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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Will Biden Resuscitate Obama’s Reprehensible “Operation Choke Point”?

Some policies will improve with Biden in the White House, most notably trade, but also government spending (not because Biden is good, but rather because Republicans will go back to pretending to be fiscally conservative).

But some policies will move in the wrong direction. Biden is awful on tax policy, for instance, though I expect Republicans in the Senate will block his class-warfare agenda.

Biden is also very bad on regulatory issues. Unfortunately, this is an area where the new President (and his appointees) will have plenty of authority to shift policy in the wrong direction.

I’m especially worried that Biden will resuscitate an Obama-era policy of strong-arming banks so they won’t do business with unpopular industries. This video, which I first shared back in 2016, explains this reprehensible policy.

Norbert Michel of the Heritage Foundation, in a column for Forbes, provides some additional background on the policy.

Choke Point consisted of bureaucrats in several independent federal agencies taking it upon themselves to shut legal businesses – such as payday lenders and firearms dealers – out of the banking system. Given the nature of the U.S. regulatory framework, this operation was easy to pull off. Officials at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), for instance, simply had to inform the banks they were overseeing that the government considered certain types of their customers “high risk.” The mere implication of a threat was enough to pressure banks into closing accounts, because no U.S. bank wants anything to do with extra audits or investigations from their regulator, much less additional operating restrictions or civil and criminal charges. Banks are incredibly sensitive to any type of pressure from federal regulators, and they know that the regulators have enormous discretion.

In a column for the Wall Street Journal earlier this year, Phil Gramm and Mike Solon elaborated on the left’s campaign to politicize the banking system.

Banking was used as a weapon against legal, solvent businesses by the Obama administration during Operation Choke Point, a program to deny the disfavored access to banking services. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. labeled certain businesses “high risk,” including firearms and ammunition dealers, check-cashers, payday lenders and fireworks vendors. Unelected regulators, not Congress or courts, marked these industries as “dirty business” and made it “unacceptable for an insured depository institution” to offer them banking services. …With Democrats unable to ban guns legislatively, Rep. Carolyn Maloney admonished banks at a recent hearing to not “finance gun slaughter.” When she urged JPMorgan to deny credit for legal firearm sales as other banks had done, the CEO responded, “We can certainly consider that. Yes.” At the same hearing, Rep. Rashida Tlaib challenged bank CEOs: “Will any of your banks make a commitment to phase out your investments in fossil fuels and dirty energy?” The CEOs declined to defend fossil fuels… Letting political intimidation dictate the availability of private credit endangers freedom and stifles productivity growth and job creation. …The use of political intimidation to allocate capital is an assault on economic efficiency and freedom.

There is, however, a bit of good news.

The Trump Administration ended Operation Choke Point back in 2017.

And, although it is happening at the last minute, the Trump Administration is now trying to strengthen the rule of law so banks won’t feel pressured to discriminate against certain industries in the future.

In a column published yesterday by the Wall Street Journal, Brian Brooks and Charles Calomiris of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) explain the new rule that their agency has unveiled.

…there have been too many allegations of banks cutting off vital services, credit and capital that legal businesses rely on to create jobs, meet community needs and support the economy. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, where we serve as acting comptroller and chief economist, respectively, on Friday proposed a rule to prevent banks from discriminating against legal businesses and individuals. The rule would require bankers to do what they do best: assess risk and underwrite credit decisions. …politically driven discrimination against particular industries has threatened fairness in banking. Under the Obama administration, Operation Choke Point, in which the OCC did not take part, involved regulators discouraging banks from serving legal and constitutionally protected businesses such as payday lenders and gun and ammunition sellers. …the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 added to the OCC’s traditional mission of safety and soundness the obligation to ensure fair access to financial services… Banks may not exclude entire parts of the economy for reasons unrelated to objective, quantifiable risks specific to an individual customer.

Sadly, if Biden has the same attitude as Obama about the rule of law, a future OCC can reverse anything Trump’s people adopt.

I’ll close with a libertarian-minded observation.

Because I believe in freedom of association, I think banks should have the liberty to discriminate against specific businesses, or even entire industries.

But there’s a big difference between banks choosing to discriminate and being coerced into such behavior by government regulators.

So it was disgusting that Obama’s regulators went after industries they didn’t like, such as gun dealers.

But it would be equally reprehensible if a Republican Administration went after an industry it didn’t like, such as legal marijuana.

P.S. The broader lesson to learn from Operation Choke Point is that regulatory power for governments is a vehicle for corruption and malfeasance.

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Is Japan a Role Model for the United States?

Japan is an interesting country to examine if you want insights about public policy.

• We can study the impact of population aging on fiscal outcomes.
• We can learn about the utter failure of Keynesian economics.
• We can understand why it’s a very bad idea to impose a value-added tax.
• We can find out that a higher tax burden is bad news.
• We can determine that higher spending is bad news.

Overall, I have a pessimistic view of Japan, but not because it has terrible policy by world standards (it’s currently ranked #20 for economic liberty).

Instead, my concern is that it is drifting in the wrong direction (it was ranked in the top 10 for economic freedom in the mid-1950s) and the country is dealing with grim demographics.

But not everyone shares my view. Indeed, some people even think Japan is a role model. Here are some excerpts from a column in the Japan Times by Jesper Koll of Wisdomtree Investments.

U.S. President-elect Joe Biden can learn a lot from Japan. …the overall result generated by the Japanese economic system is extremely positive. Japan is the global best-in-class for balancing both income growth and income distribution. …an economy must both grow and distribute the spoils of wealth creation in a fair and equitable way.

So why does Mr. Koll think Japan does a good job?

Mostly because of economic outcomes for lower-income people.

At the end of last year, the median net financial wealth — all financial assets minus liabilities — for households in Japan stood at $104,000. In the United States, it was $62,000. …Japan does have an underbelly of poor people, but compared to America, relatively few are truly left behind financially. …America has more than two times more very wealthy people than Japan, but it also has more than five times more poor people. …In the past eight years, the bottom 10% of income earners saw a $15,000 rise in earnings in Japan, from $17,000 to $32,0000. In contrast, their American counterparts got only $10,000 more income, from $18,000 to $28,000.

For what it’s worth, I’m a bit skeptical of whether the experiences of ethnically homogeneous Japan are directly applicable to an ethnically heterogeneous society such as the United States.

I also think it’s strange that Koll compares the last eight years, which mixes the stagnation of the Obama years with the somewhat better performance of the Trump years.

But it’s interesting that he concludes by observing that you help low-income people with tight labor markets rather than the kind of class-warfare tax policy that Biden has been advocating.

How did Japan successfully bring up the poor? Not by taxing the rich, but by…positive demographic dynamics…because the growing scarcity of labor is forcing steadfast improvement in the type of employment contracts offered, i.e., not just part-time, but full-time as well as solid pay increases at the bottom end of the employment attractiveness spectrum.

But what about Koll’s point about lower-income people being better off in Japan than in the United States?

On that issue, I’m very skeptical.

His article doesn’t include links to data sources, so I can’t comment on the accuracy of his numbers.

But here’s a chart that I first shared earlier this year, which I’ve augmented in red to highlight how the bottom 10 percent of people in the United States are at the same level of middle-income people in Japan.

Call me crazy, but the above data don’t suggest that the United States should copy Japan.

Or what about this chart, which I originally shared back in 2019. It shows that the bottom 20 percent of people in the United States are doing better than the average person in Japan (highlighted in red).

Once again, these numbers don’t lead me to think that America should be copying Japan.

I won’t bother with another chart, but I also invite readers to peruse the OECD’s AIC data, which shows the average person in the United States being way ahead of the average person in Japan.

The bottom line is that I’m all in favor of Joe Biden using other nations as role models. But I would go with Singapore before Japan. Or perhaps he could adopt an a la carte approach, picking the best of the best from around the world (Switzerland’s fiscal rule, Monaco’s tax system, Chile’s private pension regime, etc).

P.S. Japan only ranks in the middle third when looking at the societal capital of nations.

P.P.S. I used to assume that Japan had a competent government sector, stories like this and this have changed my perspective.

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

In Part I of this series, I expressed some optimism that Joe Biden would not aggressively push his class-warfare tax plan, particularly since Republicans almost certainly will wind up controlling the Senate.

But the main goal of that column was to explain that the internal revenue code already is heavily weighted against investors, entrepreneurs, business owners and other upper-income taxpayers.

And to underscore that point, I shared two charts from Brian Riedl’s chartbook to show that the “rich” are now paying a much larger share of the tax burden – notwithstanding the Reagan tax cuts, Bush tax cuts, and Trump tax cuts – than they were 40 years ago.

Not only that, but the United States has a tax system that is more “progressive” than all other developed nations (all of whom also impose heavy tax burdens on upper-income taxpayers, but differ from the United States in that they also pillage lower-income and middle-class residents).

In other words, Biden’s class-warfare tax plan is bad policy.

Today’s column, by contrast, will point out that his tax increases are impractical. Simply stated, they won’t collect much revenue because people change their behavior when incentives to earn and report income are altered.

This is especially true when looking at upper-income taxpayers who – compared to the rest of us – have much greater ability to change the timing, level, and composition of their income.

This helps to explain why rich people paid five times as much tax to the IRS during the 1980s when Reagan slashed the top tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent.

When writing about this topic, I normally use the Laffer Curve to help people understand why simplistic assumptions about tax policy are wrong (that you can double tax revenue by doubling tax rates, for instance). And I point out that even folks way on the left, such as Paul Krugman, agree with this common-sense view (though it’s also worth noting that some people on the right discredit the concept by making silly assertions that “all tax cuts pay for themselves”).

But instead of showing the curve again, I want to go back to Brian Riedl’s chartbook and review his data on of revenue changes during the eight years of the Obama Administration.

It shows that Obama technically cut taxes by $822 billion (as further explained in the postscript, most of that occurred when some of the Bush tax cuts were made permanent by the “fiscal cliff” deal in 2012) and raised taxes by $1.32 trillion (most of that occurred as a result of the Obamacare legislation).

If we do the math, that means Obama imposed a cumulative net tax increase of about $510 billion during his eight years in office

But, if you look at the red bar on the chart, you’ll see that the government didn’t wind up with more money because of what the number crunchers refer to as “economic and technical reestimates.”

Indeed, those reestimates resulted in more than $3.1 trillion of lost revenue during the Obama years.

I don’t want the politicians and bureaucrats in Washington to have more tax revenue, but I obviously don’t like it when tax revenues shrink simply because the economy is stagnant and people have less taxable income.

Yet that’s precisely what we got during the Obama years.

To be sure, it would be inaccurate to assert that revenues declined solely because of Obama’s tax increase. There were many other bad policies that also contributed to taxable income falling short of projections.

Heck, maybe there was simply some bad luck as well.

But even if we add lots of caveats, the inescapable conclusion is that it’s not a good idea to adopt policies – such as class-warfare tax rates – that discourage people from earning and reporting taxable income.

The bottom line is that we should hope Biden’s proposed tax increases die a quick death.

P.S. The “fiscal cliff” was the term used to describe the scheduled expiration of the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts. According to the way budget data is measured in Washington, extending some of those provisions counted as a tax cut even though the practical impact was to protect people from a tax increase.

P.P.S. Even though Biden absurdly asserted that paying higher taxes is “patriotic,” it’s worth pointing out that he engaged in very aggressive tax avoidance to protect his family’s money.

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

During the campaign, Joe Biden proposed a massive tax increase, far beyond what either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton put forth when they ran for the White House.

Some people speculate that Biden isn’t actually that radical, and that his class-warfare agenda was simply a tactic to fend off Bernie Sanders, so it will be interesting to see how much of his political platform winds up as actual legislative proposals in 2021.

That being said, we can safely assume three things.

1. Biden will propose higher taxes.
2. Those tax increases will target upper-income taxpayers such as entrepreneurs, investors, and business owners.
3. Those tax increases will be a very bad idea.

The main argument that Biden and his supporters will use to justify such a plan is that “rich” taxpayers are not paying their fair share.

More specifically, we’ll be told that upper-income households are not pulling their weight thanks to the cumulative impact of the Reagan tax cuts, the Bush tax cuts, and the Trump tax cuts.

There’s just one problem with this argument. As shown by this multi-decade data from Brian Riedl’s chartbook, it’s wildly, completely, and utterly inaccurate. The richest 20 percent are now shouldering a much greater share of the tax burden.

Every other group, by contrast, is now paying a smaller share of the tax burden.

Some folks on the left assert that the above chart is misleading. They say the chart merely shows that the rich have been getting richer and everyone else is falling behind.

The solution, they argue, is to catch up with the rest of the world by making the tax system more “progressive.”

Their assertions about income trends are wrong, but let’s leave that for another day and focus on so-called progressivity.

Once again, Riedl’s chartbook is the go-to source. As shown in this chart, it turns out that rich people pay a higher share than their counterparts in every other developed nation.

Please notice, by the way, the additional explanation in the lower-left portion of the chart, The numbers displayed do not include the value-added taxes that are imposed by every other nation, which are regressive or proportional depending on the time horizon. This means that the overall American tax code is far more tilted against the rich than shown by this chart.

But the key point to understand, as I’ve noted before, is that difference between Europe and the United States is not the taxation of the rich. The real reason that America has the most progressive tax system is that European nations impose much heavier taxes on lower-income and middle-class taxpayers.

P.S. At the risk of stating the obvious, this is not desirable since class-warfare taxes generally cause the most economic damage on a per-dollar-collected basis.

P.P.S. It’s also worth remembering that higher tax rates on the rich don’t necessarily lead to higher tax revenues.

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President Joe Biden Will Be Bad, but a President Kamala Harris Would Be Worse

Joe Biden has a very misguided economic agenda. I’m especially disturbed by his class-warfare tax agenda, which will be bad news for American workers and American competitiveness.

The good news, as I wrote earlier this year, is that he probably isn’t serious about some of his worst ideas.

Biden is a statist, but not overly ideological. His support for bigger government is largely a strategy of catering to the various interest groups that dominate the Democratic Party. The good news is that he’s an incrementalist and won’t aggressively push for a horrifying FDR-style agenda if he gets to the White House.

But what if Joe Biden’s health deteriorates and Kamala Harris – sooner or later – winds up in charge?

That’s rather troubling since her agenda was far to the left of Biden’s when they were competing for the Democratic nomination.

And it doesn’t appear that being Biden’s choice for Vice President has led her to moderate her views. Consider this campaign ad, where she openly asserted that “equitable treatment means we all end up at the same place.”

The notion that we should strive for equality of outcomes rather than equality of opportunity is horrifying.

For all intents and purposes, Harris has embraced a harsh version of redistributionism where everyone above average is punished and everyone below average is rewarded.

This goes way beyond a safety net and it’s definitely a recipe for economic misery since people on both sides of the equation have less incentive to be productive.

I’m not the only one to be taken aback by Harris’ dogmatic leftism.

Robby Soave, writing for Reason, is very critical of her radical outlook.

Harris gives voice to a leftist-progressive narrative about the importance of equity—equal outcomes—rather than mere equality before the law. …Harris contrasted equal treatment—all people getting the same thing—with equitable treatment, which means “we all end up at the same place.” …This may seem like a trivial difference, but when it comes to public policy, the difference matters. A government should be obligated to treat all citizens equally, giving them the same access to civil rights and liberties like voting, marriage, religious freedom, and gun ownership. …A mandate to foster equity, though, would give the government power to violate these rights in order to achieve identical social results for all people. 

And, in a column for National Review, Brad Polumbo expresses similar reservations about her views.

Whether she embraces the label “socialist” or not, Harris’s stated agenda and Senate record both reveal her to be positioned a long way to the left on matters of economic policy. From health care to the environment to housing, Harris thinks the answer to almost every problem we face is simply more government and more taxpayer money — raising taxes and further indebting future generations in the process. …Harris…supports an astounding $40 trillion in new spending over the next decade. In a sign of just how far left the Democratic Party has shifted on economics, Harris backs more than 20 times as much spending as Hillary Clinton proposed in 2016. …And this is not just a matter of spending. During her failed presidential campaign, Harris supported a federal-government takeover of health care… The senator jumped on the “Green New Deal” bandwagon as well. She co-sponsored the Green New Deal resolution in the Senate that called for a “new national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II and the New Deal era.” …she supports enacting price controls on housing across the country. …The left-wing group Progressive Punch analyzed Harris’s voting record and found that she is the fourth-most liberal senator, more liberal even than Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren. Similarly, the nonpartisan organization GovTrack.us deemed Harris the furthest-left member of the Senate for the 2019 legislative year. (Spoiler alert: If your voting record is to the left of Bernie Sanders, you might be a socialist.)

To be fair, Harris is simply a politician, so we have no idea what she really believes. Her hard-left agenda might simply be her way of appealing to Democratic voters, much as Republicans who run for president suddenly decide they support big tax cuts and sweeping tax reform.

But whether she’s sincere or insincere, it’s troubling that she actually says it’s the role of government to make sure we all “end up at the same place.”

Let’s close with a video clip from Milton Friedman. At the risk of understatement, he has a different perspective than Ms. Harris.

Since we highlighted Harris’ key quote, let’s also highlight the key quote from Friedman.

Amen.

P.S. It appears Republicans will hold the Senate, which presumably (hopefully?) means that any radical proposals would be dead on arrival, regardless of whether they’re proposed by Biden or Harris.

P.P.S. Harris may win the prize for the most economically illiterate proposal of the 2020 campaign.

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A Victory for Biden, a Defeat for the Left

The day after the election, I wrote that “left-wing goals are now very unlikely” because Republicans almost certainly will retain control of the Senate.

But perhaps I should have been ever bolder and argued that the election was a rejection of the left-wing agenda.

An editorial from the Wall Street Journal points out that voters did not vote for bigger government or more statism.

…the closer we inspect the nationwide election returns, the more the result looks like a defeat…for the progressive agenda. …Democrats lost seats in the House, giving up some of the suburban gains they made in 2018 while continuing to struggle in rural areas. …A GOP Senate may compromise with Mr. Biden around centrist ideas, but the aggressive House agenda of the last two years would die again. This result is all the more remarkable given that Democrats had nearly all of the media, Silicon Valley billionaires, and all of the leading cultural figures and institutions helping them. …The lack of coattails was also evident in the states, where Democrats spent heavily to flip legislatures. …The GOP flipped both legislative bodies in New Hampshire, despite Mr. Trump’s loss in the Granite State, and Republicans protected their advantage nearly everywhere else. …There was no blue wave, and certainly no mandate for progressive change. …in their considerable wisdom, the voters may have elected Mr. Biden but they left his party and its radical ideas behind.

Some readers may think that the Wall Street Journal‘s editors are engaging in spin. In other words, because of their pro-market views, they’re trying to make it seem like a defeat wasn’t really a defeat.

But what about Helaine Olen, a reliably left-wing columnist for the Washington Post, who reached the same conclusion when opining about election results from California.

Proposition 22 — which would allow gig-economy companies such as Uber, Lyft and DoorDash to continue treating drivers as independent contractors — passed handily. On the other hand, Proposition 16, which would have restored affirmative action to California’s public college and university admissions, has gone down in defeat. …Let’s take Proposition 22. Activists have been unhappy with the tech giants of the sharing economy for years, pointing out repeatedly that they are using venture capital to subsidize an unprofitable industry and that, moreover, they offer almost nothing in either the way of labor or consumer protection. The entire business model is designed to get around government regulations. …Voters did not appear particularly concerned that allowing a major employer to override state regulation and effectively set its own working conditions is a terrible precedent — not when a few extra dollars per ride was at stake. When it came down to worker welfare vs. short-term convenience and financial gain, it wasn’t even a contest. …Proposition 16…supporters roundly outspent opponents and hoped the increased attention to issues of systemic racial inequities in the wake of the killing of George Floyd would help them garner support. …The biggest obstacle might have been the traditional antipathy toward affirmative action reasserting itself — a survey last year found that 3 out of 4 Americans opposed using race or ethnicity as a factor in college admissions.

And the New York Times isn’t exactly a bastion of right-wing thinking, yet an article by Thomas Fuller, Shawn Hubler, Tim Arango and Conor Dougherty also acknowledges that the election results were not great for the left.

…the nation’s most populous state put up mammoth numbers for the Democrats. But dig a little deeper into the results and a more complex picture of the Golden State voter emerges, of strong libertarian impulses and resistance to some quintessentially liberal ideas. In a series of referendums, voters in California rejected affirmative action, decisively shot down an expansion of rent control and eviscerated a law that gives greater labor protections for ride-share and delivery drivers, a measure that had the strong backing of labor unions. A measure that would have raised taxes on commercial landlords to raise billions for a state that sorely needs revenue also seemed on track for defeat. …said Bob Shrum, a former Democratic strategist…“California is a very liberal state that is now resistant to higher taxes.” …For all their liberal leanings on issues like the environment, California voters have long been less welcoming to new taxes… Proposition 15, would have removed the Proposition 13 tax limits on commercial properties like office buildings and industrial parks, continuing to shield homeowners while raising an estimated $6.5 billion to $11.5 billion a year for public schools and local governments. The measure was trailing on Thursday.. More than $100 million was also spent on another hot-button measure, rent control. Polls showed that the housing crisis was the No. 1 concern for state voters… And yet voters up and down the state resoundingly rejected efforts to expand tenants’ rights and rent control. …What do voters think about voting for Democrats and at the same time not supporting Democratic-led initiatives? José Legaspi, a Los Angeles resident…voted for Mr. Biden and did not think twice about opposing the measure that would raise taxes on commercial properties. “I truly believe in paying taxes,” he said. “However there is a point at which one should limit how much more in taxes one should personally pay.”

The bottom line is that Joe Biden won the White House (barring some dramatic and unexpected developments), but not because of his statist agenda.

It’s more accurate to say that voters wanted to end the sturm and drang of Trump, but without embracing bigger government.

P.S. I’m not going to pretend that voters are rabid libertarians who are clamoring for my preferred policies (such as shutting down departments, genuine entitlement reform, etc). But I also think that it’s safe to say that they don’t want the left’s agenda (class warfare, Medicare for all, green new deal, etc) of bigger government and more dependency.

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Interpreting the Election Results

For what it’s worth, my presidential prediction for 2020 will probably turn out to be more accurate than my presidential prediction for 2016.

But I doubt anyone cares about that. Let’s instead look at what happened last night (and, in some cases, what is still happening).

President

It appears that Biden will prevail in the battle for the White House when the dust settles, but you can see from this Washington Post map that the race was much closer than most people expected (Pennsylvania is expected to shift to Biden as mail-in votes are counted, and perhaps Georgia as well).

If that’s the final result, here are two obvious takeaways based on where a president has a lot of unilateral power.

• Trade policy will move in the right direction.
• Regulatory policy will move in the wrong direction.

Other policy areas generally require agreement between the executive branch and the legislative branch, so we can’t know the impact of a Biden presidency without perusing congressional results.

Senate

In my humble opinion, the big news of the night is that Republicans appear to have retained control of the Senate.

If true, that means some left-wing goals are now very unlikely.

There won’t be any court packing. There won’t be any serious effort to increase the number of Democratic senators by granting statehood to Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico.

But let’s focus on the economic issues. Here are some quick takeaways.

• There will be another “stimulus,” but it won’t be nearly as profligate as would have been the case if Democrats had total control of Congress and the White House.
• There won’t be any serious effort for forced unionization in right-to-work states.
• Biden’s class-warfare tax increases won’t happen.
• The state and local tax deduction will remain capped.
• The corporate tax rate will stay 21 percent (the best fiscal achievement of Trump’s presidency).

House of Representatives

It appears that Republicans will gain seats, which is contrary to all expectations.

That being said, there’s zero possibility of a GOP takeover, so Nancy Pelosi will remain in charge.

Ballot Initiatives

I wrote two weeks ago about this election’s six most important ballot initiatives.

The great news is that taxpayers scored a big victory by defeating the effort to get rid of the flat tax in Illinois an replace it with a so-called progressive tax. Winning that battle probably won’t rescue the Prairie State, but at least it will slow down its march to bankruptcy.

The other five battles mostly were decided correctly – at least based on the latest vote margins.

• California voters rejected an initiative that would allow the state to engage in racial discrimination.
• The California initiative to weaken limits on property taxes is trailing.
• The Colorado initiative to lower the state’s flat tax appears prevailed.
• The Colorado initiative to strengthen TABOR (the state’s spending cap) is leading.
• The one clear piece of bad news is that an Arizona initiative to impose a big increase in the top income tax rate appears likely to prevail.

What’s the future for Trump and Trumpism?

Regular readers know I want the GOP to be the Party of Reagan rather than the Party of Trump.

So I will be very interested to see whether Trump’s apparent defeat means Republicans go back to (at least pretending to favor) conventional small-government conservatism.

That will have the be the topic of a future column.

A Silver Lining for Republicans

The party controlling the White House usually loses mid-term elections. For recent examples, Democrats won the House in 2018 and there were big victories for the GOP in 2010 and 2014 during the Obama years.

In all likelihood, Republicans will now do much better in the 2022 midterm election with Biden in the White House instead of Trump.

A Silver Lining for Taxpayers

It’s not something that can be quantified, but congressional Republicans will now become much better on spending issues. They’ll no longer face pressure to go along with Trump’s profligacy and they’ll have a partisan incentive to oppose Biden’s profligate agenda.

P.S. Whether you’re happy or sad about the election results, remember that it’s always appropriate to laugh at the clowns and crooks in Washington.

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The Final Pre-Election Edition of Joe Biden Humor

Back in August, I shared some examples of Joe Biden Humor followed by some examples of Donald Trump Humor.

One of these clowns (hopefully!) will soon be fading from the public eye, so let’s take advantage of this opportunity for a final round of mockery. Today is Biden’s turn – starting with this trailer for the remake of a classic movie.

The Bernie Sanders version was a hit in North Korea, so I’m sure this additional remake will be good as well.

Next we have a cartoon about Biden’s get-out-the-vote efforts.

And here’s a campaign sign from Hunter Biden.

There was just a big battle over Amy Coney Barrett’s elevation to the Supreme Court and some folks on the left want to pack the court if Democrats are in power next year.

Biden infamously has refused to take a stand on this topic, which has led to two examples of clever satire from the Babylon Bee.

First, we have Biden expanding this evasive strategy.

Joe Biden was asked yet again today if he plans to abolish the Constitution, overthrow Congress, dismiss the Supreme Court, and set up a Communist regime to take their place. Once again, Biden refused to answer the question… “Look, if I tell you whether or not I plan to institute a new Communist order, establishing a glorious worker-led revolution that will lead us out of this capitalistic nightmare and into a paradisical utopia, that would become the headline,” Biden said. “That would be playing Trump’s game.” …”Don’t voters deserve to know this?” asked a concerned reporter. “No, they don’t deserve to know,” Biden snapped back. “And you’ll be the first thrown into the gulag, bucko, I tell you what. Write that whippersnapper’s name down, Kamala.”

The Babylon Bee also reports that this evasive approach is being adopted by Biden’s supporters.

According to anonymous sources, local liberal man Penn Millikers proposed to his girlfriend but has refused to reveal his position on adultery until after the wedding is over. The staunch Democrat said he wants the woman to marry him but won’t reveal his position on adultery until the marriage is finalized. …’Lookie here, Jill! If I tell you right now whether or not I plan to remain faithful to you, that would become the story! This is just a distraction! I think it’s better to just get married first with no prenup. Then I’ll tell you what I plan to do.'” Other things he refuses to reveal his position on include taking showers, putting socks in the hamper, going out drinking with the boys every night, and watching sports all day while he ignores his family.

Here’s another cartoon about Biden’s voter turnout strategy.

And you won’t be surprised to learn that we have a couple of memes about Biden’s cognitive skills.

Here’s the first one.

And here’s the second one.

Since we’re on the topic of Biden’s age, let’s share another story from the Babylon Bee.

Democrats around the nation are growing increasingly worried that their candidate for President, Joe Biden, will live through election day… Biden had surprised Democrats around the nation when he spoke for an extended period of time off a teleprompter…, causing a bit of a panic among Democratic Party operatives and voters. …“We all went back to the drawing board to plan a strategy that includes the possibility that Joe might actually be President…” At publishing time, the DNC was throwing the idea around that maybe they should be airing ads that make Biden look a little more on the verge of dying to reassure progressives.

Biden also has a reputation for unwanted touching.

Apparently it goes all the way back to the end of World War II.

Last but not least, here’s my favorite example from today’s collection.

Given her reckless profligacy and knee-jerk statism, that would be a terrifying remake on an Indiana Jones film!

Nov 2 addendum: I received this cartoon late yesterday. It’s too good not to include.

Reminds me of the Hillary joke I included when I made my 2016 predictions.

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2020 Election Predictions (and Policy Implications)

Given my big miss in 2016, I’m not sure why anyone would be interested in my election predictions, but I’ve received several emails asking me to offer up my guesses for 2020 (perhaps some of them are long-time readers who remember 2010, when I actually did a good job?).

Before I offer up my prediction, I’ll first share some of the guesses from the experts.

Everyone is predicting Biden, though my Trump friends regularly remind me that the experts were wrong in 2016.

We’ll start with the outlook from Real Clear Politics.

Next, we have Nate Silver’s 538 numbers.

Here are the betting odds for the election, as compiled by John Stossel and Maxim Lott.

And here’s Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball forecast.

I’ll add one caveat to the above estimates.

This tweet from Frank Luntz explains why my Democratic friends are still nervous.

RCP battleground poll average:

𝗢𝗰𝘁. 𝟮𝟵, 𝟮𝟬𝟭𝟲
• Florida: (Tied)
• Pennsylvania: Clinton +5.6
• Michigan: +7
• Wisc: +6.2
• NC: +3.2

𝗧𝗼𝗱𝗮𝘆
• Florida: Biden +1.2
• Pennsylvania: +5.1
• Michigan: +7.8
• Wisc: +4.6
• NC: +1.5

👉🏻 https://t.co/ZBRpAvXwZT https://t.co/GZmTCAxlSI

— Frank Luntz (@FrankLuntz) October 25, 2020

Finally, for those of you who want my guess, here’s my prediction of a comfortable Biden victory.

It’s basically the same (wrong) prediction I made in 2016, except I’m now giving Arizona and Michigan to the Democrats and Pennsylvania to the Republicans.

For what it’s worth, I was very tempted to give Pennsylvania – and maybe a few other states – to Biden.

Why? Because I think late-deciding voters may decide that they’re tired of all the drama and fighting that we get with Trump in the White House.

But I ultimately decided on the above map because I also think some of those voters may worry about Biden’s age. And they may worry even more about the Democratic Party’s leftward drift.

I guess we’ll know in a week (or so!).

In any event, if you really want to have fun, you can take my predictions, give Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina to Trump, along with one of Maine’s congressional districts, at which point you’d have a 269-269 tie. That would be a perfect ending for 2020, huh?

I’ll close with a few words about policy.

Biden clearly would move the country to the left on certain issues, most notably taxes and regulation. The only silver lining to that dark forecast is that I suspect that his tax increase will be much smaller than what’s contained in his awful plan.

I’m also somewhat hopeful that he won’t push for the so-called Green New Deal and that we’ll instead get the more-modest kind of Solyndra-style cronyism that we got under Obama. That’s bad, but not the end of the world.

The good news is that trade policy will move in the right direction.

But the biggest silver lining to a Biden victory is that Republicans will revert to pretending to once again be opposed to big government.

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Trump vs. Biden on the Minimum Wage

In another display of selfless masochism, I watched the Trump–Biden debate last night.

The candidates behaved better, for whatever that’s worth, but I was disappointed that there so little time (and even less substance) devoted to economic issues.

One of the few exceptions was the brief tussle regarding the minimum wage. Trump waffled on the issue, so I don’t give him any points, but Biden fully embraced the Bernie Sanders policy of basically doubling the minimum wage to $15 per hour.

This is very bad news for low-skilled workers and very bad news to low-margin businesses.

The economic of this issue are very simple. If a worker generates, say, $9 of revenue per hour, and politicians say that worker can’t be employed for less than $15 per hour, that’s a recipe for unemployment.

Earlier this month, Professor Steven Landsburg on the University of Rochester opined for the Wall Street Journal on Biden’s minimum-wage policy.

It isn’t only that I think Mr. Biden is frequently wrong. It’s that he tends to be wrong in ways that suggest he never cared about being right. He makes no attempt to defend many of his policies with logic or evidence, and he deals with objections by ignoring or misrepresenting them. …Take Mr. Biden’s stance on the federal minimum wage, which he wants to increase to $15 an hour from $7.25. …So why does Mr. Biden want to raise the minimum wage…? He hasn’t said, so I have two guesses, neither of which reflects well on him. Guess No. 1: He’s dissembling about the cost. …The minimum wage…comes directly from employers but indirectly (after firms shrink and prices rise) from consumers. A minimum wage is a stealth tax on eating at McDonald’s or shopping at Walmart. …Mr. Biden should acknowledge the cost of wage hikes and argue for accepting it. Instead he’s silent about the cost, hoping he can foist it on people who won’t realize they’re footing this bill. Guess No. 2: He’s rewarding his friends and punishing his enemies. New York is going to vote for Mr. Biden. The state also has a high cost of living and high wages—so New Yorkers would be largely unaffected by the minimum-wage hike. Alabama is going to vote against Mr. Biden. Alabama has a low cost of living and relatively low wages—so under the Biden plan Alabama firms would shrink, to the benefit of competitors in New York. Alabama workers and consumers would pay a greater price than New Yorkers.

And Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute recently highlighted some of the adverse effects for unskilled workers.

It’s an economic reality that workers compete against other workers, not against employers, for jobs, and higher wages in the labor market. And it’s also true that lower-skilled, limited-experience, less-educated workers compete against higher-skilled, more experienced, more educated workers for jobs. …If the minimum wage is increased…, that will…take away from unskilled workers the one advantage they currently have to compete against skilled workers – the ability to offer to work for a significantly lower wage than what skilled workers can command. …Result of a minimum wage hike to $15 an hour? Demand for skilled workers goes up, demand for unskilled workers goes down, and employment opportunities for unskilled workers are reduced.

Since I recently shared videos with Milton Friedman’s wisdom on both taxes and spending, here’s what he said about the minimum wage.

Let’s share one last bit of evidence. Mark Perry’s article referenced some new research by Jeffrey Clemens, Lisa Kahn, and Jonathan Meer.

Here’s what those scholars found in a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

We investigate whether changes in firms’ skill requirements are channels through which labor markets respond to minimum wage increases. …Data from the American Community Survey show that recent minimum wage changes resulted in increases in the average age and education of the individuals employed in low-wage jobs. Data on job vacancy postings show that the prevalence of a high school diploma requirement increases at the same time. The shift in skill requirements begins within the first quarter of a minimum wage hike. Further, it results from both within-firm shifts in postings and across-firms shifts towards firms that sought more-skilled workers at baseline. Given the poor labor market outcomes of individuals without high school diplomas, these findings have substantial policy relevance. This possibility was recognized well over a century ago by Smith (1907), who noted that the “enactment of a minimum wage involves the possibility of creating a class prevented by the State from obtaining employment.” Further, negative effects may be exacerbated for minority groups in the presence of labor market discrimination.

So why do politicians push for higher minimum wages, when all the evidence suggests that vulnerable workers bear the heaviest cost?

Part of the answer is that they don’t understand economics and don’t care about evidence.

But there’s also a more reprehensible answer, which is that they do understand, but they want to curry favor with union bosses, and those union bosses push for higher minimum wages as a way of reducing competition from lower-skilled workers.

P.S. Here’s my CNBC debate with Joe Biden’s top economic advisor on this issue.

P.P.S. Here’s a rather frustrating discussion I had on the minimum wage with Yahoo Finance.

P.P.P.S. But if you’re pressed for time, don’t listen to me pontificate. Instead, watch this video.

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The Economic Impact of the Biden Agenda

The good news is that the election season is almost over. The bad news is that we’ll have a president next year who does not embrace classical liberal principles of free markets and social tolerance.

But that doesn’t mean Trump and Biden are equally bad. Depending on what issues you think are most important, they’re not equally bad in what they say. And, because politicians often make insincere promises, they’re not equally bad in what they’ll actually do.

Regarding Trump, we have a track record. We know he’s pro-market on some issues (taxes and red tape) and we know he’s anti-market on other issues (spending and trade).

Regarding Biden, we have his track record in the United States Senate, where he routinely voted to expand the burden of government.

But we also have his presidential platform. And that’s the topic for today’s column. We’re going to review the major economic analyses that have been conducted on his proposals.

We’ll start with a report from Moody’s Analytics, authored by Mark Zandi and Bernard Yaros, which compares the economic impacts of the Trump and Biden agendas.

The economic outlook is strongest under the scenario in which Biden and the Democrats sweep Congress and fully adopt their economic agenda. In this scenario, the economy is expected to create 18.6 million jobs during Biden’s term as president, and the economy returns to full employment, with unemployment of just over 4%, by the second half of 2022. During Biden’s presidency, the average American household’s real after-tax income increases by approximately $4,800, and the homeownership rate and house prices increase modestly. Stock prices also rise, but the gains are limited. …Near-term economic growth is lifted by Biden’s aggressive government spending plans, which are deficit-financed in significant part. …Greater government spending adds directly to GDP and jobs, while the higher tax burden has an indirect impact through business investment and the spending and saving behavior of high-income households. …The economic outlook is weakest under the scenario in which Trump and the Republicans sweep Congress and fully adopt their economic agenda. …Trump has proposed much less expansive support to the economy from tax and spending policies.

Here’s the most relevant set of graphs from the report.

The Moody’s study is an outlier, however. Most other comprehensive analyses are less favorable to Biden.

For instance, a study for the Hoover Institution by Timothy Fitzgerald, Kevin Hassett, Cody Kallen, and Casey Mulligan, finds that Biden’s plan will weaken overall economic performance.

We estimate possible effects of Joe Biden’s tax and regulatory agenda. We find that transportation and electricity will require more inputs to produce the same outputs due to ambitious plans to further cut the nation’s carbon emissions, resulting in one or two percent less total factor productivity nationally. Second, we find that proposed changes to regulation as well as to the ACA increase labor wedges. Third, Biden’s agenda increases average marginal tax rates on capital income. Assuming that the supply of capital is elastic in the long run to its after-tax return and that the substitution effect of wages on labor supply is nontrivial, we conclude that, in the long run, Biden’s full agenda reduces fulltime equivalent employment per person by about 3 percent, the capital stock per person by about 15 percent, real GDP per capita by more than 8 percent, and real consumption per household by about 7 percent.

Wonkier readers may be interested in these numbers, which show that there’s a modest benefit from unwinding some of Trump’s protectionism, but there’s a lot of damage from the the other changes proposed by the former Vice President.

In a report authored by Garrett Watson, Huaqun Li, and Taylor LaJoie, the Tax Foundation estimated the impact of Biden’s proposed policies. Here are some of the highlights.

According to the Tax Foundation General Equilibrium Model, Biden’s tax plan would reduce the economy’s size by 1.47 percent in the long run. The plan would shrink the capital stock by just over 2.5 percent and reduce the overall wage rate by a little over 1 percent, leading to about 518,000 fewer full-time equivalent jobs. …Biden’s tax plan would raise about $3.05 trillion over the next decade on a conventional basis, and $2.65 trillion after accounting for the reduction in the size of the U.S. economy. While taxpayers in the bottom four quintiles would see an increase in after-tax incomes in 2021 primarily due to the temporary CTC expansion, by 2030 the plan would lead to lower after-tax income for all income levels.

Table 2 from the report is worth sharing because it shows what policies have the biggest economic impact.

The bottom line is that it’s not a good idea to raise the corporate tax burden and it’s not a good idea to worsen the payroll tax burden.

Here are some excerpts by a study authored by Professor Laurence Kotlikoff for the Goodman Institute.

The micro analysis is based on The Fiscal Analyzer (TFA), which uses data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finance to calculate how much representative American households will pay in taxes net of what they will receive in benefits over the rest of their lives. …The key micro issues…are the degree to which the Vice President’s reforms alter relative remaining lifetime net tax burdens and lifetime spending of the rich and poor within specific age cohorts and the impact of the reforms on incentives to work, i.e., remaining lifetime marginal net tax rates. The macro analysis is based on the Global Gaidar Model (GGM)…a dynamic, 90-period OLG, 17-region general equilibrium model. …The analysis includes three sets of findings. The first is the change in lifetime net taxes defined as the change in lifetime net taxes. The second is the percentage change in lifetime spending, defined as the change in the present value of outlays on all goods and services as well as bequests, averaged across all survivor path. The third is the lifetime marginal net tax rate from earning an extra $1,000. TFA’s lifetime marginal net tax rate measure takes full account of so-called double taxation. …The GGM predicts a close to 6 percent reduction in the U.S. capital stock. The GGM predicts close to a 2 percent permanent reduction in annual U.S. GDP.  The GGM predicts a roughly 2 percentage-point reduction in wages of U.S. workers, with a larger reduction in the wages of high-skilled workers.

In a study for the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, Professor Casey Mulligan estimated the following effects.

This study addresses the impact of these tax rate changes on economic behavior – work, investment, output and growth. This study finds that the Biden tax agenda will reduce production, incomes, and employment per capita by increasing taxation of both labor and business capital. Employment will be about 3 million workers less in the long run (five to ten years). This employment effect is primarily due to the agenda’s expansion of health insurance credits, which raises the average marginal tax rates on labor income by 2.4 percentage points. Biden also plans to increase taxes on businesses and their owners by a combined 6 to 10 percentage points. These taxes will reduce long-run wages, GDP per worker, and business capital per worker in the long run. By decreasing both the number of workers per capita and GDP per worker, respectively, these two key elements of Biden’s agenda reinforce to significantly reduce GDP per capita and average household incomes. I estimate that, as a result of Biden’s tax agenda, real GDP per capita would be 4 to 5 percent less, which is about $8,000 per household per year in the long run. The two parts of the tax agenda combine to reduce real per capita business capital by 7 to 12 percent in the long run.

Here’s a table from the study.

I’ll add two points to the above analyses.

First, the reason that the Moody’s study produces wildly different results is that its model is based on Keynesian principles. As such, a bigger burden of government spending is assumed to stimulate growth.

For what it’s worth, I think borrowing and spending can lead to short-run increases in consumption, but I’m very skeptical that Keynesian policies can generate increases in national income (i.e., what we produce rather than what we consume) over the medium-run or long-run.

All of the other studies rely on models that estimate how government policies impact incentives to engage in productive behavior. They don’t all measure the same things (some of the studies look solely at taxes, some look at overall fiscal policy, and some also include a look at regulatory proposals) but the methodologies are similar.

Second, I’ll re-emphasize the point I made at the beginning about how politicians routinely say things during campaigns that are either insincere or impractical.

For instance, Trump promised to restrain domestic discretionary spending by $750 billion and he actually increased it by $700 billion.

Likewise, I don’t expect Biden (assuming he prevails) to deliver on his campaign promises. In this case, that’s good news since he won’t increase taxes and spending by nearly as much as what he’s embraced during the campaign (in my fantasy world, he turns out be like Bill Clinton and actually delivers a net reduction in the burden of government).

P.S. For those on the losing side of the upcoming election, I’ll remind you that Australia is probably the best option if you want to escape the United States. Though you may want to pick Switzerland if you have a lot of money.

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The “Public Option” and the Future of Employer-Provided Health Insurance

Last night’s train-wreck debate reinforced my disdain for politicians.

But let’s ignore the immature theatrics from Trump and Biden and focus on one of their policy disagreements.

The two candidates squabbled over whether creating a government-administered health plan (see page 31 for a description of Biden’s so-called  “public option“) would lead to the demise of the current system of employer-provided health insurance.

For what it’s worth, there are two big reasons why I’m not a fan of the current employer-based system.

• It is propped up by a huge distortion in the tax code known as the “healthcare exclusion.”
• It leads to over-insurance and therefore exacerbates our third-party payer problem.

That being said, I’m very aware of the fact that politicians are always capable of making things worse (the “lather-rinse-repeat cycle” of government failure).

So let’s consider this key question: Government intervention has made our health system expensive and inefficient, but would a “public option” make things better or worse?

About two months ago, I shared this video which explains why the so-called public option will wind up being an expensive boondoggle.

Given the track record of health entitlements, I think the video you just watched is correct. A public option would be a fiscal nightmare.

But does that mean it also would be a threat to the employer-based system of private health insurance?

I think the answer is yes, largely because the subsidies that will make the system more expensive are also the subsidies that will make the public option seem like a good deal.

Let’s use two analogies to get this point across.

• Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac dominate housing finance, not because government-created entities are efficient, but because they use subsidies from the federal government to under-price private competitors.
• Parents know private schools produce much better educational outcomes than government schools, but most families opt for the inferior option because it’s already being financed by their tax dollars.

I fear the same thing will happen with the so-called public option. Politicians (in their never-ending efforts to but votes) will keep increasing the subsidies. That will make employer-based health plans seem less attractive by comparison.

And there will also be political pressure to provide an ever-more-extensive set of benefits (as illustrated by the cartoon). That will also make employer-based health plans seem less attractive by comparison.

The net result of all this is that even though the vast majority of workers are happy with their current employer-provided health plans, Biden’s public option will slowly but surely squeeze them out of the market.

The bottom line is that we’ll wind up with single-payer, government-run healthcare, but politicians would be sneaking it in the back door.

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Kudos to Trump and Biden for Aggressive Tax Avoidance

Washington is a cesspool of waste, fraud, and abuse.

All taxpayers, to avoid having their income squandered in D.C., should go above and beyond the call of duty to minimize the amount they send to the IRS.

Which is why today’s column is a bipartisan love fest for Donald Trump and Joe Biden – both of whom have been very aggressive in limiting their tax liabilities.

Here are some details from the report in the New York Times about Trump’s leaked tax returns.

Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750. He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made. …His reports to the I.R.S. portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year yet racks up chronic losses that he aggressively employs to avoid paying taxes. …They report that Mr. Trump owns hundreds of millions of dollars in valuable assets, but they do not reveal his true wealth. …Most of Mr. Trump’s core enterprises — from his constellation of golf courses to his conservative-magnet hotel in Washington — report losing millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars year after year. …Business losses can work like a tax-avoidance coupon: A dollar lost on one business reduces a dollar of taxable income from elsewhere. The types and amounts of income that can be used in a given year vary, depending on an owner’s tax status. But some losses can be saved for later use, or even used to request a refund on taxes paid in a prior year.

It’s worth noting that the leaked returns didn’t show any unknown business ties to Russia. Nor do they suggest any criminality.

Instead, Trump appears to have relied on using losses in some years to offset income in other years – a perfectly legitimate practice.

Now let’s look at some of what CNBC reported about Joe Biden’s clever tactic to save lots of money.

…consider borrowing a tax-planning tip from Joe Biden. The former vice president…reported about $10 million in income in 2017 from a pair of S-corporations… The two entities were paid for the couple’s book deals and speaking gigs. …both S-corps generated a lot of income, they paid out modest salaries in comparison. …In 2017, the two companies paid the couple a combined $245,833 in wages. …any amounts the Bidens received as a distribution wasn’t subject to the 15.3% combined Social Security and Medicare tax. …Tim Steffen, CPA and director of advanced planning at Robert W. Baird & Co. in Milwaukee. “…if you don’t report that income to the business as wages, then that portion of the income avoids Social Security and Medicare taxes,” he said.

So how much did this aggressive strategy save  the family?

The article doesn’t do all the math, but it certainly seems like the Biden household avoided having to cough up any payroll taxes on more than $9.75 million.

There’s a “wage base cap” on Social Security taxes (thankfully), so it’s possible that their tax avoidance only saved them about $283,000 (what they would have paid in Medicare taxes – 2.9 percent rather than 15.3 percent).

But that’s still a nice chunk of change – about four times as much as the average household earned that year.

As far as I’m concerned, we should applaud both Trump and Biden. Tax avoidance is legal. Even more important, it’s the right thing to do.

Though my applause for Biden is somewhat muted because he said in 2008 that paying more tax is patriotic. So he’s guilty of tax hypocrisy, which seems to be a common vice for folks on the left (the Clintons, John Kerry, Obama’s first Treasury Secretary, Obama’s second Treasury Secretary, Governor Pritzker of Illinois, etc).

For all his flaws, at least Trump isn’t a hypocrite on this issue (though all his spending may pave the way for future tax increases).

P.S. Here’s a story about the greatest-ever tactic for escaping taxes.

P.P.S. And here’s my favorite adults-only story about tax avoidance.

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Keynesian Economics Is Wrong…Again

I’ve previously written that Keynesian economics is like Freddy Kreuger. No matter how many times it is killed off by real-world evidence, it comes back to life whenever a politician wants to justify a vote-buying orgy of new spending.

And there will always be Keynesian economists who will then crank up their simplistic models that churn out results predicting that a bigger burden of government spending somehow will produce additional growth.

They never bother to explain why they think draining funds from the private sector is good for growth, of course, or why they think politicians supposedly spend money more wisely than households and businesses.

Nonetheless, there are some journalists who are willing to act as stenographers for their assertions.

In a September 25 story for the Washington Post, Tory Newmyer gives free publicity to Keynesian predictions that the economy will grow faster if Biden wins and then imposes his profligate agenda – which they underestimate to include $7.3 trillion of new spending and $4.1 trillion of new taxes over the next 10 years.

A Democratic sweep that puts Joe Biden in the White House and the party back in the Senate majority would produce 7.4 million more jobs and a faster economic recovery than if President Trump retains power. …Moody’s Analytics economists Mark Zandi and Bernard Yaros…see the higher government spending a Biden administration would approve — for emergency relief programs, infrastructure, and an expanded social safety net — giving the economy a potent injection of stimulus. …while a Biden administration would seek to offset some of his proposed $7.3 trillion in new spending over the next decade with $4.1 trillion in higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy, “the net of these crosscurrents is to boost economic activity,” the economists write.

Here’s one of the charts that was included in the story, which purports to show how bigger government leads to faster growth.

If there was a contest for the world’s most inaccurate economist, Zandi almost surely would win a gold medal.

But his laughable track record is hardly worth mentioning. What matters more is that we have decades of real-world experience with Keynesian economics. And it never works.

• It didn’t work for Hoover.
• It didn’t work for Roosevelt.
• It didn’t work for Japan.
• It didn’t work for Europe.
• It didn’t work for Obama.

It’s also worth pointing out that Keynesians have been consistently wrong with predicting economic damage during periods of spending restraint.

• They were wrong about growth after World War II (and would have been wrong, if they were around at the time, about growth when Harding slashed spending in the early 1920s).
• They were wrong about Thatcher in the 1980s.
• They were wrong about Reagan in the 1980s.
• They were wrong about Canada in the 1990s.
• They were wrong after the sequester.

Now let’s look at another example of how Keynesian predictions are wrong.

Professor Casey Mulligan from the University of Chicago analyzed what happened when turbo-charged unemployment benefits recently ended.

July was the final month of the historically disproportionate unemployment bonus of $600 per week. The termination or reduction of benefits will undoubtably make a difference in the lives of the people who were receiving them, but old-style Keynesians insist that the rest of us will be harmed too. …Paul Krugman explained in August that “I’ve been doing the math, and it’s terrifying. . . . Their spending will fall by a lot . . . [and there is] a substantial ‘multiplier’ effect, as spending cuts lead to falling incomes, leading to further spending cuts.” GDP could fall 4 to 5 percent, and perhaps as much as ten percent… Wednesday the Census Bureau’s advance retail-sales report provided our first extensive look at consumer spending in August, which is the first month with reduced benefits (reduced roughly $50 billion for the month). Did consumer spending drop by tens of billions, starting our economy on the promised path toward recession?

Not exactly. As shown in this accompanying chart, “…retail sales increased $3 billion above July.”

Professor Mulligan explains why Keynesian economics doesn’t work in the real world.

Two critical elements are missing from the old-style Keynesian approach. The first piece is that employment, which depends on benefits and opportunity costs to employer and employee, is a bigger driver of spending than government benefits are. For every person kept out of work by benefits, that is less aggregate spending that is not made up elsewhere in the economy. The second missing piece is that taxpayers and lenders to our government finance these benefits and therefore have less to spend and save on other things. Even a foreign lender who decides to lend that extra $1 million to our government may well be lending less to U.S. households and companies. At best, redistribution from workers to the unemployed reallocates demand rather than increasing its total.

Amen.

At best, Keynesian policy enables a transitory boost in consumption, but there’s no increase in production. At the risk of stating the obvious, a nation’s gross domestic income does not increase when the government borrows money from one group of people and redistributes it to another group of people.

P.S. Since today’s topic is Keynesian economics here’s the famous video showing the Keynes v. Hayek rap contest, followed by the equally entertaining sequel, which features a boxing match between Keynes and Hayek. And even though it’s not the right time of year, here’s the satirical commercial for Keynesian Christmas carols.

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Joe Biden Humor

Now that Joe Biden has been officially nominated, I should probably augment my analysis of his statist economic agenda.

But it’s also been a long time (almost nine years!) since I last shared some Biden-themed humor, so let’s make that today’s topic.

We’ll start with this campaign poster.

For what it’s worth, I think this visual would have been even better.

That being said, Biden’s propensity for unwanted touching doesn’t seem damaging, perhaps for the reason identified by America’s premiere satire site, Babylon Bee.

Medical experts were excited to announce today that Democrats have achieved herd immunity against sexual assault allegations. …”It’s amazing — the entire Democrat demographic is entirely immune,” said one researcher as he took blood samples from Joe Biden. “After conspiring with the media to squash any accusations that pop up, it seems, over time, Democrats have been able to develop a kind of herd immunity to any allegations.” Biden has been an important case study for medical experts’ work, as he can publicly sniff people’s hair and inappropriately touch many people on camera and still be entirely protected from any accusation whatsoever. His DNA is being studied for a possible breakthrough for other politicians. …Other political parties and at-risk conservatives are being advised to quarantine so as to avoid any allegations until a vaccine is discovered.

There’s more good news for Biden.

He’s been endorsed by Obama.

The Babylon Bee reported on Obama’s endorsement.

Many were worried Obama wasn’t going to endorse Biden, but he came through for the DNC establishment, telling everyone how deeply and personally Biden has touched everyone he has ever worked with. “Many leaders, um, you know, they, um, don’t rub you the right way,” Obama said. “But not Joe. Joe, see, he, um, touches everyone he comes into contact with, whether they want him to or not. …Joe’s campaign is very touching, that’s what I’m, um, here to say. So don’t let a Trump victory sneak up on us — embrace Joe Biden in 2020.”

We’ll wrap up with three more satirical images.

First, the former Vice President is prepared to defend America from foreign attacks.

The final two items target Biden’s alleged forgetfulness.

As usual, I save my favorite item for last.

P.S. You can find a few other anti-Biden jabs here, here, and here.

P.P.S. Sometimes Biden is unintentionally funny.

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The Economic Damage of Wealth Taxation

Speculating about tax policy in 2021, with Washington potentially being controlling by Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi, there are four points to consider.

1. The bad news is that Joe Biden has endorsed a wide range of punitive tax increases.
2. The good news is that Joe Biden has not endorsed a wealth tax, which is one of the most damaging ways – on a per-dollar raised basis – for Washington to collect more revenue.
3. The worse news is that the additional spending desired by Democrats is much greater than Biden’s proposed tax increases, which means there will be significant pressures for additional sources of money.
4. The worst news is that the class-warfare mentality on the left means the additional tax increases will target successful entrepreneurs, investors, innovators, and business owners – which means a wealth tax is a very real threat.

Let’s consider what would happen if this odious example of double taxation was imposed in the United States.

Two scholars from Rice University, John Diamond and George Zodrow, produced a study for the Center for Freedom and Prosperity on the economic impact of a wealth tax.

They based their analysis on the plan proposed by Senator Elizabeth Warren, which is probably the most realistic option since Biden (assuming he wins the election) presumably won’t choose the more radical plan proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders.

They have a sophisticated model of the U.S. economy. Here’s their simplified description of how a wealth tax would harm incentives for productive behavior.

The most direct effect operates through the reduction in wealth of the affected taxpayers, including the reduction in accumulated wealth over time. Although such a reduction in wealth is, for at least some proponents of the wealth tax, a desirable result, the associated reduction in investment and thus in the capital stock over time will have deleterious effects, reducing labor productivity and thus wage income as well as economic output. …A wealth tax would also affect saving by changing the relative prices of current and future consumption. In the standard life-cycle model of household saving, a wealth tax effectively increases the price of future consumption by lowering the after-tax return to saving, creating a tax bias favoring current consumption and thus reducing saving. … we should note that the apparently low tax rates under the typical wealth tax are misleading if they are compared to income tax rates imposed on capital income, and the capital income tax rates that are analogous to wealth tax rates are often in excess of 100 percent. …For example, with a 1 percent wealth tax and a Treasury bond earning 2 percent, the effective income tax rate associated with the wealth tax is 50 percent; with a 2 percent tax rate, the effective income tax rate increases to 100 percent.

And here are the empirical findings from the report.

We compare the macroeconomic effects of the policy change to the values that would have occurred in the absence of any changes — that is, under a current law long run scenario… The macroeconomic effects of the wealth tax are shown in Table 1. Because the wealth tax reduces the after-tax return to saving and investment and increases the cost of capital to firms, it reduces saving and investment and, over time, reduces the capital stock. Investment declines initially by 13.6 percent…and declines by 4.7 percent in the long run. The total capital stock declines gradually to a level 3.5 percent lower ten years after enactment and 3.7 percent lower in the long run… The smaller capital stock results in decreased labor productivity… The demand for labor falls as the capital stock declines, and the supply of labor falls as households receive larger transfer payments financed by the wealth tax revenues… Hours worked decrease initially by 1.1 percent and decline by 1.5 percent in the long run. …the initial decline in hours worked of 1.1 percent would be equivalent to a decline in employment of approximately 1.8 million jobs initially. The declines in the capital stock and labor supply imply that GDP declines as well, by 2.2 percent 5 years after enactment and by 2.7 percent in the long run.

Here’s the table mentioned in the above excerpt. At the risk of understatement, these are not favorable results.

Other detailed studies on wealth taxation also find very negative results.

The Tax Foundation’s study, authored by Huaqun Li and Karl Smith, also is worth perusing. For purposes of today’s analysis, I’ll simply share one of the tables from the report, which echoes the point about how “low” rates of wealth taxation actually result in very high tax rates on saving and investment.

The American Action Forum also released a study.

Authored by Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Gordon Gray, it’s filled with helpful information. The part that deserves the most attention is this table showing how a wealth tax on the rich results in lost wages for everyone else.

Yes, the rich definitely lose out because their net wealth decreases.

But presumably the rest of us are more concerned about the fact that lower levels of saving and investment reduce labor income for ordinary people.

The bottom line is that wealth taxes are very misguided, assuming the goal is a prosperous and competitive America.

P.S. One obvious effect of wealth taxation, which is mentioned in the study from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, is that some rich people will become tax expatriates and move to jurisdictions (not just places such as Monaco, Bermuda, or the Cayman Islands, but any of the other 200-plus nations don’t tax wealth) where politicians don’t engage in class warfare.

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The Adverse Economic Consequences of Higher Tax Rates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And here are the new contributions from the authors.

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

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

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

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

So what’s the bottom line?

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

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Is Gun Control Dead?

In recent months, governments released prisoners and announced that some laws wouldn’t be enforced because of the coronavirus. Now, with protests against police misbehavior, we’re seeing governments fail to maintain law and order.

As suggested by this excellent Reason video, these developments bolster the case against gun control.

But does this mean politicians will be more supportive of the 2nd Amendment?

The answer (at least for anyone with an IQ above room temperature) should be yes.

From an economic perspective, one major goal is to change the cost-benefit analysis for criminals. If bad guys have to worry that good guys may be armed, that significantly increases the potential cost of illegal behavior.

A well-functioning system of law enforcement can help, of course, but that’s not a description of how things work in some communities – even in normal times, much less when there’s civil unrest.

But all this evidence and analysis doesn’t seem to matter for Joe Biden. A look at his campaign website shows support for a wide range of gun-control laws from the soon-to-be Democratic nominee.

…gun violence is a public health epidemic. …In 1994, Biden – along with Senator Dianne Feinstein – secured the passage of 10-year bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. As president, Joe Biden will defeat the NRA again. …As president, Biden will: …Ban the manufacture and sale of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. …Regulate possession of existing assault weapons under the National Firearms Act. …Biden supports legislation restricting the number of firearms an individual may purchase per month to one. …End the online sale of firearms and ammunitions. …Give states incentives to set up gun licensing programs.

What’s especially discouraging is that Biden apparently hasn’t learned anything about so-called assault weapons since 1994.

In a 2019 column for Reason, Jacob Sullum dissected Biden’s incoherent views on the topic.

Joe Biden…is still proud of the ban on “assault weapons”… Biden argues that it made mass shootings less common…, citing a study reported in The Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery last January. But that is not what the researchers, led by New York University epidemiologist Charles DiMaggio, actually found. …The study…looked not at the number of mass shootings, as Biden claims, but the number of mass-shooting deaths as a share of all firearm homicides. The difference in total fatalities during the period when the ban was in effect amounted to 15 fewer deaths over a decade, or 1.5 a year on average, including mass shootings that did not involve weapons covered by the ban. …The causal mechanism imagined by Biden is even harder to figure out. He describes “assault weapons” as “military-style firearms designed to fire rapidly.” But they do not fire any faster than any other semi-automatic. …Under the 1994 ban, removing “military-style” features such as folding stocks, flash suppressors, or bayonet mounts transformed forbidden “assault weapons” into legal firearms, even though the compliant models fired the same ammunition at the same rate with the same muzzle velocity as the ones targeted by the law.

I wonder if Biden understands the policy he’s advocating.

Does he think that “assault weapons” are actual machine guns, capable of firing multiple rounds with one pull on the trigger (a remarkably common misconception among gun-control advocates)?

Or, if he understands that a so-called assault weapon is just like any other gun (firing one round each time the trigger is pulled), then why would he think anything would be achieved by banning some guns and leaving others (that work the same way) legal?

Perhaps most relevant, does he even care what the evidence shows?

The bottom line is that people are “voting with their dollars” for gun ownership for the simple reason that they know it’s unwise to trust government (either to protect them from crime or to respect their rights).

But that doesn’t mean their constitutional freedoms will be secure if Biden wins the 2020 election.

P.S. The good news is that there will be widespread civil disobedience if politicians push for new gun bans.

P.P.S. Another silver lining is that we’ll get more and more clever humor mocking gun control.

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Joe Biden: An Incrementalist Version of Bernie Sanders?

Hardly anybody noticed because the nation has been focused on protests about police misbehavior, but Joe Biden officially clinched the Democratic nomination this past week.

And he’s now comfortably ahead in the political betting markets as well as public polling.

If Biden wins in November, what does that mean for the nation’s economic policy?

According to folks on the left, a Biden presidency means bigger government and more statism.

For instance, opining for the New York Times, Jamelle Bouie applauds Biden’s leftist agenda.

…if the goal is to move America to the left…then a Biden candidacy…represents an opportunity. …If Biden goes on to win the White House, there’s real space for the pro-Sanders left to work its will on policy. …It can fulfill some of its goals under the cover of Biden’s moderation, from raising the minimum wage nationally to pushing the American health care system closer to single-payer. …Biden…is a creature of the party. He doesn’t buck the mainstream, he accommodates it. He doesn’t reject the center, he tries to claim it. …the center of the Democratic Party as far left as it’s been since before Ronald Reagan, then Biden is likely to hew to that center, not challenge it.

His colleague at the NYT, Michelle Goldberg, is similarly enthused about the prospects for bigger government under a Biden Administration.

Biden’s proposals go far beyond his call for a $15 federal minimum wage — a demand some saw as radical when Sanders pushed it four years ago. While it’s illegal for companies to fire employees for trying to organize a union, the penalties are toothless. Biden proposes to make those penalties bite and to hold executives personally liable. …should Biden become president, progressives have the opportunity to make generational gains. …To try to unite the party around him, he’s making serious progressive commitments. …he’s moving leftward. Biden recently came out for tuition-free college for students whose families earn less than $125,000. He endorsed Elizabeth Warren’s bankruptcy plan…His climate plan already went beyond any of Barack Obama’s initiatives, and he’s pledged to make it even more robust.

According to (supposedly) neutral analysts, a Biden presidency means bigger government and more statism.

In an article for Newsweek, Steve Friess discusses Biden’s shift to the left.

Being stuck running for the presidency from the basement of his home in Wilmington, Delaware, had given the former vice president a lot of time to think, he told them, and he wanted bigger ideas. Go forth, he urged his financial brain trust, and bring back the boldest, most ambitious proposals they’d ever dreamed of to reshape the U.S. economy… Biden began issuing a raft of new proposals that move his positions closer to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, with a promise to unveil an even more transformative economic plan this summer. …It’s a yes to adding $200 a month to Social Security benefits and lowering the qualifying age for Medicare from 65 to 60. Yes to trillions in new spending, yes to new regulations on banks and industry, yes to devil-may-care deficits. …the leader he most often invokes—in interviews, in public addresses, on his podcast—is no longer Barack Obama but Franklin Delano Roosevelt. …Biden has already made a series of significant leftward policy shifts since effectively sewing up the nomination in March.

Perry Bacon, in a piece for fivethirtyeight, analyzes Biden’s statist agenda.

…if Biden is elected in November, the left may get a presidency it likes after all…if American politics is moving left, expect Biden to do the same. …Biden’s long record in public office suggests that he is fairly flexible on policy — shifting his positions to whatever is in the mainstream of the Democratic Party at a given moment. …Biden is likely to be a fairly liberal president, no matter how moderate he sounded in the primaries. …Biden’s 2020 primary platform…adopted fairly liberal policies…more liberal than his pre-campaign record suggested. The Democratic Party is more liberal now than it was when Bill Clinton took office, or even when Obama was inaugurated, and Biden’s platform reflects that shift. …Biden and his advisers are now…rolling out more liberal policy plans, speaking in increasingly populist terms and joining forces with the most progressive voices in the party. …“Joe Biden is running on the most progressive platform of any Democratic nominee in recent history. But given the pandemic, he has to look at the New Deal and Great Society traditions in the Democratic Party and go bigger,” said Waleed Shahid, the communications director for Justice Democrats, a left-wing group aligned with Ocasio-Cortez.

Writing for the Washington Post, Sean Sullivan documents Biden’s leftward drift.

Joe Biden sought to appeal to liberal supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday with a pair of new proposals to expand access to health care and curtail student loan debt. Biden proposed lowering the eligibility age for Medicare coverage from 65 to 60. He also came out in favor of forgiving student loan debt for people who attended public colleges and universities and some private schools and make up to $125,000 a year. …In another peace offering to liberals, Biden proposed paying for his student debt plan by repealing a provision in the recent coronavirus legislation that Congress passed and President Trump enacted. “That tax cut overwhelmingly benefits the richest Americans and is unnecessary for addressing the current COVID-19 economic relief efforts,” he wrote… Biden endorsed a bankruptcy plan put forth by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), another rival who ran to his left.

And, according to more market-friendly sources, a Biden presidency means bigger government and more statism.

The Wall Street Journal editorialized about Biden’s leftist agenda.

Already Medicare is scheduled to be insolvent by 2026. …In 1970, life expectancy in the U.S. was 70.8. Now it’s about eight years longer. By lowering the age of eligibility instead, Mr. Biden would begin shifting Medicare’s focus from seniors to everybody else. Don’t worry about the funding, he insists, since the extra costs would be “financed out of general revenues.” …Mr. Biden’s new left turn on student loans is equally sharp. …Cancel all federal undergraduate tuition debt for many borrowers who went to public schools, including four-year universities. This forgiveness would be given to anyone who earns $125,000 a year or less. …How much would it cost? There’s no explanation.

Jeff Jacoby analyzed Biden in a column for the Boston Globe.

Biden…is running on a platform far more progressive — i.e., far less moderate — than any Democratic presidential nominee in history. …on issue after issue, Biden has veered sharply from Obama’s path. On health insurance, for example, Obama rejected a public option as part of the Affordable Care Act and repeatedly stressed the importance of maintaining private coverage. But Biden favors a public option open to everyone… Biden supports government-funded health care even for unauthoritzed immigrants, something Obama never came close to proposing. …No Democratic presidential nominee ever endorsed anything like the radical Green New Deal, with its price tag in the tens of trillions of dollars and its goal of eliminating the use of all fossil fuels. But Biden does. No Democratic nominee ever called for a national minimum wage of $15 an hour. But Biden does. …Sanders may not end up on the November ballot, but it will unmistakably reflect his influence. For he and his band of progressives have pushed their party to the left with such success that even the “moderate” in the race would be the most liberal Democrat ever nominated for president.

Here’s some of what Peter Suderman wrote for Reason.

Biden is a moderate compared to Sanders, but he is notably to the left of previous Democratic standard-bearers. …Biden has proposed a significant expansion of the Affordable Care Act that his campaign estimates would cost $750 billion over a decade… Biden has proposed a $1.7 trillion climate plan that is similar in scope to many candidates on his left and a $750 billion education plan… He favors an assault weapons ban and other gun control measures, a national $15 minimum wage, and a raft of subsidies, loans, and other government-granted nudges designed to promote rural economies. Has proposed $3.4 trillion worth of tax hikes—more than double what former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proposed when she ran in 2016. …Biden’s leftward drift is thus the party’s leftward shift…, a big-government liberal, a candidate whose current incarnation was shaped and informed by progressive politics, if not wholly captured by them.

The Tax Foundation examined the former Vice President’s tax plan and the results are not encouraging.

Former Vice President Joe Biden would enact a number of policies that would raise taxes, including individual income taxes and payroll taxes, on high-income individuals with income above $400,000. …According to the Tax Foundation’s General Equilibrium Model, the Biden tax plan would reduce GDP by 1.51 percent over the long term. …The plan would shrink the capital stock by 3.23 percent and reduce the overall wage rate by 0.98 percent, leading to 585,000 fewer full-time equivalent jobs. …On a dynamic basis, we estimate that Biden’s tax plan would raise about 15 percent less revenue than on a conventional basis over the next decade. …That is because the relatively smaller economy would shrink the tax base for payroll, individual income, and business income taxes. …The plan would lead to lower after-tax income for all income levels.

Here’s a table summarizing the findings.

So what does all this mean?

At the risk of oversimplifying, Biden unquestionably would move tax policy to the left (he actually said higher taxes are patriotic, even though he engages in aggressive tax avoidance), and the same thing would happen on regulatory issues.

His spending agenda is terrible, though it’s worth noting that Democrat presidents usually don’t spend as much as Republicans (with the admirable exception of Reagan).

And, to be fair, there’s no way he could be as bad on trade as Trump.

Let’s close by looking at some hard data. Back in January, I sifted through the vote ratings prepared by the National Taxpayers Union and the Club for Growth and showed that Biden was not a Bill Clinton-style moderate.

I went back to those same sources an put together this comparison of Biden and some other well-known Democrats (scores on a 0-100 scale, with zero being statism and 100 being libertarian).

In both measures, he’s worse than Crazy Bernie!

Moreover, a lifetime average of zero from the Club for Growth is rather horrifying. His average from the National Taxpayers Union isn’t quite so bad, but the trend is in the wrong direction. Biden’s post-2000 average was less than 10, while his score for the preceding years averaged more than 23.

That being said, my two cents on this topic is that Biden is a statist, but not overly ideological.

His support for bigger government is largely a strategy of catering to the various interest groups that dominate the Democratic Party.

The good news is that he’s an incrementalist and won’t aggressively push for a horrifying FDR-style agenda if he gets to the White House.

The bad news is that he will probably allow Nancy Pelosi and other statist ideologues to dictate that kind of agenda if he wins the presidency.

P.S. My collection of Biden-oriented humor is rather sparse (see here, here, here, and here), an oversight that I’ll have to address in the near future.

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Bernie Has Faded, but Socialism Is Still a Threat

I would like to think that the election results from Super Tuesday signify a rejection of the evil and destructive ideology of socialism. After all, despite promising the most handouts, Bernie Sanders was defeated in most states and quickly went from being the front-runner to a long-shot candidate.

This chart shows how political betting markets have dramatically changed in the past couple of days. Crazy Bernie (in green) has collapsed with Biden (in blue) has skyrocketed.

Moreover, the other explicitly hard-left major candidate, Elizabeth Warren, saw her support collapse even earlier.

Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal opined today on the implications of this week’s political earthquake.

Before the voting began Tuesday it was conventional wisdom…that something called progressivism was on the march in the U.S., sweeping aside decades if not centuries of belief, history and tradition with a new agenda of wokeness, identity politics and socialism. …Guess what? The voters still get the last word. …Progressives, however much they dominate the culture, keep losing big, competitive elections. …Joe Biden, hardly a commanding presence, is a proxy for Democratic voters’ pragmatism and their doubts about Mr. Sanders, socialism and the American left.

By the way, it’s not just that Crazy Bernie got trounced.

As reported by the New York Times, many hard-left congressional candidates also are being rejected.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez previously suggested that Democrats who were not sufficiently loyal to an emergent brand of progressive politics should have others like her run against them in a primary. She is now suggesting that, exit polling be damned, Mr. Biden’s latest string of successes is because of the strong-arming of corporate lobbyists, something Mr. Sanders has underscored by repeatedly calling Mr. Biden the establishment candidate. But the results speak for themselves. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez threw her weight behind Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez in her Senate primary campaign in Texas to defeat the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s chosen candidate, M.J. Hegar. Ms. Hegar ended up easily outpacing a crowded Democratic field.

All of this is very encouraging, but I’m still worried.

There are three reasons why I’m not brimming with optimism.

First, as explained by Annie Lowrey for the Atlantic, a non-trivial number of young people are enamored with the evil ideology of socialism.

A striking generational divide has emerged. Older people still see socialism and communism as dangerous, authoritarian political systems, whereas younger people are more likely to see them as economic systems, and to care far less one way or another. For millions of potential voters, the Red Scare is no longer so scary. …The simple passage of time explains a lot. Millions of Millennials and Gen Zers were never exposed to the threats of the Soviet Union; they did not live through the fall of the Berlin Wall… A recent poll conducted by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation showed that 36 percent of Millennials have a favorable opinion of communism, as do a quarter of Gen Zers. Roughly half of the members of those two generations have a favorable view of socialism and thinks the government should act as an employer of last resort. One in five Millennials thinks the Communist Manifesto better “guarantees freedom and equality” than the Declaration of Independence and thinks society would be better off if the government abolished private property.

I’ve shared plenty of additional data to confirm this worrisome trend.

Second, older Democrats may not embrace the socialist label, but they have shifted in that direction.

I previously wrote about how even prominent folks on the left agree that Joe Biden is far to the left of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

This graphic from the New York Times illustrates how the rest of the Democratic establishment (as measured by party platforms) has also veered toward statism.

For what it’s worth, the “Median party” line shows the average position of the world’s other political parties, so the takeaway is that America’s Democrats (and the U.K.’s Labour Party) are now further to the left than some of the world’s socialist parties.

Third, while the Republican Party hasn’t moved to the left based on its platforms, I fear that the GOP isn’t motivated today by a Reagan-style belief in limited government and individual liberty.

It’s not just that Trump is a big spender (and a protectionist). Every major Republican in the post-Reagan era has expanded the burden of government and rejected the principles of classical liberalism.

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Bernie Sanders Easily Prevails in the Free-Stuff Primary

In an amazing display of incompetence, we still don’t know whether Bernie Sanders or Pete Buttigieg won the Iowa caucus.

This has created some opportunities for satire, with people asking how a political party that can’t properly count 200,000 votes somehow can effectively run a healthcare system for 340 million people.

That’s a very good point, but today let’s focus on a contest that does have a clear winner.

As explained in this video, John Stossel and his team crunched the numbers and they have concluded that “Crazy Bernie” wins the free-stuff primary.

Senator Sanders doubtlessly will be very happy with this victory, especially since he trailed Kamala Harris when Stossel did the same calculations last summer.

America’s taxpayers, however, might not be pleased with this outcome. Especially if Bernie Sanders somehow gets to the White House.

Last week, I shared new numbers from the Congressional Budget Office, which showed that the federal budget is now consuming $4.6 trillion.

Bernie Sanders is proposing a staggering $4.9 trillion of new spending – more than doubling the burden of government spending!

And the 10-year cost of his promises could be as high as $97 trillion.

To make matters worse, all this new spending is in addition to already-legislated spending increases for everything from boondoggle discretionary programs to behemoth entitlement programs.

Hello Greece.

Heck, it may be hello Venezuela if Bernie gets unleashed.

P.S. Trump’s record on spending is bad, though his mistakes are measured in billions rather than trillions.

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The “Public Option” Is a Slow-Motion Version of Medicare-for-All

Government intervention has made a mess of health care in America. Programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, along with the tax code’s healthcare exclusion, have created a massive third-party-payer problem.

The inevitable result is systemic inefficiency and ever-rising prices.

Some politicians look at these government-created problems and want us to believe that the right solution is to have even more government.

Consider, for example, the radical Medicare-for-All scheme that is supported by “Crazy Bernie” and “Looney Liz.” That’s like driving in the wrong direction at 100 miles per hour.

It’s also a bad idea to head the wrong direction at 50 miles per hour.

In a column for the Wall Street Journal, Lanhee Chen exposes the reckless nature of the so-called public option that is supported by other candidates.

Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg and Mike Bloomberg claim they’re proposing a moderate, less disruptive approach to health-care reform when they advocate a public option—a government policy offered as an alternative to private health insurance—in lieu of Medicare for All. Don’t believe it. …those effects are predicated on two flawed assumptions: first, that the government will negotiate hospital and provider reimbursement rates similar to Medicare’s fee schedules and far below what private insurers pay; second, that the government would charge “actuarially fair premiums,” which cover 100% of provided benefits and administrative costs.

Mr. Chen explains that politicians can’t resist buying votes by offering ever-more goodies at ever-lower costs (I made similar points in a video explaining why Obamacare would be a fiscal boondoggle).

Political pressure upended similar financing assumptions in Medicare Part B only two years after the entitlement’s creation. The Johnson administration in 1968 and then Congress in 1972 had to intervene to shield seniors from premium increases. Objections from health-care providers to low reimbursement rates have regularly led to federal spending increases in Medicare and Medicaid.

And when politicians offer more goodies at lower cost, that means someone else will have to pay.

Either taxpayers today (higher income taxes and payroll taxes) or taxpayers tomorrow (more borrowing).

If premiums can’t rise to cover program costs, or reimbursement rates are raised to ensure access to a reasonable number of providers, who’ll pay? Taxpayers… If Congress’s past behavior is a guide, a public option available to all individuals and employers would add more than $700 billion to the 10-year federal deficit. The annual deficit increase would hit $100 billion within a few years. Some 123 million people—roughly 1 in 3 Americans—would be enrolled in the public option by 2025, broadly displacing existing insurance. These estimates don’t include the costs of additional Affordable Care Act subsidies and eligibility expansions proposed by Messrs. Biden, Buttigieg and Bloomberg. …if tax increases to pay for a politically realistic public option were limited to high-income filers, the top marginal rate would have to rise from the current 37% to 73% in 2049… Congress could enact a new broad-based tax similar to Medicare’s 2.9% Hospital Insurance payroll tax. The new tax would be levied on all wage and salary income and would reach 4.8% in 2049.

Mr. Chen also reminds us that the public option would surely have a very bad effect on private insurance.

Beyond fiscal considerations, the public option would quickly displace employer-based and other private insurance. …Consumers seeking coverage would be left with fewer insurance options and higher premiums. …Longer wait times and narrower provider networks would likely follow for those enrolled in the public option, harming patients’ health and reducing consumer choice.

For those of you who like lots of numbers, I also recommend a new report from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

The folks at CRFB are a bit misguided in that they focus too much on deficits and debt when they should be mostly concerned about the size of government.

But they do reliable work and their new report, Primary Care: Estimating Leading Democratic Candidates’ Health Plans, is filled with horrifying data.

We’ll start with this table looking at the details of the plans that have been put forth by Biden, Buttigieg, Sanders, and Warren. The red numbers are new spending. The black numbers are offsets (mostly tax increases).

As you can see from the above table, Warren and Sanders are definitely in the go-rapidly-in-the-wrong-direction camp.

But that shouldn’t distract us from the fact that Biden and Buttigieg also are proposing a big expansion in the burden of government.

Here’s another graphic from the CRFB report, but I’m focusing solely on the numbers for Biden and Buttigieg so that it’s clear to see that they both want about $2 trillion of new spending over the next decade.

If you look closely at the numbers for Buttigieg in Figure 2, you’ll notice that his health plan supposedly will reduce the deficit by $415 billion over 10 years (the difference between $3.3 trillion of new spending and $2.85 trillion of cost reductions and offsets).

Does that make his plan desirable? Of course not. What he’s really proposing (and this is how CRFB should have presented the data) is $1.65 trillion of net new spending (the difference between his “new spending” and his “cost reductions” ) accompanied by $2.1 trillion of new taxes.

P.S. Most of the “cost reductions” in Buttigieg’s plan are achieved with price controls on prescription drugs. At the risk of understatement, that’s a very costly way of trying to save money.

P.P.S. And if his plan is ever enacted, don’t forget that the actual amount of “new spending” will be much higher than the estimate of “new spending.”

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Joe Biden: Worse than Barack Obama, Worse than Hillary Clinton

Given their overt statism, I’ve mostly focused on the misguided policies being advocated by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

But that doesn’t mean Joe Biden’s platform is reasonable or moderate.

Ezra Klein of Vox unabashedly states that the former Vice President’s policies are “far to Obama’s left.”

The rhetorical clash between "leftists" and "moderates" is obscuring the deeper truth: This is the most progressive Democratic primary in history, and even if, say, Biden won the nomination, he'd be running on a platform far to Obama's left. https://t.co/x3CMj5XqAn

— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) December 20, 2019

This is an issue where folks on both ends of the spectrum agree.

In a column for the right-leaning American Spectator, George Neumayr also says Biden is not a moderate.

Biden likes to feed the mythology that he is still a moderate. …This is, after all, a pol who giddily whispered in Barack Obama’s ear that a massive government takeover of health care “was a big f—ing deal,”…and now pronouncing Obamacare only a baby step toward a more progressive future. It can’t be repeated enough that “Climate Change” Joe doesn’t give a damn about the ruinous consequences of extreme environmentalism for Rust Belt industries. His Climate Change plans read like something Al Gore might have scribbled to him in a note. …On issue after issue, Biden is taking hardline liberal stances. …“I have the most progressive record of anybody running.” …He is far more comfortable on the Ellen show than on the streets of Scranton. He has given up Amtrak for private jets, and, like his lobbyist brother and grifter son, has cashed in on his last name.

If you want policy details, the Wall Street Journal opined on his fiscal plan.

Mr. Biden has previously promised to spend $1.7 trillion over 10 years on a Green New Deal, $750 billion on health care, and $750 billion on higher education. To pay for it all, he’s set out $3.4 trillion in tax increases. This is more aggressive, for the record, than Hillary Clinton’s proposed tax increases in 2016, which totaled $1.4 trillion, per an analysis at the time from the left-of-center Tax Policy Center. In 2008 Barack Obama pledged to raise taxes on the rich while cutting them on net by $2.9 trillion. Twice as many tax increases as the last presidential nominee: That’s now the “moderate” Democratic position. …raising the top rate for residents of all states. …a huge increase on today’s top capital-gains rate of 23.8%… This would put rates on long-term capital gains at their highest since the 1970s. …Raise the corporate tax rate to 28% from 21%. This would…vault the U.S. corporate rate back to near the top in the developed world. …the bottom line is big tax increases on people, capital and businesses. There’s nothing pro-growth in the mix.

And the ever-rigorous Peter Suderman of Reason wrote about Biden’s statist agenda.

Biden released a proposal to raise a slew of new taxes, mostly on corporations and high earners. He would increase tax rates on capital gains, increase the tax rate for households earning more than $510,000 annually, double the minimum tax rate for multinational corporations, impose a minimum tax on large companies whose tax filings don’t show them paying a certain percentage of their earnings, and undo many of the tax cuts included in the 2017 tax law. …as The New York Times reports, Biden’s proposed tax hikes are more than double what Hillary Clinton called for during the 2016 campaign. …Hillary Clinton…pushed the party gently to the left. Four years later, before the campaign is even over, the party’s supposed moderates are proposing double or even quadruple the new taxes she proposed.

The former Veep isn’t just a fan of higher taxes and more spending.

He also likes nanny-state policies.

Joe Biden says he is 100% in favor of banning plastic bags in the U.S. …let’s take a quick walk through the facts about single-use plastic bags at the retail level. …the plastic bags typically handed out by retailers make up only 0.6% of visible litter. Or put another way, for every 1,000 pieces of litter, only six are plastic bags. …They make up less than 1% of landfills by weight… 90% of the plastic bags found at sea streamed in from eight rivers in Asia and two in Africa. Only about 1% of all plastic in the ocean is from America. …Thicker plastic bags have to be used at least 11 times before they yield any environmental benefits. This is much longer than their typical lifespans. …Though it might seem almost innocuous, Biden’s support for a bag ban is symptom of a greater sickness in the Democratic Party. It craves unfettered political power.

Let’s not forget, by the way, that Biden (like most politicians in Washington) is corrupt.

Here are some excerpts from a Peter Schweizer column in the New York Post.

Political figures have long used their families to route power and benefits for their own self-enrichment. …one particular politician — Joe Biden — emerges as the king of the sweetheart deal, with no less than five family members benefiting from his largesse, favorable access and powerful position for commercial gain. …Joe Biden’s younger brother, James, has been an integral part of the family political machine… HillStone announced that James Biden would be joining the firm as an executive vice president. James appeared to have little or no background in housing construction, but…the firm was starting negotiations to win a massive contract in war-torn Iraq. Six months later, the firm announced a contract to build 100,000 homes. …A group of minority partners, including James Biden, stood to split about $735 million. …With the election of his father as vice president, Hunter Biden launched businesses fused to his father’s power that led him to lucrative deals with a rogue’s gallery of governments and oligarchs around the world. …Hunter’s involvement with an entity called Burnham Financial Group…Burnham became the center of a federal investigation involving a $60 million fraud scheme against one of the poorest Indian tribes in America, the Oglala Sioux. …the firm relied on his father’s name and political status as a means of both recruiting pension money into the scheme.

I only excerpted sections about Biden’s brother and son. You should read the entire article.

And even the left-leaning U.K.-based Guardian has the same perspective on Biden’s oleaginous behavior.

Biden has a big corruption problem and it makes him a weak candidate. …I can already hear the howls: But look at Trump! Trump is 1,000 times worse! You don’t need to convince me. …But here’s the thing: nominating a candidate like Biden will make it far more difficult to defeat Trump. It will allow Trump to muddy the water, to once again pretend he is the one “draining the swamp”, running against Washington culture. …With Biden, we are basically handing Trump a whataboutism playbook. …his record represents the transactional, grossly corrupt culture in Washington that long precedes Trump.

I’ll close by simply sharing some objective data about Biden’s voting behavior when he was a Senator.

According to the National Taxpayers Union, he finished his time on Capitol Hill with eleven-consecutive “F” scores (hey, at least he was consistent!).

And he also was the only Senator who got a lifetime rating of zero from the Club for Growth.

Though if you want to be generous, his lifetime rating was actually 0.025 percent.

Regardless, that was still worse than Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren.

So if Biden become President, it’s safe to assume that America will accelerate on the already-baked-in-the-cake road to Greece.

P.S. Of course, we’ll be on that path even if Biden doesn’t become President, so perhaps the moral of the story is to buy land in Australia.

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The Painful Impact of a Financial Transactions Tax

I was interviewed a couple of days ago about rival tax plans by various Democratic presidential candidates.

It’s the “Class Warfare Olympics,” and even Joe Biden is thinking about going hard left with a tax on financial transactions.

It’s not just Joe Biden’s crazy idea. Other Democratic candidates have endorsed the idea, as has Nancy Pelosi, and CNBC reports that legislation has been introduced in the House and the Senate.

House Democrats are reintroducing their proposal of a financial transaction tax on stock, bond and derivative deals, and this time they’ve signed on a key new supporter: left-wing firebrand Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. …“This option would increase revenues by $777 billion from 2019 through 2028, according to an estimate by the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation,” the Congressional Budget Office’s website says. …The House bill comes on the heels of its companion legislation introduced by Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, in the other chamber. Republicans have a 53-47 majority in the Senate.

Needless to say, I’m not surprised to see that AOC is on board. I don’t think there’s a tax she doesn’t want to impose and/or increase.

By the way, I should note that she and other advocates generally are looking at more limited FTTs that would tax transactions only in financial markets, so there wouldn’t necessarily be any direct burden when we write a check or visit the ATM.

But even this more restrained FTT would be very bad news, with significant indirect costs on ordinary people.

Some analysis from the Tax Foundation highlights some of the drawbacks from this tax.

Policymakers should be wary about adopting a financial transactions tax. Like a gross receipts tax, a financial transactions tax results in tax pyramiding. The same economic activity is taxed multiple times. For example, an individual might sell a stock worth $100 to diversify her portfolio and then purchase stock in a new company with that same $100. The $100 is being taxed twice: first, when the individual sells the stock, and then again when the money is used to buy the new security. Imagine this happening thousands of times a day. …That is why this tax would generate nearly $770 billion over a decade. …Supporters, however, argue that the Wall Street Tax Act is needed, because it would reduce volatility in financial markets. It’s not clear that it would reduce volatility. In 2012, the Bank of Canada studied the issue and concluded that “little evidence is found to suggest that an FTT [financial transactions tax] would reduce speculative trading or volatility. In fact, several studies conclude that an FTT increases volatility and bid-ask spreads and decreases trading volume.” …Sweden’s imposition of a financial transactions tax in the 1980s illustrates the challenges perfectly. The country experienced a 60 percent decrease in trading volume as it moved to other markets, as well as a decrease in revenue.

Another report from the Tax Foundation notes the tax can increase volatility and cause direct and indirect revenue losses.

A financial transactions tax would distort asset markets, as types of securities traded more frequently would be taxed much more than assets traded less frequently. This distortion would lead to investors holding certain assets longer than they should in order to avoid the tax. The tax also decreases liquidity and increases transaction costs. …it will also discourage transactions between well-informed investors; furthermore, much of the research on the issue of volatility suggests that higher transaction costs correlate with more volatility, not less. Financial transactions taxes are also not surefire revenue generators. In the 1980s, Sweden imposed a financial transactions tax, and, thanks to the relative mobility of capital markets, 60 percent of trades moved to different markets. Not only did this behavior mean that the financial transactions tax raised little revenue, it also drove down revenue for the capital gains tax, ultimately lowering total government receipts.

A column in the Wall Street Journal notes that such a levy would directly and indirectly hurt ordinary people.

The proposed 0.1% tax on all financial transactions—trades in stocks, bonds, derivatives—may sound small, but it could make markets less stable and hurt small investors. …advocates overlook the breadth of smaller investors… Each day, more than $1 trillion in securities are traded in the U.S., mostly by large investment managers that represent not only wealthy investors, but also 401(k) plans, public pensions and middle-income families. …even a small tax is significant enough to affect trading strategy and raise costs. Such firms…use the minimal cost of automated, high-frequency trading to reduce the need for paid traders, generating savings for investors. …high-frequency traders provide liquidity and have reduced the gap between bid and ask rates in almost every asset class. The disruptive effect of transaction taxes is more than theoretical. The Chinese government has taxed trades since the early 1990s, and its gradual reduction of the tax on certain types of stocks offers an occasion to measure the tax’s effects. A 2014 study by University of Southern California finance professor Yongxiang Wang found that as the tax decreased, affected companies saw corresponding increases in capital investment, innovation and equity financing. …Sweden and France similarly have introduced financial-transactions taxes over the past few decades, resulting in heightened market volatility and declining liquidity, respectively. …Even at a 0.1% rate, the Joint Committee on Taxation estimates the proposed tax would raise $777 billion over 10 years—all taken out of potentially productive private investment. …financial transactions are highly mobile and easy to move to another jurisdiction. Two parties to a financial contract settled in New York can just as easily sign and enforce the contract in the Cayman Islands, for instance, avoiding the tax.

Interestingly, the Washington Post‘s editorial on the topic back in 2016 noted some significant downsides.

It’s worth noting that the United States had a 0.02 percent tax on stock trades in force during the 1920s, and the market still crashed in 1929. If the tax is too high, however, you could stamp out needed price-discovery, hedging and liquidity, thus destroying efficiency and economic growth. Oh, and you also could end up collecting no revenue, or less than you expected, as market activity dried up or fled to more lightly taxed jurisdictions overseas. For these and other reasons, in 1991 Sweden had to repeal a financial transaction tax it had imposed just seven years earlier. An analysis of financial transaction taxes, both actual and proposed, by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center…shows rapidly diminishing returns once the tax rate exceeds a certain level; a 0.5 percent tax brings in about the same amount of revenue as a 0.1 percent rate.

For what it’s worth, I expect that the Post will do an about-face and embrace the tax as we get closer to the 2020 election.

Though I hope I’m wrong about that.

Let’s close with some excerpts from three substantive studies.

Tim Worstall, in a report for London’s Institute for Economic Affairs, analyzes the harmful effect of a proposed European-wide FTT.

The Robin Hood Tax campaign seems to think that hundreds of billions of dollars can be extracted from the financial markets without anyone really noticing very much: a rather naïve if cute idea. The European Commission is continuing its decades-long campaign to have its ‘own resources’. Under its proposal, FTT revenue would be sent to the Commission, which would thus become less dependent on national governments for its budget. This is neither unusual nor reprehensible in a bureaucracy. It is the nature of the beast that it would like to have its own money to spend without being beholden. …The first and great lesson of tax incidence is that taxes on companies are not paid by companies. …The importance of this effect is still argued over. Various reports from various people with different assumptions about capital openness and so on lead to estimates of 30-70% of corporation tax really being paid by the workers, the rest by the shareholders. One study, Atkinson and Stiglitz (1980), points to the at least theoretical possibility that the incidence on the workers’ wages can be over 100%. That is, that the employees lose in wages more than the revenue raised by the tax. So what will be the incidence of an FTT? … the incidence of the FTT will be upon workers in the form of lower wages, upon consumers of financial products in higher prices and that the incidence, the loss of income resulting from the tax, will be over 100%. The loss will be greater than the revenues raised.

here’s some research from the Committee for Capital Markets Regulation.

For over 300 years, financial transaction taxes (“FTTs”) have been proposed, discussed, and implemented in various forms across global financial markets. And for over 300 years, FTTs have been a failure wherever imposed, frequently failing to raise the promised revenues, while simultaneously damaging the efficiency of the affected markets. Recent proposals for an FTT in the United States would likely have a similar result. …FTT proponents also ignore the empirical evidence from other countries that have imposed FTTs that universally demonstrates that (i) FTTs fall far short of revenue expectations and (ii) securities markets – and by extension the real economy as well as all investors and taxpayers – are significantly harmed by FTTs due to the wide array of beneficial trading activity that is indiscriminately targeted. In fact, many of the G20 countries that have experimented with FTTs in the past, including Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Portugal and Sweden, ultimately repealed such taxes due to the damage that they caused.

Last but not least, a study from the Center for Capital Markets Competitiveness has lots of valuable information.

Lower stock prices make it harder for growing businesses to sell stock to raise the capital they need to grow their businesses. At the same time, business borrowing costs through the corporate bond market will go up for the same reason. Lenders will require a higher pre-tax return in order to retain the same after-tax return. …This increase in the cost of capital due to higher interest rates means that businesses will have to spend more in order to raise capital, resulting in less capital investment and fewer jobs. …For example, economists for the European Union conducted a 1,223-page study on the impact of a proposed 0.10% transaction tax under consideration, the same tax rate as that proposed by Sen. Schatz. They found that such a tax would lower GDP by 1.76% while raising revenue of only 0.08% of GDP.26 In other words, the cost to the economy is far more than the revenue raised. …We can learn from U.S. history how little revenue an FTT would raise. When the last FTT was abolished, the rate was approximately 0.4% with a limit of 8 cents per share. Congress estimated that the tax would raise a mere $195 million in 1966. This represents 0.0285% of 1966’s $813 billion GDP. Applying the same percentage to today’s $21 trillion GDP yields an annual revenue of less than $6 billon—less than one-tenth of Sen. Schatz’s projections for such a tax today.

This map from the study is especially helpful.

Just as is the case for wealth taxes, governments have not had positive experiences when they impose this levy.

P.S. Speaking of wealth taxes, I did note in the above interview that those levies are presumably the most destructive because of their negative effect on saving and investment.

P.P.S. If I’m a judge in the Class Warfare Olympics, I’m giving the Gold Medal to Bernie Sanders, the Silver Medal to Elizabeth Warren, and the Bronze Medal to Kamala Harris.

P.P.P.S. As I warned in the interview, the class-warfare taxes won’t collect much revenue, especially compared to the massive spending increases the candidates are proposing. That’s why the middle class is the real target.

P.P.P.P.S. I goofed in the interview when I identified Larry Summers as Obama’s Treasury Secretary. He was Treasury Secretary for Bill Clinton and head of the National Economic Council for Barack Obama.

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Joe Biden: Providing another Great Moment in Left-Wing Hypocrisy

I wrote last month about a group of leftist millionaires who said they should pay more in taxes.

My response was to ask why they aren’t taking advantage of the existing process that allows them to send extra money to the federal government? There’s even a special website that facilitates payments from people who want to voluntarily pay more tax.

Yet, in a glaring example of hypocrisy, these rich statists won’t “put their money where their mouths are.”

Now we have a new example of a rich leftist who says one thing and does another.

And he happens to be a former Vice President of the United States. Tax Notes reports that Joe Biden, who says he wants higher taxes if he wins the 2020 presidential election, has been very aggressive about minimizing the amount of his money that is taken by the IRS.

Former Vice President Joe Biden’s tax returns show he took advantage of a planning strategy that the Obama administration tried to shut down. The planning technique involves the use of an S corporation to allow only a small portion of an individual’s earnings to be subject to self-employment tax. On the portion that isn’t on the hook for self-employment taxes, in some cases it can also escape the 3.8 percent net investment income tax for high-income earners enacted into law during the Obama administration. “It’s truly astounding to me that Biden would take such an aggressive position while contemplating a run for president,” Steven Rosenthal of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center said. “I don’t get it,” he added. …Biden, who is now a Democratic presidential candidate for 2020, released federal and state tax information on June 9 showing he and his wife, Jill, earned millions from speaking and writing engagements since leaving office.

Interesting, there are some Democrats who have chosen not to take advantage of this strategy.

…before becoming president, Barack Obama earned income as an author but listed it on Schedule C, subjecting it to self-employment tax. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., similarly earned income as author and listed the amounts on Schedule C.

What makes Biden’s hypocrisy so remarkable is that the Obama-Biden Administration proposed to make this type of avoidanceillegal.

In its proposed fiscal 2017 budget, the Obama administration would’ve expanded the 3.8 investment to passthrough income so it wouldn’t escape the 3.8 percent tax based on a technicality. The provision, included in a section entitled “loophole closers,” would have raised $271.7 billion over 10 years, according to the Treasury Department’s analysis of the proposal.

So Biden wanted to take away the right of other people to protect their money, yet he is perfectly happy to copy their tax-minimization tactics.

By the way, I should say, quite emphatically, that Biden made the right choice for his family.

Voluntarily giving more money to Washington would be wasteful and reckless. I’m not going to claim that politicians in D.C. are the worst people in the country. But I will assert that they’re the ones with the worst incentive to use money wisely.

In any event, there’s definitely something distasteful about a rich leftist politician behaving like a “greedy capitalist” in his private life. Especially since this politician in the past has asserted that it’s patriotic to pay more tax!

Does this make him a fiscal draft dodger? Is there smoke coming out of the Hypocrisy Meter?

And if so, does that mean John Kerry also is unpatriotic? And what about Bill and Hillary Clinton?

Though Governor Pritzker of Illinois may be the most aggressive example of taxes-for-thee-but-not-for-me.

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Joe Biden’s Self-Defense Advice

Good ol’ Uncle Joe.

Given his chief role as national laughingstock, the Vice President attracts plenty of abuse. I like this caption contest, which led to a clever winning entry.

Handgun bad, shotgun good?

Here’s an amusing joke (with the naughty word redacted), and the late-night talk shows have produced some good one liners about the Veep here, here, here, and here.

And let’s not forget the laughs we all enjoyed when he asserted that paying higher taxes was patriotic.

But Biden has reached new levels on unintentional humor with his recent advice on home defense, all of which appears to be illegal according to fellow Bulldog Mary Katherine Ham.

This video, which has been a viral phenomenon, looks at the practical implications of arming some people with 12-gauge shotguns.

This is amusing, though it’s actually not that funny when you realize that this clown is in charge of the task force putting together gun control proposals for the Obama Administration.

By the way, if you like humorous videos dealing with gun control, here are my favorites.

• A revealing look at how leftists think about gun control.
• A heartwarming adoption story.
• An amusing cartoon conversation between an anti-gun ideologue and a supporter of the Constitution.
• This Christmas greeting from the Second Amendment.

P.S. And if you want serious videos about gun control, you can access several options by clicking here.

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My Critique of Biden’s Class Warfare…and a Very Compelling Argument from A Guy Who Escaped Communism

I talked a couple of days ago to Neil Cavuto about whether the Obama Administration is slightly modifying its class-warfare tax policy.

As you can see, I’m not overly fixated on the parsing of Biden’s comments since I’m against higher tax rates for anyone.

And my takeaway message from the segment is that we need some discussion on the need to reduce the burden of government spending.

But the purpose of this post isn’t to share my appearance on the Fox Business Network. While I like to think that I offer coherent analysis and occasionally can be persuasive, I’m the first to admit that this second video is far more compelling. It features an old guy who escaped from Hungary after World War II and is now worried about creeping statism in the United States.

He does have a political message at the end, but ignore those final few seconds (after all, GOPers can be just as bad as Democrats).

I especially like his point about how class-warfare policy hurts the poor. Very similar to what Margaret Thatcher says in this powerful video.

Please share this post so more people are exposed to his message.

P.S. Since everyone is making fun of Biden, I may as well hop on the bandwagon. Here’s a joke about our feckless Vice President, and you can see a photoshop contest about “Lunchbucket Joe” by clicking here and here.

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