“In the last decade, the average income of the bottom 90 percent of all working Americans actually declined,” Obama said on April 13. “The top 1 percent saw their income rise by an average of more than a quarter of a million dollars each.”

Politi-Fact, partly on the basis of my own research, generously rates the president’s claim as “Half True.”

The truth is that the President’s source, Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, refer only to pretax, pretransfer income reported on individual tax returns (as opposed to being sheltered inside a corporation or IRA or simply unreported), and they have no data on the bottom 90%. Worst of all, they leave out transfer payments, which amounted to $2.3 trillion last year — 44% as large as all private wages and salaries ($5.2 trillion). The data also excludes refundable tax credits, which added about $170 billion to low and middle incomes in 2009 according to the the Joint Committee on Taxation (the EITC, child credit and Obama’s “making work pay” credit). And the Bureau of Economic Analysis estimates that gross income reported on tax returns is about $1 trillion less than actual income.

As for the top 1%, my research shows that top investors report more capital gains and dividends when those tax rates go down, which is why they paid such a big share of income taxes (up to 40%) in 1997-2000 and 2003-2007.  Raise the tax on dividends and capital gains to 23.8%, as Obama hopes to do by 2014, and somebody else would have to pay the taxes now paid by the top 1%. Using income reported to the IRS to measure actual living standards is foolhardy at best.

President Obama’s Dubious Claims about Incomes of the Top 1% vs. the Bottom 90% is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Rand Paul, after setting the newswires alight with his controversial stance on the Civil Rights Act, is busy touting his “moderate” credentials.

Moderate, in this case, being a euphemism for “laughably timid.”

In a recent interview with a Kentucky radio station, Paul rejected the charge of his political opponent that he was opposed to farm subsidies. Not true, sayeth Paul. He is “much more moderate than that.”

According to an article in yesterday’s  Lexington Herald-Leader, Paul’s less-than-radical view on farm subsidies is that, well, maybe dead people should not receive them:

Let’s just agree that we will get rid of subsidies for dead farmers first,” he said.

After that, Paul said, the government should restrict subsidies to farmers who make more than $2 million a year.

Paul said 2,007 farmers last year whose income was greater than $2 million received subsidies.

“Let’s agree that maybe we can cut them out,” he said.

Despite his “ideologically pure” stance on the CRA, Rand Paul can compromise on issues of freedom when he wants to, for example on drug laws and gay marriage, as Tim Lee points out.  And now, apparently, he is to the left of Barack Obama (who favored a $500,000 adjusted gross income limit) when it comes to farm subsidies. Paul’s choice of when to be ideologically pure is curious indeed.

HT: Don Carr at the Environmental Working Group

Rand Paul Not So Hardcore On Farm Subsidies is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

1. Additional federal spending transfers resources from the more productive private sector to the less productive public sector of the economy. The bulk of federal spending goes toward subsidies and benefit payments, which generally do not enhance economic productivity. With lower productivity, average American incomes will fall.

2. As federal spending rises, it creates pressure to raise taxes now and in the future. Higher taxes reduce incentives for productive activities such as working, saving, investing, and starting businesses. Higher taxes also increase incentives to engage in unproductive activities such as tax avoidance.

3. Much federal spending is wasteful and many federal programs are mismanaged. Cost overruns, fraud and abuse, and other bureaucratic failures are endemic in many agencies. It’s true that failures also occur in the private sector, but they are weeded out by competition, bankruptcy, and other market forces. We need to similarly weed out government failures.

4. Federal programs often benefit special interest groups while harming the broader interests of the general public. How is that possible in a democracy? The answer is that logrolling or horse-trading in Congress allows programs to be enacted even though they are only favored by minorities of legislators and voters. One solution is to impose a legal or constitutional cap on the overall federal budget to force politicians to make spending trade-offs.

5. Many federal programs cause active damage to society, in addition to the damage caused by the higher taxes needed to fund them. Programs usually distort markets and they sometimes cause social and environmental damage. Some examples are housing subsidies that helped to cause the financial crises, welfare programs that have created dependency, and farm subsidies that have harmed the environment.

6. The expansion of the federal government in recent decades runs counter to the American tradition of federalism. Federal functions should be “few and defined” in James Madison’s words, with most government activities left to the states. The explosion in federal aid to the states since the 1960s has strangled diversity and innovation in state governments because aid has been accompanied by a mass of one-size-fits-all regulations.

For more, see DownsizingGovernment.org.

Six Reasons to Downsize the Federal Government is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

There’s a widespread belief that public schools are homogeneous and all inclusive while private schools are bastions of the elite. This was proven to be a myth decades ago by the renowned sociologist James Coleman, and as far as I know, that pattern of findings hasn’t changed in recent years.

Nevertheless, the myth continues. A new Fordham Institute paper provides a partial antidote, pointing out that quite a few public schools enroll virtually no low-income kids, making them bastions of the elite. Where the Fordham paper trips up a bit is in calling these elite public schools “private public schools.” As already noted above, private schools are, on average, better economically integrated than their government counterparts, so this phrase is exactly backwards and, as Sara Mead points out, is quite a slap in the face to the many private schools that do yeoman’s work serving large numbers of low-income students. Still, good to have folks taking note of these data.

The Paucity of Poor Kids in Many Public Schools is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

During his SOTU address last week, the president declared it a national goal to double our exports over the next five years.  As my colleague Dan Griswold argues (a point that is echoed by others in this NYT article), such growth is probably unrealistic. But with incomes rising in China, India and throughout the developing world, and with huge amounts of savings accumulated in Asia, strong U.S. export growth in the years ahead should be a given—unless we screw it up with a provocative enforcement regime.

The president said:

If America sits on the sidelines while other nations sign trade deals, we will lose the chance to create jobs on our shores. But realizing those benefits also means enforcing those agreements so our trading partners play by the rules.

Ah, the enforcement canard!

One of the more persistent myths about trade is that we don’t adequately enforce our trade agreements, which has given our trade partners license to cheat.  And that chronic cheating—dumping, subsidization, currency manipulation, opaque market barriers, and other underhanded practices—the argument goes, explains our trade deficit and anemic job growth.

But lack of enforcement is a myth that was concocted by congressional Democrats (Sander Levin chief among them) as a fig leaf behind which they could abide Big Labor’s wish to terminate the trade agenda.  As the Democrats prepared to assume control of Congress in January 2007, better enforcement—along with demands for actionable labor and environmental standards—was used to cast their opposition to trade as conditional, even vaguely appealing to moderate sensibilities.  But as is evident in Congress’s enduring refusal to consider the three completed bilateral agreements with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea (which all exceed Democratic demands with respect to labor and the environment), Democratic opposition to trade is not conditional, but systemic.

The president’s mention of enforcement at the SOTU (and his related comments to Republicans the following day that Americans need to see that trade is a two way street — starts at the 4:30 mark) indicates that Democrats believe the fig leaf still hangs.  It’s time to lose it.

According to what metric are we failing to enforce trade agreements?  The number of WTO complaints lodged? Well, the United States has been complainant in 93 out of the 403 official disputes registered with the WTO over its 15-year history, making it the biggest user of the dispute settlement system. (The European Communities comes in second with 81 cases as complainant.)  On top of that, the United States was a third party to a complaint on 73 occasions, which means that 42 percent of all WTO dispute settlement activity has been directed toward enforcement concerns of the United States, which is just one out of 153 members.

Maybe the enforcement metric should be the number of trade remedies measures imposed?  Well, over the years the United States has been the single largest user of the antidumping and countervailing duty laws.  More than any other country, the United States has restricted imports that were determined (according to a processes that can hardly be described as objective) to be “dumped” by foreign companies or subsidized by foreign governments. As of 2009, there are 325 active antidumping and countervailing duty measures in place in the United States, which trails only India’s 386 active measures.

Throughout 2009, a new antidumping or countervailing duty petition was filed in the United States on average once every 10 days.  That means that throughout 2010, as the authorities issue final determinations in those cases every few weeks, the world will be reminded of America’s fetish for imposing trade barriers, as the president (pursuing his “National Export Initiative”) goes on imploring other countries to open their markets to our goods.

Rather than go into the argument more deeply here, Scott Lincicome and I devoted a few pages to the enforcement myth in this overly-audaciously optimistic paper last year, some of which is cited along with some fresh analysis in this Lincicome post.

Sure, the USTR can bring even more cases to try to force greater compliance through the WTO or through our bilateral agreements.  But rest assured that the slam dunk cases have already been filed or simply resolved informally through diplomatic channels.  Any other potential cases need study from the lawyers at USTR because the presumed violations that our politicians frequently and carelessly imply are not necessarily violations when considered in the context of the actual rules.  Of course, there’s also the embarrassing hypocrisy of continuing to bring cases before the WTO dispute settlement system when the United States refuses to comply with the findings of that body on several different matters now.  And let’s not forget the history of U.S. intransigence toward the NAFTA dispute settlement system with Canada over lumber and Mexico over trucks.  Enforcement, like trade, is a two-way street.

And sure, more antidumping and countervailing duty petitions can be filed and cases initiated, but that is really the prerogative of industry, not the administration or Congress.  Industry brings cases when the evidence can support findings of ”unfair trade” and domestic injury.  The process is on statutory auto-pilot and requires nothing further from the Congress or president. Thus, assertions by industry and members of Congress about a lack of enforcement in the trade remedies area are simply attempts to drum up support for making the laws even more restrictive.  It has nothing to do with a lack of enforcement of the current rules.  They simply want to change the rules.

In closing, I’m happy the president thinks export growth is a good idea.  But I would implore him to recognize that import growth is much more closely correlated with export growth than is heightened enforcement.  The nearby chart confirms the extremely tight, positive relationship between export and imports, both of which track similarly closely to economic growth.

U.S. producers (who happen also to be our exporters) account for more than half of all U.S. import value.  Without imports of raw materials, components, and other intermediate goods, the cost of production in the United States would be much higher, and export prices less competitive.  If the president wants to promote exports, he must welcome, and not hinder, imports.

Time to Lose the Trade Enforcement Fig Leaf is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

We’ve got an IRS Commissioner who doesn’t even do his own taxes, and is not embarrassed about it. We’ve got complex deductions that nobody understands, including the government, as the Maryland nurse with the MBA found out. We’ve got a Treasury Secretary and other high appointees who apparently cheated on their taxes. And we’ve got the Democrats hell-bent on greatly increasing the power and responsibilities of the overwhelmed IRS with their health care bill.

Now, more than ever, it’s time to scrap the current income tax and put in a flat tax. Or at least we could take a big jump in that direction with a “Simplified Tax,” as discussed in a new National Academies report. Get rid of all almost all deductions, exemptions, and credits and drop individual rates to 10 and 25 percent. While we’re at it, let’s drop the federal corporate rate to 25 percent or less.

For more on the two-rate tax idea, see my Options for Tax Reform and Rep. Paul Ryan’s American Roadmap.

Reforming the Insane Tax Code is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In a new study titled, “Obama’s Prescription for Low-Wage Workers: High Implicit Taxes, Higher Premiums,” I show that the House and Senate health care bills would impose implicit tax rates on low-wage workers that exceed 100 percent.  Here’s the executive summary:

House and Senate Democrats have produced health care legislation whose mandates, subsidies, tax penalties, and health insurance regulations would penalize work and reward Americans who refuse to purchase health insurance. As a result, the legislation could trap many Americans in low-wage jobs and cause even higher health-insurance premiums, government spending, and taxes than are envisioned in the legislation.

Those mandates and subsidies would impose effective marginal tax rates on low-wage workers that would average between 53 and 74 percent— and even reach as high as 82 percent—over broad ranges of earned income. By comparison, the wealthiest Americans would face tax rates no higher than 47.9 percent.

Over smaller ranges of earned income, the legislation would impose effective marginal tax rates that exceed 100 percent. Families of four would see effective marginal tax rates as high as 174 percent under the Senate bill and 159 percent under the House bill. Under the Senate bill, adults starting at $14,560 who earn an additional $560 would see their total income fall by $200 due to higher taxes and reduced subsidies. Under the House bill, families of four starting at $43,670 who earn an additional $1,100 would see their total income fall by $870.

In addition, middle-income workers could save as much as $8,000 per year by dropping coverage and purchasing health insurance only when sick. Indeed, the legislation effectively removes any penalty on such behavior by forcing insurers to sell health insurance to the uninsured at standard premiums when they fall ill. The legislation would thus encourage “adverse selection”—an unstable situation that would drive insurance premiums, government spending, and taxes even higher.

See also my Kaiser Health News oped, “Individual Mandate Would Impose High Implicit Taxes on Low-Wage Workers.”

And be sure to pre-register for our January 28 policy forum, “ObamaCare’s High Implicit Tax Rates for Low-Wage Workers,” where the Urban Institute’s Gene Steuerle and I will discuss these obnoxious implicit tax rates.

(Cross-posted at Politico‘s Health Care Arena.)

Dear Poor People: Please Remain Poor. Sincerely, ObamaCare is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

An earlier post revealed that higher tax rates in Maryland were backfiring, leading to less revenue from upper-income taxpayers. It seems New York politicians are running into a similar problem. According to an AP report, the state’s 100 richest taxpayers have paid $1 billion less than expected following a big tax hike. The story notes that several rich people have left the state, and all three examples are about people who have redomiciled in Florida, which has no state income tax. For more background information on why higher taxes on the rich do not necessarily raise revenue, see this three-part Laffer Curve video series (here, here, and here):

Early data from New York show the higher tax rates for the wealthy have yielded lower-than-expected state wealth.

…[New York Governor David] Paterson said last week that revenues from the income tax increases and other taxes enacted in April are running about 20 percent less than anticipated.

…So far this year, half of about $1 billion in expected revenue from New York’s 100 richest taxpayers is missing.

…State officials say they don’t know how much of the missing revenue is because any wealthy New Yorkers simply left. But at least two high-profile defectors have sounded off on the tax changes: Buffalo Sabres owner Tom Golisano, the billionaire who ran for governor three times and who was paying $13,000 a day in New York income taxes, and radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh.

…Donald Trump told Fox News earlier this year that several of his millionaire friends were talking about leaving the state over the latest taxes.

Revenge of the Laffer Curve, Part II is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

KPMG has released its annual survey of personal income tax rates around the world. The survey covers 86 countries, including all the high-income nations and many middle- and lower-income nations, such as Brazil, China, and India.

The chart shows the top personal income tax rates in 2009 for national governments, per the KPMG study. The current top U.S. rate is 35 percent, which is substantially above the 86-country average of 28.9 percent. The Obama administration plans to let the U.S. rate jump to 39.6 percent in 2011, which would be almost 11 points higher than the international average.

Worse still, the United States has state income taxes with rates up to 10 percent that are piled on top of the federal tax. Some of the nations in the survey (e.g. Canada) also have subnational income taxes, but many, or  most, of them do not.

Finally, note that supporters of government health care expansion have been eyeing further increases in the top U.S. tax rate above 40 percent. Alas, we need more of the Global Tax Revolution to sweep across our shores.

More Evidence on America’s Socialism is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Will the President raise taxes on new tires?

President Obama will need to decide any day now whether to impose tariffs on lower-end automobile tires imported from China. As my colleague Dan Ikenson has ably argued, the decision will tell us much about whether the president believes trade policy should serve the general interest of all Americans, or whether it is simply a political tool to satisfy key constituencies.

Neglected in the news coverage of the pending decision is the impact it could have on consumers. The imported tires targeted by this Section 421 case are of the cheaper variety, the kind that low-income Americans would buy to keep their cars on the road during a recession. If the president decides to impose tariffs, his union supporters will cheer, but “working families’ will find it more difficult to keep their cars running safely.

A central theme of my new Cato book, Mad about Trade: Why Main Street America Should Embrace Globalization, is that import competition is a working family’s best friend, especially imports from China. As I write in an excerpt published in today’s Washington Examiner,

Imports from China have delivered lower prices on goods that matter most to the poor, helping to offset other forces in our economy that tend to widen income inequality. …

Imposing steep tariffs on imports from China would, of course, hurt producers and workers in China, but it would also punish millions of American consumers through higher prices for shoes, clothing, toys, sporting goods, bicycles, TVs, radios, stereos, and personal and laptop computers.

We will see shortly if President Obama will punish low-income Americans who drive.

A Flat Tire for Low-Income Drivers? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The housing boom and bust that occurred earlier in this decade resulted from efforts by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — the government sponsored enterprises with implicit backing from taxpayers — to extend mortgage credit to high-risk borrowers. This lending did not impose appropriate conditions on borrower income and assets, and it included loans with minimal down payments. We know how that turned out.

Did U.S. policymakers learn their lessons from this debacle and stop subsidizing mortgage lending to risky borrowers? NO. Instead, the Federal Housing Authority lept into the breach:

The FHA insures private lenders against defaults on certain home mortgages, an inducement to make such loans. Insurance from the New Deal-era agency has enabled lending to buyers who can’t make a big down payment or who want to refinance but have little equity. Most private lenders have sharply curtailed credit to those borrowers.

In the past two years, the number of loans insured by the FHA has soared and its market share reached 23% in the second quarter, up from 2.7% in 2006, according to Inside Mortgage Finance. FHA-backed loans outstanding totaled $429 billion in fiscal 2008, a number projected to hit $627 billion this year.

And what is the result of this surge in FHA insurance?

The Federal Housing Administration, hit by increasing mortgage-related losses, is in danger of seeing its reserves fall below the level demanded by Congress, according to government officials, in a development that could raise concerns about whether the agency needs a taxpayer bailout.

This is madness. Repeat after me: TANSTAAFL (There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch).

C/P Libertarianism, from A to Z

Housing Bailouts: Lessons Not Learned is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

USA Today reports that President Obama is seeking a cap on federal pay raises:

President Obama urged Congress Monday to limit cost-of-living pay raises to 2% for 1.3 million federal employees in 2010, extending an income squeeze that has hit private workers and threatens Social Security recipients and even 401(k) investors.

…The president’s action comes when consumer prices have fallen 2.1% in the 12 months ending in July, because of a massive drop in energy prices. The recession has taken an even tougher toll on private-sector wages, which rose only 1.5% for the year ended in June — the lowest increase since the government started keeping track in 1980. Private-sector workers also have been subject to widespread layoffs and furloughs.

Last week, economist Chris Edwards discussed data from the Bureau of Economic research that revealed the large gap between the average pay of federal employees and private workers. His call to freeze federal pay “for a year or two” received attention and criticism, (FedSmith, GovExec, Federal Times, Matt Yglesias, Conor Clarke) to which he has responded.

As explained on CNN earlier this year, the pay gap between federal and private workers has been widening for some time now:

Obama to Seek Cap on Federal Pay Raises is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

House Democrats released their 1,018 page health care reform bill, America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009, yesterday.

This bill is a dog’s breakfast of bad ideas paid for by more than $500 billion in new taxes. The reform would impose an individual mandate on individuals, requiring every American to buy a government designed insurance package or pay a new tax equal to 2.5 percent of their income. At a time of rising unemployment, businesses would be required to provide health insurance to workers or pay a new tax equal to 8 percent of workers wages. These new taxes could drive the total cost to taxpayers much higher than the $500 billion in direct taxes in the bill.

In addition, the bill includes a host of new insurance regulations that will drive up the cost of insurance premiums, and a new government-run insurance plan that will “compete” with private insurance. That government-run plan will ultimately force millions of Americans out of their current insurance plan and into the government-run system. This is a health care “reform” under which Americans will pay more for worse care.

To get an idea of what sort of bureaucratic nightmare that would ensue with passage of this bill is illustrated by the Republican Staff of the Joint Economic Committee here.

For regular updates on the reform process as it progresses, check out Cato’s health care Web site.

The Health Care Reform Bill Will Cost $500 Billion in New Taxes is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In a recently published article for the journal Democracy, Michael Lind of the New America Foundation lays out “The Case for Goliath” (registration required) — i.e., for returning to the good old days of price-and-entry regulation and cartelized industries. No, seriously.

I’ll give Lind credit for daring to go where his fellow devotees of “nostalgianomics” fear to tread.  Many on the left these days look back fondly at the ’50s and ’60s when activist government and strong unions coincided with a narrowing income distribution. What they fail to recognize, or at least admit, is that the political economy of that supposed golden age rested on a systematic muting of competition, both by circumstance and deliberate policy.  The devastation of Europe and Japan in World War II, price-and-entry controls, high trade barriers, and the threat of antitrust enforcement against industry leaders all combined to make heavy unionization and above-market wages for union workers economically viable.

This glaring oversight is understandable. There is, after all, overwhelming economic evidence that competition beats cartelization of industry hands down. When government restricts entry by new firms, the predictable result is a stifling of innovation. For example, consider this admission by former FCC chairman Michael Powell: “Because the history of the FCC is, when something happens that it doesn’t understand, kill it. We tried to kill cable. We tried to kill long-distance. When [MCI founder] Bill McGowan starting stringing out microwave towers that threatened AT&T, the FCC tried to stop him. The FCC tried to kill cable because it was going to threaten broadcasting.” (For more details on the the FCC’s lamentable track record, see here.)

The upshot is that progressive fantasies of a return to the good old days are just that — fantasies. Private-sector unions have withered and shrunk not because of changes in labor law, but because unionized firms haven’t been able to hack it in the new, more competitive marketplace (see “Auto industry, U.S.”). So the only way to get back to the days of Big Labor is by throttling the main engine of innovation and productivity: competition. And, well, that just doesn’t sound very progressive, does it?

Lind, though, grasps the nettle and chooses cartels and unions over economic progress. He does try to argue that we can have our cake and eat it too, but his case boils down to a crude post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy: the big move toward cartelization in the ’30s was followed by good times in the ’50s and ’60s (let’s not talk about the ’70s), so therefore cartelization was good for the economy!  Yes, and the Union won the Civil War with inferior generals, so perhaps poor military leadership is a key to victory. The fact is, the strong economic performance of the early postwar decades occurred in spite of, not because of, widespread restrictions on competition.

Though the anticompetitive nostrums Lind peddles are pure poison, he nonetheless deserves commendation. By identifying correctly the link between cartelization and strong unions, Lind highlights the essentially reactionary nature of progressives’ infatuation with Big Labor. He has therefore, however unwittingly, performed a public service.

Michael Lind’s Economic Philistinism is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog