Higher Tax Rates ==> Less Innovation ==> Less Prosperity

If the goal is higher living standards, then higher levels of productivity are necessary. And that requires entrepreneurship and innovation.

But bad tax policy can be an obstacle to the economic choices that create a better future.

I’ve already shared lots of research showing how punitive tax rates undermine growth, but it never hurts to add to the collection.

Let’s look at a new study by Ufuk Akcigit, John Grigsby, Tom Nicholas, and Stefanie Stantcheva. Here’s the issue they investigated.

…do taxes affect innovation? If innovation is the result of intentional effort and taxes reduce the expected net return from it, the answer to this question should be yes. Yet, when we think of path-breaking superstar inventors from history…we often imagine hard-working and driven scientists, who ignore financial incentives and merely seek intellectual achievement. More generally, if taxes affect the amount of innovation, do they also affect the quality of the innovations produced? Do they affect where inventors decide to locate and what firms they work for? …In this paper, we…provide new evidence on the effects of taxation on innovation. Our goal is to systematically analyze the effects of both personal and corporate income taxation on inventors as well as on firms that do R&D over the 20th century.

To perform their analysis, the economists gathered some very interesting data on the evolution of tax policy at the state level. Such as when personal income taxes were adopted.

By the way, I may have discovered an error. They show Connecticut’s income tax being imposed in 1969, but my understanding is that the tax was first levied less than 30 years ago.

In any event, the authors also show how, over time, states have taxed upper-income households.

They look at 20th-century data. If you want more up-to-date numbers, you can click here.

But let’s not digress. Here are some of the findings from the study.

We use OLS to study the baseline relationship between taxes and innovation, exploiting within-state tax changes over time, our instrumental variable approach and the border county design. On the personal income tax side, we consider average and marginal tax rates, both for the median income level and for top earners. Our corporate tax measure is the top corporate tax rate. We find that personal and corporate income taxes have significant effects at the state level on patents, citations (which are a well-established marker of the quality of patents), inventors and “superstar” inventors in the state, and the share of patents produced by firms as opposed to individuals. The implied elasticities of patents, inventors, and citations at the macro level are between 2 and 3.4 for personal income taxes and between 2.5 and 3.5 for the corporate tax. We show that these effects cannot be fully accounted for by inventors moving across state lines and therefore do not merely reflect “zero-sum” business-stealing of one state from other states.

Here are further details about the statewide impact of tax policy.

A one percentage point increase in either the median or top marginal tax rate is associated with approximately a 4% decline in patents, citations, and inventors, and a close to 5% decline in the number of superstar inventors in the state. The effects of average personal tax rates are even larger. A one percentage increase in the average tax rate at the 90th income percentile is associated with a roughly 6% decline in patents, citations, and inventors and an 8% decline in superstar inventors. For the average tax rate at the median income level, the effects are closer to 10% for patents, citations, and inventors, and 15% for superstar inventors.

At the risk of understatement, that’s clear evidence that class-warfare policy has a negative effect.

The study also looked at several case studies of how states performed after significant tax changes.

…case studies provide particularly clear visual evidence of a strong negative relationship between taxes and innovation. When combined with the macro state-level regressions, the instrumental variable approach and the border county analysis, the results overall bolster the conclusion that taxes were significantly negatively related to innovation outcomes at the state level.

Here’s the example of Delaware.

For what it’s worth, we have powerful 21st-century examples of the consequences of bad tax policy. Just think New Jersey, California, and Illinois.

But I’m digressing again.

Back to the study, were we find that the authors also look at how tax policy affects the decisions of people and companies.

We then turn to the micro-level, i.e., individual firms and inventors. …we find that taxes have significant negative effects on the quantity and quality (as measured by citations) of patents produced by inventors, including on the likelihood of producing a highly successful patent (which gathers many citations). At the individual inventor level, the elasticity of patents to the personal income tax is 0.6-0.7, and the elasticity of citations is 0.8-0.9. …we show that individual inventors are negatively affected by the corporate tax rate, but much less so than by personal income taxes. …We find that inventors are significantly less likely to locate in states with higher taxes. The elasticity to the net-of-tax rate of the number of inventors residing in a state is 0.11 for inventors who are from that state and 1.23 for inventors not from that state. Inventors who work for companies are particularly elastic to taxes.

And here are additional details about the micro findings.

…patenting is significantly negatively affected by personal income taxes. A one percentage point higher tax rate at the individual level decreases the likelihood of having a patent in the next 3 years by 0.63 percentage points. Similarly, the likelihood of having high quality patents with more than 10 citations decreases by 0.6 percentage points for every percentage point increase in the personal tax rate. …We find that a one percentage point increase in the personal tax rate leads to a 1.1 percent decline in the number of patents and a 1.4-1.7 percent decline in the number of citations, conditional on having any. …the likelihood of having a corporate patent also reacts very negatively to the personal tax rate… A one percentage point decrease in the corporate tax rate increases patents by 4% and citations by around 3.5%. The IV results are of similar magnitudes, but again even stronger. According to the IV specification, a one percentage point decrease in the corporate tax rate increases patents by 6% and citations by 5%.

Here are some of the conclusions from the study.

Taxation – in the form of both personal income taxes and corporate income taxes – matters for innovation along the intensive and extensive margins, and both at the micro and macro levels. Taxes affect the amount of innovation, the quality of innovation, and the location of inventive activity. The effects are economically large especially at the macro state-level, where cross-state spillovers and extensive margin location and entry decisions compound the micro, individual-level elasticities. …while our analysis focuses on the relationship between taxation and innovation, our data and approach have much broader implications. We find that taxes have important effects on intensive and extensive margin decisions, on the mobility of people and where inventors and firms choose to locate.

In other words, the bottom line is that tax rates should be as low as possible to produce as much prosperity as possible.

P.S. If you check the postscript of this column, you’ll see that there is also data showing how inventors respond to international tax policy. And there’s similar data for top-level entrepreneurs.

Trump and Trade: Evolving from Bluster to Danger

I wrote a few days ago about Obama’s weak track record on the economy and included the relevant part of a Fox Business interview.

In that same interview, I also talked about Trump’s performance. As you might expect, I said nice things about tax reform and regulatory relief, but was rather alarmist about his protectionism.

The bottom line is that Trump simply doesn’t understand trade. He thinks a trade deficit is bad, when it’s really just the flip side of a capital surplus.

Investor’s Business Daily opines on the inanity of protectionist spats.

In the tit-for-tat trade war between the U.S. and China, pain is a major theme. The idea is to ratchet up the pain, through tariffs and other punishments, until one side says “uncle.” But what if no one says “uncle”? …President Trump doubled down, proposing $100 billion in added tariffs on Chinese goods, in addition to the $50 billion or so already imposed. …China, meanwhile, on Friday withdrew from trade talks and promised to “fight back with a major response,” calling Friday’s U.S. move “arrogant.” …As the rhetoric heats up, neither side feels it can back down. …China slapped tariffs on products made in states that voted heavily for Trump, including such products as soybeans, SUVs, and small commercial jet planes. …trade disputes and tariffs have a history of becoming nasty economic downturns. …the Smoot-Hawley tariffs…caused a massive contraction in global trade and output in the late 1920s and led to the Great Depression. …in 1971, President Nixon devalued the dollar, imposed a 10% “surtax” on all imports, and the 1970s stagflation began. …trade wars are hardly ever beneficial. So maybe it’s time for both countries to cool their rhetoric, step back, and return to talking. Before we add to the damage and end up with another global economic meltdown.

Amen, especially about the foolishness of copying one of the policies that contributed to the Great Depression.

In a column for the Wall Street Journal, Tunku Varadarajan shares some observations by Douglas Irwin, a prominent trade economist.

Mr. Trump may be the first openly protectionist president since Hoover, but what Mr. Irwin finds most frustrating about him is that “he never really defines what a ‘better’ trade deal is. His judgment of trade comes down to the trade balance, which he uses as a sort of ledger, as a businessman would, rather than think more broadly about the national economic impact of trade.” It is impossible for every country to run a trade surplus, but “Trump thinks about trade in these zero-sum terms, about whether there’s profits or losses, and he views exports as good and imports as bad.” …He fails to see that in international trade, imbalances “aren’t an indication that one country is beating another, or that one is ‘winning’ and the other’s ‘losing.’ ” Mr. Trump’s rhetoric and vocabulary are “not the way economists think about trade at all.”

There are two things from the column that merit extra attention.

First, manufacturing employment primarily has declined because of productivity improvements.

The U.S. has lost steel jobs, but Mr. Irwin says that’s because the domestic industry has become more productive. “In 1980, it used to take 10 worker-hours to produce a ton of steel. Today, it takes less than two worker-hours. So even though we’re producing the same amount of steel, or even more, we use many, many fewer workers to produce that steel.”

Second, Trump has botched the opportunity to create an alliance against China.

The U.S., Mr. Irwin says, needs strong allies in Europe and Asia to “counter China when it violates the letter or spirit of its World Trade Organization commitments, and the Trump administration has done little to cultivate such allies. Instead, it seems bent on alienating them.”

Moving beyond theory and history, Trump’s protectionism is a job killer.

Here are some excerpts from a Bloomberg report about steel tariffs.

Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said… “The new tariffs are likely to lead to a net loss in U.S. employment, at least in the short to medium run,” Mary Amiti, Sebastian Heise, and Noah Kwicklis wrote in a blog post… “given the history of protecting industries with import tariffs, we can conclude that the 25 percent steel tariff is likely to cost more jobs than it saves.” …the Fed’s Beige Book…cited one unnamed company in the Boston Fed’s region as saying that “these tariffs are now killing high-paying American manufacturing jobs and businesses.” …the effects of similar tariffs imposed by President George W. Bush in 2002 led to the loss of 200,000 jobs across the U.S. labor market. That number was bigger than the total headcount of U.S. steel producers at the time.

In other words, protectionism is bad for America, even if other countries don’t retaliate (which they often do, further exacerbating the damage of bad policy).

In the New York Times, Veronique de Rugy’s column offers some essential insights about why the trade deficit doesn’t matter.

In 1776, Adam Smith observed that nothing “can be more absurd than this whole doctrine of the balance of trade.” Sadly, almost 250 years later, the president — along with his economic adviser Peter Navarro and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross — has elevated this economic fallacy into a pretext for protectionism. Fueling this bipartisan hysteria is the widespread failure to understand that United States trade deficits generally add capital to our economy — more factories, more R & D or more machines. …The notion that trade deficits are always bad for the economy is…simply wrong. …we mustn’t forget that the American dollars we spend on imports eventually return to America, either by foreigners purchasing American exports or making investments. Protectionists like Mr. Trump always complain about the United States’ trade deficit for goods but mention neither the surplus of foreign investment capital that we get nor our trade surplus in services. …Recessions, reduced foreign investment in the United States and a weak dollar are the most effective ways to reduce the trade deficit. I doubt any of us would enjoy these remedies.

Trump isn’t merely wrong on the basic economics of trade. He also doesn’t even understand specific examples. Consider his recent tweets about using tariffs to force Ford to build cars in the United States.

A report in the Detroit Free Press explains why that is nonsense.

Auto analysts groaned on Sunday in response to tweets sent by President Trump that touted his tariffs on Chinese imports and his claim that the trade war would inspire Ford Motor Co. to build its Ford Active crossover in the U.S. rather than overseas. …Jon Gabrielsen, a market economist who advises automakers and auto suppliers, said, “This is further evidence that neither the president nor his trade representatives have any clue of the complexities of global supply chains.”

And Trump’s protectionism will hurt exports by American car companies.

Dziczek said. “China lowered the tariff rate from 25 percent to 15 percent for most-favored nation status — which is offered to World Trade Organization members — but raised it to 40 percent for the U.S. in retaliation to the tariffs we put on Chinese goods.”

If that’s “winning,” I hate to see the definition of losing.

We’ll round out the editorial commentary with Dan Griswold’s piece in the Los Angeles Times.

The U.S.-China trade war escalated again…both sides have a lot — almost exactly the same amount — to lose from commercial warfare. …A recent World Bank study confirms that neither side will win a protracted trade war. At the current level of tariff retaliation, the World Bank estimates that each country will suffer a drop in annual exports of about $40 billion. If retaliation escalates to include all two-way trade in goods and services, Chinese exports to the United States would fall by $190 billion and U.S. exports to China by $166 billion. …a worst-case scenario would result in a $426-billion loss to the Chinese economy and a $313-billion loss to the U.S. economy. The biggest losers in the United States will be agriculture, chemicals and transport equipment. It will be cold comfort to Americans who lose their jobs and their businesses that our loss is somewhat smaller than what our government inflicts on China.

Lots of material today, so if you made it this far, your reward is this amusing remake of the famous Ben Stein clip from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

If you want a more substantive video on why trade barriers are bad, I included Don Boudreaux’s excellent presentation at the end of this column.

P.S. If trade policy continues to move in the wrong direction, I suspect Trump’s final “grade point average” on economic policy might be similar to Obama’s final report card.

Laughing at the Evil of Communism

It’s time to add to my collection of Socialism/Communism Humor.

I wrote a serious column a few days ago about Colin Kaepernick and his new Nike ad about protesting. Well, that’s become a meme, including this appearance by Joseph Stalin.

I guess he would argue that you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.

This next example is very simplistic, but it somehow got a chuckle from me.

This cartoon strip is clever. I’m assuming the kid is the same one from this classroom.

And here’s some biting sarcasm from Libertarian Reddit.

And here’s a reappearance of the real-communism-hasn’t-been-tried excuse.

Sticking with that theme, here’s another example. Funny how anything labeled communism always fails, but some sinister fools rationalize how it can work next time.

Next, we have a list of fantasy authors, though the President of the European Commission might disagree.

Last but not least, we have my favorite from today’s collection.

Yuri Gagarin was a hero for the Soviets and he probably was loyal to the regime, but I like this reinterpretation of his motives.

In any event, flying into space beats crawling under barbed wire.

P.S. While it’s cathartic to mock communism, let’s never forget that this statist ideology was truly horrible in practice.

Should We Upgrade Our Assessment of Obama’s Economic Record?

President Trump and former President Obama are arguing over who deserves credit for the economy’s performance. Given the less-than-ideal numbers for labor force participation, I’m not convinced we should be celebrating.

Regardless, here’s a quick assessment of whether Obama deserves praise, taken from yesterday’s interview with Neil Cavuto.

To elaborate, I generally don’t blame presidents if there’s a downturn as they take office. In many cases, such a downturn is baked in the cake thanks to bad monetary policy before they ever took office.

But I do hold them at least somewhat accountable for the economic performance after the recession. More specifically, is there strong growth for a year or two, allowing the economy recover the lost output? And does the economy then stabilize at the long-run trend of 3 percent growth (as illustrated by this chart showing U.S. growth from 1870-2008).

Remember, there is no substitute for long-run growth if the goal is higher living standards.

Yet we didn’t get that growth under Obama. We didn’t get a period of above-average growth, which meant we never recovered the lost output from the recession. We never even got back to the historical trendline.

Here’s a chart from Business Insider that reviews what has happened over the past 10 years. As you can see, we haven’t come close to our potential GDP. This is why Obama deserves bad marks.

But this doesn’t mean Trump deserves good marks.

First of all, it’s far too early to give a final grade. And, for what it’s worth, his interim grade is not that great. Good policy on taxes and red tape is being offset by bad policy on spending and trade.

Let me also say something semi-positive about the Obama economy. We may not have enjoyed strong growth, but the economy continued to expand. And if the economists who argue that there are structural reasons causing permanently lower potential growth are correct, maybe Obama did okay (my view is that “secular stagnation” is driven mostly by bad policy choices, so I’m not overly sympathetic to this hypothesis).

Regardless, Obama largely didn’t do anything destructive after his first two years (when we got mistakes such as the fake stimulus, Obamacare, and Dodd-Frank). Indeed, we even got some good policy later in Obama’s tenure, though the overall effect of his policies was negative.

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More Evidence that Value-Added Taxes Are Money Machines to Finance Bigger Government

The value-added tax was first imposed in Europe starting about 50 years ago. Politicians in nations like France approve of this tax because it is generally hidden, so it is relatively easy to periodically raise the rate.

And that’s the reason I am vociferously opposed to the VAT. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the burden of government spending dramatically increased in Europe once politicians got their hands on a new source of revenue.

Simply stated, I don’t want that to happen in America.

Now I have new evidence to support that position.

We’ll start by crossing the Pacific to see what’s happening in Japan, as reported by Reuters.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe vowed to proceed with next year’s scheduled sales tax hike “by all means”… Abe said his ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) won last year’s lower house election with a pledge to use proceeds from the sales tax increase to make Japan’s social welfare system more sustainable. …his plan to raise the tax to 10 percent from 8 percent in October next year. Abe twice postponed the tax hike after an increase to 8 percent from 5 percent in 2014 tipped Japan into recession.

I give Prime Minister Abe credit for honesty. He openly admits that he wants more revenue to finance even bigger government.

But that doesn’t make it a good idea. Japan has been experimenting with bigger government for the past 25-plus years and it hasn’t led to good results. The VAT was just 3 percent in 1997 and the Prime Minster now wants it to be three times higher.

All of which is sad since Japan used to be one of the world’s most market-oriented nations.

You also won’t be surprised to learn that the OECD is being a cheerleader for a higher VAT in Japan.

Speaking of which, let’s look at what a new OECD report says about value-added taxes.

VAT revenues have reached historically high levels in most countries… Between 2008 and 2015, the OECD average standard VAT rate increased by 1.5 percentage points, from 17.6% to a record level of 19.2%, accelerating a longer term rise in standard VAT rates… VAT rates were raised at least once in 23 countries between 2008 and 2018, and 12 countries now have a standard rate of at least 22%, against only six in 2008… Raising standard VAT rates was a common strategy for countries…as increasing VAT rates provides immediate revenue.

And here’s a chart from the study that tells you everything you need to know about how politicians behave once they have a new source of tax revenue.

Incidentally, there’s another part of the report that should be highlighted.

For all intents and purposes, the OECD admits that higher taxes are bad for growth and that class-warfare taxes are the most damaging method of taxation.

…increasing VAT rates…has generally been found to be less detrimental to economic growth than raising direct taxes.

What makes this excerpt amusing (at least to me) is that the bureaucrats obviously want readers to conclude that higher VAT burdens are okay. But by writing “less detrimental to growth,” they are admitting that all tax increases undermine prosperity and that “raising direct taxes” (i.e., levies that target the rich such as personal income tax) is the worst way to generate revenue.

Which is what I’ve been pointing out!

Last but not least, I’ll recycle my video explaining why a VAT would be very bad news for the United States.

Everything that has happened since that video was released in 2009 underscores why it would be incredibly misguided to give Washington a big new source of tax revenue. And that’s true even if the people pushing a VAT have their hearts in the right place.

The only exception to my anti-VAT rigidity is if the 16th Amendment is repealed, and then replaced by something that unambiguously ensures that the income tax is permanently abolished. A nice goal, but I’m not holding my breath.

P.S. One of America’s most statist presidents, Richard Nixon, wanted a VAT. That’s a good reason for the rest of us to be opposed.

Identifying (and Preventing) Future Greek-Style Fiscal Collapses

Way back in early 2011, I wrote about the likelihood of various nations suffering a Greek-style meltdown. After speculating on the importance of debt burdens and interest payments, I concluded that

…which nation will be the next domino to fall? …Some people think total government debt is the key variable…that’s not necessarily a good rule of thumb. …Japan’s debt is nearly 200 percent of GDP, yet Japanese debt is considered very safe… The moral of the story is that there is no magic point where deficit spending leads to a fiscal crisis, but we do know that it is a bad idea for governments to engage in reckless spending over a long period of time. That’s a recipe for stifling taxes and large deficits. And when investors see the resulting combination of sluggish growth and rising debt, eventually they will run out of patience.

As I noted earlier this year, it’s not easy to predict the point at which “investors no longer trust that they will receive payments on government bonds.”

Though that would be useful information, which is why a new study from the International Monetary Fund could be very helpful. The researchers look at how to measure fiscal crisis.

The literature on fiscal crises and on early warning indicators is limited, although it has expanded in recent years. Most of the past literature focused on sovereign external debt defaults alone …the canonical fiscal crisis is a debt crisis, when the government is unable to service the interest and or principle as scheduled. … It is important to note, however, that fiscal crises may not necessarily be associated with external debt defaults. They can be associated with other forms of expropriation, including domestic arrears and high inflation that erodes the value of some types of debt. …a fiscal crisis is identified when one or more of the following distinct criteria are satisfied: …Credit events associated with sovereign debt (e.g., outright defaults and restructuring). …Recourse to large-scale IMF financial support. …Implicit domestic public default (e.g., via high inflation rates). …Loss of market confidence in the sovereign.

The goal is to figure out the conditions that precipitate problems.

…The objective of this paper is to better understand the structural weaknesses that make countries prone to entering a fiscal crisis. …We use two of the more common approaches to build early warning systems (EWS) for fiscal crises: the signal approach and logit model. …event studies indicate that a fiscal crisis tends to be preceded by loose fiscal policy (Figure 3.1). In the run-up to a crisis, there is robust real expenditure growth.

Some of the obvious variables, as noted above and also in Figure 3.1 (the dashed vertical line is the year a crisis occurs), are whether there’s a rising burden of government spending and whether the economy is growing.

For readers who like wonky material, the authors explain the two approaches they use.

In order to construct early warning systems for fiscal crises, we adopt two alternative approaches that have been used in the literature. We first use the signal approach, followed by multivariate logit models. …The signals approach involves monitoring the developments of economic variables that tend to behave differently prior to a crisis. Once they cross a specific threshold this gives a warning signal for a possible fiscal crisis in the next 1-2 years. …Logit model…early warning systems…draw on standard panel regression…with a binary dependent variable equal to one when a crisis begins (or when there is a crisis). …The main advantage of this approach is that it allows testing for the statistical significance of the different leading indicators and takes into account their correlation.

Then they crunch a bunch of numbers.

Here’s what they find using the signal approach.

…current account deficit, degree of openness, use of central bank credit to finance the deficit, size of the fiscal (overall or primary) deficit and pace of expansion in public expenditures—all these increase the probability of a future crisis.

And here’s what they conclude using the logit approach.

The results, by and large, highlight similar leading indicators as the signals approach… The probability of entering a crisis increases with growing macroeconomic imbalances due to large output gaps and deteriorating external imbalances. The results also indicate a role for fiscal policy, via public expenditures growth. … high expenditure growth could contribute to a deterioration in the current account and a large output gap, making the fiscal position vulnerable to changes in the economic cycle.

The bottom line is that both approaches yield very similar conclusions.

Our results show that there is a small set of robust leading indicators (both fiscal and non-fiscal) that help assess the probability of a fiscal crisis. This is especially the case for advanced and emerging markets. For these countries, we find that domestic imbalances (large output or credit gaps), external imbalances (current account deficit), and rising public expenditures increase the probability of a crisis. …Our results suggest that indeed fiscal variables matter. Strong expenditure growth and financing pressures (e.g., need for central bank financing) can help predict crises.

Some of this data is reflected in Figure 5.2.

And here’s the bottom line, starting with the claim that governments are being semi-responsible because we don’t actually see many fiscal crises.

…we find that some types of vulnerabilities are consistently relevant to explain fiscal crises. This raises the question why governments do not act as they see signals. In large measure they do, as crises among advanced economies are rare. Still, the occurrence of crises may reflect overly optimistic projections about the future… Our results show that a relatively small set of robust leading indicators can help assess the probability of a fiscal crisis in advanced and emerging markets with high accuracy. …countries can reduce the frequency of fiscal crises by adopting prudent policies and strengthening risk management. Fiscal crises are more likely when economies build domestic and external imbalances. This calls for avoiding excessively loose polices when domestic growth is above average. For fiscal policy, this means avoiding procyclical increases in expenditures.

The key takeaway is that spending restraint is a very important tool for avoiding a fiscal crisis.

Yes, a few other factors also are important (central bankers should avoid irresponsible monetary policy, for instance), but some of these are outside the direct control of politicians.

Which is why this new research underscores the importance of some sort of spending cap, preferably enshrined in a jurisdiction’s constitution like in Hong Kong and Switzerland.

P.S. While there haven’t been many fiscal crises in developed nations, that may change thanks to very unfavorable demographics and poorly designed entitlement programs.

P.P.S. I hope the political decision makers at the IMF read this study (as well as prior IMF studies on the efficacy of spending caps) and no longer will agitate for tax increases on nations that get into fiscal trouble.

Some Unsolicited Advice for Colin Kaepernick and the NFL Players

I’m a fan of college football rather than the NFL, so I haven’t paid much attention to the controversy over players protesting against police misbehavior during the national anthem.

However, the topic is now trending. The 2018 season about to start and Colin Kaepernick is being featured in a new ad campaign for Nike, so I figure why not insert myself into the discussion.

The bottom line is that Kaepernick and the other players have identified a very real and very important issue.

I’ve written on many occasions about the need for better policing.

Though I don’t think the problem is systemic racism or pervasive brutality.

Some of that exists, of course, but I assume the vast majority of cops want to do a good job and treat people fairly (except when giving me traffic tickets).

The real problem is that politicians have enacted far too many laws, many of which don’t make sense or don’t have any victims, and then they expect the police to use those laws to generate more revenue.

This is a recipe for more Eric Garner tragedies.

That being said, NFL players are not going to win the hearts of middle America by actions that can be portrayed as being anti-flag, anti-police, anti-military, and/or anti-country. Heck, they’re playing into Trump’s hands with that approach.

The players would have much more success (both in terms of the issue and with respect to their own popularity) if they portrayed their cause as one that affirms and extends American ideals.

NFL players should come up with some inclusive pro-America slogan about “The Constitution Protects Everyone” or “The Principles of the Founding Fathers Apply to All Americans.” And then they should be ostentatiously patriotic (in the proper sense), standing for the national anthem, with one hand over their hearts and one hand holding both an American flag and some sort or symbol of their campaign.

Trump would have a hard time attacking that kind of approach.

More important, I’m guessing a lot of Americans who heretofore have been rejecting the message of Kaepernick, et al, may start paying attention. And that would be the ideal outcome. After all, the goal should be to change policy, not generate noise and controversy.

For all intents and purposes, I’m suggesting the football players adopt the strategy Martin Luther King used when fighting Jim Crow laws. Dr. King explained that equality of law was an American principle. He embraced the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, even though slavery and other sins meant America was grossly imperfect at that point.

But he wanted an inclusive message. I hope that today’s NFL players copy that approach. Assuming, of course, they actually want better policing and a better America.

P.S. Until and unless there’s a better strategy, Nike will probably suffer the same adverse consequences as Dick’s, which lost customers after kowtowing to the anti-gun crowd. Irritating a big chunk of the buying public is not a wise idea.

P.P.S. I believe in a tough-on-crime approach, but only if laws are just.

P.P.P.S. If you want some cop-related humor, click here, here, and here.