Author Archive
No, the Fed Did Not Stabilize the Economy
Commenting on a recent article of mine in The Wall Street Journal, Peter Gartside claims that:
Prior to 1913, the U.S. annual gross domestic product changes oscillated between extremes of approximately plus or minus 15%. After the establishment of the Federal Reserve Board, the limits of GDP oscillations narrowed to approximately plus or minus 6%.
You may well wonder where he got that idea, since there are no official estimates of gross domestic product (GDP) for years before 1929. In the early 1960s, however, John Kendrick and Simon Kuznets bravely attempted to construct such estimates for gross national product (GNP). That would be close enough to modern GDP data were it not for the primitive statistics and technology they had to work with.
The table (after the jump) shows these heroic old estimates for real GNP from 1889 to 1914. In that period, there was only one year (1908) in which the drop in GNP exceeded 6% and none that remotely approaches the “minus 15%” figure of Mr. Garstide’s imagination.
Filed under: Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy; Tax and Budget Policy
Cash for Clunkers Lesson: How to Use the $$ to Buy a Gas Guzzler
My son’s station car is an old Ford Explorer AWD which, despite being a V-6, was rated at about 15 mpg. Approaching 100,000 miles, the SUV’ s resale value is very low.
The House approved a bill to give him a $3,500 voucher to buy a car that is supposed to get only 18 mpg, or $4,500 if it gets 20 mpg. Only 18-20 mpg? That’s not moving us much closer to President Obama’s pie-in-the-sky 35.5 mpg goalpost is it?
Consider how easy it would be to game this giveaway program by using that $4,500 voucher to buy a big SUV or V-8 muscle car.
First of all, with Chrysler and GM dealerships folding, it should be easy to buy a mediocre Chevy Cobalt or Dodge Caliber for about $10,000 more than the voucher.
What you do next is sell that boring econobox, even if you end up with $1,000 less than you paid — that still leaves you with $3,500 of free money, courtesy of taxpayers.
As this process unfolds, the flood of resold small cars will make it even harder for GM, Chrysler and Ford dealers to get a decent price for small cars, because of added competition from new cars being resold as used.
That’s their problem, not yours.
So, take the $9,000 net from reselling the crummy little car plus the $4,500 from Uncle Sam. Then use that $13,500 to make a big down payment on a used Cadillac Escalade, Toyota Tundra pickup or Corvette.
File this under “unintended consequences” (my own file is running out of space).
Filed under: Energy and Environment; Government and Politics; Regulatory Studies; Tax and Budget Policy
Marginal Tax on Corporate Profits was 74.2% in the 1st Quarter
From the Bureau of Economic Analysis news release of May 29:
Profits from current production (corporate profits with inventory valuation and capital consumption adjustments) increased $42.6 billion in the first quarter. . . Taxes on corporate income increased $31.6 billion. . . [therefore] profits after tax . . . increased $11.1 billion.
In other words, taxes extracted 74.2% of any added (marginal) corporate earnings, leaving only scraps for stockholder.
Companies that lost money, on the other hand, were often bailed out and/or nationalized.
Why bother even trying to maximize profits or minimize losses?
Filed under: Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy; Tax and Budget Policy
Robert H. Frank, A 200% Tax Even Socialists Will Hate
In the latest issue of Forbes, Cornell University economist Robert H. Frank is pushing “A Tax Even Libertarians Can Love.” I hope he wasn’t counting on this libertarian’s support.
What he advocates is “replacing the income tax with a progressive tax on spending. …A family’s income minus its savings is its consumption, and that amount minus a large standard deduction — say, $30,000 a year for a family of four — would be its taxable consumption. …Rates would start low, perhaps 20%, then rise gradually with total consumption. …With savings tax-exempt, top marginal tax rates on consumption would have to be significantly higher than current top rates on income.”
His concept of “significantly higher” includes tax rates of 100-200% on marginal income that isn’t saved. This is about minimizing affluence, not maximizing revenues. There is ample evidence from Emmanuel Saez and others that the amount of reported income drops sharply as marginal tax rates rise above 25-30% (and even less on capital gains).
In his 2007 book, Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class, Frank suggests marginal tax rates of 50% above $220,000 and rising to 200%. Since seniors (like me) commonly finance retirement from past savings, Frank’s tax scheme amounts to rapid confiscation of past savings.
For young people, Frank’s tax can’t possibly encourage savings because it discourages earning any income in the first place. Consumption is, after all, the motive for both earning and saving. The prospect of facing future consumption taxes of 50-200% would surely discourage saving much, because the rewards from invested savings (namely, future consumption) would be subjected to such prohibitive tax brackets. Under this steeply progressive tax on unsaved income, any income exempt from taxes today would be subject to brutal taxes whenever folks wanted to buy anything of value, like a car or house, or to retire on their accumulated savings.
Filed under: Government and Politics; Tax and Budget Policy
Why Bank Stocks Rose on Bernanke’s Remarks
In a CNBC spot with Steve Liesman & Erin Burnett, I tried to explain why investors in bank stocks had good reason to be pleased with part of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s speech. Judging by the response of Steve and Erin, and others on CNBC over the following day, I must not have been persuasive.
For clarification, I am quoting the exact language from Bernanke’s talk, with my emphasis added.
My main point is that Bernanke admitted that when it comes to the “financial crisis” of some big banks, this is largely an artifact of unduly harsh regulation being applied at the worst possible time:
There is some evidence that capital standards, accounting rules, and other regulations have made the financial sector excessively procyclical–that is, they lead financial institutions to ease credit in booms and tighten credit in downturns more than is justified by changes in the creditworthiness of borrowers, thereby intensifying cyclical changes.
For example, capital regulations require that banks’ capital ratios meet or exceed fixed minimum standards for the bank to be considered safe and sound by regulators. Because banks typically find raising capital to be difficult in economic downturns or periods of financial stress, their best means of boosting their regulatory capital ratios during difficult periods may be to reduce new lending, perhaps more so than is justified by the credit environment. We should review capital regulations to ensure that they are appropriately forward-looking. . .
Bernanke emphasized the regulators’ dangerous habit of raising capital requirements and loan loss reserves simply because of a strict mark-to-market misinterpretation of the “fair value” of mortgage-backed securities.
He noted that:
Determining appropriate valuation methods for illiquid or idiosyncratic assets can be very difficult, to put it mildly. Similarly, there is considerable uncertainty regarding the appropriate levels of loan loss reserves over the cycle. As a result, further review of accounting standards governing valuation and loss provisioning would be useful, and might result in modifications to the accounting rules that reduce their procyclical effects without compromising the goals of disclosure and transparency.
The key here is Bernanke’s criticism of the rigid use of Basel capital standards, not mark-to-market information per se (which would be harmless if it did not trigger foolish regulations). When combined with Barney Frank’s similar comments on the same day, it begins to look as though sensible economics might finally take priority over dubious bookkeeping.
Filed under: Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy; General; Regulatory Studies; Tax and Budget Policy
The Foreclosure Five Dominate Case-Shiller Price Indexes
A CNNMoney.com report, “Home prices in record drop,” posted a scary map labeled “Falling Homes Sales.” But it actually shows falling home prices. Within the S&P Case-Shiller sample of 20 metropolitan areas, the steepest drop in prices (not sales) were in Phoenix, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Tampa and Detroit.
All 7 of those metropolitan areas (7 out of 20 in that index) lie within 5 states with by far the worst mortgage problems, as shown in my February 21 article, “The Foreclosure Five.” Yet I also showed that states with the steepest price declines also have had huge increases in home sales, which makes the label on the CNNMoney map doubly misleading.
My article used third quarter house prices because fourth quarter figures were not yet available. That turns out to make even less difference than I expected.
The fourth quarter Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) figures show home prices down 21.8% for the year in Nevada, 20.5% in California, 15.2% in Arizona, 19.5% in Florida, and 11.8% in Michigan. Prices were down 3.7% in the median state, North Carolina, but up 21.6% over five years. That means prices fell by less than 3.7% last year in 24 states— including a half dozen states with home prices up a bit, and New York with only a 3.3% decline.
CNNMoney says, “The decline does not seem to be slowing – just the opposite. The average home price dropped 2.5% between November and December in the 20 top metro areas.” The FHFA data for all 50 states, by contrast, show a small 0.1% increase in home prices between November and December.
The article goes on say, “The S&P Case-Shiller National Home Price Index reported that prices sank a record 18.2% during the last three months of 2008, compared with the same period in 2007. Case-Shiller’s index of 20 major metropolitan areas fell 18.5%, also a record.” The FHFA, by contrast, shows that prices fell just 8.2% during the last three months of 2008, or 3.7% if using a median average. Ten percentage points is quite a wide gap.
What accounts for such huge differences between Case-Shiller and federal price indexes? CNNMoney imagines it’s because “Homes purchased without financing or ones too expensive to qualify for a Fannie-Freddie loan are not counted in the FFHA (sic) statistics.” That’s more than unlikely. The inclusion of cash sales and jumbo loans (larger than $729,750 in pricey area) can’t possibly explain why price declines in the Case-Shiller index look so much more dramatic those in the OFHEO/FHFA index.
The real reason is simple: Case-Shiller indexes are hugely dominated by the Foreclosure Five. In the Case-Shiller index of only 20 “top” metro areas, the Foreclosure Five account for 41.2% of that value-weighted index with California alone accounting for 27.4%.
The “national” Case-Shiller index totally excludes 13 states, such as Indiana and South Carolina, and samples only a fraction of many others. The Foreclosure Five account for 28.3% of that “national” index, with California amounting to 17.1%.
As is true of nearly all reprorting about foreclosures, underwater mortgages and falling house prices, what the Case-Shiller price index really shows is that many people are confusing what has been happening in the Foreclosure Five with what has been happening in the nation as a whole.
Filed under: Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy; General; Regulatory Studies; Tax and Budget Policy
Toxic TARP: Mr. Geithner’s Takeover Targets
A front-page story in the February 23 Wall Street Journal describes a plan to let the government convert its preferred shares in Citigroup to common stock, taking 25-40% ownership.
It could be worse. A brilliant February 19 Journal report by Peter Eavis warned that “Government capital injections sit like ill-disguised Trojan horses in the nation’s largest banks,” showing that under Treasury Secretary Geithner’s socialist scheming the government could seize 74% of Citigroup and 66% of Bank of America. Meanwhile, most other reporters kept claiming bank stocks collapsed simply because Geithner had left out a few details. On the contrary, he said too much, not too little.
The newer Journal report says, “When federal officials began pumping capital into U.S. banks last October, few experts would have predicted that the government would soon be wrestling with the possibility of taking voting control of large financial institutions. . . . Citigroup’s low share price already reflects, at least in part, a fear among shareholders that their stakes might be further diluted. A government move to take a big stake could backfire, potentially spurring investors to flee other banks, even healthier ones [emphais added].”
Why is any of this a surprise? Even before the scary “capital purchase program” was unveiled, I wrote in the October 20, 2008 issue of National Review that, “Conservative legislators who expressed fear about letting the Treasury buy mortgage-backed bonds were strangely enthusiastic about inviting the Treasury to acquire equity in companies. Critics of derivatives became enthusiasts for warrants . . . which would give the Treasury secretary virtually unlimited power to confiscate the wealth of stockholders of any company foolhardy enough to play this game.”
More recently, in a February 11 New York Post piece (subtly titled “A Plan to Kill Banks”) I explained that, “Once a bank or insurance company gets in bed with the government, the property rights of that company’s stockholders become uniquely insecure. When the government jumps into the cockpit, smart stockholders bail out. And depressed stock prices deflate the banks’ capital cushion.”
If “few experts” predicted these consequences of Treasury purchases of bank preferred shares and warrants, then why are they called experts?
Filed under: Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy; Government and Politics; Regulatory Studies; Tax and Budget Policy
The “Last Word on Fiscal Stimulus” Explained
Back in 1977 I gave a talk at the Tax Foundation which was quickly added to Campbell McConnell’s best selling Economics textbook. At the back of each chapter, McConnell added just one select reading, called “The Last Word.” He gave me the last word on fiscal policy.
I found out about it many years later when my daughter Melissa found her dad inside her college textbook (a much newer edition). Apparently my old words had been confusing or enlightening the youth of America for well over a decade.
Because I failed to explain all that, my blog was edited in a way that makes it look as though I was inserting my old remarks to argue with McConnell.
On the contrary, that excerpt of mine was quoted directly from his book. It still holds up fairly well, I imagine, as heresies go.
And now you know the rest of the story.
The U.S. Didn’t Cause the World Recession
In the Washington Post, Ricardo Caballero of MIT has a novel and promising idea about “How to Lift a Falling Economy.” Unfortunately, he echoes the mantra that all the world’s economic problems can be traced to the U.S. in general, and to big U.S. banks in particular. “Already,” he says, “this illness has spread to the global economy.”
Already? Industrial production in Japan began collapsing in November 2007, two months ahead of the U.S., and the Japanese industrial decline has been twice as fast.
Unlike the U.S., real GDP began falling in the second quarter of 2008 in Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong. By no coincidence, that was when the price of oil rose as high as $145 a barrel. Soaring oil prices raise the cost of production and distribution for many industries, and reduce real household incomes and therefore consumption. Nine of the ten postwar U.S. recessions were preceded by a major spike in the price of oil.
In a piece for the Claremont Review of Books (written last November), I conclude , “This recession is not just a U.S. problem, not just about housing, and not just financial.”
Compare the decline in real GDP over the past 4 quarters (from The Economist):
|
U.S. |
-0.2% |
|
France |
-1.0 |
|
Germany |
-1.6 |
|
Britain |
-1.8 |
|
Italy |
-2.6 |
|
Japan |
-4.6 |
Filed under: Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy; General; International Economics and Development; Trade and Immigration
Inflation and the Fed
In a National Review post on the recent Producer Price Index numbers, I argued that inflation worries are overwrought — for now. If inflation does become a problem, though, the Fed could have trouble controlling it. Here’s why.
According to a recent AP story, “Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told an audience at the National Press Club on Wednesday that … once the economy begins to rebound and financial markets stabilize, the Fed will be able to quickly reverse the actions it has taken before inflation becomes a problem.”
That’s the trillion dollar question.
Federal Reserve bank credit rose from $890.4 billion on September 10 to $1.83 trillion by February 11, mainly because the Fed purchased a lot of semi-toxic securities (e.g., from Bear Stearns) and made huge loans against other dodgy assets. That allowed a similar doubling of the monetary base (bank reserves and currency). Even before that happened, the Fed was selling off Treasuries to make room for lesser investments. The Fed’s holding of government securities has fallen from $790.5 billion in September 2007 to $470.7 billion on February 11 (not counting some second-rate IOUs from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac).
To assume, as Bernanke does, that inflation cannot possibly accelerate until “the economy begins to rebound and financial markets stabilize” is to assume stagflation is impossible, though 1973-75 and 1979-82 proved otherwise. If inflation catches the Fed by surprise, are they really “able to quickly reverse the actions,” as Bernanke says? How could they do that?
The Fed could certainly raise the interest rates on bank reserves — the fed funds and discount rate — which is how it makes money and credit tighter in normal times. But that rationing device would not prove so effective in times like these, because banks are already sitting on a mountain of untapped reserves. Besides, once expected inflation has begun to rise, the Fed has usually moved rates up in tiny 25-basis point steps — increases so small that perceived real interest rates can continue to fall even as nominal rates rise.
To literally reverse the actions that doubled its assets since last September, the Fed would have to sell nearly a trillion dollars worth of IOUs. Unfortunately, they don’t have nearly that many Treasury securities to sell. And even if the Fed were willing sell off all of its Treasury bills and bonds, the remaining backing for Federal Reserve notes would be little better than junk bonds. Meanwhile, private and agency securities acquired since last September must be very hard to sell — or else the Fed would not have felt obliged to buy them.
The Fed’s System Open Market Account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York holds $39.4 billion in inflation-protected Treasury bonds — more than twice its $18.4 billion stash of short-term Treasury bills. Are they trying to tell us something?
The Last Word on Fiscal Stimulus?
From “the best-selling Principles of Economics textbook [which] has been teaching students in a clear, unbiased way for 40 years.” Campbell R. McConnell, Economics: Principles, Problems, and Policies. McGraw-Hill, 7th edition, 1978.
The Last Word: The Impotence of Fiscal Policy
Some economists feel that fiscal policy is an impotent and unpredictable stabilization tool.
Well, as I wrote in a 1977 Tax Review article (reprinted 1w permission of the Tax Foundation, Inc.):
The real question is whether or not conventional fiscal policy works as advertised. If fiscal policy works, and its impact is properly measured by the size of the full employment deficit, then it should be possible to find some correlation between either the level or direction of the full employment budget and some measure of current or subsequent economic activity. George Terborgh tried to find some such link back in 1968, in The New Economics, but found only a weak correlation that turned out to be perverse. That is, larger full employment surpluses were associated with faster economic growth. More rigorous tests by economists at the St. Louis Fed, and again at Citibank, had no more luck in uncovering the magical properties of the full employment budget. A sharp shift toward larger full employment deficits did not prevent the recession of’ 1953-54, for example, nor the mini-recession of 1967. In 1946, a $60 billion reduction of Federal spending (equivalent to $400 billion today) was followed by a vigorous boom, and a combination of tax cuts and higher spending in 1948 (the equivalent of S75 billion today) was followed by a sharp recession.
The theory of fiscal policy is almost as messy as the evidence. If deficit spending is financed by borrowing from the private sector, there is no obvious stimulus-even to that undifferentiated thing called “demand.” Whoever buys the government securities surrenders exactly as much purchasing power as is received by the beneficiaries of Federal largess. There would be a net fiscal stimulus only if there were no private demand for the funds needed to cover the added Treasury borrowing. Otherwise, lendable funds are just diverted from market-determined uses to politically determined uses.
There may be a stimulus in some circumstances if the deficit is financed by a more rapid increase in the money supply, but this is really a monetary stimulus, not a purely fiscal effect.
In the long run, resources allocated through the government must displace those allocated through markets, and growth of government spending must be at the expense of the private sector. The government has only three sources of revenue — taxes, borrowing, and printing money — and increasing any one of those must reduce the private sector’s command over real resources. Although deficit spending may at times be a short-run stimulus to nominal demand, it is also a long-run drag on real supply-siphoning resources from uses that would otherwise augment the economy’s productive capacity, and instead diverting those resources into hand-to-mouth consumption through government salaries, subsidies, and transfer payments.
So, the theory and evidence suggests that fiscal policy is essentially impotent, or at least unpredictable, except as a device to promote inflationary monetary policy and/or to reduce investment and growth.
Filed under: Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy; General; Government and Politics; Tax and Budget Policy
Investors Bet against the Stimulus Plan and/or Tim Geithner
I rarely give investment advice unless asked. But I’ve found that most people are unduly shy about using short sales to hedge and, yes, “speculate.”
If you were invested in, say, an S&P 500 index fund over the past two years, you were actually speculating that stocks of banks and homebuilders would go up. Index funds are weighted by the value of shares, so financial firms in particular were much too heavily weighted (the market has fixed that).
Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) make it easy to hedge that sort of unwanted long position with shorts. You buy them like stocks and they have similar trading symbols like SKF or TBT. Since 2007 (but not lately), I was invested in SRS which shorts real estate, and SKF which shorts financial stocks. Those are ultra-short funds, which means the rise about twice as fast as those stocks fall in a day (though not over time). The gains from SKF sometimes topped 150%.
In a May 1 2008 blog, I revealed that “I am shorting oil through an exchange-traded fund (DUG), and shorting precious metals through a mutual fund (SPPIX). I’m also slightly long the dollar (UUP).” Shorting energy stocks and going long the dollar were contrarian positions, but profitable. Shorting precious metals (then, not now) was partly because platinum and silver have industrial uses; gold held up fairly well.
If you still hold any mutual fund or 401(k) that is invested in long-term Treasury bonds that shows admirable patriotism and courage but not much caution.
Two old friends, one at a hedge fund the other a California economist, told me they think the government will be borrowing too much, and that the Treasury and Fed are trying too hard to expand money and credit. That sounds like an easy bet to me. I suggested another Pro Shares Ultra Short fund called TBT. It makes a strong, leveraged bet that the price of 30-year Treasury bonds will fall and long-term interest rates will rise.
Since the end of 2008, this bet that government borrowing will cease being so cheap has risen by 36% — from about $36 to $49.
And that happened even though the Fed has threatened to buy long-term Treasuries.
If the Obama team’s “stimulus” plans and “rescues” keep making it this lucrative to bet that long-term long-term interest rates are heading up, what sort of “stimulus” is that?
GDP Is Down 1% — Not 3.8%
The preliminary GDP estimate for the fourth quarter of 2008 is $11,599.4 billion (in 2000 dollars). That was 0.965% smaller than the third quarter — a figure commonly multiplied by four to convert it into a more dramatic 3.8% annual rate. But these quarterly rates are highly erratic, even in recessions, so converting them into compound annual rates is misleading if not foolhardy.
The table below compares recent quarterly GDP figures with those of 2000-2001.
The first quarter of 2001 and second quarter of 2008 look no worse than the third quarter of 2000. The second quarter of 2008 was stronger than the fourth quarter of 2000. Yet the entire years of 2001 and 2008 are labeled recessionary and 2000 is not.
Percentage Changes in Real GDP
| Quarterly | Annualized | ||
| 2000 | III | -0.115 | -0.5% |
| 2000 | IV | 0.52 | 2.1% |
| 2001 | I | -0.123 | -0.5% |
| 2001 | II | 0.307 | 1.2% |
| 2001 | III | -0.352 | -1.4% |
| 2001 | IV | 0.395 | 1.6% |
| 2008 | II | 0.699 | 2.8% |
| 2008 | III | -0.127 | -0.5% |
| 2008 | IV | -0.965 | -3.8% |
Looking at any extended period, such as the 2000-2001 figures or the 2008 figures, shows why annualized quarterly changes are a very poor guide to future trends. It makes no more sense to use this figure to suggest the economy will keep falling at a 3.8% rate than it would have been to cite the second quarter figure as evidence the economy would keep rising at a 2.8% rate.
The annualized fall in GDP in the first quarter of 1982 was 6.4%, yet the overall drop between the peak and trough quarters of that deep recession was only 2.3%. The annualized drop in first quarter of 1975 was 4.7%, yet that overall cyclical decline was 3.1%.
Reply to Tax Policy Center on Corporate Tax Rates and Revenue
Len Burman, director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, suggests I was “careless” in a recent Wall Street Journal article when I said, “the Tax Policy Center (TPC) estimate of corporate rate cuts . . . is also nonsense because it’s entirely static. The estimate assumes raising or lowering corporate tax rates has no effect on corporate decisions about where to locate production, income or costs, and no effect on the economy’s performance.”
Burman says, “That is simply untrue (as we would have told Mr. Reynolds had he asked). If corporate tax rates were 10 percentage points below the top ordinary income tax rate, there would indeed be increased reporting of corporate income. But individual income tax revenues would fall too, quite possibly by more than the pickup in corporate revenues. . . . Investors would have had a huge incentive to channel their income through closely-held corporations instead of reporting it on their individual tax returns. Many S-corporations and partnerships, which are taxed at individual rates, would have chosen to be taxed as C-corporations at a lower rate. . . .I know the Wall Street Journal editorial page tries not to let facts get in the way of its tax-cut narrative, but those facts do matter.”
Was it “simply untrue” for me to say the Tax Policy Center’s corporate income tax estimates are static? The footnote to their Table T08-0167 about “Senator John McCain’s Tax Proposals” could not be more clear: “Corporate income tax estimates are static (they do not include a behavioral response). Official estimates from the Joint Committee on Taxation would likely differ.”
Burman attempts to justify static revenue estimates by asserting that “quite possibly” there is no behavioral response to corporate tax rates, aside from shifting business income to and from the individual tax system. But that just proves he is assuming, as I correctly said, that lowering corporate tax rates wold have literally “no effect on corporate decisions about where to locate production, income or costs, and no effect on the economy’s performance.” If that static assumption made any sense, then doubling corporate tax rates would double revenues (though more of the loot would show up on individual tax returns). That is certainly not what the economic literature suggests. Many countries in which income switching is impossible or trivial have cut their corporate tax rates to 25% or less with no loss in revenue as a share of GDP.
Trying justify static estimates on the basis of undocumented conjectures about the scale income shifting looks like an ad hoc rationalization. Guessing what might “quite possibly” be true has nothing to do with “facts.” It amounts to abandoning economic theory and evidence in favor of a dubious hunch.
Under both the Obama and McCain plans the corporate tax rate would be 5-7 points below the individual tax through 2013. Yet the Tax Policy Center mentions income shifting only in connection with the McCain plan. If bias does not explain that, what does?
If income switching was as huge as Burman speculates, then the Tax Policy Center’s estimates of individual tax revenues from the Obama plan (which include a very modest behavioral response) are much too large, though corporate receipts would be somewhat higher. In fact, that is exactly what I estimated in the 60-page paper cited in the byline to my op ed, which is mainly an empirical critique of Tax Policy Center methodology. I estimate that corporate income tax receipts under the Obama plan would be larger than the Tax Policy Center expects (because they ignored income shifting in Obama’s case). But I also found their estimates of added receipts from higher tax rates on individual income, capital gains and dividends to be unbelievably rosy.
Filed under: General; Government and Politics; Tax and Budget Policy
What Is an American Car?
Before “loaning” billions more in taxpayer money to some very bad credit risks, simply because they are old American brands associated with Detroit, we might ask what distinguishes these companies from others.
The not-so-big three are certainly are no less global than, say, Honda. General Motors gets 44% of its revenue from other countries and Ford gets 53%, according to Forbes (April 21). A German company, Daimler-Benz, still owns a fifth of Chrysler, and a group of affluent private investors owns the rest.
An “American” brand tells you little about where all the parts in a car are made. I was once at a dinner with Lee Iaccoca where I teased him about my Dodge Stealth, made in Japan by Mitsubishi. Similarly, today’s Chevy Aveo is imported from Daewoo in South Korea. Yet Hyundai has a plant in Alabama.
Cars.com found only four cars and six light trucks with a domestic content (meaning US or Canadian) above 75%. That list includes the Toyota Tundra and Sienna and the Honda Odyssey. Other Honda’s have a 60-70% domestic content, barely missing the cut.
The “Detroit” metaphor for primarily domestic vehicles is also inappropriate. Among the remaining seven vehicles with a very high domestic content, three are made outside Michigan —the Chevy Malibu from Kansas and Cobalt from Ohio, and the Ford Explorer from Kentucky. Ford’s F-150 truck might be made in Michigan or Missouri, the Chevy Silverado in Michigan or Indiana.
The only strictly “Detroit” cars with high domestic content are the Pontiac G6 from Orion MI and the Chrysler Sebring from Sterling Heights MI. Consumer Reports says, “The G6 isn’t a very good car” and “The Sebring is one of the least competitive family sedans on the market.” Yet these are the only Detroit-made sedans with a high domestic content. Does anyone really think taxpayer subsidies can save cars like that? And why should the federal government offer special deals for uncompetitive cars made in Michigan, thus tilting the playing field against better cars made in, say, Ohio, Tennessee or South Carolina?
As a Chicago Fed study documents, “the auto industry is increasingly characterized by international carmakers, as well as by parts suppliers that operate in multiple countries. Against a background of global supply chains, it has become quite difficult to identify and label products such as autos by nationality. Overall, the processes of globalization of markets and supply chains have served to noticeably lower prices of new cars for American consumers and businesses. On a quality-adjusted basis, for example, new vehicle prices have been falling at an average annual rate of 0.5% over the current decade. Importantly, higher quality and gains in longevity are among the improvements in today’s vehicles.”
Filed under: General; Government and Politics; International Economics and Development; Trade and Immigration
Reply to Robert Gordon & James Kvaal’s WSJ letter
In a letter to the Wall Street Journal (Nov. 5), Robert Gordon and James Kvaal responded to my critique of their estimate that McCain’s tax plan would cut big oil’s taxes by $3.8 billion. They claim that “corporations as profitable as ExxonMobil pay a 35% rate on more than 99% of their profits.” Yet they also say, “Our code is riddled with special interest deductions, credits and exemptions that shield corporate profits from tax.” Well, which is it?
If big oil companies actually “pay a 35% rate on more than 99% of their profits,” then Gordon and Kvaal might be justified in ignoring McCain’s bold plan to end the oil companies’ “deductions, credits and exemptions.”
As the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget noted, “Senator McCain . . . would repeal special expensing rules for oil and gas companies, eliminate the foreign tax credit for oil companies, disallow expensing of exploration and development costs, encourage an increase in royalty rates for drilling on public land, subject working interests in oil and gas to the passive loss rules, eliminate 15 percent tax credit for enhanced oil recovery costs for tertiary wells, and eliminate special depreciable lifetimes for certain assets used by oil companies.”
CFARB estimated that McCain’s plan to tighten up deductions and credits would raise oil company taxes by $6 billion in 2013. That would certainly be offset to some extent, of course, by lower tax rates—30% in 2010-11 and 28% in 2012-2013 (Gordon and Kvaal wrongly assumed the rate would drop to 25% in 2009).
If big oil really pays 35% tax on virtually all their profits, however, then such loophole-closing would simply be a waste of time.
If big oil does not surrender 35% of profits to the IRS, however, then Gordon and Kvaal’s estimates (which assume that statutory tax rates are the same as effective tax rates) are worthless.
Filed under: Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy; General; Government and Politics
Obama’s Pandering to Seniors
“Many seniors are struggling to keep pace with costs,” Senator Obama told a largely senior audience in Florida on September 18. Social Security benefits are adjusted for rising prices but not for rising taxes, including increased fees for Medicare. Using a line from his tax plan, Obama said, “This strain has been greater since 1993, when taxes on social security benefits were raised. Millions of seniors saw their net benefits go down.”
Thanks to Bill Clinton’s 1993 tax law, single seniors with incomes above $40,048 in 2007 had to pay income tax on 85% of a portion of their benefits, and those with income above $46,850 had to pay tax on 85% of their entire benefits. That 1993 tax increase hits couples with incomes above $54,278.
In retirement communities in key states like Florida and Arizona, Obama has cleverly tapped into senior resentment about the Clinton era, when “millions of seniors saw their net benefits go down.” But then he pulls a bait and switch trick.
Clinton’s 1993 tax hike reduced after-tax benefits for seniors earning more than $50,000—because they continued working after age 65 and/or because they saved for retirement.
Obama proposes to fix that by eliminating income tax for seniors earning less than $50,000. He says, “When I’m President, we’ll work to see that no retiree making less than $50,000 each year has to pay income tax. This will eliminate income taxes for about 7 million Americans, at a savings rate of roughly $1,400 each year. And 22 million seniors won’t even have to file a return and hire an expensive tax preparer.”
If Sally is 60 years old earns $49,000 by working, she would pay a higher income (and payroll) tax than Sam who is 66 and makes $49,000 from retirement income. Is there any rational explanation for that other than a shameless attempt to buy senior votes?
To help pay for such arbitrary tax favoritism, Obama wants to increase the tax rates on capital gains and dividends—two taxes that hit frugal seniors much harder than young people.
As I wrote in my Hillsdale College paper, “The argument for Obama’s tax plans is expressed in terms of fairness, rather than the impact on incentives and economic performance, yet the implied concept of fairness remains ambiguous. A single senior with a retirement income of $50,000 has the same per capita income as a two-earner family with $250,000 and three children. Yet the retired senior would be exempt from income tax, under this plan, while the large working family would be required to pay federal and state taxes of up to 46% on their next dollar of income while losing valuable deductions (e.g., for state income taxes and mortgage interest) and also losing five personal exemptions (which were supposed to be partial compensation for the added expense of supporting a larger family). The fairness of such a reallocation of tax burdens is, to put it mildly, not self-evident.”
Filed under: General; Government and Politics; Health, Welfare & Entitlements; Tax and Budget Policy
Obama’s Tax Deceptions
Senator Obama famously claims, “I’ll give a tax break to 95% of workers and their families.” The Obama team never explained that figure, because they made it up. They always cite the friendly Tax Policy Center (TPC), when it suits their purposes, but not this time. That is because the Tax Policy Center concludes that under Obama’s plan, “about 81 percent of households would owe less tax while only [only?] about 10 percent would owe more.” Compared with current tax policy, says the TPC “those in the top fifth of the income distribution would face and average tax increase of 3.4 percent of income, or $7,727.” The TPC adds that “married couples filing jointly would fare worst” because “married couples have much higher average incomes ($125,155 in 2009).”
Writing in The Wall Street Journal on Nov. 3, however, Obama said, “If you work, pay taxes, and make less than $200,000, you’ll get a tax cut.” That too is flatly false. Single workers who make more than $80,000 (or joint returns above $155,000) would not get a tax cut under Obama’s plan.
The centerpiece of the Obama redistribution scheme is a refundable “Making Work Pay Credit” (MWPC) of 6.2% up to a maximum of $8,100 of earnings, or about $500 per earner. This credit alone would cost $710 billion over ten years, according to the TPC, about half the cost of his entire $1.32 trillion package of assorted tax credits and exemptions.
The Making Work Pay credit results in a $500 check for those who pay no income tax, but it phases-out quickly once income exceeds $75,000. A two-earner family could get as much as $1000 from two tax credits, but that disappears as income exceeds $150,000. That is what Joe Biden meant when he said—correctly—that the plan is designed to help those earning less than $150,000.
University of Maine accounting professor Jeff Gramlich created a website which (like the Obama campaign) relies on Tax Policy Center estimates. It shows that a single worker earning $80,000 would get a $132 tax cut in 2010, but a single worker earning $85,000 would get nothing. A joint return with $155,000 of salary income would get a $270 tax cut, but a joint return with $160,000 would get nothing.
None of the other Obama tax cuts would be available to anyone earning anything close to $200,000. His child care credit phases out as incomes rise from $30,000 to $58,000; his exemption for seniors phases out as income rises from $50,000 to $60,000; his 50% savers credit ends at $75,000; his $4000 college tax credits (which pays $40 an hour for community service work) phases out as family income rises from $100,000 to $120,000. Robert Carroll of the Tax Foundation notes that, “The combination of the phase-out of the EITC, the “Making Work Pay” credit, and the child and dependent care credit pushes the effective marginal tax rate to as high as 51.7 percent. That is, the taxpayer who benefits from all these provisions at a lower income discovers that he gets to keep less than one half of every additional dollar of earnings in the roughly $30,000-to-$43,000 range.”
I recently demonstrated that Obama’s repeated claim about McCain’s alleged $200 billion corporate tax cut is a total fraud. Amazingly, it turns out that Obama is also unable to tell the truth about his own tax plan.
Filed under: General; Government and Politics; Tax and Budget Policy
Alan Reynolds’ Critique of Obama and McCain Tax Plans
Peter Ferrara writes that, “Obama’s tax increases will not produce nearly enough revenue to finance all his lavish spending proposals, as shown by a brilliant new paper from Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute.” Brilliant or not, it’s serious paper I prepared for a Hillsdale College conference, which is now online (at the link to my name).
Filed under: Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy; General; Government and Politics; Tax and Budget Policy
Paul Krugman’s Nobel Prize
Paul Krugman wrote some interesting essays in international economics theory (he is not noted for using facts), but began to put politics above economics ever since the 1992 presidential campaign –as shown in my 1994 review of his book, Peddling Prosperity.
Wiser choices for future Nobel prizes would be Arnold Harberger and Martin Feldstein for their innovative work in microeconomics and public finance.
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