By the way, whoever edits the press releases for the OECD might want to consider changing “despite” to “because of” (writers at the Washington Post, WTNH, Irish-based Independent, and Wall Street Journal need similar lessons in causality).

Let’s take a more detailed look at the data. Here’s a chart from the OECD showing how corporate rates have dropped just since 2000. Pay special attention to the orange line, which shows the rate for developed nations.

I applaud this big drop in tax rates. It’s been good for the world economy and good for workers.

And the chart only tells part of the story. The average corporate rate for OECD nations was 48 percent back in 1980.

In other words, tax rates have fallen by 50 percent in the developed world.

Yet if you look at this chart, which I prepared using the OECD’s own data, it shows that revenues actually have a slight upward trend.

I’ll close with a caveat. The Laffer Curve is very important when looking at corporate taxation, but that doesn’t mean it has an equally powerful impact when looking at other taxes.

It all depends on how sensitive various taxpayers are to changes in tax rates.

Business taxes have a big effect because companies can easily choose where to invest and how much to invest.

The Laffer Curve also is very important when looking at proposals (such as the nutty idea from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) to increase tax rates on the rich. That’s because upper-income taxpayers have a lot of control over the timing, level, and composition of business and investment income.

But changes in tax rates on middle-income earners are less likely to have a big effect because most of us get a huge chunk of our compensation from wages and salaries. Similarly, changes in sales taxes and value-added taxes are unlikely to have big effects.

Increasing those taxes is still a bad idea, of course. I’m simply making the point that not all tax increases are equally destructive (and not all tax cuts generate equal amounts of additional growth).

P.S. The International Monetary Fund also accidentally provided evidence about corporate taxes and the Laffer Curve. And there was also a little-noticed OECD study last year making the same point.

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Supply-Side Economics and the Post-Reagan Years

Steve Moore and Art Laffer are the authors of Trumponomics, a largely favorable book about the President’s economic policy.

I have a more jaundiced view about Trump.

I’m happy to praise his good policies (taxes and regulation), but I also condemn his bad policies (spending and trade).

And as you might expect, some people are completely on the opposite side from Moore and Laffer.

Writing for New York, Jonathan Chait offers a very unfriendly review of the book. He starts by categorizing Steve and Art (as well as Larry Kudlow, who wrote the foreword) as being fixated on tax rates.

The authors of Trumponomics are Larry Kudlow (who left in the middle of its writing to accept a job as director of the National Economic Council), Stephen Moore, and Arthur Laffer. The three fervently propound supply-side economics, a doctrine that holds that economic performance hinges largely on maintaining low tax rates on the rich. …Kudlow, Moore, and Laffer are unusually fixated on tax cuts, but they are merely extreme examples of the entire Republican Establishment, which shared their broad priorities.

For what it’s worth, I think low tax rates are good policy. And I suspect that the vast majority of economists will agree with the notion that lower tax rates are better for growth than high tax rates.

But Chait presumably thinks that Larry, Steve, and Art overstate the importance of low rates (hence, the qualification about “economic performance hinges largely”).

To bolster his case, he claims advocates of low tax rates were wrong about the 1990s and the 2000s.

In the 1990s, the supply-siders insisted Bill Clinton’s increase in the top tax rate would create a recession and cause revenue to plummet. The following decade, they heralded the Bush tax cuts as the elixir that had brought in a glorious new era of prosperity. …The supply-siders have maintained absolute faith in their dogma in the face of repeated failure by banishing all doubt. …they have confined their failed predictions to the memory hole.

If Chait’s point is simply that some supply-siders have been too exuberant at times, I won’t argue. Exaggeration, overstatement, and tunnel vision are pervasive on all sides in Washington.

Heck, I sometimes fall victim to the same temptation, though I try to atone for my bouts of puffery by bending over backwards to point out that taxation is just one piece of the big policy puzzle.

Which is why I want to focus on this next excerpt from Chait’s article. He is very agitated that the book praises the economic performance of the Clinton years and criticizes the economic performance of the Bush years.

A brief economic history in Trumponomics touts the gains made from 1982 to 1999, and laments “those gains stalled out after 2000 under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.” Notice, in addition to starting the Reagan era in 1982, thus absolving him for any blame for the recession that began a year into his presidency, they have retroactively moved the hated leftist Bill Clinton into the right-wing hero camp and the beloved conservative hero George W. Bush into the failed left-wing statist camp.

Well, there’s a reason Clinton is in the good camp and Bush is in the bad camp.

As you can see from Economic Freedom of the World (I added some numbers and commentary), the U.S. enjoyed increasing economic liberty during the 1990s and suffered decreasing economic liberty during the 2000s.

For what it’s worth, I’m not claiming that Bill Clinton wanted more economic liberty or that George W. Bush wanted more statism. Maybe the credit/blame belongs to Congress. Or maybe presidents get swept up in events that happen to occur when they’re in office.

All I’m saying is that Steve and Art are correct when they point out that the nation got better overall policy under Clinton and worse overall policy under Bush.

In other words, Clinton’s 1993 tax increase was bad, but it was more than offset by pro-market reforms in other areas. Likewise, Bush’s tax cuts were good, but they were more than offset by anti-market policies in other areas.

P.S. Chait complained about Moore and Laffer “starting the Reagan era in 1982, thus absolving him for any blame for the recession that began a year into his presidency”.

Since I’m a fan of Reaganomics, I feel compelled to offer three comments.

• First, the recession began in July 1981. That’s six months into Reagan’s presidency rather than one year.
• Second, does Chait really want to claim that the downturn was Reagan’s fault? If so, I’m curious to get his explanation for how a tax cut that was signed in August caused a recession that began the previous month.
• Third, the recession almost certainly should be blamed on bad monetary policy, and even Robert Samuelson points out that Reagan deserves immense praise for his handling of that issue.

P.P.S. Bill Clinton’s 1993 tax hike didn’t produce the budget surpluses of the late 1990s. If you don’t believe me, check out the numbers from Bill Clinton’s FY1996 budget.

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A Teachable Moment on Taxes and Deadweight Loss, Courtesy of D.C.’s Greedy Government

The central argument against punitive taxation is that it leads to less economic activity.

Here’s a visual from an excellent video tutorial by Professor Alex Tabarrok. It shows that government grabs a share of private output when a tax is imposed, thus reducing the benefits to buyers (“consumer surplus”) and sellers (“producer surplus).

But it also shows that some economic activity never takes place (“deadweight loss”).

When discussing the economics of taxation, I always try to remind people that deadweight loss also represents foregone taxable activity, which is why the Laffer Curve is a very real thing (as even Paul Krugman admits).

To see these principles at work in the real world, let’s look at a report from the Washington Post. The story deals with cigarette taxation, but I’m not sharing this out of any sympathy for smokers. Instead, the goal is to understand and appreciate the broader point of how changes in tax policy can cause changes in behavior.

The sign on the window of a BP gas station in Southeast Washington advertises a pack of Newports for $10.75. Few customers were willing to pay that much. But several men in the gas station’s parking lot had better luck illegally hawking single cigarettes for 75 cents. The drop in legal sales and spike in black market “loosies” are the result of $2-a-pack increase in cigarette taxes that took effect last month… Anti-tobacco advocates hailed the higher legal age and the tax increase as ways to discourage smoking. But retailers say the city has instead encouraged the black market and sent customers outside the city.

Since I don’t want politicians to have more money, I’m glad smokers are engaging in tax avoidance.

And I feel sympathy for merchants who are hurt by the tax.

Shoukat Choudhry, the owner of the BP and four other gas stations in the city, says he does not see whom the higher taxes are helping. His customers can drive less than a mile to buy cheaper cigarettes in Maryland. He says the men in his parking lot are selling to teenagers. And the city is not getting as much tax revenue from his shops. Cigarette revenue at the BP store alone fell from $63,000 in September to $45,000 in October, when the tax increase took effect on the first of the month. …The amateur sellers say the higher cigarette tax has not been a bonanza for them. They upped their price a quarter for a single cigarette.

It’s also quite likely that the Laffer Curve will wreak havoc with the plans of the D.C. government.

Citywide figures for cigarette sales in October — as measured by tax revenue — will not be available until next month, city officials said. The District projected higher cigarette taxes would bring in $12 million over the next four years. Proceeds from the tax revenue are funding maternal and early childhood care programs. The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids says the fear of declining tax revenue because of black market sales has not materialized elsewhere.

Actually, there is plenty of evidence – both in America and elsewhere – that higher cigarette taxes backfire.

I would be shocked if D.C. doesn’t create new evidence since avoidance is so easy.

…critics of the tax increase say the District is unique because of how easy it is to travel to neighboring Virginia, which has a 30-cent tax, and Maryland, with a $2 tax. “What person in their right mind is going to pay $9 or $10 for a pack of cigarettes when they can go to Virginia?” said Kirk McCauley of the WMDA Service Station and Automotive Repair Association, a regional association for gas stations. …Ronald Jackson, who declined to buy a loose cigarette from the BP parking lot, says he saves money with a quick drive to Maryland to buy five cartons of Newport 100s, the legal limit. “After they increased the price, I just go over the border,” said Jackson, a 56-year-old Southeast D.C. resident. “They are much cheaper.”

An under-appreciated aspect of this tax is how it encourages the underground economy.

Though I’m happy to see (especially remembering what happened to Eric Garner) that D.C. police have no interest in hindering black market sales.

The D.C. Council originally set aside money from the cigarette tax increase for two police officers to crack down on illegal sales outside of stores. But that funding was removed amid concerns about excessive enforcement and that it would strain police relations with the community. On a Tuesday morning, Choudhry, the owner of the Southeast BP, stopped a police officer who was filling up his motorcycle at the BP station to point out a group of men selling cigarettes in his parking lot. The officer drove off without action. …On a good day, he can pull about $70 in profit. “Would you rather that we rob or steal,” said Mike, who said he has spent 15 years in jail. “Or do you want us out here selling things?”

Kudos to Mike. I’m glad he’s engaging in voluntary exchange rather than robbing and stealing. Though maybe he got in trouble with the law in the first place because of voluntary exchange (a all-too-common problem for people in Washington).

But now let’s zoom out and return to our discussion about economics and taxation.

An under-appreciated point to consider is that deadweight loss grows geometrically larger as tax rates go up. In other words, you don’t just double damage when you double tax rates. The consequences are far more severe.

Here are two charts that were created for a chapter I co-authored in a book about demographics and capital taxation. This first chart shows how a $1 tax leads to 25-cents of deadweight loss.

But if the tax doubles to $2, the deadweight loss doesn’t just double.

In this hypothetical example, it rises to $1 from 25-cents.

For any given tax on any particular economic activity, the amount of deadweight loss will depend on both supply and demand sensitivities. Some taxes impose high costs. Others impose low costs.

But in all cases, the deadweight loss increases disproportionately fast as the tax rate is increased. And that has big implications for whether there should high tax rates on personal income and corporate income, as well as whether there should be heavy death taxes and harsh tax rates on capital gains, interest, and dividends.

Some of my left-wing friends shrug their shoulders because they assume that rich people bear the burden. But remember that the reduction of “consumer surplus” is a measure of the loss to taxpayers. The deadweight loss is the foregone output to society.

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The IRS Commits Unsportsmanlike Conduct against the NFL

I’ve written about how taxes have a big impact on soccer (a quaint game with little or no scoring that Europeans play with their feet).

Taxes affect both the decisions of players and the success of teams.

Grasping and greedy governments also have an impact on football. Especially if teams play in Europe.

…the Los Angeles Chargers and Tennessee Titans traveled across the Atlantic to play a game in London’s Wembley Stadium. …Players spoke of the burdens of traveling so far to play a game, especially the team from California that had to cross eight time zones. Players also spoke out about the tax nightmare they faced when they got to the UK. …players talked ahead of time to their CPAs to determine the tax hit they’d take for the privilege of such a long road trip… Great Britain…levies high taxes on athletes who visit for an athletic match. Teams from California — the Raiders, Chargers, and Rams — already face the highest state income tax in the nation with a top rate of 13.3 percent. Of course, players also have to pay federal income tax. …To top it all off, those players who receive one of their 16 paychecks in London pay a 45 percent tax on a prorated amount based on the number of days they spend in the country. Bottom line: Players on California teams could end up paying 60 percent or more in income taxes for that game check. …For non-resident foreign athletes, HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) reserves the right to tax not only the income they earn from competing in the match but a portion of any endorsement money they earn worldwide.

No wonder some of the world’s top athletes don’t want to compete in the United Kingdom.

And what about the NFL players, who got hit with a 60 percent tax rate for one game?

Those players are lucky they’re not Cam Newton, who paid a 198.8 percent tax for playing in the 2016 Super Bowl.

Last year’s tax bill also impacts professional football in a negative way. The IRS has decided that sports teams don’t count as “pass-through” businesses, as noted by Accounting Today.

Two major sports franchises might soon be on the auction block following Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen’s death last week. But a recent Internal Revenue Service rule could cut the teams’ sales prices. Allen died with no heirs and a $26 billion estate, including the National Football League’s Seattle Seahawks… The teams together are worth more than $3 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. …the IRS said in August that team owners would be barred from the write-off — one of the biggest benefits in the law — that allows owners of pass-through entities such as partnerships and limited liability companies to deduct as much as 20 percent of their taxable income. …Arthur Hazlitt, a tax partner at O’Melveny & Myers LLP in New York who provided the tax structure and planning advice for hedge fund manager David Tepper’s acquisition of the Carolina Panthers, estimates the IRS rules could spur potential bidders to offer at least tens of millions of dollars less.

Gee, what a surprise. Higher tax burdens lower the value of income-producing assets.

Something to keep in mind next them there’s a debate on whether we should be double-taxing dividends and capital gains.

Or the death tax.

Let’s close with a report from Bloomberg about some new research about the impact of taxes on team performance.

The 2017 law could put teams in states with high personal income tax rates at a disadvantage when negotiating with free agents thanks to new limits on deductions, including for state and local taxes, according to tax economist Matthias Petutschnig of the Vienna University of Economics and Business. Petutschnig’s research into team performance over more than two decades shows that National Football League franchises based in high-tax states lost more games on average during the regular season compared to teams in low or no-tax states. That’s because of the NFL’s salary cap for teams, according to Petutschnig; if they have to give certain players more money to compensate for higher taxes, it reduces how much they pay other players and lowers the team’s overall talent level. “The new tax law exacerbates my findings and makes it harder for high-tax teams to put together a high-quality roster,” Petutschnig said.

Here’s a chart from the article.

And here are more details.

A player for the Miami Dolphins or Houston Texans, where no state income taxes are levied, “was always going to come out a whole lot better than somebody playing in New York,” said Jerome Glickman, a director at accounting firm Friedman LLP who works with professional athletes. “Now, it’s worse.” …a free agent considering a California team compared to a team in Texas or Florida would need to make 10 percent to 12 percent more to compensate for his state tax bill, said NFL agent Joe Linta… the Raiders — who will eventually move to Las Vegas in no-tax Nevada — have often made the case that unequal tax rates create an uneven playing field. Quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo’s five-year $137.5 million contract with the San Francisco 49ers will mean an additional $3 million tax bill under the new tax law… Garoppolo would have saved $2 million in taxes under the new code had he instead signed with the Denver Broncos in lower-tax Colorado.

By the way, other scholars have reached similar conclusions, so Professor Petutschnig’s research should be viewed as yet another addition to the powerful body of evidence about the harmful effect of punitive tax policy.

P.S. I think nations have the right to tax income earned inside their borders, so I’m not theoretically opposed to the U.K. taxing athletes who earn income on British soil. But I don’t favor punitive rates. And I don’t think the IRS should add injury to injury by then taxing the same income. That lesson even applies to royalty.

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