The Case Against Biden’s Per-Child Handouts

Joe Biden wants to dramatically expand the welfare state (more than $5 trillion of new spending over the next 10 years).

In this discussion with Ross Kaminsky of KHOW in Denver, I warn that the President’s proposal for per-child handouts is an especially bad idea.

In part, my opposition to per-child handouts is motivated by a desire to protect the welfare reform law enacted in the 1990s.

As I noted in the interview, that reform reduced dependency and it reduced poverty. And Biden’s plan, for all intents and purposes, will repeal that law since it will be possible to get big chunks of money while not working, simply by having kids.

But since I’m a public finance economist, I’m also motivated by opposition to a massive new entitlement program.

At the risk of understatement, we don’t need to spend another $1.1 trillion when we can’t even afford all the programs that already are burdening taxpayers.

Others share my concern about the impact of Biden’s plan.

Matt Weidinger dissects per-child handouts in an article for National Review.

This year, parents don’t need to have paid taxes at all to collect an annual allowance of up to $3,600 per child. …According to the New York Times, “more than 93 percent of children — 69 million” will benefit from the new federal giveaway. …No work is expected from parents collecting them. That’s reminiscent of welfare programs before bipartisan 1996 reforms that required parents to work or attend training in order to receive government checks. In fact, the biggest beneficiaries of the new child allowance will be parents who earn less than $2,500 per year — including those who don’t work or pay taxes at all. …As explained in a 2019 report proposing child allowances in the U.S., the idea comes “from other countries.” …American policy-makers could merely be following suit. But it seems more likely that they’re just searching for a palatable way to package their current explosion of new spending, a spin on a return to the failed policies of the past: bigger benefits, for more people, funded by others’ tax dollars. After all, calling such payments “welfare” just wouldn’t do, would it?

David Henderson of the Hoover Institution also explains why Biden’s scheme is misguided.

Child allowances are a bad idea. It’s wrong to forcibly take money from some and give to others simply because they have children. Moreover, child allowances would create increased dependence, are not targeted at the needy, could reduce the work effort of lower-income women, and would add to the already huge federal budget… Scott Winship, the director of poverty studies at the American Enterprise Institute…worries that child allowances will undercut the successful welfare reform of the mid-1990s and thereby cause a substantial number of unmarried low-income mothers to stop working. …in the 1990s he thought welfare reform would increase child poverty and he now admits that he was wrong. He writes that in the United States, “Poverty among the children of single parents fell from 50 percent in the early 1980s to 15 percent today, with an especially sharp decline during the 1990s.” …the urgent need is to get federal spending under control. This means slowing the growth of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, the three programs most responsible for the coming federal deficits. But it also means not adding major new programs.

By the way, Henderson’s column focuses on Mitt Romney’s plan, but his criticisms apply equally (actually, even more) to Biden’s proposal.

I’ll close with some encouraging polling data that was shared by G. Elliott Morris of the Economist.

Biden’s plan has only 29 percent support (versus 43 percent opposition).

I suspect that polling data would look even better if the pollsters had been honest and asked whether people favored expanded redistribution payments based on number of kids (“refundable” tax credits are simply spending that gets laundered through the tax code).

The bottom line is that the United States already has a big problem with government dependency. Per-child handouts will make a bad situation even worse.

P.S. Some advocates of the handouts say we need to copy Europe, but they never explain why “catching up” is a good idea when Europeans have much lower living standards.

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The Biden-Bernie Budget Blowout

Back in 2009, there was strong and passionate opposition to Bush’s corrupt TARP scheme and Obama’s fake stimulus boondoggle – both of which had price tags of less than $1 trillion.

Today, Biden has already squandered $1.9 trillion on his version of “stimulus” and has asked Congress to expand the federal government’s budgetary burden by another $3.5 trillion (plus about $600 billion for so-called infrastructure).

Yet there doesn’t seem to be the same intensity of opposition, even though Biden is proposing policies that are far more costly.

Is this simply because Republicans were corrupted by Trump’s profligacy and are now comfortable with big government?

Or are they distracted by cultural battles over issues such as critical race theory?

I don’t know, but I’m very worried that insufficient opposition may result in Biden’s dependency agenda getting enacted.

And I’m even more worried because we now know that the left intends to increase the spending burden by a lot more than $3.5 trillion. Especially since Bernie Sanders is Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee.

The Wall Street Journal opined on this topic a couple of days ago.

Democrats have provided few details of what they plan to include in Sen. Bernie Sanders’s $3.5 trillion budget proposal, and now we know why. The real cost is $5 trillion or more… Their plan is to include every program but start small and pretend they’re temporary. This will let them skirt the budget-reconciliation rule that spending can’t add to the deficit outside a 10-year budget window without triggering a 60-vote threshold to pass. The nonprofit Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget examined the budget outline… Assuming the major provisions will be made permanent and continue through the 10-year budget window, the group says, the “policies under consideration could cost between $5 trillion and $5.5 trillion over a decade.” …All of this false accounting will let Democrats pretend the overall cost of their budget spending is lower than it really is… Any way you add it up, Democrats are attempting to pass the biggest expansion of government since the 1960s with narrow majorities and no electoral mandate. No wonder they want to disguise its real cost.

By the way, it’s not just Democrats who play this game. Some provisions of the Trump tax cut expire in 2025 because Republicans also finagled to get around restrictions that govern the 10-year budget process.

That being said, I don’t think there’s moral equivalency between proposals to let people keep their own money and the Biden-Bernie scheme to buy votes with other people’s money.

Anyhow, here’s the relevant table from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s report.

P.S. This battle is not just an issue of dollars and cents. Some of the Biden-Bernie proposals, such as per-child handouts, would increase dependency by undoing Bill Clinton’s welfare reform.

P.P.S. Don’t forget all the debilitating taxes that will accompany all the new spending.

P.P.P.S. But at least we’ll “catch up” with Europe if Biden-Bernie agenda is enacted.

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Biden’s Awful Plan for a Hybrid Death Tax/Capital Gains Tax

More than 10 years ago, I narrated this video explaining why there should be no capital gains tax.

The economic argument against capital gains taxation is very simple. It is wrong to impose discriminatory taxes on income that is saved and invested.

It’s bad enough that government gets to tax our income one time, but it’s even worse when they get to impose multiple layers of tax on the same dollar.

Unfortunately, nobody told Biden. As part of his class-warfare agenda, he wants to increase the capital gains tax rate from 23.8 percent to 43.4 percent.

Even worse, he wants to expand the capital gains tax so that it functions as an additional form of death tax.

And that tax would be imposed even if assets aren’t sold. In other words, it would a tax on capital gains that only exist on paper (a nutty idea associated with Sens. Ron Wyden and Elizabeth Warren).

I’m not joking. In an article for National Review, Ryan Ellis explains why Biden’s proposal is so misguided.

The Biden administration proposes that on top of the old death tax, which is assessed on estates, the federal government should add a new tax on the deceased’s last 1040 personal-income-tax return. This new, second tax would apply to tens of millions of Americans. …the year someone died, all of their unrealized capital gains (gains on unsold real estate, family farms and businesses, stocks and other investments, artwork, collectibles, etc.) would be subject to taxation as if the assets in question had been sold that year. …In short, what the Biden administration is proposing is to tax the capital gains on a person’s property when they die, even if the assets that account for those gains haven’t actually been sold. …to make matters worse, the administration also supports raising the top tax rate on long-term capital gains from 23.8 percent to 43.4 percent. When state capital-gains-tax rates are factored in, this would make the combined rate at or above 50 percent in many places — the highest capital-gains-tax rate in the world, and the highest in American history.

This sounds bad (and it is bad).

But there’s more bad news.

…that’s not all. After these unrealized, unsold, phantom gains are subject to the new 50 percent double death tax, there is still the matter of the old death tax to deal with. Imagine a 50 percent death tax followed by a 40 percent death tax on what is left, and you get the idea. Karl Marx called for the confiscation of wealth at death, but even he probably never dreamed this big. …Just like the old death tax, the double death tax would be a dream for the estate-planning industry, armies of actuaries and attorneys, and other tax professionals. But for the average American, it would be a nightmare. The death tax we have is bad enough. A second death tax would be a catastrophic mistake.

Hank Adler and Madison Spach also wrote about this topic last month for the Wall Street Journal.

Here’s some of what they wrote.

Mr. Biden’s American Families Plan would subject many estates worth far less than $11.7 million to a punishing new death tax. The plan would raise the total top rate on capital gains, currently 23.8% for most assets, to 40.8%—higher than the 40% maximum estate tax. It would apply the same tax to unrealized capital gains at death… The American Families Plan would result in negative value at death for many long-held leveraged real-estate assets. …Scenarios in which the new death tax would significantly reduce, nearly eliminate or even totally eliminate the net worth of decedents who invested and held real estate for decades wouldn’t be uncommon. …The American Families Plan would discourage long-term investment. That would be particularly true for those with existing wealth who would begin focusing on cash flow rather than long-term investment. The combination of the new death tax plus existing estate tax rates would change risk-reward ratios.

The bottom line is that it is very misguided to impose harsh and discriminatory taxes on capital gains. Especially if the tax occurs simply because a taxpayer dies.

P.S. Keep in mind that there’s no “indexing,” which means investors often are being taxed on gains that merely reflect inflation.

P.P.S. Rather than increasing the tax burden on capital gains, we should copy Belgium, Chile, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Hungary, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Singapore, Slovenia, Switzerland, and Turkey. What do they have in common? A capital gains tax rate of zero.

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Biden’s Misguided Plan for a Bigger Welfare State

President Biden pushed through $1.9 trillion of new spending earlier this year, but that so-called stimulus plan was mostly for one-time giveaways. As I warn in this recent discussion on Denver’s KHOW, we should be much more worried about his proposals to permanently expand the welfare state.

When I first got to Washington, I would be upset that politicians wanted to add billions of dollars to the burden of government.

Well, those were the good ol’ days. Biden is proposing to divert trillions of dollars from the private sector to expand the welfare state.

Even worse, he wants to make more Americans dependent on the federal government.

Maybe that’s a smart way of buying votes, but it will erode societal capital.

John Cogan and Daniel Heil of the Hoover Institution warned about the consequences of this dependency agenda in a column for the Wall Street Journal.

The federal government’s system of entitlements is the largest money-shuffling machine in human history, and President Biden intends to make it a lot bigger. His American Families Plan—which he recently attempted to tie to a bipartisan infrastructure deal—proposes to extend the reach of federal entitlements to 21 million additional Americans, the largest expansion since Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. …more than half of working-age households would be on the entitlement rolls if the plan were enacted in its current form. …57% of all married-couple children would receive federal entitlement benefits, and more than 80% of single-parent households would be on the entitlement rolls.

Many of the handouts would go to people with middle-class incomes.

And higher.

…The American Families Plan proposes several new entitlement programs. One promises students the government will pick up the entire cost of community-college tuition; another promises families earning 1.5 times their state’s median income that Washington will cover all daycare expenses above 7% of family income for children under 5; still another promises workers up to 12 weeks of federally financed wage subsidies to take time off to care for newborns or sick family members. …Two-parent households with two preschool-age children and incomes up to $130,000 would qualify for federal cash assistance for daycare. Single parents with two preschoolers and incomes up to $113,000 would qualify. And some families with incomes over $200,000 would be eligible for health-insurance subsidies. Other parts of the plan, such as paid leave and free community college, have no income limits at all.

The Wall Street Journal opined on this issue last month. Here are the key passages from their editorial.

The entitlements are by far the biggest long-term economic threat from the Biden agenda. …entitlements that spend automatically based on eligibility are nearly impossible to repeal, or even reform, and they represent a huge tax-and-spend wedge far into the future. …We’d highlight two points. First is the dishonesty about costs. Entitlements always start small but then soar. The Biden Families Plan is even more dishonest than usual. For example, it pretends the child tax credit ends in 2025, so its cost is $449 billion over the 10-year budget window that is used for reconciliation bills that require only 51 votes to pass the Senate. But a future Congress will never repeal the credit. …Second, these programs aren’t intended as a “safety net” for the poor or those temporarily down on their luck. They are explicitly designed to make the middle class dependent on government handouts.

The editorial explicitly warns that the United States will economically suffer if politicians copy Europe’s counterproductive redistributionism.

…on present trend the U.S. is falling into the same entitlement trap as Western Europe. Entitlement spending requires higher taxes, which grab 40% or more of GDP. Economic growth declines as more money flows to transfer payments instead of investment. The entitlement state becomes too large to afford but also too politically entrenched to reform. …Only a decade ago the Tea Party fought ObamaCare. Now most Beltway conservatives worry more about Big Tech than they do Big Government. If the Biden Families Plan passes, these conservatives will find themselves spending the rest of their careers as tax collectors for the entitlement state.

Amen. I’m baffled when folks on the left argue that we should “catch up” with Europe.

Are they not aware that American living standards are far higher? Do they not understand that low-income people in the United States often have more income than middle-class people on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean?

P.S. As I mentioned in the interview, the 21st century has been bad news for fiscal policy, with two big-government Republicans and two big-government Democrats.

For what it’s worth, the $3,000-per-child handouts are Biden’s most damaging idea. In one fell swoop, he would create a trillion-dollar entitlement program and repeal the successful Clinton-Gingrich welfare reform.

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Tax Cartels Mean Ever-Higher Tax Rates

When President Biden proposed a “global minimum tax” for businesses, I immediately warned that would lead to ever-increasing tax rates.

Ross Kaminsky of KHOW and I discussed how this is already happening.

I hate being right, but it’s always safe to predict that politicians and bureaucrats will embrace policies that give more power to government.

Especially when they are very anxious to stifle tax competition.

For decades, people in government have been upset that the tax cuts implemented by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher triggered a four-decade trend of lower tax rates and pro-growth tax reform.

That’s the reason Biden and his Treasury Secretary proposed a 15 percent minimum tax rate for businesses.

And it’s the reason they now want the rate to be even higher.

Though even I’m surprised that they’re already pushing for that outcome when the original pact hasn’t even been approved or implemented.

Here are some passages from a report by Reuters.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will press G20 counterparts this week for a global minimum corporate tax rate above the 15% floor agreed by 130 countries last week…the global minimum tax rate…is tied to the outcome of legislation to raise the U.S. minimum tax rate, a Treasury official said. The Biden administration has proposed doubling the U.S. minimum tax on corporations overseas intangible income to 21% along with a new companion “enforcement” tax that would deny deductions to companies for tax payments to countries that fail to adopt the new global minimum rate. The officials said several countries were pushing for a rate above 15%, along with the United States.

Other kleptocratic governments naturally want the same thing.

A G7 proposal for a global minimum tax rate of 15% is too low and a rate of at least 21% is needed, Argentina’s finance minister said on Monday, leading a push by some developing countries… “The 15% rate is way too low,” Argentine Finance Minister Martin Guzman told an online panel hosted by the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation. …”The minimum rate being proposed would not do much to countries in Africa…,” Mathew Gbonjubola, Nigeria’s tax policy director, told the same conference.

Needless to say, I’m not surprised that Argentina is on the wrong side.

And supporters of class warfare also are agitating for a higher minimum rate. Here are some excerpts from a column in the New York Times by Gabriel Zucman and Gus Wezerek.

In the decades after World War II, close to 50 percent of American companies’ earnings went to state and federal taxes. …it was a golden period. …President Biden should be applauded for trying to end the race to the bottom on corporate tax rates. But even if Congress approves the 15 percent global minimum corporate tax, it won’t be enough. …the Biden administration to give working families a real leg up, it should push Congress to enact a 25 percent minimum tax, which would bring in about $200 billion in additional revenue each year. …With a 25 percent minimum corporate tax, the Biden administration would begin to reverse decades of growing inequality. And it would encourage other countries to do the same, replacing a race to the bottom with a sprint to the top.

I can’t resist making two observations about this ideological screed.

1. Even the IMF and OECD agree that the so-called race to the bottom has not led to a decline in corporate tax revenues, even when measured as a share of economic output.
2. Since companies legally avoid rather than illegally evade taxes, the headline of the column is utterly dishonest – but it’s what we’ve learned to expect from the New York Times.

The only good thing about the Zucman-Wezerek column is that it includes this chart showing how corporate tax rates have dramatically declined since 1980.

P.S. For those interested, the horizontal line at the bottom is for Bermuda, though other jurisdictions (such as Monaco and the Cayman Islands) also deserve credit for having no corporate income taxes.

P.P.S. If you want to know why high corporate tax rates are misguided, click here. And if you want to know why Biden’s plan to raise the U.S. corporate tax rate is misguided, click here. Or here. Or here.

P.P.P.S. And if you want more information about why Biden’s global tax cartel is bad, click here, here, and here.

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Deconstructing Biden’s Corporate Tax Cartel, Part II

Yesterday’s column explained why Biden’s proposed global cartel for corporate taxation was a bad idea.

In this clip from a recent panel hosted by the Austrian Economics Center in Vienna, I speculated on whether the plan would become reality.

I encourage you to watch the 4-minute video, but all you really need to know is that there are lots of obstacles to a cartel. Most notably, countries with pro-growth business tax regimes (such as Ireland, Estonia, and Switzerland in Europe) have big incentives to say no.

And if legislation is required in the United States, I assume that won’t be an easy sell, at least for GOP members.

But, as I warn in the video, the other side has hundreds of bureaucrats at the OECD and various finance ministries and treasury departments. And these taxpayer-financed mandarins have both the time and patience to chip away until they achieve their goals.

So it is critical that economists such as myself do a good job of educating policy makers about the adverse consequences of a tax cartel.

Which is why people should read this column by Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center. Here are some key excerpts.

For several decades now, politicians around the world have tried to curtail tax competition to make it easier for them to increase the tax burdens on their citizens without them fleeing to other lower-tax jurisdictions. The best way to achieve their goal is to create a global high-tax cartel. …It’s no mystery why politicians don’t like tax competition. …The ability to shift residences and operations from country to country puts pressure on governments to keep taxes on income, investment, and wealth lower than politicians would like. Politicians in each country fear that raising taxes will prompt high-income earners and capital to move away. …Academic research shows that the imposition of higher corporate taxes is a highly destructive way to collect revenue because it lowers investment and, in turn, workers’ wages. It also increases consumer prices. Also, let’s face it, no nation has ever become wealthier and better through higher taxes and wealth redistribution.

This column for Prof. Bruce Yandle also is very informative. Here’s some of what he wrote.

It was with a feeling of deep disappointment…that I read Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is…pushing to form an international cartel of governments that would implement a minimum corporate income tax rate across borders. …Efforts to cartelize taxation among nations will…, all else equal, lead to a higher-cost world economy. …Instead of searching high and low for ways to raise costs in the hope that more federal revenue and spending will follow, we should hope that our national leaders work harder to find better, more efficient ways to govern and serve the people. Doing so will give more people a much better chance at prosperity.

Amen. Tax harmonization was most accurately described by a former member of the European Parliament, who said it was a “thieves’ cartel.”

P.S. One of the worst aspects of the proposed tax cartel is that it will make it more difficult for poor countries to use good policy to improve living standards for their people.

P.P.S. Click here for my primer on tax competition.

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Deconstructing Biden’s Corporate Tax Cartel, Part I

When governments have to compete with each other, we get lower tax rates. That’s good for taxpayers and good for growth.

But politicians hate limits on their taxing power, which is why Biden has proposed a global tax cartel. Here are some of my remarks made yesterday on this topic.

If you don’t have time to watch the video, here are the key points I made when asked about the impact of Biden’s scheme.

• The tax cartel is a naked grab for more revenue.
• Higher taxes on businesses arguably are the worst way to collect more tax revenue. Indeed, both the IMF and OECD have research showing the destructive impact of higher corporate tax burdens.
• The global minimum tax will lead to a couple of additional bad consequences. 1) The 15 percent rate will be increased, and 2) Cartels will be created for other taxes.

I was then asked about whether there are better ways of generating revenue, particularly by having economic policies that lead to more growth.

This presumably was an opportunity for me to pontificate about the Laffer Curve, but I decided to make a more fundamental point about how politicians should not have more money.

• The burden of government spending already is excessive.
• The Rahn Curve shows that spending levels should be reduced.
• More taxes will lead to more spending.

I closed my remarks by pointing out that the world enjoyed an era of falling tax rates, which began when Reagan and Thatcher slashed tax rates about 40 years ago.

The average top personal tax rate in the developed world dropped from nearly 70 percent to just a bit over 40 percent.

The average corporate tax rate in industrialized nations dropped from nearly 50 percent to less than 25 percent.

Other nations didn’t copy the U.S. and U.K. because politicians were reading my boring articles about marginal tax rates. Instead, they only did the right thing because they were worried about losing jobs and investment.

One point I forgot to make (particularly in response to the second question) is that I should have explained that tax revenues as a share of GDP did not fall when tax rates were reduced.

Indeed, OECD data shows that tax revenues on income and profits (as a share of GDP) actually have risen during the period of falling tax rates.

The bottom line is that we need tax competition to protect us from “stationary bandits” who would produce “goldfish government.”

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Biden’s Global Tax Cartel: Bad News for Workers and Consumers

Biden’s tax agenda – especially the proposed increase in the corporate rate – would be very bad for American competitiveness.

We know this is true because the Administration wants to violate the sovereignty of other nations with a scheme that would require all nations to impose a minimum corporate tax rate of 15 percent.

Indeed, the White House openly says it wants to export bad policy to other nations “so that foreign corporations aren’t advantaged and foreign countries can’t try to get a competitive edge.”

Other big nations (the infamous G-7) just announced they want to participate in the proposed tax cartel.

I was just interviewed on this topic by the BBC World Service and I’ve extracted my most important quotes.

But I encourage you to listen to the full discussion, which starts with (predictably awful) comments from the French Finance Minister, followed by a couple of minutes of my sage observations.

For what it’s worth, “reprehensible” doesn’t begin to capture my disdain for what the politicians are trying to achieve.

What’s particularly irritating is that politicians want us to think that companies are engaging in rogue tax avoidance. Yet, as I noted in the interview, national governments already have the ability to reject overly aggressive forms of tax planning by multinational firms.

Here’s some of what was reported about the proposed cartel by the Associated Press.

The Group of Seven wealthy democracies agreed Saturday to support a global minimum corporate tax of at least 15%… U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the agreement “provides tremendous momentum” for reaching a global deal that “would end the race-to-the-bottom in corporate taxation…” The endorsement from the G-7 could help build momentum for a deal in wider talks among more than 135 countries being held in Paris as well as a Group of 20 finance ministers meeting in Venice in July. …The Group of 7 is an informal forum among Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the United States. European Union representatives also attend. Its decisions are not legally binding, but leaders can use the forum to exert political influence.

As you just read, the battle is not lost. Hopefully, the jurisdictions with good corporate tax policy (Ireland, Bermuda, Hong Kong, Cayman Islands, Switzerland, etc) will resist pressure and thus cripple Biden’s cartel.

I’ll close by emphasizing that the world needs tax competition as a necessary check on the greed of politicians. Without any sort of constraint, elected officials will over-tax and over-spend.

Which is why they’re trying to impose a tax cartel. They don’t want any limits on their ability to buy votes with other people’s money.

And we can see from Greece what then happens.

P.S. The Trump Administration also was awful on the issue of tax competition.

P.P.S. Here’s my most-recent column about the so-called “race to the bottom.”

P.P.P.S. As noted in the interview, both the IMF and OECD have research showing the destructive impact of higher corporate tax burdens.

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Biden’s Failure on Trade

Biden campaigned for higher taxes and a bigger welfare state, so I haven’t been surprised by his misguided fiscal agenda.

That being said, I was modestly hopeful that he would move trade policy in the right direction after four years of Trump’s protectionism.

To be sure, I didn’t think he would do the right thing because of some long-hidden belief in sound economics. But I figured he might reduce trade barriers simply to do the opposite of his predecessor.

We should be so lucky. Regardless of the policy, we’ve been getting statism.

Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post is not impressed by Biden’s protectionism.

Several months after he left office, some of President Donald Trump’s most foolish economic policies remain in place: his sweeping trade restrictions. …Trump began waging a series of trade wars three years ago — not primarily with U.S. adversaries, mind you, but with friends. Among the dumbest and most self-sabotaging measures were global tariffs levied on nearly $50 billion of imported steel and aluminum. …the countries most affected by Trump’s move were our close economic and military allies, including the European Union, Canada and Japan. …Despite Trump’s claims otherwise, the cost of the tariffs was primarily passed through to American consumers and companies. Downstream firms that use steel or inputs made of steel, which employ about 80 times more workers than the steel industry does, faced higher costs. One estimate found that Trump’s steel tariffs alone cost U.S. consumers and businesses about $900,000 for every job created or saved.

Getting rid of taxes on imported steel and aluminum would be a positive step for the economy.

But the real goal should be getting rid of all Trump’s taxes on global trade. Garrett Watson from the Tax Foundation recently shared estimates of how this would benefit the American economy.

…repealing the tariffs imposed under President Trump’s administration would be one of the simplest ways policymakers could boost economic growth. …About $460 billion worth of goods were subject to the tariffs, raising prices for consumers. In fact, we estimated the tariffs were about an $80 billion annual tax increase, reducing consumer purchasing power. …According to the Tax Foundation model, repealing tariffs imposed since 2018 would raise long-run GDP by 0.1 percent, long-run incomes (gross national product) by 0.2 percent, and create about 83,000 full-time equivalent jobs. This growth would boost after-tax incomes by about 0.3 percent for people across the income spectrum, helping low-income and middle-class taxpayers. …Repealing the tariffs would be a simple option to boost growth because it can be done without congressional authorization by President Biden, and would provide timely relief to businesses and households.

The last sentence is key. Trump had lots of unilateral authority to impose bad trade policy, and Biden has lots of unilateral authority to undo bad trade policy.

The fact that he hasn’t exercised that authority makes him just as guilty of anti-market trade policy as Trump.

The next thing to watch for is whether he continues Trump’s bad policy of sabotaging the World Trade Organization.

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Biden’s Anti-Empirical Budgetary Philosophy

When I debate public policy with leftists, I frequently stump them by asking for an example of a country where their ideas have worked.

They get flummoxed for the simple reason that no nation has ever become rich with big government.

There are some rich nations that have big governments, to be sure, but they all became rich in the 1800s and early 1900s, back when government was a tiny burden (and there often were no income taxes).

That’s true for the United States. And it’s true for Western Europe.

It’s also worth noting that places that have become rich in the modern era, such as Hong Kong and Singapore, have small governments and low tax burdens.

I’m making these points because Jim Tankersley of the New York Times has a thorough article on the Biden Administration’s budgetary philosophy.

And that philosophy is based on a completely different perspective. Indeed, the headline and subtitle are a very good summary of the entire article.

Here are some passages that further capture the Biden approach.

President Biden’s $6 trillion budget bets on the power of government to propel workers, families and businesses to new heights of prosperity…by redistributing income and wealth from high earners and corporations to grow the middle class. …it sets the nation on a new and higher spending path, with total federal outlays rising to $8.2 trillion by 2031… That spending represents an attempt to expand the size and scope of federal engagement in Americans’ daily lives… Mr. Biden also seeks to expand the government safety net in an effort to help Americans — particularly women of all races and men of color — work and earn more, rather than relying on corporate America to funnel higher wages to workers. …Mr. Biden is pushing what amounts to a permanent increase in the size of the federal footprint on the U.S. economy. Since 1980, annual federal spending has been, on average, about one-fifth the size of the nation’s economic output; under Mr. Biden’s plans, that would grow to close to one-fourth.

The article is definitely correct about one thing. As I wrote yesterday, Biden wants a big expansion of government spending.

But is he correct about the consequences? Will bigger government “help Americans” and allow more of them to “enjoy prosperity”?

If the evidence from Europe is any indication, adopting bigger welfare states is not a recipe for more prosperity.

For instance, OECD data on “actual individual consumption” show that people in the United States enjoy much higher living standards than their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

There’s also very powerful data showing that poor Americans (those at the 20th percentile) have higher living standards than most middle-class Europeans.

There’s even data showing that very poor Americans (those at the 10th percentile) have living standards equal to most middle-class Europeans.

The bottom line is that Biden wants higher taxes and more redistribution, but that’s been a big failure in the part of the world that has tried that approach.

Not that we should be surprised. Both theory and evidence tell us that bigger government is bad for prosperity.

P.S. There’s a very sobering example of what happens when a rich nation decides to dramatically curtail economic liberty.

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The Most Disturbing Takeaway from Biden’s Budget Plan

There are many things to dislike about President Biden’s budget plan to expand the burden of government.

• Class-warfare tax policy.
• Expanding welfare.
• Higher levels of red ink.

There will be ample opportunity to write about these issues in the coming weeks. For today, however, let’s identify and highlight the biggest problem.

Simply stated, Biden wants to permanently and significantly increase the burden of government spending. Here’s a chart, based on data from Table S.1 of the President’s budget, augmented by data from Table 1.3 of the Budget’s Historical Tables.

The budget had reached $4 trillion before the pandemic. It then skyrocketed for coronavirus-related spending.

But now that the emergency is receding, Biden is not going to let the burden of government fall back to prior levels. Instead, he’s proposing a $6 trillion budget for the upcoming fiscal year.

And that’s just the starting point. He wants spending to then climb rapidly – at almost twice the rate of inflation – up to $8 trillion by 2031.

By the way, this horrifying data doesn’t tell the entire story.

Biden’s budget doesn’t include some of his new spending giveaways. Brian Riedl addressed this fiscal gimmickry in a column for today’s New York Post.

…this budget does not even include additional spending and debt proposals that are coming later. …They account only for the recently-enacted “stimulus,” a massive discretionary spending hike, and the trillions in (creatively-defined) “infrastructure” spending proposed by the President over the past two months. However, during last fall’s campaign, Biden also proposed trillions in new spending for health care, Social Security, Supplemental Security Income, climate change, college aid, and other priorities. The White House has signaled that these new spending initiatives are still in the pipeline. Including these forthcoming proposals, the President would push spending and deficits far above any levels that have ever been sustained.

And don’t forget all this spending, both proposed and in the pipeline, is in addition to all the entitlement spending that is going to burden the economy over the next several decades.

Here’s one final point to underscore and emphasize the radical nature of Biden’s budget.

I’ve taken the previous chart and added a trendline showing what spending would be if Biden has simply followed the trajectory based on the actual spending levels of every President from Carter to Trump.

In other words, we’re looking at trillions of dollars of additional money being diverted from the productive sector of the economy and being put under the control of politicians and bureaucrats.

That does not bode well for American prosperity. Even the Congressional Budget Office recognizes this means lower living standards for our nation.

The bottom line is that if you adopt European-style fiscal policy, you get anemic European-style levels of income.

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Biden’s Class-Warfare Agenda Is Bad News According to Academic Research on Taxes and Growth

Back in 2013, the Tax Foundation published a report that reviewed 26 academic studies on taxes and growth.

That scholarly research produced a very clear message: The overwhelming consensus was that higher tax rates were bad news for prosperity.

Especially soak-the-rich tax increases that reduced incentives for productive activities such as work, saving, investment, and entrepreneurship.

That compilation of studies was very useful because then-President Obama was a relentless advocate of class-warfare tax policy.

And he partially succeeded with an agreement on how to deal with the so-called “fiscal cliff.”

Well, as Yogi Berra might say, it’s “deju vu all over again.” Joe Biden is in the White House and he’s proposing a wide range of tax increases.

It’s unclear whether Biden will gain approval for his proposals, but I’ve already produced a four-part series on why they are very misguided.

• In Part I, I showed that the tax code already is biased against upper-income taxpayers.
• In Part II, I explained how the tax hike would have Laffer-Curve implications, meaning politicians would not get a windfall of tax revenue.
• In Part II, I pointed out that the plan would saddle America with the developed world’s highest corporate tax burden.
• In Part IV, I shared data on the negative economic impact of higher taxes on productive behavior.

The bottom line is that the United States should not copy France by penalizing entrepreneurs, innovators, investors, and business owners.

Particularly since the rest of us are usually collateral damage when politicians try to punish successful taxpayers.

So it’s serendipity that the Tax Foundation has just updated it’s list of research with a new report looking at seven new high-level academic studies.

Here’s some of what the report says about class-warfare tax policy.

With the Biden administration proposing a variety of new taxes, it is worth revisiting the literature on how taxes impact economic growth. …we review this new evidence, again confirming our original findings: Taxes, particularly on corporate and individual income, harm economic growth. …We investigate papers in top economics journals and National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working papers over the past few years, considering both U.S. and international evidence. This research covers a wide variety of taxes, including income, consumption, and corporate taxation.

And here’s the table summarizing the impact of lower tax rates on economic performance, so it’s easy to infer what will happen if tax rates are increased instead.

Some of these findings may not seem very significant, such as changes in key economic indicators of 0.2%, 0.78%, or 0.3%.

But remember that even small changes in economic growth can lead to big changes in national prosperity.

P.S. In an ideal world, Washington would be working to boost living standards by adopting a flat tax. In the real world, the best-case scenario is simply avoiding policies that will make America less competitive.

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Biden’s Tax Plan Contains a Poison Pill for American Firms that Compete in Global Markets

As explained here, here, here, and here, I don’t like Biden’s class-warfare tax policy.

I’m especially concerned about his approach to business taxation.

1. He wants to penalize American-based companies with the highest corporate tax rate among all developed nations.
2. He wants to export that bad policy to the rest of the world with a “global minimum tax” – sort of an OPEC for politicians.
3. He wants to handicap American multinational companies with taxes that don’t apply to foreign-based firms.

Regarding the third point, I wrote a column on that topic for the Orange County Register.

Here’s how I described Biden’s proposal.

Biden has proposed several tax increases that specifically target American firms that compete in world markets. Most notably, the Administration has proposed to double the tax rate on “global intangible low-tax income” (GILTI) from 10.5 percent to 21 percent. Translated from tax jargon to English, this is largely a tax on the income American firms earn overseas from intellectual property, most notably patents and royalties. Keep in mind, by the way, that this income already is subject to tax in the nations where it is earned. Most other nations do not handicap their companies with similar policies, so this means that American firms will face a big competitive disadvantage – especially when fighting for business in low-tax jurisdictions such as Hong Kong, Ireland, Singapore, Switzerland, and most of Eastern Europe.

And here are some additional reasons why it is very bad news.

…let’s simply look at the bottom-line impact of what Biden is proposing. The Tax Foundation estimates that, “The proposal would impose a 9.4 percent average surtax on the foreign activities of U.S. multinationals above and beyond the taxes levied by foreign governments” and “put U.S. multinationals at a competitive disadvantage relative to foreign corporations.” …a stagging $1.2 trillion tax increase on these companies. …This is not just bad for the competitiveness of American-based companies, it is also bad policy. Good fiscal systems, such as the flat tax, are based on “territorial taxation,” which is the common-sense notion that countries only tax economic activity inside their borders. …Many other nations follow this approach, which is why they will reap big benefits if Biden’s plan to hamstring American companies is approved. The key thing to understand is that the folks in Washington have the power to raise taxes on American companies competing abroad, but they don’t have the ability to raise taxes on the foreign companies in those overseas markets.

The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page has been sounding the alarm on this issue as well.

Here are some excerpts from an editorial back in April.

…the tax on global intangible low-tax income, known as Gilti, which was created by the 2017 tax reform. …Gilti was flawed from the start…but Mr. Biden would make it worse in every respect. …The 2017 tax law set the statutory Gilti rate at…10.5%. Mr. Biden would increase that to 21%… the effective rate companies actually pay is higher. This is because Gilti embedded double taxation in the tax code. …Gilti allows a credit of only 80% of foreign taxes, with no carry-forwards or carry-backs. …Raising the statutory rate to 21% increases that effective rate to 26.25%. This new Biden effective minimum tax would be higher than the statutory tax rates in most countries even in Western Europe… The Biden plan would further increase the effective Gilti rate by expanding the tax base on which it’s paid. …A third Biden whammy would require companies to calculate tax bills on a country-by-country basis. …Requiring companies to calculate taxable profits and tax credits individually for every country in which a company operates will create a mountain of compliance costs for business and work for the Internal Revenue Service. …The Biden Administration and its progressive political masters have decided they don’t care about the global competitiveness of American companies.

Let’s close with some international comparisons.

According to the most-recent International Tax Competitiveness Index, the United States ranks #21 out of 35 nations, which is a mediocre score.

But the United States had been scoring near the bottom, year after year, before the Trump tax reform bumped America up to #21. So there was some progress.

If the Biden plan is approved, however, it is a near-certainly that the U.S. will be once again mired at the bottom. And this bad policy will lead to unfortunate results for American workers and American competitiveness.

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The Double-Barreled Danger of Biden’s Plan to Expand the Welfare State

The United States has a big economic advantage over Europe in part because the burden of welfare spending is lower.

This means fewer people trapped in government dependency in America. And it means a smaller tax burden in America.

But some of our friends on the left think it is bad news that the United States isn’t more like Europe.

They want more redistribution in America and they may get their wish if Congress approves Biden’s so-called American Families Plan.

The Economist has an article about Biden’s radical proposal, which would, as they correctly note, “Europeanise the American welfare state.”

President Joe Biden is proposing an ambitious reweaving of the American safety-net, which the White House says will cost $1.8trn. The American Families Plan has bits of the European welfare state that have long been missing in the country—a child allowance, paid family leave, universal pre-school, subsidised child care and free community college—but contains no reference to work requirements. …So how did Democrats go from Clintonism—which implicitly conceded the Reaganite critique that too much governmental assistance is a very bad thing—to its present-day unconcern about (even relish for) deficit-financed expansions of the safety-net?

Here are some of the specific details from the story, including discussion of Biden’s plan for per-child handouts.

This would bring America more in line with the rest of the developed world: the average government spending on benefits such as child allowances, family leave and early education is 2.1% of GDP in the OECD club of mostly rich countries. In America, it is just 0.6%. …A generous child allowance is the main anti-poverty tool in most rich countries—and also one that America lacks. One such scheme was created this year as part of the covid-19 relief bill that the president signed in March. It will pay most families $3,000 per year per child ($3,600 for young children)… The president’s plan proposes to extend these payments until 2025. Some Democrats think they should simply be made permanent.

The Wall Street Journal opined about Biden’s plan last month.

It’s more accurate to call this the plan to make the middle class dependent on government from cradle to grave. The government will tell you sometime later, after you’re hooked to the state, how it will force you to pay for it. We’d call the price tag breathtaking, but by now what’s another $2 trillion? …But the cost, while staggering, isn’t the only or even the biggest problem. The destructive part is the way the plan seeks to insinuate government cash and the rules that go with it into all of the major decisions of family life. The goal is to expand the entitlement state to make Americans rely on government and the political class for everything they don’t already provide. …This is now about mainlining benefits to middle-class families so they become addicted to government—and to the Democratic Party that has become the promoting agent of government.

I agree with the WSJ. Biden wants to create more dependency, even if that means eviscerating Bill Clinton’s very successful welfare reform.

For my contribution to this discussion, I want to make two points about the practical implications of Biden’s plan to “Europeanise” the United States.

First, it is impossible to have a European-sized government without massive tax increases. And since there aren’t enough rich people to finance big government, that inevitably means low-income and middle-class taxpayers will have to be hit with much bigger fiscal burdens. Which is exactly what has happened in Europe (and lots of honest people on the left openly admit a bigger welfare state would require similar policies in the United States).

Second, it is impossible to have a European-sized government and still maintain a big economic advantage over Europe. Higher spending and higher taxes will combine to reduce work, saving, investment, and entrepreneurship. Simply stated, European fiscal policy will lead to European economic results, and that will be very bad news for ordinary Americans since living standards are 30 percent-40 percent lower on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

It’s also worth noting that the United States ranks very high in societal capital, and that presumably will erode if more people are lured into government dependency.

P.S. Biden used to oppose a government-guaranteed income, correctly realizing it would undermine the work ethic.

P.P.S. The United States already faces a huge long-run challenge because of entitlement spending, so it’s remarkable – in a bad way – that Biden wants to step on the gas rather than hit the brakes.

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Subsidized Unemployment and the Work Ethic

I wrote two days ago about subsidized unemployment, followed later in the day by this interview.

This controversy raises a fundamental economic issue.

I explained in the interview that employers only hire people when they expect a new worker will generate at least enough revenue to cover the cost of employment.

There’s a similar calculation on the part of individuals, as shown by this satirical cartoon strip.

People decide to take jobs when they expect the additional after-tax income they earn will compensate them for the loss of leisure and/or the unpleasantness of working.

Which is why many people are now choosing not to work since the government has increased the subsidies for idleness (a bad policy that began under Trump).

The Wall Street Journal editorialized about this issue a couple of days ago.

White House economists say there’s no “measurable” evidence that the $300 federal unemployment bonus is discouraging unemployed people from seeking work. They were rebutted by Tuesday’s Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Jolts survey, which showed a record 8.1 million job openings in March. …But these jobs often pay less than what most workers could make on unemployment. That explains why the number of job openings in many industries increased more than the number of new hires in March. …The number of workers who quit their jobs also grew by 125,000. …some quitters may be leaving their jobs because they figure they can make more unemployed for the next six months after Democrats extended the bonus into September.

Dan Henninger also opined on the issue for the WSJ. Here’s some of what he wrote.

President Biden said, “People will come back to work if they’re paid a decent wage.” But what if he’s wrong? What if his $300 unemployment insurance bonus on top of the checks sent directly to millions of people (which began during the Trump presidency) turns out to be a big, long-term mistake? …Mr. Biden and the left expect these outlays effectively to raise the minimum wage by forcing employers to compete with Uncle Sam’s money. …Ideas have consequences. By making unemployment insurance competitive with market wage rates in a pandemic, the Biden Democrats may have done long-term damage to the American work ethic. …The welfare reforms of the 1990s were based on the realization that transfer payments undermined the work ethic. The Biden-Sanders Democrats are dropping that work requirement for recipients of cash payments.

Amen.

I made similar arguments about the erosion of the work ethic last year when discussing this issue.

And this concern applies to other forms of redistribution. Including, most notably, the foolish idea of big per-child handouts.

P.S. The WSJ editorial cited above mentioned the Labor Department’s JOLT data. Those numbers are also useful if you want proof that federal bureaucrats are overpaid, and you’ll also see that the same thing is true for state and local government employees.

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The Upside-Down Economics of Subsidized Unemployment

Back in 2010, I applauded Paul Krugman for acknowledging that government unemployment benefits can encourage joblessness.

And I even cited Krugman in this 2012 debate on the topic.

We’re debating this issue again today, but it’s an even bigger problem because politicians in Washington have added a special bonus payment for people who stay unemployed.

So we’re naturally finding that people are more reluctant to work, which is a rational choice for many of them since they’re getting more money for sitting on their butts.

So if Krugman recognized back in 2009 that regular-sized unemployment benefits lead to more joblessness, he must be even more worried about today’s super-sized unemployment benefits.

But there’s a catch. Krugman made his sensible observations on this issue in a textbook when he was still an academic economist, back when he felt some professional obligation to be rational and pay attention to the academic evidence and empirical research.

Today, he’s an ideologue and polemicist. So we get nonsense like this column in the New York Times.

…the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the U.S. economy added only 266,000 jobs in April, far short of consensus expectations that we’d gain around a million new jobs. Was this evidence that the economy really is being held back because we’re “paying people not to work”? No. For one thing, you should never make much of one month’s numbers, especially in an economy still distorted by the pandemic. …Also, if unemployment benefits were holding job growth back, you’d expect the worst performance in low-wage industries, where benefits are large relative to wages. …on the face of it the data don’t support an unemployment-benefits story. So what actually happened? We don’t know. Maybe it was a statistical aberration.

For what it’s worth, I prefer the sober-minded analysis available in editorials from the Wall Street Journal.

Such as this one.

Employers nationwide have complained for months that Washington’s $300-a-week bonus has made it harder to find willing workers. Yet Mr. Biden brushed aside the complaints, saying he and his staff “don’t see much evidence” that the payments are a “major factor.” …The perverse incentive of the bonus is clear, and the evidence goes beyond the anecdotes from tens of thousands of employers. …Bank of America economist Joseph Song notes that any worker earning less than $32,000 annually would get a raise by going on unemployment… The President intended his remarks to depict his Administration as the driver of job growth instead of its main hindrance. It was a tall order. But the bright side is that his urgent appearance showed that more Americans are figuring out that when the government pays people not to work, millions choose not to.

The good news is that some governors are opting out.

Here are some excerpts from a report in the Washington Post.

An unexpected slowdown in hiring nationwide has prompted some Republican governors to start slashing jobless benefits in their states, hoping that the loss of generous federal aid might force more people to try to return to work. …Arkansas on Friday became the latest to announce plans to cancel the extra benefits, joining Montana and South Carolina earlier in the week… Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb signaled to local reporters that the state could soon follow suit, while Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey is considering the same.

I’m tempted to comment about the Post‘s usual bias (saying GOP governors want to “slash” when they’re simply proposing to return to regular-sized benefits).

But let’s stick to the topic.

Here’s another interview on the issue, but it’s about the current fight rather than the Obama-era fight.

I’m especially concerned, as I noted in the interview, that bad government policy may erode the work ethic.

I’ll close with a comment about the fight we had during the Obama years. Back then, the battle revolved around extended unemployment benefits rather than turbo-charged benefits.

Republicans eventually prevailed in blocking the extended benefits. So what happened? As you might expect, there was an increase in employment.

P.S. I imagine this story from Michigan and this example from Ohio will ring a bell with many people because they have some relative or buddy who also has used government benefits as an excuse to stay unemployed.

P.P.S. Senator Rand Paul and I wrote about this issue back in 2014.

P.P.P.S. For some unintentional humor, Nancy Pelosi actually argued that the economy is stronger when people are paid not to work.

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When “Catching Up” Means Lower Income

My approach during the Trump years was very simple.

• If he did good things, I applauded.
• If he did bad things, I criticized.

Other people, however, muted their views on policy because of their partisan or personal feelings about Trump.

I was very disappointed, for instance, that some Republicans abandoned (or at least downplayed) their support for free trade to accommodate Trump’s illiteracy on that issue.

But those people look like pillars of stability and principle compared to the folks who decided to completely switch their views.

Max Boot, for instance, is a former adviser on foreign policy to Republicans such as John McCain and Marco Rubio, who has decided that being anti-Trump means he should now act like a cheerleader for high taxes and big government.

Here’s some of what he wrote in a column for today’s Washington Post.

Republicans accuse President Biden of pursuing a radical agenda that will turn the United States into a failed socialist state. …It’s true that Biden is proposing a considerable amount of new spending… But those investments won’t turn us into North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela or the Soviet Union — all countries with government ownership of industry. …with proposals such as federally subsidized child care, elder care, family leave and pre-K education — financed with modest tax increases on corporations and wealthy individuals — Biden is merely moving us a bit closer to the kinds of government services that other wealthy, industrialized democracies already take for granted. …That’s far from radical. It’s simply sensible.

Part of the above excerpt makes sense. Biden is not proposing socialism, at least if we use the technical definition.

And he’s also correct that Biden isn’t trying to turn us into North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, or the Soviet Union.

But he does think it’s good that Biden wants to copy Europe’s high-tax welfare states.

…by most indexes we are an embarrassing international laggard. …the United States spends nearly twice as much on health care as a percentage of gross domestic product than do other wealthy countries… The United States is also alone among OECD nations in not having universal paid family leave. …Our level of income inequality is now closer to that of developing countries in Africa and Latin American than to our European allies. …it’s possible to combine a vibrant free market with generous social welfare spending. In fact, that’s the right formula for a more satisfied and stable society. In the OECD quality-of-life rankings — which include everything from housing to work-life balance — the United States ranks an unimpressive 10th.

Mr. Boot seem to think that it’s bad news that the United States ranks 10th out of 37 nations in the OECD’s so-called Better Life Index.

I wonder if he understands, however, that this index has serious methodological flaws – such as countries getting better scores if they have bigger subsidies that encourage unemployment? Or countries getting better scores if they have high tax rates that discourage labor supply?

But the real problem is that Boot seems oblivious to most important data, which shows that Americans enjoy far more prosperity than Europeans.

And he could have learned that with a few more clicks on the OECD’s website. He could have found the data on average individual consumption and discovered the huge gap between U.S. prosperity and European mediocrity.

The obvious takeaway is that big government causes deadweight loss and hinders growth (as honest folks on the left have always acknowledged).

P.S. I can’t resist nit-picking four other points in Boot’s column.

1. As show by this Chuck Asay cartoon, you don’t magically make government spending productive simply be calling it an “investment.”
2. Like beauty, the interpretation of “modest” may be in the eye of the beholder, but it certainly seems like “massive” is a better description of Biden’s proposed tax hikes.
3. It’s worth noting that Europe became a relatively prosperous part of the world before governments adopted punitive income taxes and created big welfare states.
4. America’s excessive spending on health is caused by third-party payer, which is caused by excessive government intervention.

P.P.S. I’ve wondered whether the OECD (subsidized by American taxpayers!) deliberately used dodgy measures when compiling the Better Life Index in part because of a desire to make the U.S. look bad compared to the European welfare states that dominate the organization’s membership? That certainly seems to have been the case when the OECD put together a staggeringly dishonest measure of poverty that made the U.S. seem like it had more destitution than poor countries such as Greece, Portugal, and Turkey.

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Biden’s Infrastructure Boondoggle Will Undermine Growth

President Biden has proposed a massive $2 trillion-plus infrastructure plan. Here are the two things everyone should understand.

1. It will hurt growth because it will be financed with very harmful tax increases, most notably a big increase in the corporate tax rate that will undermine competitiveness.
2. It will hurt growth because the new spending will divert resources from the productive sector of the economy, leading to inefficient allocation of labor and capital.

Actually, there’s another thing everyone should understand. As illustrated by this summary from the Washington Post, it’s not really an infrastructure plan. It’s a spend-money-on-anything-and-everything plan, presumably to reward various interest groups.

Though I guess we have to give the Biden Administration points for consistency. The President’s COVID relief plan from earlier this year had very little to do with the pandemic, so we shouldn’t be surprised to see that the infrastructure plan has very little to do with infrastructure.

The Wall Street Journal editorialized about this bait-and-switch scam.

Most Americans think of infrastructure as roads, highways, bridges and other traditional public works. That’s why it polls well… Yet this accounts for a mere $115 billion of Mr. Biden’s proposal. There’s another $25 billion for airports and $17 billion for ports and waterways that also fill a public purpose. The rest of the $620 billion earmarked for “transportation” are subsidies for green energy and payouts to unions for the jobs his climate regulation will kill. …The magnitude of spending is something to behold. There’s $85 billion for mass transit plus $80 billion for Amtrak, which is on top of the $70 billion that Congress appropriated for mass transit in three Covid spending bills. The money is essentially a bailout for unions… Then there’s $174 billion for electric vehicles, including money to build 500,000 charging stations and for consumer “incentives” on top of the current $7,500 federal tax credit to buy an EV. …Mr. Biden is also redefining infrastructure as social-justice policy and income redistribution. …His plan also includes $213 billion for affordable housing, $100 billion for retrofitting public schools, $25 billion for child-care facilities and $400 billion for increasing home-health care.

Michael Boskin, a professor at Stanford, is not optimistic that Biden’s plan will generate good results.

Joe Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan would be many times larger than previous such bills, only about one-third of it would meet even a broad definition of “infrastructure.” …What could possibly go wrong? A lot. …federal spending would crowd out private and local government spending, with a substantial risk of boondoggles piling up along the way. …The Biden plan is rife with opportunities for earmarked pork-barrel projects (bridges to nowhere) and crony capitalist corporate welfare (next-generation Solyndras). Consider California High-Speed Rail, an infrastructure train wreck that will soon be begging for a bailout from the Biden administration. It originally used a grant from President Barack Obama’s 2009 “stimulus” package to pay, six years later, for a tiny initial rail line. Yet, because the project’s projected total San Francisco to Los Angeles cost has tripled to $100 billion.

And even if the plan was nothing but real infrastructure, that wouldn’t be a cause for optimism.

Kenneth Rogoff, a professor at Harvard, wrote late last year that governments have a terrible track record with cost overruns.

…perhaps the biggest obstacle to improving infrastructure in advanced economies is that any new project typically requires navigating difficult right-of-way issues, environmental concerns, and objections from apprehensive citizens… The “Big Dig” highway project in my hometown of Boston, Massachusetts was famously one of the most expensive infrastructure projects in US history. The scheme was originally projected to cost $2.6 billion, but the final tab swelled to more than $15 billion… The construction of New York City’s Second Avenue Subway was a similar experience, albeit on a slightly smaller scale. In Germany, the new Berlin Brandenburg Airport recently opened nine years behind schedule and at three times the initial estimated cost.

Amen. I wrote a column about the infamous Second Avenue Subway, and I’ve also repeatedly opined about how government projects always wind up costing much more than initial projections.

Let’s wrap up by looking at an economic analysis of Biden’s plan by the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Wharton Budget Model.

The overall macroeconomic effects of enacting the AJP, including both its spending and tax provisions, are shown in Table 4. …After the AJP’s new spending ends in 2029, however, its tax increases persist—as a result, federal debt ends up 6.4 percent lower by 2050, relative to the current law baseline. Despite the decline in government debt, the investment-disincentivizing effects of the AJP’s business tax provisions decrease the capital stock by 3 percent in 2031 and 2050. The decline in capital makes workers less productive despite the increase in productivity due to more infrastructure, dragging hourly wages down by 0.7 percent in 2031 and 0.8 percent in 2050. Overall, GDP is 0.9 percent lower in 2031 and 0.8 percent lower in 2050.

Here’s Table 4, which I’ve augmented by circling the two most important statistics.

The immediate lesson from all of this is that Biden’s plan is a boondoggle waiting to happen (just as would have been the case with Trump).

The longer-term lesson is that we should get the federal government out of the business of infrastructure.

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Sloppy or Dishonest Fiscal Analysis from the Washington Post

Good fiscal policy means low tax rates and spending restraint.

And that’s a big reason why I’m a fan of Reaganomics.

Unlike other modern presidents (including other Republicans), Reagan successfully reduced the tax burden while also limiting the burden of government spending.

President Biden wants to take the opposite approach.

A few days ago, Dan Balz of the Washington Post provided some “news analysis” about Biden’s fiscal agenda. Some of what he wrote was accurate, noting that the president wants to increase spending by an additional $6 trillion over the next 10 years.

…the scope and implications of his domestic agenda have come sharply into focus. Together they represent the most dramatic shift in federal economic and social welfare policy since Ronald Reagan was elected 40 years ago. …The politics of redistribution, which are at the heart of what Biden is proposing, could test decades of assumptions that Democrats should be afraid of being tagged as the party of big government. …Together, the already approved coronavirus relief plan, the infrastructure proposal that was unveiled a few weeks ago and the newly proposed plan to invest in social welfare programs would total roughly $6 trillion.

But Mr. Balz then decided to be either sloppy or dishonest, writing that we’ve had decades of Reagan-style policies that have squeezed domestic spending and disproportionately lowered tax burden for rich people.

Reagan’s small-government philosophy resulted in a decades-long squeeze on the federal government, especially domestic spending, and on tax policies that mainly benefited the wealthiest Americans. …Government spending on social safety-net programs has been reduced compared with previous years.

Balz is wrong, wildly wrong.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Here’s a chart, taken from an October 2020 report by the Congressional Budget Office. As you can see, people in the lowest income quintile have been the biggest winners,, with their average tax rate dropping from about 10 percent to about 2 percent..

Here’s a chart showing marginal tax rates from a January 2019 CBO report. As you can see, Reagan lowered marginal tax rates for everyone, but Balz’s assertion that the rich got the lion’s share of the benefits is hard to justify considering that people in the bottom quintile now have negative marginal tax rates.

Balz’s mistakes on tax policy are significant.

But his biggest error (or worst dishonesty) occurred when he wrote about a “decades-long squeeze” on domestic spending and asserted that “spending on social safety-net programs has been reduced.”

A quick visit to the Office of Management and Budget’s Historical Tables is all that’s needed to debunk this nonsense. Here’s a chart, based on Table 8.2, showing the inflation-adjusted growth of entitlements and domestic discretionary programs.

Call me crazy, but I’m seeing a rapid increase in domestic spending after Reagan left office.

P.S. There’s a pattern of lazy/dishonest fiscal reporting at the Washington Post.

P.P.S. I also can’t resist noting that Balz wrote how Biden wants to “invest” in social welfare programs, as if there’s some sort of positive return from creating more dependency. Reminds me of this Chuck Asay cartoon from the Obama years.

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Big Government vs. “Trickle-Down Economics”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Stanford Professor John Shoven observed several decades ago:

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

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

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

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

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

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

By the way, Biden is not an honest redistributionist.

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

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

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

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

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

The response is always deafening silence.

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

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

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The “American System” Is Big Government?!?

We can learn a lot by looking at economic history.

It’s instructive to note, for instance, that the United States evolved from agricultural poverty to middle-class prosperity in the 1800s – during a time when the burden of government spending was trivially small.

Federal spending that century, on average, consumed less than 5 percent of the country’s economic output, meaning we had a public sector far smaller that what is found today in supposedly small-government jurisdictions such as Hong Kong and Singapore.

There’s a lesson to be gleaned from America’s rise to prosperity, in my humble opinion, as well as from similar experiences in Western Europe.

But not everybody sees history the same way. Earlier this month, David Brooks opined in the New York Times in favor of Biden’s spending binge.

Given his long-standing opposition to libertarianism/small-government conservatism, that’s not a big surprise. But what is noteworthy is that he argued Biden’s statism is part of the American tradition.

What is the quintessential American act? It is the leap of faith. …The early days of the Biden administration are nothing if not a daring leap. …What is this thing, Bidenomics? …democracy needs to remind the world that it, too, can solve big problems. Democracy needs to stand up and show that we are still the future. …Cecilia Rouse, the chair of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, …said…“the private sector…is not best suited to deliver certain public goods like work force training and infrastructure investment,” she told me. “These are places where there is market failure, which creates a role for government.” …Some people say this is like the New Deal. I’d say this is an updated, monster-size version of “the American System,” the 19th-century education and infrastructure investments inspired by Alexander Hamilton, championed by Henry Clay and then advanced by the early Republicans, like Abraham Lincoln. That was an unabashedly nationalist project, made by a youthful country, using an energetic government to secure two great goals: economic dynamism and national unity.

The column concludes that we have to make this leap to deal with a threat from China.

Sometimes you take a risk to shoot forward. The Chinese are convinced they own the future. It’s worth taking this shot to prove them wrong.

But Mr. Brooks is wrong. We’re not taking a daring leap into the unknown with Biden’s agenda.

We’re copying Western Europe.

And that means we have lots of data showing what that means for our future. Unfortunately, it means Americans will enjoy less income and suffer from lower living standards.

At the risk of understatement, that doesn’t seem like a good idea.

P.S. I also can’t resist pointing out that there are several small points in Brooks’ column that cry out for correction, such as the anti-empirical assertions that government job training is a good idea or that government intervention in the 1800s produced good results.

P.P.S. I’m also baffled that so many people view China as a successful economic model when living standards in that nation are only about one-fifth of American levels.

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Five Visuals that Explain Why Higher Corporate Income Tax Rates Are Bad for America

I have a four-part series (here, here, here, and here) about the conceptual downsides of Joe Biden’s class-warfare approach to tax policy.

Now it’s time to focus on the component parts of his agenda. Today’s column will review his plan for a big increase in the corporate tax rate. But since I’ve written about corporate tax rates over and over and over again, we’re going to approach this issue is a new way.

I’m going to share five visuals that (hopefully) make a compelling case why higher tax rates on companies would be a big mistake.

Visual #1

One thing every student should learn from an introductory economics class is that corporations don’t actually pay tax. Instead, businesses collect taxes that are actually borne by workers, consumers, and investors.

There’s lots of debate in the profession, of course, about which group bears what share of the tax. But there’s universal agreement that higher taxes lead to less investment, which leads to less productivity, which leads to lower pay.

Here’s a depiction of the relationship of corporate taxes and worker pay.

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Visual #2

The previous image explains the theory. Now it’s time for some evidence.

Here’s a look at how much faster wages have grown in countries with low corporate tax rates compared to nations with high corporate tax rates.

Biden, for reasons beyond my comprehension, wants America on the red line.

And his staff economists apparently don’t understand (or don’t care about) the link between investment and wages.

Visual #3

Here’s some more evidence.

And it comes from an unexpected source, the pro-tax Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Even economists at that Paris-based bureaucracy have produced studies confirming that lower tax rates lead to higher disposable income for people.

Needless to say, if lower tax rates lead to more disposable income, then higher tax rates will lead to less disposable income.

We should have learned during the Obama years that ordinary people pay the price when politicians practice class warfare.

Visual #4

It’s very bad news that Biden wants a big increase in the corporate tax rate, but let’s not forget that the IRS double-taxes corporate income (i.e., that same income is subject to a second layer of tax when shareholders receive dividends).

The combined effect, as shown in this visual, is that the United States will have the dubious honor of having the highest effective corporate tax rate in the entire developed world.

Call me crazy, but I don’t think that’s a recipe for jobs and investment in America.

Visual #5

The economic damage of higher corporate tax rates means that there is less taxable income (i.e., we need to remember the Laffer Curve).

Will the damage be so extensive, causing taxable income to fall so much, that the IRS collects less revenue with a higher tax rate?

We’ll learn the answer to that question over time, but we have some very strong evidence from the IMF that lower corporate tax rates don’t lead to less revenue. As you can see from this chart, revenues held steady as tax rates plummeted over the past few decades.

In other words, lower rates led to enough additional economic activity that governments have collected just as much money with lower tax rates. But now Biden wants to run this experiment in reverse.

It’s possible the government will collect more revenue, of course, but only at a very high cost to workers, consumers, and shareholders.

By the way, there’s OECD data showing the exact same thing.

Those pictures probably tell you everything you need to know about this issue.

But let’s add some more analysis. The Wall Street Journal opined today on Biden’s class-warfare agenda. Here are some of the key passages from the editorial.

The bill for President Biden’s agenda is coming due, starting with Wednesday’s proposal for the largest corporate tax increase in decades. …Mr. Biden’s corporate increase amounts to the restoration of the Obama-era corporate tax burden, only much more so. …Mr. Biden wants to raise the corporate rate back up to 28%, but that’s the least of his proposals. He also wants to add penalties that would make inversions punitive, and he’d impose a global minimum corporate tax of 21%. This would shoot the tax burden on U.S. companies back toward the top of the developed world list. …The larger Biden goal is to end global tax competition… “The United States can lead the world to end the race to the bottom on corporate tax rates,” says the White House fact sheet. Mr. Biden says he wants “other countries to adopt strong minimum taxes on corporations” so nations like Ireland can no longer compete for capital with lower tax rates. This has long been the dream of the French and Germans, working through the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. …All of this is in addition to the looming Biden tax increases on dividends, capital gains and other investment income. …Mr. Biden’s corporate tax increases will hit the middle class hard—in the value of their 401(k)s, the size of their pay packets, and what they pay for goods and services.

Amen.

Let’s conclude with some gallows humor.

This meme shows how some of our leftist friends will celebrate if the tax increase is imposed.

P.S. Here’s a depressing final observation. Decades of experience have led me to conclude that many folks on the left support class-warfare tax policy because they are primarily motivated by a spiteful desire to punish success rather than provide upward mobility for the poor.

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What Biden’s Corporate Tax Increase Means for American Competitiveness

Thanks to globalization (as opposed to globalism), jobs and investment are now very mobile. This means the costs of bad policy are higher than ever before, and it also means the benefits of good policy are higher than ever before.

Which is why it’s very useful to look at various competitiveness rankings, most notably the ones that are comprehensive (most notably Economic Freedom of the World and the Index of Economic Freedom).

But since my specialty is public finance, I’m also interested in measures of fiscal competitiveness (best tax system, worst tax system, costliest welfare state, etc).

Today, let’s narrow our focus and look at business tax competitiveness. This is an area where the United States traditionally has lagged, both because we used to have one of the world’s highest corporate tax rates and because onerous tax rules put U.S.-based companies at an added disadvantage.

Trump lowered the federal corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, which definitely helped, but now Biden wants to push the rate back up to 28 percent.

What will that mean for U.S. competitiveness?

It’s not good news.

The Tax Foundation calculated the combined tax rate on business income (including the double tax on dividends) for various developed nations.

As you can see, America will have the most onerous tax regime if Biden is successful.

What if we look only at the corporate tax rate? And what if we consider every jurisdiction in the world?

Professor Robert McGee pulled together all the numbers and ranked nations from #1 to #223.

The United States currently is in the bottom half, which isn’t good since we’re below average. But you can see from these two tables that Biden will drop America to the bottom 10 percent.

Needless to say, it’s not good to rank below France.

But let’s think of the glass as being 1/10th full rather than 9/10ths empty. At least the U.S. beats Venezuela!

The bottom line is that it will not be good news if Biden’s plan is enacted.

P.S. From Professor McGee’s study, here are the jurisdictions tied for 1st place.

P.P.S. Needless to say, politicians from high-tax nations resent the 15 jurisdictions that don’t have a corporate income tax.

Indeed, that’s why many of those politicians are pushing the “global minimum tax” that I wrote about yesterday.

Those politicians basically want to turn back the clock and reverse the progress depicted in this set of charts from the Tax Foundation.

P.P.S. This is why it’s important to defend the liberalizing process of tax competition.

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Biden and the OECD Pushing “Global Minimum Tax” to Increase Business Tax Burdens

For the past couple of decades, I’ve been warning (over and over and over and over again) that politicians want to curtail tax competition so that it will be easier for them to increase tax burdens.

They’ve even been using an international bureaucracy – the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development – in an effort to create a global high-tax cartel. Sort of an “OPEC for politicians.”

All of which would lead to “goldfish government.” Though “predatory government” also would be an accurate term.

The Obama Administration did not have a good track record on this issue, and neither did the Trump Administration.

Now the Biden Administration wants to be even worse. Especially if Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen continues to play a major role.

Here are some excerpts from a story in today’s Washington Post by Jeff Stein.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is working with her counterparts worldwide to forge an agreement on a global minimum tax on multinational corporations, as the White House looks for revenue… A key source of new revenue probably will be corporate taxes… Biden has said he would aim to raise potentially hundreds of billions more in revenue from big businesses. …tax experts…say raising the rate could damage U.S. competitiveness. …Yellen is working…through an effort at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in which more than 140 countries are participating. The goal is for countries to agree in principle to a minimum corporate tax rate… “A global minimum tax could stop the destructive global race to the bottom…,” Yellen told U.S. senators during her confirmation process. …The impact of the falling international tax rate has hit the United States as well, constraining lawmakers’ ambitions to approve new domestic programs.

Needless to say, any type of tax harmonization is a bad idea, and it is an especially bad idea to impose a minimum rate on a tax that does so much economic damage.

Here are four points that deserve attention.

1. Higher corporate tax burdens will be bad news for workers, consumers, and investors.
2. Regarding the so-called race to the bottom, even the IMF and OECD have admitted that lower corporate tax rates have not led to lower corporate tax revenue.
3. Once politicians impose a global agreement for a minimum corporate tax rate, they will then start increasing the rate.
4. Politicians also will then seek agreements for minimum tax rates on personal income, capital gains, and dividends.

I also want to cite one more passage from the article because it shows why the business community will probably lose this battle.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce says it supports a “multilateral” approach to the problem but is “extremely concerned”.

I don’t mean to be impolite, but the lobbyists at the Chamber of Commerce must be morons to support the OECD’s multilateral approach. It was obvious from the beginning that the goal was to grab more revenue from companies.

I’m tempted to say the companies that belong to the Chamber of Commerce deserve to pay higher taxes, but the rest of us would suffer collateral damage. Instead, maybe we can come up with a special personal tax on business lobbyists and the CEOs that hire them?

Let’s wrap this up. The Wall Street Journal opined on the issue this morning.

As you might expect, the editors have a jaundiced view.

Handing out money is always popular, especially when there appear to be no costs. Enjoy the moment because the costs will soon arrive in the form of tax increases. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen put that looming prospect on the table… The Treasury Secretary is also floating a global minimum tax on corporations, which would reduce the tax competition among countries that is a rare discipline on political tax appetites.

Amen. The WSJ understands that tax competition is a vital and necessary constraint on the greed of politicians.

P.S. Even OECD economists have acknowledged that tax competition helps to curtail excessive government.

P.P.S. Though an occasional bit of good research does not change the fact that the OECD is a counterproductive international bureaucracy that advocates for statist policy.

P.P.P.S. To add insult to injury, American taxpayers finance the biggest portion of the OECD’s budget.

P.P.P.P.S. To add insult upon insult, OECD bureaucrats get tax-free salaries while pushing for higher taxes on everyone else.

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The World’s Most Politically Illiterate Statement

Exactly one month ago, I declared that Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley deserved an award for the “world’s most economically illiterate statement” because of her claim that “poverty is not naturally occurring.”

In reality, poverty has been the norm throughout history. As documented by Professors Deirdre McCloskey and Don Boudreaux, it was only the development of capitalism (starting a few hundred years ago in Europe) that enabled humanity to enjoy amazing and unprecedented increases in living standards.

Moreover, Ms. Pressely was trying to argue that redistribution was the proper way to address poverty, and I concluded my column by noting “that part of her statement also is wrong, according to both U.S. data and global data.”

Today, I want to debunk another preposterous assertion.

David Smith of the U.K.-based Guardian wrote a column yesterday claiming that Biden’s so-called stimulus should be celebrated since it marks an end to forty years of Reaganomics.

…he will…be on a mission to restore faith in government. Confidence in it “has been plummeting since the late 60s to what it is now”, Biden noted in his remarks last week. His legislation, called the American Rescue Plan, can correct that with the biggest expansion of the welfare state in decades. …Biden knows better than anyone what that means. When he was born, in 1942, the president was Franklin Roosevelt, architect of the New Deal… When Biden was a student at the University of Delaware, Lyndon Johnson embarked on his project of the “Great Society”… Then came Ronald Reagan and his famous quip: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” …He described Johnson’s “Great Society” as a fundamental wrong turn and set about dismantling it. …This orthodoxy held and dominated the political centre ground. …Biden’s could hardly be more of a polar opposite. …All the more reason to enjoy his victory lap and celebrate that four decades of Reaganism and “trickle down” economics are at an end.

Some of that political analysis is reasonable. FDR’s failed New Deal did expand government, as did LBJ’s failed War on Poverty.

And it’s also true that Reagan challenged their big-government orthodoxy and was somewhat successful in reining in the welfare state (“dismantling it” is a huge exaggeration, however).

But the author’s claim that there were “four decades of Reaganism” is breathtaking nonsense.

• George H.W. Bush expanded the burden of government.
• George W. Bush expanded the burden of government.
• Barack Obama expanded the burden of government.
• Donald Trump expanded the burden of government.

That’s 24 years of statist policies after Reagan left office.

If Mr. Smith actually knew the subject matter and wanted to write an honest article, he could have made an argument about 16 years of Reaganism because we also benefited from a net reduction in the burden of government during Clinton’s eight years in office.

But the 21st century has been nothing but bad news for proponents of free markets. If you peruse Economic Freedom of the World, you’ll find that America’s level of economic freedom peaked in 2000 with a score of 8.67 (on a 1-10 scale).

Now the score for the United States has dropped to 8.22.

By the way, that’s not catastrophically bad. There’s no immediate risk of America becoming another Greece. And we’ll presumably never turn into Venezuela, no matter how hard Biden tries (it wouldn’t even happen if Vice President Harris took over).

That being said, what we’ve endured over the past two decades definitely is not Reaganism. The “Washington Consensus” is just a distant memory.

P.S. David Smith’s article is an example of sloppy journalism at a left-wing newspaper, but I’ll always have a bit of fondness for the Guardian because of the unintended compliment it bestowed upon me back in 2009.

P.P.S. For younger readers who did not experience the Reagan years, here’s my assessment of his record and here are some videos of some of his iconic remarks (and here’s a bonus video).

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Biden, the Minimum Wage, and Political Fantasy

While I understandably don’t like politicians, I rarely think they are stupid. They do lots of idiotic things, of course, but they are making calculated decisions that it’s okay to hurt the economy if they achieve some political benefit. That’s immoral, but not dumb.

However, sometimes politicians say things so absurdly inaccurate that it makes me wonder if they actually are…what’s the politically correct term?…cognitively challenged.

Consider, for instance, some of Donald Trump’s trade tweets, which were jaw-dropping examples of economic illiteracy.

And now Joe Biden is showing he can be similarly detached from the real world, claiming this past weekend that a $15-per-hour minimum wage is a good idea because, “all the economics show that if you do that the whole economy rises.”

Though maybe that’s true if one can somehow claim that “1 out of 40” is the same as “all.”

Moreover, it appears that “all” doesn’t include the Congressional Budget Office.

The bean counters at CBO don’t have a reputation for being fire-breathing libertarians, so it’s especially noteworthy that its new estimates show that a higher minimum wage will reduce economic output, destroy 1.4 million jobs, raise prices, and increase the burden of government spending.

As the old joke goes, “other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, what did you think of the play?”

And “all” doesn’t include America’s premier source for financial news. The Wall Street Journal opined on Biden’s plan this morning.

…his proposal for a $15 federal minimum wage…by 2025, according to the CBO’s new average estimate, would result in a loss of 1.4 million jobs.The idled workers would be disproportionately younger and less educated, and CBO projects that half of them would drop out of the labor force. …The federal budget deficit through 2031 would increase $54 billion, CBO says, as the government spent more on unemployment benefits and health-care programs. …setting the minimum wage at a high of $15 would essentially put the country through an economic experiment. This would mean imposing the urban labor costs of San Francisco and Manhattan on every out-of-the-way gas station in rural America.

Of course, we’ve already experienced some real-world experiments.

Higher minimum wages already have wreaked havoc and destroyed jobs in places such as Seattle, New York City, Oakland, and Washington, DC, so we already have plenty of evidence (and don’t forget the European data as well).

I’ll close with this clever cartoon strip, which mocks people who support higher mandated wages for reasons of naivete rather than stupidity.

P.S. Here’s my most recent interview about the minimum wage, here’s the interview that got me most frustrated, and here’s my interview debate with Biden’s economic advisor.

P.P.S. I strongly recommend this video on the topic from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity.

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What Matters More to Biden: Union Bosses or Poor Children?

I have a Bureaucrat Hall of Fame to highlight government employees who have turned sloth and overcompensation into an art form, and I have a Moocher Hall of Fame to illustrate the destructive entitlement mindset that exists when politicians pay people to do nothing.

I’m now thinking we also need another Hall of Fame to bring attention to the despicable people who oppose school choice because currying favor with teacher unions is more important than giving poor children an opportunity for a good education.

Some of the charter members would include:

• Bernie Sanders
• The NAACP
• Barack Obama

And we many need to include Joe Biden on this tawdry list.

We’ll know soon enough. There’s a federally funded school choice program in Washington, DC, and time will tell whether the President intends to kill it.

In a column for the Wall Street Journal, Virginia Walden Ford expresses hope that President Biden won’t sacrifice the needs of minority children in the nation’s capital.

I hope his administration doesn’t tear down a program that has brought hope to thousands of African-American children in the District of Columbia. In 2004, Congress created the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. …In 2020-21, 82% of scholarship recipients identified as African-American and another 12% as Hispanic. While scholarships for poor children of color should hold bipartisan appeal, the…2020 Biden-Sanders “unity” platform went out of its way to recommend defunding the program.

Ms. Ford isn’t opposed to government schools, but she does want poor kids to have the same opportunity as Joe Biden’s kids.

I strongly support both public education and school choice. I attended public schools, and my father served as the first African-American school administrator in Little Rock, Ark.—for which my family received a burning cross on our front yard. …What really undermines public education is attempts from elites to keep good education for themselves… Mr. Biden’s children went to private schools. Why shouldn’t my former neighbors in Southeast Washington have the opportunity to do so too?

I’ll close by observing that many of the people opposing school choice are total hypocrites. They send their kids to private schools while fighting to deny hope and opportunity for children from poor families.

Including Senator Elizabeth Warren and Obama’s Education Secretary, both of whom also would be charter members of a new Hall of Fame for policy makers who care more about union bosses than poor kids.

There are folks on the left who have genuine integrity on this issue, including the editors at the Washington Post.

P.S. At the risk of stating the obvious, the solution is not dumping more money into government-run schools. We’ve tried that and tried that and tried that, over and over again, and it never works.

P.P.S. For example, Bush’s No Child Left Behind (which I call No Bureaucrat Left Behind) was a failure, as was Obama’s Common Core.

P.P.P.S. Instead of throwing good money after bad and imposing more centralization, getting rid of the Department of Education in Washington would be a far-preferable approach (we’d be copying Canada with that approach).

P.P.P.P.S. If you want evidence on the benefits of school choice, click here, here, here, here, here, and here.

P.P.P.P.P.S. There’s also international evidence from Sweden, Chile, Canada, and the Netherlands, all of which shows superior results when competition replaces government education monopolies.

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

I’ve shared three reasons why Biden’s tax plan is misguided (the tax code is biased against rich taxpayers, the tax hike would have Laffer-Curve implications, and it would saddle America with the world’s highest corporate tax burden).

For Part IV of the series, let’s explain why every piece of his plan will backfire.

There are three main arguments for higher taxes, though I don’t find any of them convincing.

1. Spite and envy against successful entrepreneurs, investors, innovators, and business owners.
2. Bringing more money to Washington to finance a larger burden of government spending.
3. Bringing more money to Washington to ostensibly lower the burden of deficits and debt.

For what it’s worth, Biden’s proposed spending increases are far larger than his proposed tax increases, so we can rule out reason #3.

So we have to ask ourselves whether reasons #1 and #2 are compelling.

And when considering those two arguments, we also should ask whether those reasons are sufficiently compelling to justify throwing millions of Americans into unemployment and reducing the nation’s competitiveness.

The answer should be a resounding no.

In a column in the Wall Street Journal from last July, Philip DeMuth elaborated on the damage that would be inflicted by Biden’s class-warfare agenda.

Mr. Biden has proposed to reinstate the Obama tax rates for top earners while simultaneously imposing an unlimited 12.4% Social Security payroll tax on earnings over $400,000. …Mr. Biden proposes to eliminate the capital gains reset to fair market value at death. For long-term holdings, much of that gain is merely inflation, created by the government’s failure to maintain price stability, so this is effectively a tax on a tax. The remaining gains are usually from corporate earnings, which were already taxed once, when they came in the door. It will be difficult to keep your business or farm in the family if the Biden scheme forces it to be liquidated to pay the death taxes. …If a President Biden has his way, the top capital-gains tax rate will be 39.6%—the same as for ordinary income. This could be a triple whammy: cutting the estate tax exemption in half, eliminating the capital gains reset to fair market value, and then doubling the capital-gains tax rate. A small step for the government, a giant loss for the American family. …The former vice president’s ambitious spending programs would more than offset any new revenue from his tax proposals. …This isn’t a debate between growing the pie vs. redistributing the pie; it is about everyone settling for a smaller pie.

The final two sentences deserve extra attention.

First, nobody should be deluded that tax increases will be used to reduce red ink. Yes, Biden is proposing to collect a lot more money, but he’s proposing about $2 of new spending for every $1 of projected tax revenue.

Brian Riedl’s Chartbook has the grim details on Biden’s spending agenda.

Second, the point about “growing the pie” is critically important since even a very small reduction in long-run growth will have a surprisingly large impact on household finances within a few decades.

The bottom line is that living standards in the United States are significantly higher than living standards in Europe, in large part because fiscal burdens are not as onerous in America.

Biden’s plan to make America more like France, Italy, and Greece is not a good idea.

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The Suddenly Real Threat of a Higher Corporate Income Tax Rate

After November’s election, I figured we would have gridlock. Biden would propose some statist ideas, but they would be blocked by Republicans in the Senate.

All things considered, not a bad outcome.

But Democrats won the run-off elections yesterday for both Georgia Senate seats, which means they now have total control of Washington.

And that means, as I recently warned, a much bigger threat that Biden’s proposed tax increases may get enacted.

That won’t be good news for America’s economy or American competitiveness.

Today, let’s focus on the biggest tax increase that the President Elect is proposing.

In an article for National Review, Joseph Sullivan writes about the adverse impact of Biden’s increase in the corporate tax rate.

Biden’s corporate-tax proposal is remarkable. …If the U.S. adopted Biden’s proposed federal tax rate, its overall corporate-tax rate would not be “in line” with the rest of the G7. Assuming U.S. state and local corporate taxes stayed the same, Biden’s proposal would result in nearly the highest overall corporate-tax rate in the G7, according to data from the OECD. The U.S. would be tied with France. …The average overall corporate rate among the G7 has fallen to 25 percent… With the G7 average trending in one direction, Biden would move the U.S. in the opposite direction.

In other words, while the Biden team claims that a higher corporate tax won’t be too damaging because it will be similar to the rate in other major nations, the U.S. actually will be tied with France once you include the impact of state corporate tax burdens.

Here’s the chart included with the article.

And don’t forget that there are many other economies where the corporate tax rate is well below the G7 average.

The bottom line is that the United States currently ranks only #19 out of 35 nations in the Tax Foundation’s competitiveness ranking for OECD nations.

The good news is that being #19 is much better than being #31, which is where the U.S. was in 2016.

The bad news is that Biden wants to undo much of the 2017 reform, as well as impose other tax increases. And that means a much lower competitiveness score in the future.

Which ultimately means lower wages for American workers.

P.S. Although the proposed increase in the corporate rate is theoretically the biggest revenue raiser in Biden’s tax plan, I will safely predict that it won’t raise nearly as much revenue as projected by static revenue estimates. I wasn’t able to educate Obama on this issue, and I’m even less hopeful of getting through to Biden.

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Hopes and Fears for 2021

Yesterday was my review of the best and worst policy developments in 2020.

Today, I’ll share my hopes and fears for 2021.

These are not predictions (economists have a terrible track record when try to make forecasts). Instead, these are merely good and bad things that might plausibly happen.

We’ll start with the positives.

Gridlock – I don’t necessarily think Biden is a hard-core leftist, but his fiscal agenda is terrible. I want him to have an excuse to put those policies on the back burner, and that will happen if Republicans control the Senate and we have “gridlock.” Simply stated, I’d rather nothing happen in Washington than have bad things happen. By the way, I’ll openly admit to being a hypocrite on this issue. At some point, I hope there will be a White House and a Congress that want to reform the tax code and fix entitlements. When that happens, I won’t want any obstacles.

Supreme Court tosses civil asset forfeiture – I’m recycling this item from last year because I’m hopeful that it’s just a matter of time before the Justices toss out this wretched policy that literally allows government to steal property from people who have not been convicted of any crime, or even charged with any wrongdoing.

Trade liberalization – To be charitable, Trump was a disaster on trade. Biden almost certainly will move policy in the right direction, including a restoration of the World Trade Organization‘s ability to settle disputes.

I used to list the collapse of Venezuela’s totalitarian government as one of my annual hopes and I still think that will happen, hopefully sooner rather than later. That being said, I’m getting a superstitious feeling that I’m jinxing regime change since I’ve listed that hope the past three years and it hasn’t happened.

Now let’s look at the negatives.

Absence of gridlock, leading to big anti-growth tax increases – If Democrats win both Senate seats in Georgia in a few days, that will give them control of the Senate, which will dramatically increase the danger that Biden will push his class-warfare tax policies.

Re-regulation – Trump did not have a perfect track record on red tape (coal subsidies, property rights, Fannie/Freddie, for instance), but there was a net shift in the right direction during his four years. Biden almost certainly will impose more intervention. Indeed, I’m not aware of a single regulatory issue where he’s on the right side. So don’t get your hopes up for better showerheads and dishwashers.

Kamala Harris becomes president – The Vice President-Elect staked out policies far to the left of Biden when she ran for president. And she has a reprehensible track record of trampling rights when she was California’s top cop. That’s an unsavory combination. If she’s even half as bad as her rhetoric, we all should wish Biden good health for the next four years.

P.S. If you want to see hope and fears for previous years, here are my thoughts for 2020, 2019, 2018, and 2017.

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