A Partisan Nonpartisan Blog: Cutting Through Confusion Since 2012
Overall per capita GDP growth does not tell the whole story. The incomes of those in the top income categories and those in lower income categories have evolved in very different ways. Jordan Weissman lays out a graph that is very good at summarizing what has happened to the real incomes of different groups since 1950.
The slogan “No taxation without representation” played a key role in the American Revolution. There is great wisdom in this slogan. First of all, it recognizes that taxation is necessary. Benjamin Franklin famously wrote in a 1789 letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy
Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.
May the Constitution of the United States of America continue to long endure! And may we someday be free of death and taxes. But freedom from death and taxes will not come in my lifetime. Indeed, in his piece
“The Reality of Trying to Shrink Government,”
Larry Summers makes a persuasive case that anything like our current expectations for what government should do cannot be funded without substantial government revenue increases in the future. The reason is that one of the largest tasks our government has taken on is helping older Americans. As the ratio of older Americans to younger Americans increases that task becomes more difficult.
Japan and most nations in Europe are already ahead of us in being subject to the heavy burdens governments face from an aging population.
This is an important factor in the debt crises they face.
There is one way for America (and the other rich nations) to escape the fiscal difficulties of taking care of an aging population. That escape hatch is dramatically more open immigration, which I urge as a matter of basic ethics in “You Didn’t Build That: America Edition” and “Adam Ozimek: What ‘You Didn’t Build That’ Tells Us About Immigration.’”
But for the rest of this post, I will consider what we need to do in tax policy if American politicians, for whatever reason, stubbornly refuse to live up to the words engraved on the Statue of Liberty. In the better case of dramatically more open immigration, what I say below should still be helpful in the context of lower overall tax rates than if current quite-restrictive immigration policies continue.
The second dimension of wisdom in the slogan
“No taxation without representation”
is the idea that, if taxes are necessary, we should at least demand something in return for our taxes–something beyond the government spending itself. Members of the English parliament used the need of kings for tax revenue to establish this principle of asking for something in return for taxes using the earlier slogan “redress of grievances before supply."
Polycarp ably explains on the Straight Dope website:
The Speaker of the House of Representatives is the title for its presiding officer, as noted, by paralleling the English institution, where there was a Speaker of the House of Commons. And this name came about for historical reasons: back in the early days, when the law was the king’s commands, the Lords and Commons were convened to (1) approve taxes for the benefit of the realm, e.g., defense, the idea being taxes people had a voice in were less resented than those levied by the king alone, and (2) advise the king on the people’s needs and wants, so that he was informed on conditions throughout the realm. To ensure their concerns got listened to, they adopted a policy of "redress of grievances before supply”, i.e., “deal with our complaints before we vote you any money.” They would draft up bills of grievances outlining what was wrong and suggesting what the king might do about it, which eventually took the form of draft legislation prepared for the king to approve. (This is why a not-yet-passed law is a “bill”) The person who would bring the result of the Commons’ deliberations before the King in formal address was its presiding officer, the person who would speak to HM for it – and hence its Speaker.
In my post “Scott Adams’s Finest Hour: How to Tax the Rich,” I wrote:
…human beings want many things, including many intangibles. It is my belief that we can do much better at harnessing these other desires for the common good than we have.
In particular, if we give people something in return for their taxes that increases with the amount of taxes they pay, then their motivation to avoid taxes will not be as strong. Scott Adams himself wrote in “How to Tax the Rich” about
…how the rich can feel good while the rest of society is rifling through their pockets.
I can think of five benefits that the country could offer to the rich in return for higher taxes: time, gratitude, incentives, shared pain and power.
To encapsulate the idea that–especially if current policy is being altered–the government should give people something in return for their taxes other than just the government spending, let me propose two slogans with the same basic meaning. The formal version is
No tax increase without recompense.
The colloquial version is
No tax hike without something to like!
I hasten to say that–especially when leaving aside the benefits of the government spending itself–it would be overoptimistic to hope that the “something to like” will be enough to make those being taxed more heavily actually feel better off. The aim is to lessen the sting and lessen the motivation to avoid the tax.
It might seem utopian to think that these twin slogans could carry any weight in the political sphere. But the Republican Party–stiffened in its resolve by the amazingly effective Grover Norquist–has come surprisingly close in the last few years to enforcing a rule of no tax increases at all at the Federal level. So I do not think it unreasonable to hope to enforce a rule of “No tax increase without recompense.” On the other side, to those who think that Grover Norquist’s rule of no tax increases at all is too powerful to disobey, let me say that budget constraints are powerful things.
Holding things together in anything like the way to which we are accustomed is likely to be impossible without substantial revenue increases in the future. And any substantial need for revenue increases will hit close to home: there are not enough superrich; so a tax hike that makes a big difference on the revenue front is likely to hit the many who are moderately rich–such as economists, doctors and lawyers–not just the few who are very rich. Therefore, as a matter of self-interest, as well as out of public-spiritedness, I believe it is of great importance to come up with good proposals for tax hikes with something to like. Combining a tax increase with some kind of recompense is crucial both to avoid any hint of class warfare that could fray the social fabric and to keep tax distortions as small as possible. Here, I will make a specific proposal that is so ready to hand that many others have suggested something similar. But the details matter, and I will present my own version.
Even many economists who otherwise want to simplify the tax code have recognized the special status of the charitable deduction. Greg Mankiw wrote in the New York Times:
THERE are certain tax expenditures that I like. My personal favorite is the deduction for charitable giving. It encourages philanthropy and, thus, private rather than governmental solutions to society’s problems.
The substantive merit of the tax deduction for charitable contributions is also an important point in Matt Yglesias’s post “Tax Reform is Hard and It’s Not Just Politics.” In my proposal, I want to steer a course between partially balancing out a tax increase by expanding the current tax deduction for charitable contributions and partially balancing out a tax increase by following the proposal Tom Grey gives in his comment to “Scott Adams’s Finest Hour: How to Tax the Rich”:
How about 100% tax credits for …
donating directly to a Federal Gov'tProgram.
Thus, the rich who wantmore Social Security, donate their taxes to that cause. Or those who want more defense.
I’m pretty sure the rich would donate more taxes if they could choose where their money goes (despite the obvious ease of gov’t budget-makers just reducing the amount of other gov’t spend ).
Heck, such 100% tax credits could, and should, be available for all real taxpayers (not legal fiction corporations).
A key inspiration for my proposal is a trio of tax credits in Michigan State tax law, the public contribution credit, community foundation credit and homeless shelter/food bank credit. Although these credits are severely limited in size, up to that limit they mean that, together with the benefits of the Federal deduction, a taxpayer can get back over 70% of his or her contribution. But the set of organizations eligible for these three Michigan state tax credits is much narrower than the set of organizations eligible for the Federal tax deduction for charitable contributions. My interpretation of the intent of the law is that these three tax credits are meant to encourage people to give in ways that reduce the amount of direct government spending needed by the State of Michigan. For my proposal, let me define a “public contribution” as follows:
A public contribution is a donation to a nonprofit organization meeting high quality standards that engages in activities that (a) could be legitimate, high-priority activities of Federal or State governments and (b) can to an important extent substitute for spending these governments would otherwise be likely to do.
My proposal is to raise marginal tax rates above about $75,000 per person–or $150,000 per couple–by 10% (a dime on every extra dollar), but offer a 100% tax credit for public contributions up to the entire amount of the tax surcharge.
The reason I am not proposing a simple expansion of the current charitable deduction is that I want to make sure that the program helps ease government budget problems in a big way. (Note that, in addition to substituting to an important extent for government spending, these public contributions would crowd out some fraction of regular charitable deductions and increase government revenue in that way.) On the other side, though Tom Grey’s proposal of choosing which government program to support is great for a portion of existing taxes (as I think he intended it) I don’t think it goes far enough for a tax increase.
Now let me paint the picture of the kinds of effects I think this program of public contributions (the tax surcharge plus 100% public contribution credit up to the amount of the tax surcharge) would have:
The substitute-for-government-spending test in the proposed law is not meant to prevent the total amount of public contributions for some things from going above what the government would do under the current system. Its purpose is simply to make it possible for the government to cut back on some types of spending to an important degree. Although religious congregations would not be directly eligible for public contributions because of the legitimate-activity-of-government test, many already have associated nonprofit organizations that could be eligible. And a large fraction of religious donations are from people who earn less than $75,000 per year. Support of arts enjoyed mainly by the rich, such as opera, might not meet the high-priority test, although the fine arts would still be eligible for the usual deduction for charitable donations. Setting the public contribution goal at 10% of annual income above $75,000 per person should be enough to ensure that nonprofit activities eligible for the public contribution credit are much better funded despite any crowding out or relabeling of existing contributions. There would probably be some reduction in funding for activities not considered important enough to qualify as public contributions–which would occasion much debate about exactly where to set the boundary between “public contributions” and regular charitable contributions–but setting priorities is not a bad thing.
On the part of the relatively high-income taxpayers who are subject to the combination of tax surcharge and 100% public contribution credit, many would look at the unchanged amount they actually pay the government in the end, after the tax credit, and not think of it as a net tax increase at all. Being required to devote 10% of income above $75,000 per person to public contributions would take some getting used to, but after a while, I think many people would have fun with it. Parents could teach their kids about their social responsibilities by discussing as a family where to devote the family’s public contributions. People might become involved in volunteer work in the same organizations to which they had directed their public contributions. There is joy in giving, and by providing a choice of which organization to give to, my hope is that the joy of giving would be only partially muted by the requirement of giving to some appropriate organization.
James Madison wrote in the Federalist # 51:
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.
Since we are not angels, most of us need very strong encouragement to give as much to public causes as the health of our Republic requires. Since those who govern us are not angels, it is best that many of the details be left to each of us to decide individually. To the extent possible, let’s have the government specialize in those important tasks that for one reason or another are not as emotionally rewarding for individuals to donate to and let individuals make decisions about those tasks that are.
People love freedom. Tax increases cannot help harming freedom to some extent. On the cost side, a program of public contributions like the one outlined above comes close to minimizing the harm to freedom from a tax increase. And the benefit side is substantial. In addition to the benefits of steering far away from national bankruptcy, it is hard for me not to think it would be a better world, with greater soft power than ever for the United States of America, if we adopted a program of public contributions like the one I have outlined.
For more on this idea, see "How and Why to Expand the Nonprofit Sector as a Partial Alternative to Government: A Reader’s Guide"
Scott Adams with his creation “Dilbert"
With all the pleasure he has given millions with his Dilbert comics and all of his other incisive Wall Street Journal essays, it is a high standard indeed to say that one particular Wall Street Journal essay is Scott Adam’s finest hour, but I think this is it: “How to Tax the Rich.” Let me know in the comments what other wonderful things there are out there by Scott that can vie for the honor of Scott’s finest hour.
Even after allowing for comic license, I think I can say that Scott himself is conscious of the value of his own idea, as can be seen from these two passages:
Whenever I feel as if I’m on a path toward certain doom, which happens every time I pay attention to the news, I like to imagine that some lonely genius will come up with a clever solution to save the world. Imagination is a wonderful thing. I don’t have much control over the big realities, such as the economy, but I’m an expert at programming my own delusions.
Try to imagine that the idea that saves the country is an entirely new one. It’s too much of a stretch to imagine that a stale idea would suddenly become acceptable. In fact, that’s the dividing line between imagination and insanity. Only crazy people imagine that bad ideas can suddenly become good if you keep trying them. So let’s assume that our imagined solution is a brand new idea. That feels less crazy and more optimistic. Another advantage is that no one has an entrenched view about an idea that has never been heard.
For those of you with healthy egos—and that would be every reader of The Wall Street Journal—you can make this fantasy extra delicious by imagining that you are the person who comes up with the idea that saves the world. I’ll show you how to imagine that.
Scott’s overall idea is based on a fundamental fact that Giorgio Primiceri pointed out when I talked to him about taxing the rich at CREI in Barcelona in June: because each dollar is worth less and less the richer one is, a wide variety of other things end up mattering more for rich people than money. (On the principle that each dollar is worth less for the rich than for the poor in interpersonal comparisons, see my post “What is a Supply-Side Liberal?” But the point here is different: here it is about the value of a dollar compared to other things the rich person wants.) One should be careful: sometimes, one of the things that propels someone toward riches is having a greater desire for the things that money can buy than the average person (relative to, say, a desire for leisure time). But still, at some level of riches, the attractions of the things that extra money could directly purchase start to pale in comparison to other things, even for someone who truly loves the things that money can buy.
Scott writes:
If we accept that the rich can be taxed at a different rate than everyone else, we can also imagine that there could be other differences in how the rich are taxed. That’s the part we can tinker with, and that’s where the bad version comes in. In a minute, I’ll float some bad ideas about how the rich can feel good while the rest of society is rifling through their pockets.
I can think of five benefits that the country could offer to the rich in return for higher taxes: time, gratitude, incentives, shared pain and power.
The trouble with our tax system as it stands–and this has nothing to do with its arithmetic–is that instead our tax system does just about everything possible to make paying taxes a horrible, aversive, demeaning experience for the rich, even apart from the money they surrender.
Although few of us make it into the top 1%, my fellow economists and I definitely count among the moderately rich. Certainly folks as rich as we economists are–or as many other highly-paid professionals such as doctors and lawyers are–need to be taxed relatively heavily in order to get enough revenue to fund the government at anything close to its current level. And we are. With the voice of my late colleague Tom Juster in my head reminding me of the joys of helping the poor through paying my taxes, I don’t personally need one, but I find it remarkable that I have yet to receive a thank you note for paying my taxes. When I fill out my taxes, I notice that even receipts for $25 donations have thank you notes attached. But for the tens of thousands of dollars I give each year to help keep our wonderful Republic afloat, nothing. Can’t we do a little more as a nation to honor our taxpayers individually? If the First Spouse is willing, how about a thank-you note for every taxpayer signed by the President of the United States and the often much-more-popular First Spouse? (To save on postage, it could be mailed along with the annual Social Security report people get sometime close to their birthdays, for example.) And how about a dinner at the White House honoring the top 100 taxpayers in the country? Not the 100 richest people in the country, but the top 100 taxpayers. One might object that they would just use the opportunity to lobby for lower taxes, but if they did, they wouldn’t get invited the next year. If we honored the top 100 taxpayers like that, maybe they wouldn’t feel like fools for paying their taxes instead of finding some way to evade them like many of their friends and acquaintances.
A thank you note for every taxpayer and a dinner at the White House honoring the top 100 taxpayers are just two of many possible specific ideas for enlisting the full range of people’s motivations in an effort to make paying taxes something that people won’t try quite as hard to avoid. I promise to work hard to come up with more ideas in future posts, and encourage other bloggers to do the same. In trying to come up with ideas along these lines, I rest easy in the confidence that Scott is covering my flank with much wilder proposals. He explains his approach as follows, picking up after a passage I quoted earlier:
For those of you with healthy egos—and that would be every reader of The Wall Street Journal—you can make this fantasy extra delicious by imagining that you are the person who comes up with the idea that saves the world. I’ll show you how to imagine that.
I think you’ll be surprised at how easy it is. I spent some time working in the television industry, and I learned a technique that writers use. It’s called “the bad version.” When you feel that a plot solution exists, but you can’t yet imagine it, you describe instead a bad version that has no purpose other than stimulating the other writers to imagine a better version.
I’ll leave you to read for yourself the specific ideas Scott proposes in “How to Tax the Rich.” They are sure to inspire each of you with the thought “I can do better than that.”
Standard economic models of taxation (such as the one in my post “The Flat Tax, the Head Tax, and the Size of Government: A Tax Parable”) simplify by focusing only on a small list of desires (say consumption purchased in the market, leisure and public goods). But human beings want many things, including many intangibles. It is my belief that we can do much better at harnessing these other desires for the common good than we have. Once upon a time, many Communists made the mistake of thinking that even for the typical individual other motivations could be made to supersede the desires for the things money can buy. Unfortunately, the only desire they found that was reliably stronger was the desire to avoid being shot, sent to Siberia, or the like. But surely we can construct a better society if we recognize the other desires people have at the strength those desires actually have.
Let me end by giving two routine examples of how much people will do for motivations other than money. First, I once received an email from a professor I had known at Harvard, asking why Kim Clark would step down from his position as Dean of Harvard Business School to take a position as President of Brigham Young University-Idaho (the Mormon Church’s second most important university, coming after the better-known Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah). The question arose because in the normal pecking order of academic leadership positions, President of BYU-Idaho is a big step down from Dean of Harvard Business School, and the move probably reduced Kim Clark’s lifetime earning power significantly. My answer was fairly simple: religious motivations that motivated Kim Clark as a believing Mormon.
Second, although I have already cited it in my post “Copyright,” I love Eli Dourado’s post “Why I Should Blog More” so much, I am going to quote from it here as well. Eli writes:
People still think that the public goods problem is a problem. The naïve view of public goods is often at odds with reality, however. This is especially so when one considers the things we might care most about: our jobs and relationships. In modern society, better jobs and relationships are often the reward for the production of positive externalities. As it turns out, people like to work and socialize with those who create value for others.
This effect is pretty strong. Can you name a person who ended up poor and unhappy because they devoted too many resources to the voluntary production of public goods of actual value to the rest of society? I can’t, at least not off the top of my head.
My standard advice for those few younger people who ask me for it is simply to produce a lot of external value. Don’t worry about being compensated for it right away. If you succeed in producing things that are of value to others, they will want you around, and you will have plenty of rewarding opportunities you would not have had otherwise.
If we could arrange things so that paying taxes to indirectly support public goods could somehow result in the kinds of delayed benefits Eli traces as resulting from directly producing public goods, we wouldn’t have to worry so much about tax distortions.
Rahm Emanuel (as can be seen in this 13-second video) famously said
You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things you could not do before.
Here, Matt Yglesias reviews a new book by Michael Grunwald documenting the ways in which the Obama administration used the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the “Stimulus Bill”) to accomplish many of its other legislative priorities in addition to trying to stimulate the economy. Though many of those other legislative priorities were arguably in the right direction, I think the commingling of stimulus with other efforts having a more partisan coloring accounts for some of the Republican hatred of the Stimulus Bill. This is a good example of the political economy issues I discuss in my post “Preventing Recession-Fighting from Becoming a Political Football.”
I wanted to link to Josh Barro’s piece because it illustrates how the tradeoff between government support for the poor and government support for the old is showing up in the current political campaign.
The political triumph of the old over the poor is an instance of “Director’s Law.” In my post “Milton Friedman: Celebrating His 100th Birthday With Videos of Milton” I quote Milton’s definition of Aaron Director’s Law:
Director’s Law is, that almost invariably, government programs benefit the middle income class, at the expense of the very poor and the very rich.
In my post “Health Economics” I propose (in effect, if not in so many words) that in place of the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) states be allowed to experiment with different ways to provide universal access to medical care. On Twitter (as storified in “Miles Kimball and Noah Smith on Balancing the Budget in the Long Run”), I have sharpened that proposal to what can be translated out of Twitter shorthand to this:
Let’s abolish the tax exemption for employer-provided health insurance, with all of the money that would have been spent on this tax exemption going instead to block grants for each state to use for its own plan to provide universal access to medical care for its residents.
Evan Soltas argues here that a somewhat decentralized approach in this spirit has worked well in Canada, for at least a part of its medical spending.
A Principles of Macroeconomics Post
This is a crystal clear description of how hard it is to avoid the need for substantial government revenue increases in the future–even as a percentage of GDP. The reality Larry Summers describes is why I am so focused on the dilemma I talk about in my first post, “What is a Supply-Side Liberal?”
This is a good introduction to the political debate about the role of economic uncertainty in our current economic troubles, plus a good discussion of Keynes’s views about uncertainty.
As Axel Leijonhufvud wonderfully spoofed in “Life Among the Econ,” one of the bread-and-butter tasks of a working economist is to build and study economic models. Some of these models are meant to be a reasonable representation of some aspect of the economy, while others are meant to be only what one of my favorite philosophers, Daniel Dennett would call “intuition pumps”—parables that give us the pregnant analogies and intellectual workouts needed to raise our economic IQ for thinking about the real world. In this post, I’ll tell you a tax parable. It is not meant to have any immediate moral for the real world, but only to provide food for thought.
Economic models are inhabited by creatures called “agents.” Agents are stand-ins for people. The key ingredients in economic models are
In this model, the agents are all identical (more identical than real-life identical twins), and want three things: consumption C, leisure time L and a public good (think of city parks or Mars landers) labeled G to stand for government purchases. They know everything going on in the model, and the key thing they can do is divide up their time between making consumption goods C, enjoying leisure L, and making the public good G. Let’s measure the amount of each good by how much time it takes to make it or enjoy it. All the different uses of time have to add up to all the time the agents have. Since all the time they have is 1 day per day, measuring everything in time equivalents enables us to say that
C+L+G=1. (Only So Much Time in a Day Equation)
You might want to think of this as waking time being divided up, with sleep time off limits to the model. You also might find it helpful to imagine that a stripped-down central bank has no other job than to keep the wage at $1 per (waking) day.
The details of how much the agents want each of C, L and G are governed by the preferences and utility function most beloved of economists: Cobb-Douglas preferences, represented by a Cobb-Douglas utility function. Because I, like many economists, love logarithms (in particular the natural kind), I will use logarithms to write down the utility function. But since many readers will not have the same love for logarithms that I have, I am giving you fair warning to avert your eyes from the following utility function:
(1/3) log( C ) + (1/3) log(L) + (1/3) log(G) (Utility Function)
You can escape having to think any more about logarithms, if you know just one thing: Cobb-Douglas preferences make agents want to devote a fixed fraction of their spending to each individual good. (That is the way to maximize utility.) In this case, if C, L and G were ordinary goods, the agents would want to devote 1/3 of their spending to each. Update: If you want to learn more about logarithms and why this utility function tends to lead to equal amounts spent on each good, see my posts “The Logarithmic Harmony of Percent Changes and Growth Rates” and “The Shape of Production: Charles Cobb’s and Paul Douglas’s Boon to Economics.”
The closest we can come to treating consumption, leisure and the public good in this model as ordinary goods is if we imagine a social planner. In the real world, free-market economists are not at all fond of social planners, seeing them as chauffeurs on Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. But as long as they are confined inside of economic models, free-market economists love social planners best of all. The reason is that–as long as there are no distortionary taxes or other more complex distortions–the free market delivers the same outcome as a wise and benevolent social planner. In other words, the social planner I am talking about is not a fallible human, but the Invisible Hand. The one limitation to the benevolence of the Invisible Hand is that the Invisible Hand sometimes favors some individuals over others, making some rich and some poor. But in this model, all are alike to the Invisible Hand, and there is equality. But there is another complication for the Invisible Hand. The Invisible Hand knows just how hard the agents should work once the amount of the public good G has been decided, but needs a government to decide how much of the public good G to make. Fortunately, since everyone is identical in this model, as long as the principle of equality is maintained, there are no political disagreements in this model, and the Invisible Hand plus a democratic government would yield the same result as an all-wise, benevolent social planner committed to equality: each agent would spend a 1/3 of her time making consumption goods, 1/3 of her time enjoying leisure, and 1/3 of her time making public goods. (“Agents” are traditionally female ever since the dawn of political correctness, and I will hew to that tradition here.)
Recall now that to bring forth the Invisible Hand in all its power from Aladdin’s lamp, the taxes must be non-distortionary taxes. Non-distortionary taxes are taxes that do not create perverse incentives, which means they need to be taxes where the amount does not depend on what the agents do. Since all the agents are being treated equally, that means a head tax: each agent pays exactly the same amount, regardless of how much she earns. To show that with a head tax the Invisible Hand does the same thing as a benevolent, all-knowing social planner, think of things this way. Once the political decision is made to have the amount of the public good that 1/3 ofeveryone’s time can produce (financed by the head tax), each individual then wants to divide up the remaining time equally between the two private goods: consumption and leisure. Since 2/3 of the time remains after the public good G is produced, dividing it equally between consumption and leisure leads to 1/3 of everyone’s time being devoted to consumption and 1/3 to leisure, exactly as the social planner would have done.
Whatever time the agents are not spending at leisure, they spend working. So spending 1/3 of their time at leisure means they spend 2/3 of their time working. With the amount work produces worth $1 per waking day of work, that means that output (GDP) is 2/3 of a dollar per person per day, or 66 and 2/3 cents per day:
Output = C+G = 1-L = 2/3. (GDP Per Person Under a Head Tax)
So far so good. Now, suppose that in order to have a tax system more like other worlds, this economy switches over to financing the public good by a flat tax on labor income. (The government is only going to raise enough taxes to pay for the public good G.) Think of the agent’s decision of how much time to spend working under the flat tax. She is working when she isn’t at leisure, so she is working 1-L per day. If the tax is at rate t, then she takes home (1-t)(1-L) dollars each day after taxes if the wage is $1 per day. Firms have to pay the whole before-tax wage of $1 per day, so with competition, prices end up at $1 for a day’s worth of consumption goods and $1 for a day’s worth of the public good.
We haven’t yet figured out the best size of government (amount of the public good G) is when there is a flat tax. But whatever G is, if the agent sees G as fixed, to maximize the rest of her utility she will want to “spend” an equal amount on the other two goods: leisure and consumption. But what is the “price” of leisure she sees that we should use in figuring out how she thinks of herself as spending on leisure? If she works a bit less, she only has to sacrifice the after-tax wage $(1-t) per day’s worth of extra leisure. So let’s think of her total spending on leisure as (1-t)L dollars per day. Spending the same amount on consumption as leisure (as the Cobb-Douglas preferences lead her to do) then means that
C = (1-t)L. (Equal Shares Equation: Flat Tax)
But she also has to be able to pay for the consumption. Since she takes home (1-t)(1-L) dollars per day, the amount she can afford is
C=(1-t)(1-L). (Budget Constraint: Flat Tax)
There has been a debate online about how much algebra students should be taught in high school. (One of the best pieces in that debate is this one.) One of the arguments in favor of learning algebra is that one never knows when the urge to analyze an economic model might strike. Combining the Equal Shares Equation and the Budget Constraint,
(1-t)L = C = (1-t) (1-L) (Combination Equation: Flat Tax)
The tax rate is less than 1, that is, less than 100%, so (1-t)>0 and we can divide by it to find that
L = 1-L. (Equation to Solve for Leisure L: Flat Tax)
This one is easy to solve: L=½. That is, under the flat tax, an agent always spends half of her waking time at leisure and the other half of her time working.
Being at leisure half the time means the agents work the other half of the time. So
Output = C+G = 1-L = ½. (GDP Per Person Under a Flat Tax)
That is, GDP under the flat tax is 50 cents per person per day under the flat tax instead of the 66 and 2/3 cents per person per day it was under the head tax. Since ½ is equal to ¾ of 2/3, imposing a flat tax instead of a head tax has caused GDP to fall by ¼ or 25%.
It is time to think about the size of the government–in this case, the amount of the public good G. Let’s imagine that the government in this world experiments with various levels of G for a little while before they settle on the best amount. The agents in this world will notice something interesting: the size of the government has no effect on GDP! As long as the budget is balanced, with the flat tax just paying for G, time worked, and therefore output, will stay constant at ½. What is going on? As I wrote in two passages of my post
… what about a consumption tax that is a certain percentage of everyone’s consumption? On the one hand this makes people feel poorer so they want to work more, but on the other hand, what someone can buy with an extra hour of work is less, so they want to work less. The standard view is that these two effects will roughly cancel each other out. So the amount people want to work—and thus GDP in this simple model—will stay about the same. …The basic argument for the standard view is that to households, a consumption tax looks a lot like a wage cut. And we have a lot of information about what higher or lower wages do to desired work hours. Among people who have to live on their own wages, there is surprisingly little difference in how many hours people want to work based on whether they have high wages overall or low wages overall over the course of their lives.
In the model at hand, it is easy to see how a tax increase looks like a wage cut: the after-tax wage is 1-t.
With G having no effect on the fraction of time worked and therefore no effect on GDP, the amounts of consumption and the public good have to add up to the constant GDP of ½:
C+G = ½.
Equivalently,
C = ½ - G.
Thus, more of the public good G comes at the expense of consumption, one for one. So even though a larger government does not reduce GDP, it does cost something. It has an
in reduced consumption.
What is the right size of government if it is stuck with financing G with a flat tax? Again, the Cobb-Douglas preferences help. Holding leisure fixed at ½, Utility is maximized by equalizing the amount spent on consumption and the amount spent on the public good. Since the two amounts add up to ½, to equalize them, the quantity of consumption and the quantity of the public good must both be ¼. Here again, as under the head tax, this happens through the political process, but with everyone identical and treated equally, there is no reason for any disagreement. Since half of output was to be used for the public good, the flat tax rate had to be 50%.
As in all standard economic models, all of the agents in this model understand the economics of the model perfectly. But let’s pretend that some of the children, too young to be agents making economic decisions in their own right–while eating their portions of their mothers’ consumption–ask questions about taxes: “Mom, in the olden days when our people experimented with different sizes of government, it seemed that the size of government and the level of taxes had no effect on output. Does that mean that taxes don’t matter?” And the mothers all carefully explain to their children that in the truly ancient days (before they had begun to follow the customs of other worlds), when there was a head tax instead of a flat tax, output had been higher: 66 and 2/3 cents per person per day, instead of 50 cents per person per day. And in those truly ancient days, agents had had both more consumption and more of the public good (with the same 50-50 shares of output in C and G as now). So, they told their children “Taxes do matter for output.”
But one bright and brave girl said “Mom, in those truly ancient days, people may have had more consumption and more of the public good, but they had less leisure. Are you sure they were better off?” That led to an algebra lesson. Her younger sister averted her eyes in fear of the equations. But this bright and brave girl learned (with her mother writing with big spaces in between equations to make things less fearsome) about utility functions. She learned that utility functions only had more and less but otherwise had no meaning, so that any increasing function of a utility was as good as the original utility function. And she learned that
exp(3*[ (1/3) log( C ) + (1/3) log(L) + (1/3) log(G)]) = C L G,
so that one could compare how well-off people were in the truly ancient days to how well-off they were now by looking at C L G just as well as by looking at
(1/3)log( C )+(1/3)log(L)+(1/3)log(G).
In the truly ancient days, under the head tax, C L G was
(1/3)(1/3)(1/3) = 1/27.
Now, under the flat tax, C L G was
(¼)(½)(¼) = 1/32.
In order to compensate for the effect of the flat tax, current consumption C would have to be increased by the factor 32/27, holding L and G constant, in order to make agents as well-off as in the truly ancient days under the head tax. Since 32/27 is about 1.185, it would take an 18.5% improvement in the technology for producing consumption in order to have the same effect on agents’ welfare as it would to switch back to the head tax, her mother told her.
But the bright and brave girl was not finished with her questions. “Mom, what if when I grow up I am not as good at making things as the other agents and so have a lower income? Would I still be better off under the head tax than under the flat tax?” Her mother first reassured her “In all of our world, no one has ever been any different from anyone else in productivity once they were grown. But let’s look at your question as a math problem.” After setting up the problem as a cubic equation, the mother left her daughter to do the problem as math practice. Assuming she was less productive than others (A<1, where A was her relative productivity) the bright and brave girl could see that, under the flat tax she would pay only A/4 in taxes (and others would pay ¼), while under the head tax she would pay 1/3. But under the flat tax, G would be only ¼, while it was 1/3 under the head tax. Also, under the flat tax, the annoying incentive to work less and the smaller income effect from taxes would mean she would have leisure of ½ and consumption of A/4, while under the head tax, both her consumption and leisure would be [A-(1/3)]/[1+A]. Though the bright and brave girl was not completely certain her answer was correct, the number she came up with was that as long as she was at least 86.4% as good at making things as all the other agents when she grew up, she would still be better off under the head tax.
But even then, once she had solved the cubic equation, the bright and brave girl had one more question: “Mom, why do we have to follow the customs of other worlds and have a flat tax instead of a head tax?”
This short Twitter discussion with Noah about “job creation” came out of his reading of “Rich People Do Create Jobs: 10 Tweets” In our discussion, we identified 4 senses in which rich people or entrepreneurs can create jobs (that is, increase labor demand) in companies they fund or lead. In this discussion, I was thinking of labor demand warranted by the extra output the firm will be able to produce if it has another hour of a worker’s effort. Economists call that extra output from another work-hour the marginal product of labor.
In addition, members of the government who make wise decisions about economic policy can be said to create jobs.
In our discussion, we talk about three possible ways an entrepreneur or rich person might approach risk and uncertainty:
Noah makes what I think is an unwarranted leap that the combination of ambiguity aversion and overconfidence is similar in its effects to being a rational and sensible Bayesian with no ambiguity aversion. Or at least that is how I interpret his word “exactly.”
There is one technical error in our discussion. When there is too much capital, it is possible that more capital could be a bad thing overall, since keeping the capital stock up in the face of depreciation costs more than what the capital produces (the gross marginal product of the capital). But even in that situation, extra capital normally raises the value of having extra labor. The extra capital is a bad thing, but less of a bad thing if there is more labor, so the extra capital raises labor demand.
Update: Isomorphismes tweeted a link to this wonderful article about the principle that it is the consumption of the rich we should worry about, not their income or wealth:
Not surprisingly, a lot of our discussion ends up revolving around health care.
Update: Matt Yglesias, Stephen Bronars, Matt Stambaugh, Tyler Cowen, Modeled Behavior and Jason Becker joined the part of the debate about health care, and I flagged John Cochrane’s excellent suggestions about health insurance. Noah and I also flagged articles about Japan’s current situation, which gives a flavor of the future budget issues the U.S. faces.
In honor of Paul Ryan being chosen as Mitt Romney’s running mate–a big event no matter what your political leanings–here is a record of a Twitter discussion I had about Paul on July 27, some handicapping in the last few days of whether he would be Mitt’s pick, and my selection from the Twitter traffic about Paul today. The other participants are Noah Smith, Adam Sulewski, Matt Bruenig, Matt O'Brien, Mike Konczal, Casey Thormahlen, and indirectly, Howard Gleckman, Ezra Klein, Andrew Levine, Mike Sax, Jonathan Bernstein, Matt Williams, John Podhoretz, Betsey Stevenson, Josiah Neeley, Matt Stambaugh, Evan Soltas and Brad DeLong among others.
Don’t miss the discussions of long-run fiscal policy and health care. The video of Paul begging Congress to pass the bank bailout (TARP) that I link to at the end shows that he met an important test of seriousness. The bank bailouts are not popular now, but they were necessary in order to avoid a much worse economic outcome than the scathing economic outcome that we have actually had.
In my mini-bio at the sidebar, it says
Politically, Miles is an independent who grew up in an apolitical family. He holds many strong opinions—open to revision in response to cogent arguments—that do not line up neatly with either the Republican or Democratic Party.
In these Twitter discussions, you will see me considering and responding to arguments and coming out of the discussions in a different place than where I entered them–on several dimensions.
To untangle the different discussion threads, I had to depart from chronological order.
This is my answer to a TED talk by Nick Hanauer, “Rich people don’t create jobs.” In the context of his TED talk, “rich people” means “entrepreneurs.” You can see my 10 tweets here, as well as by clicking on the title of this post. Let me explain a little background on a couple of these tweets.
I am deeply concerned about the poor, because they are truly suffering, even with what safety net exists. Helping them is one of our highest ethical obligations. I am deeply concerned about the honest rich—not so much for themselves, though their welfare counts too—but because they provide goods and services that make our lives better, because they provide jobs, because they help ensure that we can get good returns for our retirement saving, and because we already depend on them so much for tax revenue. But for the middle-class, who count heavily because they make up the bulk of our society, I have a stern message. We are paying too high a price when we tax the middle class in order to give benefits to the middle-class—and taxing the rich to give benefits to the middle-class would only make things worse. The primary job of the government in relation to the middle-class has to be to help them help themselves, through education, through loans, through libertarian paternalism, and by stopping the dishonest rich from preying on the middle-class through deceit and chicanery.
6. Successful entrepreneurs create jobs in their own firms, but also typically destroy jobs in competing firms. That is part of how economic progress happens. We can block this competitive creation of new jobs and destruction of old jobs only at the cost of long-run stagnation. I doubt Nick Hanauer meant to argue for blocking progress in that way.
7. Outsourcing and offshoring also create jobs. People in other states or other countries getting jobs counts, too. They are human beings, just like us.
Power of the Market: The Pencil
Milton Friedman on the Basis of the Free Market (Consumer sovereignty)
Milton Friedman on Printing Money (A great deal at 29 seconds)
Milton Friedman on Public Education (Not about vouchers, but about the condescension behind public education.)
Persuasion vs. Coercion (The importance of giving people the chance to hear intellectually diverse viewpoints.)
Free Market Exchange (I love what Milton says in this video about the free development of language, English Common Law, and science.)
The Proper Role of Government (Legally formalizing ethical rules is different from other, more arbitrary legislation.)
Population and Ecology (Milton backs Pigou taxes on pollution.)
Market Failure (Milton recommends careful balancing between concerns of market failure and concerns of government failure.)
Milton Friedman Puts a Young Michael Moore in His Place (Not really Michael Moore–only “a Michael Moore” in the sense of someone like Michael Moore. Milton argues for a finite value of a human life and argues that enforcing laws against fraud is a legitimate purpose of government.)
Corporatism and Medicare (Debate between Milton and Michael Harrington)
Incentives for Immoral Behavior (Pay attention to what Milton says about the decline of corruption in England.)
Redistribution of Wealth (Milton: “As you grow up, you will discover that this is really a family society, and not an individual society.”)
In The Robin Hood Myth, Milton talks about his brother-in-law Aaron Director’s Law, saying:
Director’s Law is, that almost invariably, government programs benefit the middle income class, at the expense of the very poor and the very rich.
I take up my lance to tilt against the windmill of Director’s Law in my post “Rich, Poor and Middle Class.”
Note: There are many more videos of Milton out there. Of the ones I watched, I did some picking and choosing, based on a value per minute criterion. I tried to put the videos in a logical order.
Mark Thoma has a new post “Starving the Beast in Recessions” that links to his article in the Fiscal Times: “How GOP Lawmakers have the Fed Over a Barrel.” Mark’s post backs up the concern I expressed in “Preventing Recession-Fighting from Becoming a Political Football” that traditional stimulative fiscal policy–tax cuts or increases in goverment spending–entangles recession fighting in political disputes about the size and scope of government. In that post, I wrote:
By avoiding big changes in taxes or spending, I hope my Federal Lines of Credit proposal can help to depoliticize stabilization policy.
“Preventing Recession-Fighting from Becoming a Political Football” is a difficult post. For more accessible posts on Federal Lines of Credit, go to my second post “Getting a Bigger Bang for the Buck in Fiscal Policy” or to “My First Radio Interview on Federal Lines of Credit.” I plan to do a set of index posts for my sidebar giving links to all of my posts by topic area soon. At that point, the index post on “Short-Run Fiscal Policy” will link to all of my posts on Federal Lines of Credit.
I am going to use my blog heavily in teaching my “Principles of Macroeconomics” class this Fall. So I will be posting things I think might be useful for teaching. Click on this link to see a post by Donald Marron that has a great graph to 2012 of
government purchases (=government spending on goods and services)
total government spending (including transfers and interest on the debt)
as percentages of GDP. That is, it graphs
G/Y
(G+iB+Transfers)/Y
with the fractions expressed as percentages.
Y=GDP
G=government purchases of goods and services
i=nominal interest rate (not adjusted for inflation)
B=government debt (B is a mnemonic for “bonds”)
In my book, the two truly wonderful things Barack has done on the domestic front are advancing gay rights (through ending “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and more recently by rhetorical support for gay marriage rights) and advancing education reform through the brilliant work of Arne Duncan as his Secretary of Education. By dangling a few gigadollars worth of grant money in front of states, Arne has gotten states to fall all over themselves passing education reforms that I would have thought impossible in such a short time–often with buy-in from the teachers unions. I cheer on this effort and other efforts at education reform.
Although I am in favor of more school choice, including both charter schools and Milton Friedman’s still excellent idea of education vouchers, let me focus in on two aspects of education reform that can be fully implemented within regular public schools: increasing the total amount of schooling kids get in their K-12 years and making sure they are legally qualified to pursue a wide range of careers when they earn a high school diploma.
Sometimes the most important fact in a given area is one so obvious it might not even seem worth saying. I heard one such fact from a top researcher in education at an academic seminar at the University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center: the single most important variable in predicting whether a student will get a test question right is whether that topic was covered in class or not. Students don’t always remember what they were taught. But they never remember something they weren’t taught. More time in school means more things can be taught at least once, and the more important things can even be repeated a few times.
The secret recipe behind the “Knowledge is Power Program” or KIPP schools (which have been very successful even with highly disadvantaged kids) is this:
The KIPP schools also have highly motivated teachers, but that is a topic for another day.
So my first proposal for this post is to go to a 12-month school year, and to extend the school day until at least 5 PM (but with many extracurricular activities and sports being eligible to count as part of the school day, as they do in Japan). Research has shown poor kids and rich kids learn at a somewhat similar rate during the school year, but that poor kids forget a lot during the Summer, while rich kids retain more. So lengthening the school year is especially helpful for poor kids. Lengthening the school year and the school day also effectively provides year-round day care for poor parents who desperately need it. For rich families who are used to being able to go on a summer vacation, I would allow families to make proposals for family or individual activities with educational value that could substitute for some part of school in the summer, and grant permission for these substitutions for summer school relatively liberally for anything that research shows keeps kids academically sharp. The poor kids will think this is unfair, but they simply need the formal schooling more because their parents can’t afford other high-quality educational activities. So keeping them in school during the summer really is doing them a favor.
I won’t try to work out all the details of how the longer school day and school year would work, but I need to address one objection that will spring to many readers minds: extra costs. I don’t want to assume massive new infusions of money into schooling that might never be available. But I think it can be done without major additional costs. The school buildings are there anyway, year round, so the major expense to worry about is teacher salaries. Here I think we could start by having each teacher teach the same number of annual hours as they now do, but staggered throughout the year. (Over time, on a merit basis, some teachers could be allowed to work year round at a commensurately higher salary, to make up for normal attrition.) The margin that would give is that class sizes would go up. Except in Kindergarten, and maybe in 1st grade, higher class sizes have been shown by research to have only a small effect on learning–probably less than a tenth the effect on learning on the minus side that more total school hours for the kids would have on the plus side. We might need to knock out a few walls between classrooms to accommodate these larger class sizes, but it could be done. (Note that the total number of kids in school at any one time would be basically the same as now, so the kids would fit.) Even with these expedients, costs would go up some. For example, the lights would have to be kept on longer. But I think it should be manageable. And the fact that some of the rich kids wouldn’t be there in the summer would either help bring down class sizes for the poor kids then, or allow school districts to save on staffing during the summer.
Much of the extra schooling time from the longer school day and longer school year would go toward learning the basics better–reading, writing, math–and maybe getting a little extra cultural background that will help students enjoy a wider range of things in their lives. But I want to claim some of the extra time to make sure that the kids are legally qualified to do a wide range of jobs when they finish school. One of the most important drifts of political economy at the state level in the United States has been toward requiring licenses for more and more jobs. Here is what Morris Kleiner and Alan Krueger say in their 2008 National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper “The Prevalence and Effect of Occupational Licensing”:
We find that in 2006, 29 percent of the workforce was required to hold an occupational license from a government agency … Our multivariate estimates suggest that licensing has about the same quantitative impact on wages as do unions–that is about 15 percent …
Many economists and other observers feel that occupational licensing has gone too far. Here is an interesting Wall Street Journal article:
Dick Carpenter and Lisa Knepper WSJ “Do Barbers Really Need a License?”
And here is an article from what I think is a Libertarian website (“The Library of Economics and Liberty”):
S David Young, “Occupational Licensing”
Others argue that health and safety and basic competence really do require training even for many jobs that sound easy, such as cutting hair or cutting nails.
What I want to do is to restrain the tendency to go overboard on occupational licensing while allowing genuinely necessary competencies to be transmitted by requiring states to ensure that their schools high school tracks that would make it reasonably possible to be meet the legal qualifications for any of at least 60% of all licensed occupations, with each student able to be qualified with his or her high school diploma for at least 10% of all licensed occupations. Then the graduates might actually be able to get a job. This requirement for getting the Federal education grant could be met by any combination of reducing licensing requirements and increasing effective training that each state chose. I am sure that states would game the rule, so that the overall effect would be less than what this sounds on the surface, but it would be better than the way things are now, where students graduating from high school are kept out of many of the more desirable occupations by occupational licensing restrictions.
Many schools these days have a program that allows more ambitious students to earn an Associate’s degree (equivalent to two years of college) before their time in publicly-funded high school education runs out. For them, I would add the requirement that states make it possible for ambitious students doing the equivalent of an Associate’s degree to be licensed for any of 50% of medical care jobs. (Being a doctor would still require much, much more training. Note: “any” is not the same as “all.” They would have to do some choosing.) This would not only help these students get jobs, it would help us as a nation to be able to afford the medical care that we want.
Note that any reduction in occupational licensing restrictions increases the value of having readily available and accurate quality ratings for services as well as goods. To be honest, in my personal experience, which I think will match that of most of my readers, I have seldom been satisfied with services from the bottom half of those in any occupation. But the stratification into different quality levels should be handled by the market as much as possible (and by government fiat as little as possible), with continually improved web-based ratings mechanisms. High school graduates need entry-level jobs, even though it is hard to be really good at anything at first before accumulating experience, especially for those who would not have been able to get jobs at all without the changes I am advocating.
Let me end by explaining my title. In his recent post “What it to be done now, Jeff Sachs appears to miss the point by a substantial margin,” Brad DeLong lays out his short-run Keynesian program for the economy, and says this about Jeff Sachs’s column:
When I started Jeff’s column, I thought it was going to be an exercise in hippie-punching, along the lines of: “Simplistic Keynesian remedies will not solve our problems. See, I am a Very Serious Person. What will solve our problems is X.” And X would turn out to be simplistic Keynesian remedies plus some magic ingredient Y. That might have been useful. It would have been a call for simplistic Keynesian policies plus magic ingredient Y.
As I discussed in my immediately previous post “Preventing Recession-Fighting from Becoming a Political Football” I am all for more aggregate demand right now, as long as it is achieved in ways that don’t ultimately add too much to the national debt, but what Brad DeLong’s words sparked in me was a desire to come up with “magic ingredient Y” for long run growth and improvement in the economy. Thinking that there might be many magic ingredients that can help in the long run–hopefully more than there are letters in the alphabet, I am going to start off with numbers. Hence, “Magic Ingredient 1: More K-12 School.”
Karl Smith has a recent post “Why is the US Government Still Collecting Taxes?: Should Lambs Lay Down with Lions Edition” arguing that we should be dramatically reducing tax collection because interest rates on government bonds are so low that, after correcting for inflation, every dollar in the national debt is shrinking over time. Karl’s post follows up on Ezra Klein’s post “The world desperately wants to lend us money,” and my grad school professor Larry Summers’s post “It’s time for governments to borrow more money.” Ezra and Larry want the government to pay ahead on things it is going to buy anyway and make other productive investments.
Larry, coming from his experience as Secretary of the Treasury makes a strong argument that the U.S. government should be borrowing long rather than short, in order to lock in amazingly low interest rates on long-term government bonds. Since the U.S. government’s position in relation to the bonds it has issued depends on what the Fed does as well as what the Treasury does, this argues against the Fed buying long-term government bonds when Larry’s argument says we should be selling long-term government bonds on net. Larry has convinced me by what he writes in “It’s time for governments to borrow more money.” The Fed should not be buying long-term government bonds.
But for the sake of stimulating the economy, the Fed needs to be buying large quantities of some type of asset. This is not just my view, implicit as a possibility in my post “Balance Sheet Monetary Policy: A Primer,” but the the official view of the Fed itself, since even the mostly stay-the-course policy the Fed announced at its last FOMC monetary policy making meeting involves buying large quantities of assets. (“Large” is less than “massive.”) So it is unfortunate that the legal authority of the Fed to buy assets is limited to a relatively narrow range of assets. See Mike Konczal’s interview with my undergraduate classmate Joseph Gagnon on the legal constraints the Fed faces. Short of buying foreign assets or otherwise going outside the Fed’s comfort zone, that probably means that the Fed should be buying mortgage-backed securities such as those issued by Fannie Mae. In general, when it uses balance-sheet monetary policy (what the press calls “quantitative easing”), the Fed should lean towards buying assets that have a high interest rate.
It is important to note that many of the objections to more vigorous use of balance sheet monetary policy in the U.S. are really objections to buying long-term Treasury bonds, not objections to buying other assets. Anytime you see an argument against balance sheet monetary policy, check whether it is an objection to buying any kind of asset or only to buying long-term Treasury bonds. And sometimes there are objections to buying Treasury bonds and other objections to buying mortgage-backed securities that even combined do not apply to other assets. So I wish the Fed had the kind of authority the Bank of Japan has to buy a wide range of assets, including commercial paper (CP), corporate bonds, exchange traded funds (ETF’s), and real estate investment trusts (REIT’s). I got this list of assets from the Bank of Japan’s own website on the range of assets it is buying. See also my post on how the Bank of Japan should use this authority quantitatively: “Future Heroes of Humanity and Heroes of Japan.”
Given the low interest rates the U.S. government is facing, even aside from stimulating the economy it should be spending more–mostly on things it would buy later anyway and other productive investments. On stimulating the economy, my proposal of Federal Lines of Credit is gaining some traction: you can see my posts on what Brad DeLong and Joshua Hausman and Bill Greider have to say recently, as well as what Reihan Salam said early on. In what I write myself on Federal Lines of Credit, including the academic paper “Getting the Biggest Bang for the Buck in Fiscal Policy” that I flag at the sidebar, I emphasize the importance of not ultimately adding too much to the national debt as it will stand, say ten years from now. This is actually consistent with saying that the government shouldbe spending money now on things the government is going to spend money on sooner or later anyway, regardless of which party is in power, such as maintenance of military assets and stores, and the government should be spending money now on things that will add to the productivity of the economy so much that they will generate more than enough tax revenue to pay for themselves.
The existence of government investment that has this property of generating more tax revenue in the future than needed to make the payments on the money the government borrowed to make the investment is the spending counterpart to being on the wrong side of the Laffer curve so that you could cut taxes and get more revenue. I am not sure how many government investments meet this stringent test, but if any do, everyone should be in favor of them, regardless of their political viewpoint. To have that statement be true, I am assuming that the investment is something noncontroversial that everyone would be glad to have for free (not something like a national stem-cell laboratory). The reason everyone should be in favor of such a self-financing investment is that the American taxpayers would be getting a better deal than “free.”
Now, a government investment being self-financing in this sense is quite hard because for this, it is not good enough to have benefits great enough to pay for the direct cost to the government (the naive cost-benefit test). The extra payments to the U.S. Treasury alone (typically a minority of the total benefits) must be enough to pay for the investment. If on net the U.S. Treasury is out money at the end of the day for the sake of other benefits, then the dollars from the U.S. Treasury have to be counted as costing more than dollar for dollar since each dollar of government spending typically has a deadweight loss from tax distortion on top of it. (See for example Diewert, Lawrence and Thompson’s paper on this. There is a good discussion in this paper accessible to anyone even before the first equation.) As long as the U.S. Treasury is out money at the end of the day, the sophisticated cost-benefit test can easily flip from thumbs up to thumbs down depending on how big the tax distortions are–and economists don’t agree on that. I am on the side of believing there are relatively large tax distortions. (See my first post, “What is a Supply-Side Liberal,” which is also now at the sidebar.)
Interest rates won’t stay low forever, and the U.S. government, unlike the government of the United Kingdom of Britain and Northern Ireland, does not sell consols that would lock in a low interest rate forever (though maybe it should in the current environment). Moreover, extra debt probably raises the interest rate on existing debt. So the cost of extra debt is higher than the interest rate itself. (This is the monopoly problem from Economics 101: the U.S. government is a monopolist in the original issuance of its own debt, and so has to consider the effect of issuing more debt on the price and interest rates of existing debt.)
The last words in this post are is in response to Karl Smith’s post, which motivated the lamb and lion illustration. (Karl’s “lamb” is the U.S. government, while the “lion” is the bond traders in the financial markets). If, as I think they will, interest rates will some day go above not only inflation, but above the long-run growth rate of the economy as a whole (which matters among other things because it is the growth rate of the tax base), and the government cannot lock in a lower rate forever using consols, then any money the government borrows will cost us sometime in the future. The low interest rates now prevailing will make government borrowing now cost less in the future, but it won’t make the cost zero. Doesn’t that mean that we should do all our taxing later, when the amounts of money will have shrunk rather than now? It would if the cost of getting an extra dollar of tax revenue were constant over time. But a basic result from public finance is that the cost of getting an extra dollar of tax revenue goes up as you try to get more and more tax revenue as a fraction of GDP. That is why I was so confident in my post “Avoiding Fiscal Armageddon” that there is some limit of government spending as a fraction of GDP that we shouldn’t go beyond, even if that limit is higher than the 50% that I used as an example (and as a reasonable representation of my own judgment given my current knowledge.) Given the pressures on the government budget that I talk about in “Avoiding Fiscal Armageddon,” I will be shocked if tax rates are not higher in the future than they are now. So if the cost of getting an extra dollar of tax revenue goes up with the rates you already have, then there is an argument for moving toward raising tax rates at times such as now when tax rates are low compared to what they will be later. This “tax smoothing” argument counterbalances the implications of current lower interest rates, which favor lower taxes now. On balance, given the low interest rates the U.S. government is paying, tax rates should certainly be lower now than we expect them to be in the future, but there is a question of how much.
Why is this called a “tax smoothing” argument? The reason is that raising tax rates when you think tax rates will be higher in the future–or following similar logic, lowering tax rates when you think tax rates will be lower in the future–tends to equalize tax rates now relative to expected tax rates in the future. I have not personally done any research on tax smoothing, but I learned about it from proofreading all of the math in Greg Mankiw’s paper “The Optimal Collection of Seigniorage: Theory and Evidence,” when I was Greg’s research assistant in graduate school, and I have heard more about it from my colleagues at the University of Michigan.
Mike Sax writes about my exchange with Karl Smith, starting with my post “Why Taxes are Bad,” Karl Smith’s reply “Miles Kimball on Taxing the Rich” and finally my post “Rich, Poor and Middle-Class.” He has at least three different lines of questions. In this post I want to answer two that might be summarized as “But what about the demand side, as a source of revenue and a source of jobs?” Here is what Mike says:
One more point: Implicit is the idea that rich are the "job creators.“ It’s not wholly true that the Occupy Wall Street presumed that most wealthy people are rich through personal chicanery. Much of their indignation is directed to what they see as systemic injustice-I for one do believe that capitalism is the most efficient and potentially most just allocator of resources, though I’m skeptical of too much laissez-faire. What I see in Supply Side analysis is no recognition that 70% of GDP is consumer demand. So who is exactly the job creators?
http://useconomy.about.com/od/grossdomesticproduct/f/GDP_Components.htm
If there’s no money in people’s pockets there’s no demand and no job creation. Again, my position is a "Demand Sider” I’d like to find ways to reduce the demand side taxes-the taxes that the poor and middle income have to pay, from high payroll taxes, to the litany of state sales taxes, and fees-traffic fees, meters, indeed, insurance. As I suggested in my first reply to Miles nothing gets my goat more than this Cato canard that’s repeated ad nauseum that “45% of Americans pay no tax.”
Even the wino on a park bench pays tax every time he gets his hands on demon rum.
Does Miles recognize the distortions that come from the demand side of income-the taxes that the nonrich pay? Again, I poise these questions to Miles as I appreciate his contributions to the debate. Hopefully he understands the spirit that I poise these questions. I’ve certainly changed my opinion some on the “progressive consumption tax”-not enough to take the scare quotes away yet, of course!-and am willing to be persuaded on supply side issues.
Mike is absolutely right that the poor and middle class pay substantial amounts of sales taxes and taxes on earnings such as Social Security taxes. When people want to argue that the tax system is unfair to the rich, they often skew things by only talking about the income tax. But a key point to make here is that almost all countries that devote a higher fraction of GDP to government spending than the U.S. tax the middle-class a lot through a national sales tax or a value added tax (VAT) which is a lot like a sales tax except that it is harder to evade because much of the tax is collected from companies long before the good gets to the final consumer. The European model, in particular, is to tax the middle-class heavily in order to give benefits to the middle class. I believe that the resultant tax distortions are why so many Europeans work many fewer hours per year than Americans. They used to work roughly the same amount as Americans when they had lower tax rates. (These are facts that Ed Prescott has made much of.)
Why not just tax the rich to pay for benefits for the middle class? The basic problem is that there aren’t enough rich people. I found this video by Tyler Durden etertaining and revealing on this topic. I can’t verify what he says exactly, though I think the basic point is right. You have to include at least the upper middle class in your tax in a big way, or you can’t get enough extra revenue to do a big expansion of social programs.
So the “demand side” is a big source of potential revenue, if by that you mean some kind of sales tax of VAT tax. But to get a lot of revenue, you have to include people who don’t think of themselves as rich, and whose acquaintances might not even think of them as rich. Maybe we should do it anyway, but it won’t feel like what people imagine a tax on the rich would feel. Here I remember Senator Russell B. Long’s parody:
“Don’t tax you, don’t tax me, tax that man behind the tree.”
There just aren’t enough “men behind the tree” who don’t seem like you or me.
What about the demand side as a source of jobs? (This is a more typical meaning of “demand-side.”) Here, my answer is that, despite the floundering of policy makers lately, it is fundamentally easy to get enough aggregate demand. On this, just click the sidebar link on the June+ 2012 table of contents and look at all the posts on monetary policy and short-run fiscal policy, together with the recent post on evidence that Federal Lines of Credit should work: “Brad DeLong and Joshua Hausman on Federal Lines of Credit.” (My post “Dissertation Topic 1: Federal Lines of Credit (FLOC’s)” is also useful, but is pretty heavy.) The bottom line is that monetary policy can provide plenty of aggregate demand, and if the Fed won’t do what it takes, we can use Federal Lines of Credit and the change in the timing of Federal payments to the states for Medicare that I talk about in “Leading States in the Fiscal Two-Step” to get enough aggregate demand without adding too much to the national debt. So, you wouldn’t know it from the news or from big chunks of discussion in the blogosphere, but getting enough aggregate demand is the easy problem. Raising aggregate supply while getting the revenue we need is the hard problem.
