(Even Better) State Tax Rankings

There’s been great progress in recent years with regards to state tax policy.

When I put together my first ranking back in 2018, there were 9 states with flat taxes and and 3 states with low-rate graduated tax systems.

Today, there are 11 (soon to be 13) states with flat taxes and 6 states with low-rate graduated systems.

But one thing has not changed.

The ideal state tax policy is to have no income tax and the 9 states in that category have not changed. Indeed, things may even be moving in the wrong direction since politicians in the state of Washington recently imposed a capital gains tax and they hope that the state’s top court somehow will decide it is constitutional.

But there’s now a glimmer of hope that a few states will jettison their income taxes.

We’ll start with an editorial in the Wall Street Journal about tax reform in North Dakota, where the state is about to join the flat tax club and might even phase out the income tax altogether.

The state has five brackets that range from 1.1% to 2.9%. That’s low compared with the 9.85% top rate in big-city Minnesota, but South Dakota doesn’t tax income at all. In the competition to be the best Dakota, this matters… The bill “would put us on a path toward eventually zeroing out our individual income tax,” Mr. Burgum told the House finance committee in January. “We compete for energy workers. Alaska, Texas and Wyoming are three of those eight states that already have zero income tax, and of course our neighbor right next to us in South Dakota.” …Zeroing out North Dakota’s income tax could finally be accomplished via a third bill, also passed by the state House. This plan would automatically cut income taxes by 0.5 percentage point if the state’s revenue targets are exceeded. If the rate starts at 1.5%, as the Governor hopes, the best case scenario is that the income tax could disappear entirely by 2028.

Iowa already has made great progress on tax policy, but may go even further according to this story in the Des Moines Register.

Iowa senators are advancing a bill that would eventually eliminate the state’s income tax. …Sen. Dan Dawson..said economic data since last year’s tax cuts show the state can afford to be even more aggressive. And, he said, Iowa needs to keep cutting taxes to compete with other states that are also lowering their own rates. …[Governor] Reynolds has said she’d like to eliminate the income tax by the end of her current term in office, which would be 2027. …”My goal is to get to zero individual income tax rate by the end of this second term,” she said. …Senate Study Bill 1126 would lower Iowa’s income tax rate to 3.55% in 2026, 2.95% in 2027 and 2.5% in 2028. Beginning in 2030, the bill would transform Iowa’s taxpayer relief fund into an “individual income tax elimination fund” and use the money in the fund to eventually lower the individual income tax rate further until it is eliminated entirely.

There’s also interest in Mississippi, as reported by Michael Goldberg for the Associated Press.

Gov. Tate Reeves promised to push for a full elimination of the state’s income tax during the 2023 legislative session. The move would make Mississippi the 10th state with no income tax. …Mississippi’s Republican-controlled legislature passed legislation in 2022 that will eliminate the state’s 4% income tax bracket starting in 2023. In the following three years, the 5% bracket will be reduced to 4%. …Mississippi’s population has dwindled in the past decade, even as other Sun Belt states are bustling with new residents. Tax-cut proposals are a direct effort to compete with states that don’t tax earnings, including Texas, Florida and Tennessee. “You don’t have to be a geography expert to look at a map and recognize that we have Texas to our west, Florida to our east and Tennessee to the north,” Reeves said. “All three of those states have no income tax, and therefore all three of those states have a competitive advantage when we are recruiting for both businesses and individual talent.”

Last but not least, the Democratic Governor of Colorado wants to abolish his state’s flat tax. Here are some details from a report by Ben Murrey in National Review.

…during his state of the state address last month, Governor Jared Polis suggested using TABOR refunds to decrease the state’s income-tax rate. The address marked the first time Polis had explicitly proposed using TABOR-refund dollars — which come out of state revenue surpluses — to lower the income-tax rate as part of his push to eliminate the state’s income tax altogether. …Discussing tax reform during his address, Polis said, “I was proud to have supported two successful income-tax cuts at the ballot and since I took office our income-tax rate has gone from 4.63 percent to 4.44 percent, helping produce strong economic growth and low unemployment.” …“It’s no secret that I, and most economists, despise the income tax,” Polis added. “I don’t expect that we can fully eliminate the income tax by our 150th anniversary [in 2026], but let’s continue to make progress.” …Polis’s willingness to stand by his support of TABOR refunds and light a path forward for his zero-income-tax agenda in the face of opposition from his own party is laudable.

By the way, “TABOR” refers to the Taxpayer Bill of Rights, which is a spending cap that requires automatic refunds to taxpayers when tax revenues increase faster than inflation plus population.

Leftists in Colorado fantasize about being able to spend those extra revenues, so kudos to Gov. Polis for instead wanting to use them to gradually phase out the income tax.

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Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, Which Nation Punishes Success Most of All?

Marginal tax rates (how much you are taxed for earning additional money) have a big impact on incentives to engage in productive activity such as work, saving, investment, and entrepreneurship.

This is why governments should keep tax rates at modest levels.

But as you can see from this map from the Tax Foundation, European governments generally cannot resist the temptation to impose onerous top tax rates on investors, entrepreneurs, business owners, and other successful taxpayers.

Congratulations to Hungary for having the lowest rate, followed by Estonia, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia.

And “congratulations” to Denmark for having the highest top tax rate, followed by France, Austria, and Spain.

At this point, a few caveats are necessary. A nation’s top income tax rate is important, but it’s not the only thing that matters for tax policy.

• It’s also important to look at social insurance (payroll) taxes, particularly if they apply to all income.
• It’s also important to look at the level of “double taxation” on income that is saved and invested.
• It’s also important to look at VATs, which increase the wedge between pre-tax income and post-tax consumption.

Needless to say, other economic policies also matter. A nation might have a good tax system but very dirigiste policies in other areas. Or vice-versa.

For instance, even though Hungary has the lowest top tax rate on personal income and Denmark has the highest, there’s actually more overall economic liberty in Denmark.

Some readers may be wondering how the United States compares to the European nations shown in the above map.

The good news (relatively speaking) is that the top tax rate in the United States is 42.9 percent, so that’s lower than the average in Europe.

The bad news is that the US would have the highest tax rate if Biden’s budget was approved.

However, the top income tax rate in the United States can vary substantially depending on state.

A resident of New York or California, for instance, will face a much higher top tax rate than a resident of a zero-income-tax state such as Texas or Florida.

The same thing is even more true in Switzerland, where top tax rates vary substantially.

A successful taxpayer in Zug pays a top tax rate of 22.22 percent, less than half as much as a similar taxpayer in Geneva.

I’ll close by noting that this map is another example of the advantages of genuine federalism.

When the central government is small and most government takes place at the state and local level (or, in the case of Switzerland, at the cantonal and municipal level), there is more diversity, choice, and jurisdictional competition.

That type of federalism still exists in Switzerland, but unfortunately is eroding in the United States.

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More Evidence of State Tax Progress

It usually is not fun writing about public policy, given my libertarian sentiments.

After all, politicians have a natural tendency to expand their powers and diminish our liberties.

So where there is occasional good news, I like to relish the moment.

For instance, I’ve been getting immense enjoyment from the progress on school choice over the past couple of years. Particularly the enactment of state-wide choice programs in West Virginia, Arizona, Iowa, and Utah.

Another area were we’ve seen big progress is state tax rates. I’ve also written about that topic, showing earlier this month how average top personal income tax rates have declined in recent years.

Today, let’s let a couple of maps tell the same story.

Here’s the Tax Foundation’s new map showing top personal tax rates for 2023. At the risk of stating the obvious, it’s best to be grey. But if you’re not grey, it’s good to be a lighter color and bad to be a darker color.

Now compare that map to the 2021 version. You’ll easily notice more dark-colored states.

But since the color schemes for the maps are not exactly the same, the best thing to compare numbers for specific states.

You’ll see some states have made huge progress, most notably Arizona and Iowa, but also incremental progress in most states.

By contrast, only a few states have moved in the wrong direction, most notably Massachusetts (thanks to a terrible referendum last November) and New York.

As you might expect, given the chance to “vote with their feet,” people and businesses are moving from high-tax states to low-tax states.

Yet that’s not stopping politicians in some high-tax states from agitating to push policy even further in the wrong direction. A very strange form of slow-motion economic suicide.

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The Most Uplifting Chart (so far) of 2023

I wrote in both 2021 and 2022 about states enacting lower tax rates.

And that includes several states (Iowa, Idaho, Arizona) adopting flat taxes.

Today, let’s quantify these developments. Our friends at the Tax Foundation just published a chart showing how top tax rates at the state level have declined since 2010.*

The decline is not enormous, but it’s encouraging to see a downward trend (particularly if the alternative is an upward trend!).

Will we see further progress this year? Yes, notwithstanding last November’s terrible ballot initiative in Massachusetts, there are already some pre-approved reductions in tax rates. So the average will fall in 2023 and 2024.

After that, my fingers will be crossed.

But I am confident that we will see continued migration from high-tax states to low-tax states. And this will happen for two reasons.

• First, some people will move because they are tired to paying high tax rates, especially since they live in states that do a rotten job of providing basic services (high tax burdens generally get diverted to bureaucrat salaries and pensions).
• Second, other people might not earn enough to directly care about high tax rates, but they nonetheless will move because low-tax states create more jobs and offer greater opportunities for economic advancement.

Let’s close with some speculation about what might happen in the future.

I’m guessing that folks on the left don’t like this shift to lower tax rates at the state level, much as they didn’t like the global shift to lower tax rates after Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher instigated a virtuous cycle of tax competition about 40 years ago.

In the case of global tax competition, high-tax nations have been using the OECD as a vehicle to curtail the shift to better tax policy. The OECD pressured so-called tax havens with financial protectionism and is now pressing governments to increase corporate tax burdens.

Unsurprisingly, global tax rates are now creeping upwards.

Is it possible that there will be similar efforts inside the United States?

I hope not. I can’t imagine sensible states like Texas and Florida agreeing to any sort of state tax cartel.

And I also don’t think there’s any immediate threat of Congress imposing a Washington-created cartel.

But it doesn’t hurt to be vigilant. Remember, the great thing about tax competition is that it pressures politicians to do the right thing when they generally would prefer to do the wrong thing.

*The “mean” is the average of all 50 states and the “median” is the rate in the state that is lower than half the states and higher in half the states.

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The Correct Rate for a State Income Tax Is Zero

Looking at reforms at the state level, the past two years have produced very good news on education policy and tax policy.

Regarding the latter, many states have lowered tax rates and several of them have junked so-called progressive tax systems and replaced them with simple and fair flat taxes.

But I’m greedy for even bigger improvements.

I want to see some states move not just to Column 2 in my ranking of state tax policy. I want them to be in Column 1.

And that means they need to get rid of income taxes.

The good news is that some states are having that discussion.

Here are some excerpts from an Associated Press report from Mississippi, written by Michael Goldberg.

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves promised to push for a full elimination of the state’s income tax during the 2023 legislative session. The move would make Mississippi the 10th state with no income tax. …Mississippi’s Republican-controlled legislature passed legislation in 2022 that will eliminate the state’s 4% income tax bracket starting in 2023. In the following three years, the 5% bracket will be reduced to 4%. …Supporters of the 2022 Mississippi tax cut said it would spur economic growth and attract new residents to Mississippi. …Republican House speaker Philip Gunn has said full elimination of the state income tax is “achievable,” though he hasn’t committed to doing so in the 2023 session. …Tax-cut proposals are a direct effort to compete with states that don’t tax earnings, including Texas, Florida and Tennessee.

And here are portions of an article in National Review about Colorado, authored by Ben Murrey, which also notes that the TABOR spending limit will need to be strengthened if lawmakers are serious about getting rid of the state’s income tax.

When an interviewer recently asked Colorado’s Democratic governor Jared Polis what the state’s income-tax rate should be, he answered without hesitation: “It should be zero.” …The effort to chisel away at the income tax has already gained steam in the state. Last year, voters reduced the tax with Proposition 116 — a ballot initiative that brought the rate from 4.63 percent to 4.55 percent. …Eliminating the tax would provide an enormous direct windfall to Colorado households. …every reduction in income tax will allow Coloradans to keep more of every dollar they earn, and it invites more jobs and opportunities for residents. …To eliminate the income tax entirely, the state would probably need to begin lowering the revenue limit along with the rate reductions in the future. …these two reforms would put the state on a road to zero.

By the way, Colorado voters once again just cut the state’s flat tax in a referendum earlier this month.

Would Mississippi and Colorado be doing the right thing if they joined the zero-income-tax club?

Yes. I cited some evidence on this issue about 10 years ago.

Here’s some updated analysis from Chris Edwards.

The nine states without an individual income tax are Alaska, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, and Wyoming. …What they have in common is providing needed state‐​local services to their residents without complex, anti‐​freedom, and anti‐​growth individual income taxes. Most of the nine run leaner and more efficient governments than most other states. They only partly make up for the income tax revenue gap with other revenues. In terms of overall tax burdens, eight of the nine states are toward the bottom of the 50 states and Washington is in the middle. …Total taxes in the seven states average 8.1 percent of income. The average in the 40 other states is 9.6 percent. Thus, the lack of individual income tax restrains the overall tax burden. …Repealing state individual income taxes is a good goal. …Residents get the state‐​local services they need, but at lower cost. 

Here’s the chart that accompanied Chris’ article. He separates Alaska and Wyoming because they get so much money from energy taxes and are not realistic role models for other states.

The bottom line is that states without an income tax tend to have smaller government.

This is especially true for Florida, Tennessee, South Dakota, and New Hampshire. And Texas may join those states now that it has strengthened its spending cap.

One should-be-obvious conclusion from this data is that states with no income taxes should not make the mistake of adopting that punitive levy. Unless, of course, they want to repeat Connecticut’s unhappy experience.

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In a Tweet, Everything You Need to Know about Taxes and Incentives

A big division among economists is whether taxes have a big or small impact on incentives.

If taxpayers are very responsive, that means more economic damage (to use the profession’s jargon, a greater level of deadweight loss).

If you’re wondering which economists are right, there’s a lot of evidence that taxpayers are sensitive to changes in tax rates, Especially upper-income taxpayers, in part because they have significant control over the timing, levels, and composition of their income.

This is why entrepreneurs, innovators, inventors, and investors respond to difference in tax rates.

And athletes also make decisions based on tax policy. Here’s a tweet about Tyreek Hill, one of the best wide receivers in the National Football League. When deciding which team to sign with for this year, he picked the Miami Dolphins, located in a state with no income tax.

Mr. Hill also had the option to sign with the New York Jets.

But that would have meant letting greedy politicians in either New York or New Jersey (where the Jets play their home games) grab almost 11 percent of each additional dollar he earns.

According to this map, star athletes should be big fans of gray states and steer clear of dark-brown (or is that maroon?) states.

There’s research, incidentally, showing that teams based in low-tax states actually win more games.

P.S. I’ll close by reiterating my caveat about taxes being just one piece of the puzzle. After all, I speculated many years ago that taxes may have played a role in LeBron James going from Cleveland to Miami. But he then migrated to high-tax California. Though many pro athletes have moved away from the not-so-Golden States, so the general points is still accurate.

P.P.S. I feel sorry for Cam Newton, who paid a marginal tax rate of nearly 200 percent on his bonus 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. Needless to say, these principles also apply in other nations.

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Taxation 101

I’ve written a few columns that explain tax principles, but this video from the Tax Foundation may be the best place to start if you have friends or colleagues who need to learn the basics.

As part of the article that accompanies the video, the Tax Foundation explains that not all taxes are created equal. In other words, some taxes impose more damage than other taxes.

And this chart from the article is a nice summary of the three types of tax, along with the potential damage caused by varying ways of collecting tax.

As a general rule, this chart is totally accurate.

Corporate income taxes, gross receipts taxes (mentioned here), and wealth taxes do a lot of economic damage on a per-dollar-collected basis.

But I want to add a caveat to the first column.

As currently designed, there’s no question that the personal income tax and the corporate income tax are very bad taxes.

But it is possible to dramatically reduce the damage imposed by those levies. For instance, the personal income tax could be largely defanged if the current system was repealed and replaced by a simple and fair flat tax.

Likewise, it’s possible to reform the corporate income tax (full expensing, territoriality, no double tax on dividends, etc) so that it does comparatively little damage.

By the way, I’m sure the experts at the Tax Foundation would agree with these observations, so I’m augmenting rather than criticizing.

And since I’m doing some augmenting, another observation is that the first two taxes on the bottom row generally are very similar, at least with regard to their economic impact (and also similar to a properly designed individual income tax).

Here’s some of what I wrote in a column back in 2012.

…anything that expands the “tax wedge” between pre-tax income and post-tax consumption is going to impose similar levels of economic harm. Here’s a simple example. If I earn $100, does it matter to me if the government takes $25 as I earn that income (either with a payroll tax or income tax) or as I spend that income (either with a sales tax or value-added tax)? Is there any reason that my incentives to earn and produce will be altered by shifting from one approach to the other?

I explain that the answer is no. My incentive to earn income is affected by my ability to use income to enjoy consumption. But if taxes take a big bite, I’ll have less reason to be productive, regardless of how politicians collect the tax.

For what it is worth, I’ve used Belgium as an example to explain why shifting from payroll taxes to sales taxes, or vice-versa, is not a recipe for greater prosperity.

P.S. Those who want more advanced primers on taxes and growth should click here and here.

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The Feel-Good Map of 2022

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

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

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

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

That’s very good news.

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

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

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

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

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The History of the Income Tax in Just Seven Minutes

I recently explained the evolution of taxation – and the unfortunate consequences of income taxation – to a seminar in the country of Georgia.

One of my main points was that income taxes are a relatively new source of revenue.

The first income tax was adopted in the United Kingdom in the mid-1800s and other nations followed over the next 50-plus years (the United States joined that unfortunate club in 1913).

And, as noted in the video, income tax enabled a massive expansion in the burden of government spending.

In a column for the Foundation for Economic Education, Martin Litwak explains how the U.S. and U.K. made the mistaken choice to impose income taxes.

…income tax is a rather recent “invention,”… Income Tax was first introduced by William Pitt in the United Kingdom in 1798, and it started to be charged in 1799. The aim was not to finance original expenses of the State but the Napoleonic Wars. …It was kept in force until the Battle of Waterloo. When the tax was annulled again, every document that referred to it was burnt, due to the sense of shame associated with having established and charged this tax. …Prime Minister Robert Peel reestablished it in 1841, not to finance a war but to cover the Government’s deficit. …the United States became independent from the United Kingdom in 1776…the country imposed the first income tax…to finance…the Civil War. …In 1872, the income tax was annulled, basically due to the pressure of taxpayers, who deemed it expropriatory… In 1894, the income tax was incorporated again, but the next year, …the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional. …In 1909, the creation of this tax was proposed again… The 16th Amendment was introduced precisely to achieve this goal.

A sad column.

But it gets worse because politicians also then imposed payroll taxes.

Then they imposed value-added taxes.

Both of which helped to finance further expansions in the burden of government spending.

The bottom line is that it’s never a good idea to give politicians a new source of revenue.

Especially new taxes that are capable of generating a lot of revenue (or a medium amount or small amount of revenue).

P.S. Interestingly, many early advocates of income taxes in the U.K. and U.S. were not trying to finance a big welfare state, but rather wanted a new revenue source so they could lower or eliminate protectionist taxes on imports.

The moral of the story is to be careful of unintended consequences.

P.P.S. If you enjoyed watching a video about the history of the income tax, here’s a (much longer) history of economic policy in the 20th century.

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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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Elizabeth Warren’s Plan to Reward a Corrupt IRS

The IRS played partisan politics during the Obama years by targeting taxpayer organizations such “Tea Party” groups. Now the IRS is at it again, this time leaking the tax returns of selected rich people to advance Biden’s class-warfare agenda.

There are two logical responses.

1. Cut the IRS budget so the bureaucrats learn a very important lesson that corruption is bad.
2. Reform the tax code with a simple and fair flat tax so the IRS can be dramatically downsized.

I suspect most Americans would select both options.

But the crowd in Washington has a different perspective. Most of them like the IRS because it’s the bureaucracy that generates the money that they use to buy votes.

Many of them want to reward the IRS with more money (including plenty of brain-dead Republicans), which is bad enough, but what’s really troubling is that some of them even want to turn the IRS budget into an entitlement.

In an article for Reason, Eric Boehm explains that Elizabeth Warren is leading the charge for this reckless proposal.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) says her plan to more than double the annual IRS budget would allow the federal government to collect an extra $1.75 trillion over the next 10 years. …her plan seems based on little more than a hunch and some bad math. …Warren’s “Restoring the IRS Act of 2021” would hike the agency’s budget from $11.9 billion to $31.5 billion. …It would also…move the IRS from the…federal budget’s discretionary side…to the mandatory portion of the budget, alongside Social Security and other programs that run on autopilot. …In practice, that means giving the IRS a big budgetary boost and giving the agency the authority to dig through bank accounts and transaction records.

The Wall Street Journal also is not impressed with the idea of rewarding a corrupt tax bureaucracy.

Here are some excerpts from its recent editorial, which notes that the Biden Administration also wants to turn IRS funding into an entitlement  .

The Internal Revenue Service leak of taxpayer returns to left-leaning media outlet ProPublica is a prime example of why Congress should refuse to give the tax agency more money and power. That includes President Biden’s little-noticed but politically consequential plan to put IRS funding on autopilot. …Like so much else in the Biden Presidency, this follows the Elizabeth Warren model. …The IRS would essentially become another mandatory budget program like Social Security and Medicare. …without the risk of having to answer to Congressional appropriators for its budget, the tax agency would have little to worry about. …Their plan would make sure the IRS doesn’t have to pay a price in the future for politically targeting taxpayers or leaking returns. The potential for abuse would grow since Mr. Biden’s plan would also give the IRS access to bank account inflows and outflows. …a tax collection agency shielded from Congressional budget supervision is one definition of tyranny.

All of this is true.

But let’s also remember that the case for more IRS funding (whether as appropriations or as an entitlement) is based on nonsensical and self-serving estimates of the supposed tax gap.

P.S. For those who want to understand the technical differences between entitlement spending and appropriated spending, click here.

P.P.S. Entitlement spending is America’s top long-run fiscal challenge, so it’s incomprehensibly foolish to expand such programs.

P.P.P.S. The bad news is that Senator Warren is an unreconstructed statist (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).

P.P.P.P.S. The good news is that she is the impetus for some clever humor (see here, here, here, and here).

P.P.P.P.P.S. And she’s a hypocrite who doesn’t abide by her own policies.

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International Comparisons of Tax Burdens on Labor

About one week ago, I shared some fascinating data from the Tax Foundation about how different nations penalize saving and investment, with Canada being the worst and Lithuania being the best.

I started that column by noting that there are three important principles for sensible tax policy.

1. Low marginal tax rates on productive behavior
2. No tax bias against capital (i.e., saving and investment)
3. No tax preferences that distort the economy

Today, we’re going to focus on #1, specifically the tax burden on the average worker.

And, once again, we’ll be citing some of the Tax Foundation’s solid research. Here are their numbers showing the tax burden on the average worker in OECD nations. As you can see, Belgium is the worst place to be, followed by Germany, Austria, and France.

Colombia has the lowest tax burden on average workers, though that’s mostly a reflection of low earnings in that relatively poor nation.

Among advanced nations, Switzerland has the lowest tax burden when value-added taxes are part of the equation, while New Zealand is the best when looking just at income taxes and payroll taxes.

Here’s some of what the Tax Foundation wrote in its report, which was authored by Cristina Enache.

Average wage earners in the OECD have their take-home pay lowered by two major taxes: individual income and payroll (both employee and employer side). …The average tax burden among OECD countries varies substantially. In 2020, a worker in Belgium faced a tax burden seven times higher than that of a Chilean worker. …Accounting for VAT and sales tax, the average tax burden on labor in 2020 was 40.1 percent, 5.5 percentage points higher than when only income and payroll taxes are considered. …The tax burden on labor is referred to as a “tax wedge,” which simply refers to the difference between an employer’s cost of an employee and the employee’s net disposable income. …Tax wedges are particularly high in European countries—the 23 countries with the highest tax burden in the OECD are all European. …Chile and Mexico are the only countries that do not provide any tax relief for families with children but they keep the average tax wedge low.

Here’s a look at which countries in the past two decades that have made the biggest moves in the right direction and wrong direction. Kudos to Hungary and Lithuania.

And you can also see why I’m not overly optimistic about the long-run outlook for Mexico and South Korea.

The report also has a map focusing on tax burdens in Europe. The darker the nation, the more onerous the tax (notice how Switzerland is a light-colored oasis surrounded by dark-colored tax hells).

The report also notes that average tax wedges only tell part of the story. If you want to understand a tax system’s impact on incentives for productive behavior, it’s important to look at marginal tax rates.

The average tax wedge is…the combined share of labor and payroll taxes relative to gross labor income, or the tax burden. The marginal tax wedge, on the other hand, is the share of labor and payroll taxes applicable to the next dollar earned and can impact individuals’ decisions to work more hours or take a second job. The marginal tax wedge is generally higher than the average tax wedge due to the progressivity of taxes on labor across countries—as workers earn more, they face a higher tax wedge on their marginal dollar of earnings. …a drastic increase in the marginal tax wedge…might deter workers from pursuing additional income and working extra hours.

And here’s Table 1 from the report, which shows that marginal tax rates can be very high, even at relatively modest levels of income.

In what could be a world record for understatement, this data led Ms. Enache to conclude that Italy’s tax system “might” deter workers.

In 2020 an Italian worker making €38,396 (US $56,839) faced a marginal tax wedge as high as 117 percent on a 1 percent increase in earnings. Such marginal tax wedges might deter workers from pursuing additional income and working extra hours.

Though that’s not the most absurd example of over-taxation. Let’s not forget that thousands of French taxpayers have had tax bills that were greater than their entire income.

Sort of like an Obama-style flat tax, but in real life rather than a joke.

P.S. As I’ve previously noted, Belgium is an example of why a country can’t simultaneously have a big government and a good tax system.

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Even the OECD Finds that Class-Warfare Taxes Lead to Lower Incomes

I’m not a big fan of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Simply stated, the Paris-based international bureaucracy represents the interests of governments, and that means the OECD often pushes policies that serve the interests of politicians at the expense of taxpayers and consumers.

I’m particularly irked that OECD bureaucrats spend so much time and effort persecuting low-tax jurisdictions. And some of their work on issues such as poverty and inequality is grotesquely dishonest and sloppy.

But there are some good economists at the OECD. They’re apparently not allowed to have any role in policy, much to my dismay, but they occasionally produce very good research studies.

Such as the 2016 study that showed how many European welfare states would enjoy big increases in prosperity if they reduced the burden of government spending.

And the pair of studies that concluded spending caps were the most effective rule for sensible fiscal policy.

Or the study admitting that competition between governments leads to better tax policy.

Today, let’s look at another example of sensible analysis by OECD economists.

In a study published in late 2017, Oguzhan Akgun, Boris Cournède and Jean-Marc Fournier examined how different types of taxes impacted economic performance.

Lo and behold, they found that it’s good to have lower tax rates on businesses and it’s good to have lower tax rates on workers.

The present paper looks at the long-term effects of tax shifts on inequality and output for an unchanged size of government. …This study uses econometric analysis to provide estimates of distributional and output effects that can be expected based on the track record in OECD countries. …The main findings emerging from the analysis are: …Higher marginal effective rates of corporate income taxation are linked with significantly lower long-term output levels. …Greater progressivity in the upper half of the income distribution, in the form of higher tax wedges on above average income earners, is linked with lower long-term output. …taxes on net wealth are found to be associated with lower output levels, in line with the literature on their distortive effects.

These finding are not a surprise, particularly for people who read the Tax Foundation’s research back in 2016.

Here’s the key visual from the OECD study. The top half shows how many nations could enjoy significant gains in disposable income if tax rates were lowered on workers with above-average incomes. The lower half shows how many nations also could enjoy gains in disposable income

The obvious takeaway is that the study shows that Biden’s class-warfare tax agenda will be bad for American competitiveness and American prosperity.

There are many other findings in the study, not all of which I like, and not all of which make sense.

For instance, the authors want us to believe that death taxes may actually have a positive impact on the economy.

Greater reliance on inheritance and gift taxes…appears to be output-enhancing by comparison with other revenue sources.

I realize the study is only claiming that such taxes are less damaging than other taxes, but it still doesn’t make sense since death taxes directly drain capital out of the economy’s productive sector.

The study also look at the impact of various tax changes on “inequality,” leading the authors to give a negative assessment to some tax cuts even if those reforms would increase the well-being of those with lower incomes (thus confirming Margaret Thatcher’s warning that some folks on the left are willing to hurt the poor if the rich are hurt by a greater amount).

I’ll close with two other findings from the study, both of which are more to my liking.

First, we find that consumption taxes (such as the value-added tax) hurt the economy, but not as much as income taxes.

Consumption taxes entail some disincentive effects, which are generally found to be weaker than those of income taxes.

Second, green taxes hurt the poor more than they hurt the rich.

…environmental taxes can increase inequality.

Given all the rich hypocrites on this issue, this doesn’t surprise me. They know they won’t be the main victims.

For what it’s worth, the OECD nonetheless wants a big energy tax on American families (thus confirming once again that there’s a disconnect between the left-leaning political types who are in charge and the professional economists who do real research).

P.S. Even if some OECD economists do good work, American taxpayers should not be subsidizing the group.

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Will Mississippi Join the No-Income-Tax Club?

When examining state public policy, big jurisdictions such as California, Texas, New York, and Florida get a lot of attention.

But what about Mississippi? It has mediocre scores for overall economic policy.

• It’s #29 according to the American Legislative Exchange Council.
• It’s #39 according to the Fraser Institute.
• It’s #35 according to Freedom in the 50 States.

And the Magnolia State also isn’t winning any prizes when looking specifically at tax policy.

• It’s #32 according to the Tax Foundation.
• It’s #22 for sales tax burden.
• It’s in the next-to-last quintile in my ranking of income tax systems.

But the state may be about to take a big step in the right direction.

The governor wants to get rid of his state’s progressive income tax and instead join the no-income-tax club.

The Associated Press reports on the proposal.

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said Monday that the state should phase out its individual income tax by 2030 to attract new residents and businesses that could boost economic growth. …Mississippi’s population has grown slowly this year after declining in recent years. Florida, Texas and Tennessee, which do not have an individual income tax, have grown rapidly. “Let’s eliminate the income tax, which is one huge speed bump to long-term economic growth and recovery for Mississippi,” Reeves said.

Analyzing the proposal for the Tax Foundation, Katherine Loughead points out a big logistical challenge.

The income tax currently generates a big chunk of revenues for the state’s budget, so abolition of that levy will require serious spending restraint and/or offsetting tax increases.

Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves (R), in his budget proposal for fiscal year (FY) 2022, has announced his goal of phasing out the state’s income tax by 2030. Mississippi’s income tax currently has three marginal rates of 3 percent, 4 percent, and 5 percent. …Under legislation adopted in 2016, the first marginal rate is already being phased out. …Gov. Reeves’ proposal seeks to build upon the ongoing phaseout of the 3 percent rate by also eliminating the 4 percent rate within five years. Then, subject to revenue availability, the governor hopes to eliminate the 5 percent rate so that, by 2030, Mississippi will join the ranks of the states with no income tax. …Mississippi’s income tax generated nearly 43 percent of the state’s total tax collections in FY 2019, with nearly $1.9 billion coming from the individual income tax and $644 million from the corporate income tax. The state will need to see continued revenue gains over the next decade to phase out the income tax without increasing other taxes. …Even if full income tax repeal is out of reach, however, the state could certainly reduce tax liability, particularly for lower-income residents, by continuing to increase the amount of income that is exempt from taxation, eliminating the first two brackets so a single-rate tax remains, and then reducing the rate below 5 percent.

A flat tax would be a step in the right direction, but state lawmakers should be aggressive and push for total elimination of the income tax. Which probably means the state will need a TABOR-style spending cap to make the numbers work.

The bottom line is that Mississippi is a relatively poor state by American standards (roughly akin to the United Kingdom or New Zealand, for those who prefer international comparisons) and needs bold reforms to catch up to the rest of the nation.

Abolishing the income tax definitely would qualify as a big move. Revisiting the chart from above, which I created in 2018, abolishing the income tax would vault the state to the top quintile of tax policy.

P.S. I also modified the chart to show that Arizona will drop from the middle quintile to the bottom quintile because voters foolishly voted for a class-warfare tax hike earlier this month.

P.P.S. The last southern governor to propose total repeal of the income tax didn’t make any progress.

P.P.P.S. Even though the people of Mississippi are the least likely of any state to read my columns, I hope they soon enjoy the benefits of living in a no-income-tax jurisdiction.

P.P.P.P.S. There’s also a proposal to get rid of the Nebraska state income tax.

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The State With the Greediest Politicians, Part I

When considering which state has the greediest politicians, the flippant (but understandable) answer is to say “all of them.”

A more serious way of dealing with that question, though, is to look at overall rankings of economic policy.

According to the Fraser Institute, we can assume that Delaware apparently has the worst politicians and New Hampshire has the best ones.

According to comprehensive calculations in Freedom in the 50 States, New York’s politicians seem to be the worst and Florida’s are the best.

But what if we just want to know the state where politicians squeeze the most money from taxpayers? In other words, which state has the worst tax system?

The Tax Foundation gives us part of the answer in their review of state income tax burdens.

Individual income taxes are a major source of state government revenue, accounting for 37 percent of state tax collections. …Forty-one tax wage and salary income… Of those states taxing wages, nine have single-rate tax structures… Conversely, 32 states levy graduated-rate income taxes… Top marginal rates range from North Dakota’s 2.9 percent to California’s 13.3 percent.

Here’s the accompanying map.

It’s very good to live in a gray state (no income tax!) and you definitely don’t want to live in a red or maroon state.

Unsurprisingly, California is the worst of the worst, with a top tax rate of 13.3 percent. No wonder productive people have been escaping the not-so-Golden State.

Hawaii and New Jersey are the next worst states, followed by Oregon and Minnesota. Though it’s definitely worth noting that there’s a local income tax in New York City, which would put the residents of that unfortunate community (if NYC was a state) in second place after California.

P.S. The disadvantage of living in a high-tax jurisdiction is especially significant now that there’s no longer a loophole in the federal tax code that subsidizes state profligacy.

P.P.S. The maroon and red states are obviously among the worst places to be an entrepreneur, investor, or business owner, though people with lots of unrealized capital gains fortunately don’t have to worry (yet!) about punitive tax laws.

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Ranking Presidents: Was Woodrow Wilson the Worst of the Worst?

I certainly don’t intend to do this for everyone who has made it to the White House, but I have produced big-picture economic assessments of several presidents.

• Herbert Hoover
• Franklin Roosevelt
• Richard Nixon
• Ronald Reagan
• George H.W. Bush
• Bill Clinton
• George W. Bush
• Barack Obama

Today, let’s go back farther in history and take a look at Woodrow Wilson.

At the risk of understatement, he did a very bad job. Indeed, it’s quite likely that he ranks as America’s worst president, at least when judging economic policy. His mistakes were either huge or disgusting.

Creating the income tax – The internal revenue code began when Wilson signed into law an income tax on October 3, 1913. The initial tax wasn’t overly onerous – with a top rate of just 7 percent – but it predictably evolved into the punitive levy that currently plagues America.

Creating the Federal Reserve – You don’t have to be a libertarian-minded advocate of competitive currencies to conclude that the central bank – also signed into law by Wilson in 1913 – has caused immense damage with its erratic, boom-bust approach to monetary policy.

Segregating the federal government – Wilson was a reprehensible racist. To make matters worse, he turned that personal moral failing into a big policy mistake by overseeing rampant (and costly) discrimination and segregation in the federal government.

Those are just the highlights – though lowlights would be a more accurate word to describe Wilson’s policies.

The Encyclopedia Britannica has a description of some additional forms of intervention imposed during his tenure.

…he took up and pushed through Congress the Progressive-sponsored Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914. It established an agency—the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)—with sweeping authority. …because his own political thinking had been moving toward a more advanced Progressive position—Wilson struck out upon a new political course in 1916. He began by appointing Louis D. Brandeis, the leading critic of big business and finance, to the Supreme Court. Then in quick succession he obtained passage of a rural-credits measure to supply cheap long-term credit to farmers; anti-child-labour and federal workmen’s-compensation legislation; the Adamson Act, establishing the eight-hour day for interstate railroad workers; and measures for federal aid to education and highway construction.

Lawrence Reed of the Foundation for Economic Education put together a damning indictment of Wilson.

1913…was a disastrous year that we’re still paying a hefty, annual price for… Wilson, arguably the worst president…ordered the segregation of all departments within the executive branch and appointed ardent segregationists to high positions. …He locked up political dissidents right and left as he trampled on the Constitution’s guarantees of speech, assembly, and press freedoms. His wartime economic controls were hideously stupid and counterproductive. …the 16th Amendment to the Constitution was…Strongly supported by Wilson… Subsequent legislation set the top rate at a mere 7 percent. …When Wilson left office eight years later, the top rate was more than ten times higher. …Wilson’s signature enshrined into law the Federal Reserve Act, creating a central bank and more economic mischief than any other federal initiative or institution in the last 100 years. …In American history, 1913 should go down as a year that will live in infamy.

It’s also worth noting that Wilson was a believer in global governance, which adds to his awful legacy.

In a review of a biography about Wilson for the Claremont Review of Books, David Goldman mentions that unpalatable feature of his presidency.

So utterly utopian was Wilson’s vision that it is unfair to characterize the internationalism of Bill Clinton or George W. Bush as “Wilsonian.” Clinton and Bush threw America’s weight around after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but they did not propose—as Wilson did—to replace America’s sovereign decision-making with a global council. …He wanted to compromise American sovereignty and most of the Senate did not. …Wilson would have liked to impose a legal obligation from a foreign body upon the United States, but could not say so openly. …His obsession was the creation of a supranational agency able to dictate policy to national governments, an obsession that grew out of his lifelong hostility to the American political system… To make sense of his grand overreach in 1919, historians will need to give more attention to his rancor at the U.S. Constitution… The constitution in Wilson’s reading had become a relic of a bygone era. He proposed to jettison this putatively archaic document in favor of a government less burdened by checks and balances. …The same utilitarian criteria that Wilson applied to the Constitution guided his judgment about capitalism and socialism. …As economists Clifford Thies and Gary Pecquet have observed, “Wilson believed that the difference between socialism and democracy was a matter of means rather than ends.” …He eschewed mass expropriation of industry only because he thought it inefficient. …Although Wilson’s dudgeon came from the Deep South, his Progressivism came from Princeton and the Social Gospel.

Wilson’s hostility to the Constitution was part of the so-called progressive era. Unlike America’s Founders, proponents of this approach viewed the federal government as a positive force rather than something to be constrained.

The idea that government or “the community,” has “an absolute right to determine its own destiny and that of its members” is a progressive one. The difference between the Founders’ and progressive’s visions can be summarized this way: The Founders believed citizens could best pursue happiness if government was limited to protecting the life, liberty, and property of individuals. …Unlike the framers of the Constitution, progressives believed that…“communities” have rights, those rights are more important than the personal liberty of any one individual in that community. …they believed…government-sponsored programs and policies as well as economic redistribution of goods from the rich to the poor. …Wilson, who served as president from 1913-1919, advocated what we today call the living Constitution, or the idea that its interpretation should adapt to the times. …Wilson oversaw the implementation of progressive policies such as the introduction of the income tax and the creation of the Federal Reserve System to attempt to manage the economy.

Bre Payton, in an article for the Federalist, opined about Wilson and the changes during the progressive era.

…to understand The New Deal and how American life and government  changed in the twentieth century and beyond, it is vital to understand the Progressive Era… FDR cited progressive-minded presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as his intellectual inspirations. …Progressives believed restricting government to only protecting citizens’ life, liberty, and ability to pursue happiness was simplistic. …Thus people should not fear the ever-expanding role of government… Wilson went on to say that modern European thinkers had declared that men were defined not by their individuality, but by their society. And one’s rights come from government.

Hostility to the Constitution and limited government was just one problem with the progressives.

Their views of minorities also were very troubling.

In a column for National Review, Paul Rahe documented not only Wilson’s racism, but also his use of government power to harm the economic prospects for black Americans.

Wilson, our first professorial president, was…the very model of a modern Progressive…he shared the conviction, dominant among his brethren, that African-Americans were racially inferior to whites. …Prior to the segregation of the civil service in 1913, appointments had been made solely on merit as indicated by the candidate’s performance on the civil-service examination. Thereafter, racial discrimination became the norm. …The existing work force was segregated. Many African-Americans were dismissed. …Jim Crow had not been the norm before 1890, even in the deep South. …it became the norm there only when it received sanction from the racist Progressives in the North. …For similar reasons, Wilson was hostile to the constitutional provisions intended as a guarantee of limited government. The separation of powers, the balances and checks, and the distribution of authority between nation and state distinguishing the American constitution he regarded as an obstacle.

This article from the New Republic covers the same ground, starting with his time as head of Princeton University, but from a left-wing perspective.

Wilson not only refused to admit any black students, he erased the earlier admissions of black students from the university’s history. …Elected president in 1912, …Wilson appeared to be the quintessential Progressive Era leader. …the progressive ideology of the era was in many ways quite racist. …it quickly became known that the Wilson administration was instituting a major modification in the treatment of black workers throughout the federal government from what had been the case under postwar presidents. …the Civil Service began demanding photographs to accompany employment applications for the first time. It was widely understood that the only purpose of this requirement was to weed out black applicants. …He insisted that the segregation policy was for the comfort and best interests of both blacks and whites.

There’s more bad news about Wilson.

In a column for the Washington Post, Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian, writes about his authoritarianism as well as his racism.

His most disgraceful flaw was his racism. …Wilson especially stood out in his white supremacy. He was not a man of his time but a throwback. …Wilson, who preened as a civil libertarian, persuaded Congress to pass the Espionage Act, giving him extraordinary power to retaliate against Americans who opposed him and his wartime behavior. That same law today enables presidents to harass their political adversaries. Wilson’s Justice Department also convicted almost a thousand people for using “disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language” against the government, the military or the flag. Wilson is an excellent example of how presidents can exploit wars to increase authoritarian power and restrict freedom.

All things considered, definitely one of America’s worst chief executives.

This tweet is an apt summary of Wilson’s presidency.

Woodrow Wilson also segregated the government, coined the concept of a "living Constitution," hated Jews, & founded modern progressivism & the administrative state. https://t.co/OG8u5C4aU0

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) June 16, 2019

For readers who are interested in the quirks of history, Lawrence Reed of the Foundation for Economic Education bemoans the fact that an untimely death in 1899 probably led to the unfortunate election of Wilson.

Garret Augustus Hobart—known to his friends as “Gus”—was America’s 24^th vice president. He served under William McKinley for two years and eight months until his death in office in November 1899 at the age of 55. With Hobart’s untimely passing, President William McKinley had to find a new running mate for the election of 1900. That man turned out to be Theodore Roosevelt, who became president upon McKinley’s assassination only six months into his second term. …Teddy…enter the presidential race in 1912 as a third-party nominee. That split the Republican vote and handed the presidency to Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Wilson won with just 42% of the popular tally and went on to become arguably the very worst of our 45 chief executives. …I greatly lament the sad fact that Gus Hobart wasn’t around to run again with McKinley in 1900. If he had lived, he instead of Teddy would have become our 26^th President when McKinley died. And if there had been no Teddy Roosevelt presidency, there might never have been a philandering, racist, “progressive” Wilson in the White House to royally screw up the country with an income tax, a Federal Reserve, entry into World War I, and other mischievous adventures in statism.

In keeping with my traditional practice, here’s a visual depiction of the good and bad policies of the Wilson Administration.

And although it’s hard to measure, Wilson belongs in the presidential Hall of Shame because his administration was a turning point in America’s tragic evolution from Madisonian constitutionalism to modern statism.

For instance, Wilson almost surely paved the way for FDR’s ill-fated New Deal.

P.S. Now readers will hopefully understand why I wrote that Obama (who largely had a forgettable legacy) wasn’t nearly as bad at Wilson.

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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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Seattle Suicide

What’s the most poorly governed city in the United States?

• San Francisco, where there are “poop patrols“?
• Chicago, which is spending itself into oblivion?
• New York City, home of America’s worst mayor?

Those are all good options, but Seattle may deserve this award. Following municipal elections last November, the City Council is controlled by hard-left members who want to impose the local version of “democratic socialism.”

In a National Review article from February, Christopher Rufo describes their agenda.

Seattle has effectively become the nation’s laboratory for socialist policies. Since the beginning of the year, the socialist faction on the Seattle City Council has proposed a range of policies on taxes, housing, homelessness, and criminal justice that put into practice the national democratic-socialist agenda. In the most recent session, socialist councilwoman Kshama Sawant and her allies have proposed massive new taxes on corporations, unprecedented regulations on landlords (including rent control and a ban on “winter evictions”), the mandated construction of homeless encampments, and the gradual dismantling of the criminal justice system, beginning with the end of cash bail. …In order to consolidate their newfound power, the progressive-socialists have begun to manipulate the democratic process in their own favor: first, by providing all Seattle voters with $100 in taxpayer-funded “democracy vouchers,” which are easily collected by unions, activists, and socialist groups; and second, by implementing a ban on corporate spending in local elections… the progressive-socialists are no longer interested in gaining reasonable concessions; they intend to overthrow capitalism itself.

The Wall Street Journal opined this week on the latest development in Seattle’s suicidal approach.

The economy is on life support, but that isn’t stopping the Seattle City Council from trying to soak employers with a new tax on hiring. …The proposal is a reprise of the council’s 2018 tax on each new hire that was repealed amid public opposition. The new proposal “is 10 times larger than the 2018 version, and it’s also in an economy that’s about 1,000 times worse,” says James Sido of the Downtown Seattle Association…a 1.3% payroll tax on most Seattle businesses with $7 million or more in payroll. …Businesses would be assessed based on the prior year’s payroll, but revenue has cratered this year amid the pandemic. …businesses on the margin that have been forced to lay off or furlough employees may not bring them back if it means crossing that $7 million payroll threshold. The tax would discourage smaller companies from growing in Seattle. …Seattle is the hardest hit city in the U.S., with unemployment rising 105.92% between January and March. Only a socialist would think now is the time to further punish job creation.

Good points.

Though I would add that it’s never a good time to raise taxes and punish job creation.

Here’s what the greedy members of the City Council don’t understand (or pretend not to understand):

It’s complicated and difficult to move out of a country.

It’s a potentially expensive hassle to move out of a state.

It’s relatively easy to move out of a city.

And that’s why Seattle’s experiment with socialism is bound to fail.

If the socialists on the City Council impose this tax, there inevitably will be an out-migration of entrepreneurs and businesses to surrounding suburbs. That will be bad for ordinary people in the city (a point that workers in the economy’s productive sector already understand).

And when that happens, I wonder if they’ll learn that it is possible to run out of other people’s money?

P.S. Seattle’s politicians already have destroyed jobs and ruined businesses with a big increase in the minimum wage.

P.P.S. The constitution of the state of Washington prohibits an income tax, so there’s an ongoing debate whether Seattle’s tax grab – if enacted – would survive a court challenge.

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The Right Way to Adopt a Consumption Tax

I’ve written dozens of columns explaining why it would be a terrible idea for the United States to enact a value-added tax.

But that’s not because I think consumption taxes are worse than income taxes. Indeed, sales taxes and VATs are less destructive because tax rates tend to be reasonable and there’s no double taxation of saving and investment.

My opposition is solely based on the fact that we shouldn’t give politicians an extra source of revenue to finance bigger government. That would effectively guarantee that the United States would morph into a stagnant European-style welfare state.

In other words, I’d be willing to accept a trade. Politicians get a VAT, but only if they permanently abolish the income tax.

There’s no chance of that happening in Washington, but it may happen in Nebraska, as reported by the North Platte Telegraph.

If Nebraskans can’t agree on reform…, state Sen. Steve Erdman of Bayard has a sweeping answer: …Income and property taxes in Nebraska would be abolished — and the state sales tax replaced by a “consumption tax” to fund state and local governments — if a constitutional amendment spearheaded by Erdman were approved by lawmakers and voters. …It would need “yes” votes from 30 of the 49 senators on final reading to appear on November’s general election ballot. …Nebraska’s state and local governments now collect a combined $9.5 billion annually in taxes, which would require a 10% consumption tax rate to replace, Erdman said. …If income and property taxes go away, Erdman said, all the state and local departments or agencies that enforce, set and collect them wouldn’t be needed, either.

Here’s some additional coverage from KETV.

Imagine not having to pay any property or income taxes in Nebraska, but there’s a catch you’d pay a new consumption tax on just about everything you buy, such as food and medical services, things that are not taxed right now. That is the idea behind a new constitutional resolution introduced by state Sen. Steve Erdman. …He and nine other lawmakers introduced LR300CA on Thursday. The resolution would allow voters to decide whether to replace all those taxes with a consumption tax. It is like a sales tax and would be about 10.6% on everything, including services and food. …He said under this proposal, everyone would get a payment called a prebate of about $1,000, which would offset the cost for low-income families. Erdman said it would also eliminate the need for property tax relief and the state having to offer costly tax incentives to attract businesses. “This is fixing the whole issue, everything. This is eliminating all those taxes and replacing it with a fair tax,” Erdman said. “Nothing is exempt,” Erdman said.

I have no idea if this proposal has any chance of getting approval by the legislature, but Senator Erdman’s proposal for a broad-based neutral tax (i.e., no exemptions) would make Nebraska more competitive.

Which would be a good idea considering that the state is only ranked #28 according to the Tax Foundation and is way down at #44 according to Freedom in the 50 States.

In one fell swoop, Nebraska would join the list of states that have no income tax, which is even better than the states that have flat taxes.

P.S. The switch to a consumption tax would address the revenue side of the fiscal equation. Nebraska should also fix the spending side by copying its neighbors in Colorado and adopting a TABOR-style spending cap.

P.P.S. Unlike advocates of the value-added tax, proponents of a national sales tax support full repeal of the income tax. I don’t think that’s realistic since it’s so difficult to amend the Constitution, but their hearts are in the right place.

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America’s Best and Worst States for Taxes

Following their recent assessment of the best and worst countries, the Tax Foundation has published its annual State Business Tax Climate Index, which is an excellent gauge of which states welcome investment and job creation and which states are unfriendly to growth and prosperity.

Here’s the list of the best and worst states. Unsurprisingly, states with no income tax rank very high, as do states with flat taxes.

It’s also no surprise to see New Jersey in last place. The state has fallen dramatically, especially considering that it was like New Hampshire as recently as the 1960s, with no state income tax and no state sales tax.

And the bad scores for New York, California, and Connecticut also are to be expected. The Nutmeg State is an especially sad story. There was no state income tax 30 years ago. Once politicians got that additional source of revenue, however, Connecticut suffered a big economic decline.

Here’s a description of the methodology, along with the table showing how different factors are weighted.

…the Index is designed to show how well states structure their tax systems and provides a road map for improvement.The absence of a major tax is a common factor among many of the top 10 states. Property taxes and unemployment insurance taxes are levied in every state, but there are several states that do without one or more of the major taxes: the corporate income tax, the individual income tax, or the sales tax. …This does not mean, however, that a state cannot rank in the top 10 while still levying all the major taxes. Indiana and Utah, for example, levy all of the major tax types, but do so with low rates on broad bases.The states in the bottom 10 tend to have a number of afflictions in common: complex, nonneutral taxes with comparatively high rates. New Jersey, for example, is hampered by some of the highest property tax burdens in the country, has the second highest-rate corporate income tax in the country and a particularly aggressive treatment of international income, levies an inheritance tax, and maintains some of the nation’s worst-structured individual income taxes.

For those who want to delve into the details, here are all the states, along with their rankings for the five major variables.

If you want to know which states are making big moves, Georgia enjoyed the biggest one-year jump (from #36 to #32) and Kansas suffered the biggest one-year decline (from #27 to #34). Keep in mind that it’s easier to climb if you’re near the bottom and easier to fall if you’re near the top.

Looking over a longer period of time, the states with the biggest increases since 2014 are North Carolina (+19, from #34 to #15), Wisconsin (+12, from #38 to #26), Kentucky (+9, from #35 to #24), Nebraska (+8, from #36 to #28), Delaware (+7, from #18 to #11), and Rhode Island (+6, from #45 to #39).

The states with the biggest declines are Kansas (-9, from #25 to #34), Hawaii (-8, from #29 to #37), Massachusetts (-8, from #28 to #36), and Idaho (-6, from #15 to #21).

We’ll close with the report’s map, showing the rankings of all the states.

P.S. My one quibble with the Index is that there’s no variable to measure the burden of government spending, which would give a better picture of overall economic liberty. This means that states that finance large public sectors with energy severance taxes (which also aren’t included in the Index) wind up scoring higher than they deserve. As such, I would drop Wyoming and Alaska in the rankings and instead put South Dakota at #1 and Florida at #2.

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Texas vs. California

Time for another edition of our long-running battle between the Lone Star State and the Golden State.

Except it’s not really a battle since one side seems determined to lose.

For instance, Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute often uses extensive tables filled with multiple variables when comparing high-performing states and low-performing states.

But when comparing California and Texas, sometimes all you need is one data source because it makes a very powerful point. Which is what he recently did with that data on one-way U-Haul rental rates between California cities and Texas cities.

There’s a very obvious takeaway from this data, as Mark explains.

…there is a huge premium for trucks leaving California for Texas and a huge discount for trucks leaving Texas for California. …U-Haul’s one-way truck rental rates are market-based to reflect relative demand and relative supply. In California there’s a relatively low supply of trucks available and a relatively high demand for trucks destined for Texas; in Texas there’s a relatively high supply of trucks and a relatively low demand for trucks going to California. Therefore, U-Haul charges 3-4 times more for one-way truck rentals going from San Francisco or LA to Houston or Dallas than vice-versa based on what must be a huge net outflow of trucks leaving California (leading to low inventory) and a net inflow of trucks arriving in Texas (leading to high inventory). …in 2016…the ratios for the same matched cities were much smaller, 2.2 to 2.4 to 1, suggesting that the outbound migration from California to Texas as reflected in one-way U-Haul truck rental rates must have accelerated over the last three years.

So why is California so unattractive compared to Texas?

To answer that question, this map from the Tax Foundation is a good place to start. It shows that California has the most punitive income tax of any state, while Texas is one of the sensible states with no income tax.

By the way, I sometimes get pushback from my leftist friends who point out that California’s 13.3 percent tax rate only applies to millionaires.

I don’t think that’s an effective argument since it makes zero sense to penalize a state’s most productive citizens. Especially when they’re the ones who can easily afford to move (and many of them are doing exactly that).

That being said, California pillages middle-class taxpayers as well. If some trendy young millennial wants to live in San Francisco, I wish that person all the luck in the world – especially since the 8 percent tax rate kicks in at just $44,377.

Now let’s ask the question of whether California residents (rich, poor, or middle class) are getting something for all the taxes they have to pay.

• Is there any evidence that they are getting better schools? No.
• How about data showing that they get better health care? No.
• What about research indicating better infrastructure in the state? No.

Instead, they’re paying for a giant welfare state and for a lavishly compensated collection of bureaucrats.

P.S. There’s also plenty of international data showing big government isn’t the way to get good roads, schools, and healthcare.

P.P.S. If you want more data comparing Texas and California, click here, here, and here.

P.P.P.S. Here’s my favorite California vs Texas joke.

P.P.P.P.S. Comparisons of New York and Florida tell the same story.

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Two Negative Consequences of the Income Tax

There are some fortunate people (in the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Monaco, Vanuatu, Antigua and Barbuda, and a few other places) who don’t have to pay income taxes.

The United States used to be in that lucky club. The income tax did not become a permanent blight upon the nation until 1913 (there was a temporary income tax during the Civil War and an attempted income tax in 1894 – ruled unconstitutional in 1895).

Indeed, this odious tax is a relatively new invention for the entire world. If my memory is correct, the first income tax was a temporary measure imposed by the United Kingdom to finance the fight against Napoleon. And the U.K. also was the first country to impose a permanent income tax (ironically, to help offset lower taxes on international trade).

In every case, politicians followed the same script. Income taxes originally were supposed to have low rates and only apply to the rich.

But it was simply a matter of time before small taxes on the wealthy became punitive taxes on everybody.

Since today is tax filing today for Americans, let’s take the opportunity to highlight two specific unfortunate consequences of the income tax.

First, it enabled the modern welfare state. You can see from the chart that the explosion of redistribution spending only occurred after politicians obtained a new source of revenue (a problem that was exacerbated in Europe when politicians adopted value-added taxes and were able to further increase the burden of government spending).

Needless to say, this is a reason to oppose an energy tax, a wealth tax, or a financial transactions tax. Giving politicians a new source of revenue is like giving alcoholics the keys to a liquor store.

Second, the income tax enabled costly economic discrimination. Prior to income taxes, governments largely relied on trade taxes and excise taxes, and those levies did not create many opportunities for mischief.

An income tax, by contrast, allows the government to impose all sorts of special penalties – either with discriminatory tax rates or with extra layers of tax on saving and investment – on people who generate a lot of economic output.

And it’s worth mentioning that the income tax also allows politicians to create all sorts of special credits, exemptions, deduction, exclusion, and other preferences (about 75,000 pages of them) for politically well-connected interest groups.

These penalties and preferences are both morally troubling (rampant cronyism) and economically damaging (back-door methods of central planning).

Let’s wrap up today’s column with this helpful reminder that the income tax is basically a penalty on productive behavior.

P.S. Politicians can play games with other revenue sources (i.e., special VAT rates or differential tariff burdens), but the income tax stands apart because it is capable of generating large amounts of revenue while simultaneously giving politicians considerable ability to pick winners and losers.

P.P.S. If you need some gallows humor to make it through tax day, go to the bottom of this column.

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The Cayman Islands: A Role Model for Harmony and Prosperity

I’m currently in the Cayman Islands, which is one of my favorite places since – like Bermuda, Monaco, Vanuatu, Antigua and Barbuda, and a few other lucky places in the world – it has no income tax.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the absence of an income tax has helped make the Cayman Islands very prosperous, 14th-richest in the world according to the latest data from the World Bank on per-capita economic output (top 10 in the world if you exclude oil-rich jurisdictions).

This does not mean, incidentally, that economic policy is perfect in the Cayman Islands.

There is a overly large and excessively compensated government bureaucracy. Indeed, financing the civil service is becoming such a burden that the Cayman Islands almost made a suicidal decision to impose an income tax earlier this decade.

And the absence of an income tax doesn’t mean an absence of taxes. Here’s a chart from a 2010 report on the jurisdiction’s fiscal challenges. Yes, the tax burden is low compared to many nations, but the government nonetheless collects plenty of revenue from import duties, fees on financial services, and tourism.

But the key thing to understand is that not all taxes are created equal. Some levies impose much more damage than others.

Richard Rahn, a fellow member of the Cayman Financial Review editorial board, explained this insight a few years ago in a column for the Washington Times.

Cayman is prosperous… Critics of Cayman and other offshore financial centers call them “tax havens,” ignoring the fact that they all have many taxes, particularly on consumption — which is good tax policy — rather than on productive labor and capital — which is bad tax policy. The statist political actors in the high-tax jurisdictions will not admit that people do not work, save and invest if they are going to be overly taxed and otherwise abused by their own governments.

And it’s also worth noting that the Cayman Islands are a role model for racial tranquility.

There are people from 135 nations and “mixed” is the largest racial category.

Here are some excerpts from a column published by Forbes about the progressive social structure of the Cayman Islands.

Somebody recently said to me “The Cayman Islands is just a mailbox.”  I started wondering if that was fair. The Cayman Islands are a real places where people live.  And they are not all attorneys and accountants, although they do have more than their fair share.  …a big upside to the Caymans. …Mr. Leung, who is of Asian descent, noticed a whiff of it in Scotland, but finds the Caymans utterly devoid of racism.  Pirates, refugees, shipwrecked sailors and enslaved people might not seem to be the best material to start a country to some, but clearly there is an upside.

I’ll close by noting that there is some trouble in paradise.

The Cayman Islands faces unrelenting pressure from international bureaucracies and high-tax nations. There is a lot of resentment because the jurisdiction is so successful.

The Cayman Islands will not be bullied by countries that cannot compete with this jurisdiction on a level playing field, Premier Alden McLaughlin told an audience… He said that despite the Cayman government’s cooperation on international standards, the Netherlands and others are more concerned about the zero tax rate here. …“But we will not be bullied by those who are jealous of our success, resentful of our tax policies and unable to compete with us on a level playing field,” McLaughlin said.

What makes these attacks so ironic and unfair is that the Cayman Islands actually has much tougher standards than “onshore” nations such as the United States and United Kingdom.

Since I began this column by looking at World Bank data on the most prosperous, let’s wrap up by perusing the U.N.’s numbers.

Hmmm…, lots of so-called tax havens are on this list. I wonder if we can draw any conclusions?

Folks on the left have accused me of “trading with the enemy” for supporting these jurisdictions, but the real story is that we should emulate rather than prosecute these low-tax jurisdictions.

P.S. My affection for the Cayman Islands is mutual.

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Tariffs and America’s Early Economic History: A Primer for President Trump

There’s an ongoing debate about Trump’s endgame on trade. Is he simply a crude protectionist, or is he disrupting the status quo in order to force other nations to reduce their protectionist barriers?

I hope it’s the latter, though I fear it’s the former.

But one thing I can state with certainty is that the President misreads early American history. Here’s a tweet that he recently sent about how America became a strong and rich country during an era when the federal government relied on tariffs to generate revenue.

Our Country was built on Tariffs, and Tariffs are now leading us to great new Trade Deals – as opposed to the horrible and unfair Trade Deals that I inherited as your President. Other Countries should not be allowed to come in and steal the wealth of our great U.S.A. No longer!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 15, 2018

Trump is partially right. The United States became a rich country in the 1800s when tariffs were a primary source of revenue.

But I have argued that America became rich because of other policies.

• The federal government was very small, with the budget consuming on average less than 3 percent of the economy’s output.
• Prior to that awful day in 1913, there was no income tax, no payroll tax, no capital gains tax, no death tax, and no corporate tax.
• There was no sprawling and intrusive administrative state imposing costly regulations that hinder the private sector.

No, the United States was not a laissez-faire paradise in the 1800s. I’m simply making the case that the economy had more than enough “breathing room” to generate ever-higher levels of national prosperity.

Meaning the economy grew, not because of tariffs, but because other bad policies didn’t exist.

And I’m not the only with this perspective. Eric Boehm’s article in Reason concludes with an offer to trade the income tax for a modest tariff.

After the ratification of the Constitution, the very first law passed by the new Congress was the Tariff Act of 1789. It imposed an 8 percent tax on pretty much all imports into the United States, with the revenue from the tariffs used to fund the new national government and to pay down debts accumulated during the Revolutionary War. …those early tariffs did solve a very practical revenue problem for the early United States government. In those days before H&R Block (indeed, before income taxes) collecting taxes was a difficult prospect. It was much easier to post-up customs officials at every port and collect taxes on the physical stuff that came ashore than to send tax collectors to every town and borough across 13 states to collect taxes from the populace—especially since many of those would-be taxpayers weren’t entirely sold on the idea of a powerful central government, and had a recent history of armed rebellion against excessive taxation. …If Trump wants to make the argument that America should use tariffs to raise revenue, like we did in the 1790s, he better have a plan to abolish all federal taxes on income, investments, and labor. If he wants to have that discussion, well, I’ll listen.

Brian Domitrovic, writing for Forbes, hits the nail on the head. He starts by agreeing with Trump’s assertion about strong growth in the era of tariffs.

…there is a general sense, among the American public, that previously in history, when the American economy really grew at great rates in the extensive stretch of time before the era of free-trade ideology after 1945, we had tariffs. Tariffs and American prosperity went together. Why not try to get that mix again? …This country’s economy regularly grew at rates double ours today, when the tariff was in force from 1789 until early in the 20^th century.

But he points out that other factors deserve the credit. Especially the absence of any type of taxation on income.

…there was a condition that obtained in these years that is absent today. That condition is that the tariff was in the main the only form of federal taxation. There was no income or profits tax, no wage tax, no tax on investment gains… When the American economy really boomed under the tariff, over the first half of our history, financiers and entrepreneurs plowed money, energy, and ideas into businesses knowing that all receipts were available to recover costs and make a profit. …A company’s pay rates did not have to exceed the wage needs of the employees so as to cover their income and payroll tax obligations, as today. The money left to a company from sales after costs faced no corporate tax. And there was no inheritance tax.

And I’ll add one additional point. One of the good things about tariffs is that they are inherently self-limiting because of the Laffer Curve. As Alexander Hamilton pointed out, the government gets less revenue if trade taxes get too high.

Anyhow, the moral of today’s story is that tariffs are bad, but they are less bad than the modern welfare/administrative state.

But here’s the challenge.

If we want to solve the problems caused by the western world’s second-most-depressing chart, we’ll need to figure out how to reverse all the bad policies that produced the western world’s most-depressing chart.

Unfortunately, Trump has been making government even bigger, so the likelihood of returning to a tariff-only tax system has dropped from 0.00005 percent to 0.00001 percent.

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The Western World’s Second-Most Depressing Chart

Last week, I shared very grim data, going all the way back to 1880, on the growth of the welfare state.

I even claimed that the accompanying graph was the “western world’s most depressing chart” because it showed the dramatic increase in the burden of government spending for redistribution programs.

And I didn’t even mention that the numbers likely will get even worse because of changing demographics.

Now it’s time for the western world’s second-most depressing chart. Like the first chart, the data for this second chart comes from “Our world in data,” only this time it shows the relentless and astounding (in a depressing way) expansion in tax burdens starting in 1868. It only shows four countries, but other western nations would show the same pattern.

What isn’t shown in this chart is that the tax burden used to be reasonable because governments generally did not have income taxes.

The United Kingdom was an early adopter, but France, Sweden, and the United States didn’t impose that onerous levy until the 1900s. And it’s no coincidence that the tax burden exploded once politicians learned to exploit that source of revenue.

An obvious lesson is that it is never a good idea to give politicians a new source of revenue. We see in the above chart what happened once nations imposed income taxes. We’ve also seen increases in fiscal burdens in nations that imposed value-added taxes (which is why Americans should fight to their dying breaths before allowing that levy in the United States).

From the perspective of politicians, they like new sources of revenue because that increases “tax capacity,” which is an Orwellian term that describes their ability to grab more money from the economy’s productive sector.

And here’s another chart from “Our world in data” showing how income taxes and VATs (along with income-tax withholding) have become ubiquitous.

Very depressing trends. Reminds me of the biased grading of tax regimes from the World Bank.

Let’s close with the tiny bit of good news from the website. Here’s a chart showing how top rates for the personal income tax dropped substantially between 1979 and 2002.

This happened, needless to say, because of tax competition. As globalization expanded, it became easier and easier for taxpayers to move themselves and/or their money from high-tax nations to low-tax jurisdictions.

Politicians thus were forced to lower tax rates so the geese with the golden eggs didn’t fly away.

Sadly, updated versions of this chart now show top tax rates heading in the wrong direction, in large part because tax havens have been weakened and politicians no longer feel as much competitive pressure.

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Another State Joins the Flat Tax Club

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The (Highly Implausible but Theoretically Attractive) Case for Import Taxes

Every time I write a column criticizing Trump’s protectionism, I get pushback. Some of the resistance is from people who genuinely think trade barriers are a good thing, and I routinely respond by asking them to ponder these eight questions or these five charts.

But I also get negative feedback from people who point out that the United States imposed significant import taxes in the 1800s, a period when the United States transitioned from agricultural poverty to middle-class prosperity.

Doesn’t this prove tariffs are pro-growth?

That’s sort of what Brian Domitrovic asserts in a recent column for Forbes.

There is an indisputable chronological correlation between the tariff and phenomenal economic growth. From the late 18^th to the early 20th twentieth centuries, the United States steadily developed into the most successful economy in the world.

Brian’s column explores how trade taxes worked in the early history of the United States, but let’s skip to the part that is relevant to today’s discussion.

From 1789 to 1913, the size of the federal government in the economy as a whole averaged about 3%, with variation in time of war. Today, that number is over 20%—a 7-fold increase. State and local government was another 3% back then, and is another 12% today. Where total government was 6% of economic output in the era of the tariff, it is five times larger at over 30% today.

In other words, the real lesson to be learned is not that trade taxes are good for growth, but rather that an economy can prosper if the public sector is very small. And Brian is right that the federal government used to be only a tiny burden in the United States.

Brian even makes the case that government may have stayed small during the 1800s precisely because import taxes were seen as naked cronyism.

The quid pro quo the populace made with the tariff is that Congress and its conspirators in business got their favors, but in turn Congress’s realm, the government, had to stay small. Therefore, the private economy was free… Boundless growth at the hands of entrepreneurs and a talented and ambitious workforce built up year after year as Congress got to curry its petty favors on the condition that government stayed limited in size.

He also explains that politicians back then were very cognizant of the Laffer Curve.

A tariff “for revenue” was one where a rate was set low enough for the good in question to flow into the country in sufficient quantity to bring in increasing receipts to the government. A “prohibitive” tariff was one that was so high, receipts would go up if a rate were lowered. The “Laffer curve” concept was the most discussed theorem in political-economic debates in the United States in the 19^th century.

The same principle applies to the income tax today. A modest rate generates lots of revenue, whereas a punitive rate can actually cause a drop in tax receipts.

And, speaking of the income tax, the introduction of that awful levy actually gave Hoover and other politicians the fiscal leeway to impose “prohibitive” tariffs…with very bad results.

After the income tax was put in place in 1913, the tariff shed its revenue purpose and became exclusively a vehicle for cronyism. Therefore it got very high—so high, in 1930, that…the…system was ruined and the result was the Great Depression.

For what it’s worth, I think there were lots of other bad policies from Hoover and Roosevelt that caused – and then exacerbated – the economic damage of the 1930s, so high tariffs don’t deserve all the blame.

But let’s not digress from our main topic of whether trade taxes can be justified.

Brian’s column doesn’t say that tariffs are good, but he does point out that such a system was only capable of financing a very small government. And that meant the private sector had lots of breathing room to operate.

But a “sin of omission” is that he also could have elaborated on the economic benefits of having no income tax. During the 1800s (with the exception of Lincoln’s income tax during the Civil War and an income tax in 1894 that was declared unconstitutional in 1895), there was no personal income tax. And no corporate income tax. And no payroll taxes. Or death tax. Or capital gains tax.

Dean Clancy highlighted these benefits when considering the conditions that would be necessary for him to support trade taxes.

I sort of agree. But I hope Dean would agree to a friendly tweak to his tweet, so that it read “McKinley-size tariffs were a less-worse option because of…”, and then list the polices that actually were good, such as no taxes on income and very small government.

Sadly, I don’t see any practical way of unwinding all the bad policy of the past 100 years.

So the case for trade taxes is very similar to the market-friendly case for a value-added tax. Yes, there is a theoretical argument to replace all income taxes with a VAT, but it’s not realistic.

Likewise, I’m open to the argument that higher tariffs might be acceptable, but only if someone first shows me a practical plan to 1) shrink the federal government back down to what the Founding Fathers envisioned, and 2) get rid of the IRS and all taxes on income.

P.S. Alexander Hamilton, writing about tariffs and excises in Federalist 21, clearly appreciated the insights of the Laffer Curve: “It is a signal advantage of taxes on articles of consumption, that they contain in their own nature a security against excess. They prescribe their own limit; which cannot be exceeded without defeating the end proposed, that is, an extension of the revenue.”

P.P.S. The Cayman Islands is the closest example of a successful modern economy that finances a big chunk of government with import taxes. But that example is somewhat limited since almost all goods are imported. For such an economy, tariffs are basically the same as a sales tax. For what it’s worth, I would argue Cayman’s fiscal system has more in common with Monaco today than with the United States in the 1800s.

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My First Pro-VAT Column, but with a Huge Caveat

Whenever I see an otherwise sensible person express support for a value-added tax, it triggers a Pavlovian response. And it’s not a favorable reaction.

• I’ve criticized Tom Dolan, Greg Mankiw, and Paul Ryan, for pro-VAT comments.
• I’ve gone after Kevin Williamson, Josh Barro, and Andrew Stuttaford for the same reason.
• I wrote that Mitch Daniels, Herman Cain, and Mitt Romney deserved skepticism from voters for being sympathetic to a VAT.
  
• I also dinged Rand Paul and Ted Cruz for including value-added taxes in their campaign tax plans.
• I strongly disagreed with pro-VAT articles by Peter Morici, Jim Carter, Geoff Davis, and Alan Murray.

But I just read a pro-VAT column and I liked it.

So what happened? Have I surrendered to big government? Did I ingest some magic mushrooms?

Actually, I think you’ll agree that I’m still the same lovable guy. Yes, Professor John Cochrane of the University of Chicago (also a Cato adjunct scholar) has a column in the Wall Street Journal that embraces a VAT. But unlike all of the others I just cited, he includes a condition that is mandatory, necessary, vital, and non-negotiable. It’s so important that it deserves the opposite of fine-print treatment.

…eliminate entirely the personal and corporate income tax, estate tax and all other federal taxes. …it is essential that the VAT replace rather than add to the current tax system, as it does in Europe.

Amen. John hits the nail on the head.

The VAT isn’t theoretically bad. Like the flat tax, it would have one rate. There also would be no double taxation of saving and investment. And it also can be designed to have no loopholes.

In other words, the good news is that the VAT – when compared to the internal revenue code – is a less-destructive way of generating revenue.

The bad news, though, is that the VAT is capable of generating a lot of revenue. And as we’ve seen in Europe, that’s a recipe for enabling a larger burden of government spending.

Which is why the idea of a VAT should only be on the table if the plan would first abolish all other federal taxes. Which is what John is proposing.

Except I’d take it one step farther. Just like I’ve argued when contemplating a national sales tax, I’d only allow the VAT if we first repeal the 16th Amendment and replace it with something so ironclad that even John Roberts and Ruth Bader Ginsberg couldn’t rule in favor of an income tax at some point in the future.

By the way, John is right that the economy would grow faster if the income tax was totally abolished. The current system is filled with warts.

Much of the current tax mess results from taxing income. Once the government taxes income, it must tax corporate income or people would incorporate to avoid paying taxes. Yet the right corporate tax rate is zero. Every cent of corporate tax comes from people via higher prices, lower wages, or lower payments to shareholders. And a corporate tax produces an army of lawyers and lobbyists demanding exemptions. An income tax also leads to taxes on capital income. Capital income taxes discourage saving and investment. But the government is forced to tax capital income because otherwise people can hide wages… The estate tax can take close to half a marginal dollar of wealth. This creates a strong incentive to blow the family money on a round-the-world cruise, to spend lavishly on lawyers, or to invest inefficiently to avoid the tax. …A reformed tax code should involve no deductions—including the holy trinity of mortgage interest, employer-provided health insurance, and charitable deductions. The interest groups for each of these deductions are strong. But if the government doesn’t tax income in the first place, these deductions vanish without a fight.

By the way, I will quibble with a couple of things he wrote.

First, I don’t necessarily think the correct corporate tax rate is zero. What’s important is eliminating either the corporate tax or the tax on dividends. That way the income is only taxed once. And since it’s probably administratively easier to tax the income once at the business level rather than once at the shareholder level, I’m not fixated on abolishing the corporate tax.

Second, it’s very important to get rid of double taxation (what he calls “capital income”), but you don’t need a VAT to make that happen. There’s no double taxation with a flat tax.

Third, he should have explicitly included the state and local tax deduction in his list of loopholes to abolish (I’m guessing he assumed it would be the first deduction on the chopping block and therefore didn’t need to be mentioned).

There’s another part of John’s column that deserves attention. He points out that you need to have small government if you want a low tax burden.

…if the federal government is going to spend 20% of gross domestic product, the VAT will sooner or later have to be about 20%. Tax reform is stymied because politicians mix arguments over the rates with arguments over the structure of taxes. This is a mistake. They should first agree to fix the structure of the tax code, and later argue about rates—and the spending those rates must support.

At the risk of being pedantic, I think the VAT rate would have to be significantly above 20 percent, both because the tax base will be smaller than GDP and also because there will be loopholes or rebates. But the point he’s making is spot on. You can’t have a low tax rate and a big government. I’ve made the same point when writing about Belgium and Germany, nations where middle-class taxpayers are pillaged because the welfare state is too big.

My bottom line on this issue is that Professor Cochrane has produced a column showing that a VAT is theoretically worth considering, but only if all other federal taxes are permanently abolished.

But since that’s not going to happen any time soon, I don’t think there’s any reason to ease up on my dogmatic (and pragmatic) opposition to that levy.

P.S. My clinching argument is that Reagan opposed a VAT and Nixon supported a VAT. That tells you everything you need to know.

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Tax Withholding: A Prerequisite for Bigger Government

The internal revenue code is a reprehensible mess that torments taxpayers and undermines American competitiveness.

The good news is that Americans don’t like the tax system.

The bad news is that they don’t dislike it nearly as much as they should. At least in my humble opinion.

There are two reasons for the inadequate level of disdain.

• First, nearly half of all households are no longer are subject to the income tax. Indeed, the system is actually a revenue generator for some households since the EITC wage subsidy is a redistribution program laundered through the tax code.
• Second, many people get a warm and fuzzy feeling when they file their taxes because of the expectation that they will get a sizable refund, even though that payment from the IRS is simply a reflection of having paid too much tax during the prior year.

For those of us who want to scrap the tax system, this is a challenge.

And I’m not shy about admitting the problem.

About three-quarters typically get money back, with refunds so far this year averaging almost $3,000. For many, it will be the single biggest payment they receive all year. …the fact that so many people are getting paid by the IRS, and not the other way around, takes some of the edge off a day when they’re trying to stoke public anger at the tax system. “The fact that people are looking forward to tax time rubs me the wrong way,” said Dan Mitchell, a tax expert at the libertarian Cato Institute. “I would like them to be upset.”

I also have a good idea of why the problem exists.

It’s withholding. And it started back during World War II. Here’s some background.

During the war, tax rates went up, and a broader number of people were expected to pay them. Professor Anuj Desai from the University of Wisconsin Law School said there was a saying that income tax went from “a class tax to a mass tax.” …“The thought was that if we withhold a little bit every bit every paycheck, people won’t have to worry about the problem of coming up with a huge chunk of money,” Desai said. But withholding is also a remarkably efficient way for the government to raise money, and policymakers knew that. …“You could never have the taxes that were levied during World War II without withholding. It was absolutely essential for that purpose,” economist Milton Friedman said in an interview… Friedman worked with the Treasury Department at the time withholding was introduced. Withholding stuck around after the war, much to Friedman’s chagrin. “Unfortunately, once you got it installed, it’s almost impossible to get rid of it,”  Friedman said. “It’s too useful to the people in power.”

Jeffrey Tucker of the Foundation for Economic Education elaborates.

The problem is…the withholding tax. Instead of being collected directly from the payer, the government  collects them “at the source,” which is to say that they are collected from the institution that pays wages and salaries — on behalf of the taxpayer. …one of the most amazingly brilliant innovations of the modern state. This tinkering with the system — the creation of the institution called withholding — has created an illusion that paying taxes is really about getting free money! When the check arrives from the government a month or so later, the taxpayer is actually tempted to think: wow, this is really great! A pillaging has been spun to look like a gift. …Withholding dramatically changed the psychology of paying taxes. It almost feels like you aren’t paying any at all. The worker gets used to how much after-tax income she makes and adapts to it quickly. Then when tax time arrives, there is no more to pay. Instead you file and find yourself on the receiving end of what seems like an unexpected gift of a check from government. Yet in reality your refund is nothing more than the belated return of a zero-interest loan you were forced to provide the government.

Exactly.

Every time I talk to somehow who is happy about a refund, I ask them whether they will give me an interest free loan instead. After all, I’d be happy to collect money from them all year long and then return it the following April.

But I’m digressing.

Jeffrey points out how the political dynamics of tax day would change in the absence of withholding.

If we really wanted to make a wonderful change in favor of transparency and decency, one that would mark a shift in people’s perceptions of the costs of government, the withholding tax could just be repealed completely. …every taxpayer would pay the full amount owed to the government every April 15 and otherwise receive full compensation the rest of the year. Such a seemingly small change would have a dramatic effect on public perceptions of taxation and government. Even from the age of 16, every citizen would have a more pungent reminder of the costs of government. We would no longer live the illusion that we can all get something for nothing and that government isn’t really expensive after all.

Ben Domenech of the Federalist agrees.

The overwhelming majority of Americans pay their taxes by having them extracted from their paychecks before they ever see the money. Operating under the fiction that the government is giving you money as opposed to returning what it has already taken is damaging to the psyche of the nation’s taxpayers. …Withholding was originally mandated as a wartime step, but its continuation since then disguises the property rights involved, essentially offers the government an interest free loan, and shields taxpayers from the ramifications of federal spending. The country would be better off if everyone experienced what entrepreneurs and business owners do: writing the most sizable checks every year to the government, and watching that hard-earned money walk out the door.

By the way, this isn’t merely impractical libertarian fantasy.

There’s a real-world example of a tax system where people actually write checks to the government and are much more aware of the cost of the public sector. It’s called Hong Kong, which is – not coincidentally – an economic success story in large part because of a good fiscal system.

And I would argue that good fiscal system exists because taxpayers are directly sensitive to the cost of government (it also helps that there’s a spending cap in Hong Kong).

Let’s close with some government propaganda. This Disney cartoon was produced before withholding. As you can see the government basically had to make the case that people should set aside money out of their paychecks so they would have enough money to make periodic tax payments.

This was a plausible case when seeking to finance a war against National Socialism and Japanese imperialism. It wouldn’t be nearly as persuasive today when the government seems to specialize in financing waste, fraud, and abuse.

P.S. At the bottom of this column, you can watch a much better cartoon from the 1940s.

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Bad Federalism Is Better than No Federalism

I don’t like the income tax that’s been imposed by our overlords in Washington. Indeed, I’ve speculated whether October 3 is the worst day of the year because that’s the date when the Revenue Act of 1913 was signed into law.

I don’t like state income taxes, either.

And, as discussed in this interview about Seattle from last week, I’m also not a fan of local income taxes.

From an economic perspective, I think a local income tax would be suicidally foolish for Seattle. Simply stated, this levy will drive some well-heeled people to live and work outside the city’s borders. And when revenues fall short of projections, Seattle politicians likely will compensate by increasing the tax rate and also extending the tax so it is imposed on those with more modest incomes. And that will drive more people out of the city, which will lead to an even higher rate that hits even more people.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Though I pointed out that this grim outcome may be averted if the courts rule that Seattle doesn’t have the legal authority to impose an income tax.

But I also explained in the discussion that a genuine belief in federalism means that you should support the right of state and local governments to impose bad policy. I criticize states such as California and Illinois when they expand the burden of government. And I criticize local entities such as Hartford, Connecticut, and Fairfax County, Virginia, when they expand the burden of government.

But I don’t think that Washington should seek to prohibit bad policy. If some sub-national governments want to torment their citizens with excessive government, so be it.

There are limits, however, to this bad version of federalism. State and local governments should not be allowed to impose laws outside their borders. That’s why I’m opposed to the so-called Marketplace Fairness Act. And they shouldn’t seek federal handouts to subsidize bad policy, such as John Kasich’s whining for more Medicaid funding.

Moreover, a state or local government can’t trample basic constitutional freedoms, for instance. If Seattle goes overboard with its anti-gun policies, federal courts presumably (hopefully!) would strike down those infringements against the 2nd Amendment. Likewise, the same thing also would (should) happen if the local government tried to hinder free speech. Or discriminate on the basis on race.

By the way, it’s worth pointing out that these are all examples of the Constitution’s anti-majoritarianism (which helps to explain why the attempted smear of James Buchanan was so misguided).

The bottom line is that I generally support the rights of state and local governments to impose bad policy, so long as they respect constitutional freedoms, don’t impose extra-territorial laws, and don’t ask for handouts.

And I closed the above interview by saying it sometimes helps to have bad examples so the rest of the nation knows what to avoid. Greece and France play that role for the industrialized world. Venezuela stands alone as a symbol of failed statism in developing world. Places like Connecticut and New Jersey are poster children for failed state policy. And now Seattle can join Detroit as a case study of what not to do at the local level.

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