Tag Archives: taxes

Department of “Duh”

Posted on January 19, 2012 by | 34 Comments

By James Kwak

The Times has a story out today: Surprise, all the Republican candidates’ tax plans increase the national deficit! The numbers (reduction in 2015 tax revenues, from the Tax Policy Center):

  • Romney: $600 billion
  • Gingrich: $1.3 trillion
  • (Late lamented) Perry: $1.0 trillion
  • Santorum: $1.3 trillion

I guess that makes Romney the “fiscally responsible” choice, at least among the Republicans. But President Obama’s tax proposals would only reduce 2015 tax revenues by $222 billion. (That’s $385 billion in Table S-4 less $163 billion in Table S-3.)

Second surprise: The big winners in all of these tax plans are the rich! (That’s not just in dollars, but in percentage increase in after-tax income.)

I don’t mean to be hard on the Times reporters. This is exactly the kind of story they should be writing. Someone has to point out that the same people who are complaining about deficits are proposing to vastly increase those deficits. Especially when their fantastic claims are essentially going unchallenged on the campaign trail.

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Who Wants Tax Cuts?

Posted on November 2, 2011 by | 68 Comments

By James Kwak

Yesterday I wrote an Atlantic column about Republican presidential candidates’ fondness for tax plans that transfer massive amounts of money from the poor to the rich. The main question, to my mind, is why people like Herman Cain and Rick Perry talk about transferring massive amounts of money to the rich when polls show that even a majority of Republicans think the rich should pay more in taxes.

Many of the readers here could probably  have written that column themselves, but it does have a wonderful picture of Cain and Perry in all their well-dressed glory.

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Confused?

Posted on September 20, 2011 by | 74 Comments

By James Kwak

Some of the headline numbers for President Obama’s deficit reduction proposal that you hear are the following:

  • $3 trillion in deficit reduction over ten years—more than the $1.2–1.5 trillion expected from the Joint Select Committee (JSC)
  • $4 trillion in deficit reduction, including the discretionary spending caps in the Budget Control Act
  • $1.5 trillion in tax increases
  • $1 trillion in deficit reduction by capping spending on Iraq and Afghanistan

This didn’t make sense to me for a few reasons, notably that any deal that preserves any of the Bush tax cuts should be scored by the CBO as a tax cut, which increases the deficit. The actual numbers are rather more complicated.

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Posted in Commentary, Debt

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Hoisted from the Archives

Posted on July 6, 2011 by | 12 Comments

By James Kwak

What was the budget debate about eleven years ago?

 

As you can see, that is the cover of the CBO’s March 2000 Budget Options report. (You can get it online, but without the cover.*) For most of the 1980s and 1990s, this report was called Reducing the Deficit: Spending and Revenue Options; this year’s version has reverted to that title.

The context for the picture above was the budget surpluses of the late 1990s. At the time, the CBO was projecting surpluses for at least the next twenty years, amounting to over $3 trillion in the first decade of the twenty-first century. (See the 2000 Budget and Economic Outlook, Summary Table 1.) And although most of the surpluses were off-budget (surpluses of Social Security payroll tax revenues over benefit payouts), there were supposed to be ten years of on-budget surpluses as well.

We all know what happened next: a (mild) recession, the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, and the Medicare prescription drug benefit, among other things. But the question for now is: did those surpluses really exist?

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And in This Corner . . .

Posted on June 7, 2011 by | 9 Comments

By James Kwak

Over in the less-prestigious and less-well-paid online section of the Times, Bruce Bartlett has a good column on the comparative tax burden across advanced economies. He makes the point that one reason European taxes look higher is that we provide subsidies through the tax code while they do it through spending programs like family allowances — another example of how aggregate statistics are distorted by calling something a “tax credit” as opposed to “spending.” His other main point is that the main substantive reason why we pay lower taxes is that we pay for less of our health care spending through the government — and that isn’t working out so well for us.

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My Medicare Deficit Solution

Posted on April 13, 2011 by | 58 Comments

By James Kwak

David Brooks, perhaps realizing that it was a bad idea to swallow a politician’s PR bullet points whole, is now backpedaling. The Ryan Plan, which he originally hailed as “the most comprehensive and most courageous budget reform proposal any of us have seen in our lifetimes,” now has the principal virtue of existing: “Because he had the courage to take the initiative, Paul Ryan’s budget plan will be the starting point for future discussions.”

As I’ve discussed before, the Ryan Plan is just one bad idea dressed up with the false precision of lots of numbers: changing Medicare from a health insurance program to a cash redistribution program that gives up on managing health care costs. Here’s the key chart from the CBO report:

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Posted in Commentary, Debt

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Taxes and Spending for Beginners

Posted on April 10, 2011 by | 43 Comments

By James Kwak

Over the long term, we are projected to have large and growing federal budget deficits. Assuming that is a problem, which most people do, there seem to be two ways to solve this problem: raising taxes and cutting spending. Today, the political class seems united around the idea that spending cuts are the solution, not tax increases. That’s a given for Republicans; Paul Ryan even proposes to reduce the deficit by cutting taxes. But as Ezra Klein points out, President Obama and Harry Reid are falling over themselves praising (and even seeming to claim credit for) the spending cuts in Thursday night’s deal. And let’s not forget the bipartisan, $900 billion tax cut passed and signed in December.

The problem here isn’t simply the assumption that we can’t raise taxes. The underlying problem is the belief that “tax increases” and “spending cuts” are two distinct categories to begin with. In many cases, tax increases and spending cuts are equivalent — except for the crucial issue of who gets hurt by them.*

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Convenient Arguments

Posted on March 27, 2011 by | 66 Comments

By James Kwak

Here’s my solution to our national debt. We have a one-time, 100 percent tax on all wealth (net worth) of all United States residents, with a $10 million per-person exemption. With household wealth at around $60 trillion, that should be plenty to pay off the accumulated debt and shore up Social Security and Medicare for the next century.* The government promises never to do it again. Since we only care about future behavior, a one-time wealth tax should have no impact on people’s incentives to work, and hence no distorting effect on the economy.

Don’t like that idea? How about this one. The Federal Reserve creates $20 trillion in money but, instead of crediting it to large banks’ accounts at the Fed, it credits it to Treasury’s account. Again, no more debt. Again, the Fed promises never to do it again.

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$1.30 > $1.00

Posted on February 11, 2011 by | 172 Comments

By James Kwak

Bruce Bartlett (hat tip Catherine Rampell) reproduces a table from a paper by Suzanne Mettler showing that most people don’t realize that they are beneficiaries of government social programs. For example, 60 percent of people who take the mortgage interest deduction say they “have not used a government social program.” Now, while the mortgage interest deduction is a subsidy designed to enable people buy houses, you could get into an argument about whether it’s really a “social program.” But these are the analogous figures for some more classic welfare programs:

  • Social Security retirement and survivors’ benefits: 44%
  • Unemployment insurance: 43%
  • Medicare: 40%
  • Social Security Disability Insurance: 29%
  • Medicaid: 28%
  • Food stamps: 25%

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Posted in Commentary, Debt

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Who Benefits from Tax Expenditures?

Posted on January 5, 2011 by | 25 Comments

By James Kwak

Ezra Klein points out a new tax expenditure database from The Pew Charitable Trusts. More attention to tax expenditures — exceptions in the tax code that reduce tax revenue or, put another way, subsidies channeled through the tax system* — is always a good thing. But Klein also says something interesting that I don’t agree with:

“they’re basically the welfare state for the middle class, cleverly arranged such that they don’t look like the welfare state for the middle class. If every year, the government sent every American — from the richest CEO to the greenest public-school teacher — a check covering 30 percent of their health-care costs, we’d think that a bit weird. We’d think it much weirder if we only sent the checks to the workers who happened to be at firms that offered benefits. . . .

“Yet that’s pretty much exactly what we do. We just hide it in the tax code rather than write it on a check.”

I agree with all of that, except the bit about the middle class. Tax expenditures primarily benefit the rich, for a few reasons.

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Tax-Exempt Bonds for Beginners

Posted on January 4, 2011 by | 22 Comments

By James Kwak

Felix Salmon linked to an article by David Kotok on Build America Bonds (BAB), which reminded me that I’ve been meaning to write about them (now that they no longer exist). BAB were introduced in the 2009 stimulus bill. If a state or local government issues BAB, the federal government pays 35 percent of the interest on the bonds; the bondholder pays tax on all the interest, as usual for corporate bonds — but not for traditional state or local government bonds (“munis”). BAB were initially only authorized for two years, and were not extended in the recent tax cut compromise.

The Republican attack line on BAB is that they “subsidize states in more imprudent-type budget and debt scenarios” (Rick Santelli, quoted in Kotok’s article) or they are “a back-door handout for profligate state and local governments, allowing them to borrow more money while shifting some of the resulting interest costs to the federal government” (Daniel Mitchell). Well yes, BAB are a subsidy for state and local borrowing. But to criticize them for that without even mentioning the alternative is either uninformed or irresponsible.

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The Moderate Republican Stimulus

Posted on December 13, 2010 by | 87 Comments

By James Kwak

One of the great things about the Internet, as opposed to, say, law school, is that other smart people will do my homework for me. Last week I said that Obama’s position on the tax cuts was a “moderate-Republican line in the sand” and that the tax deal was closer to the Republicans’ ideal outcome than the Democrats’, but the latter argument was based on some guesses about Republican preferences. Now Mike Konczal has done some of the harder argument, uncovering hard evidence that the Republicans would have agreed to the extended child tax credit sweetener anyway and presenting five points for the argument that the Republicans wanted payroll tax cuts – in particular, they wanted them more than Making Work Pay tax credit that they replaced.

Here’s Mike’s version of the administration’s chart:

He calls it the “Moderate Republican Stimulus Package 2.0.”

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Who Wanted What?

Posted on December 10, 2010 by | 87 Comments

By James Kwak

Look, I’m familiar with the argument for the tax cut deal. It’s not a terrible argument. In simple form, it goes, the top priorities are to stimulate the economy and to cushion the impact of unemployment, and a two-year tax cut extension was worth it to get that, especially since we can kill the Bush tax cuts in 2012. Now, no one who wasn’t born yesterday buys that bit about killing the Bush tax cuts in 2012, but you could still make the argument that two years of stimulus is worth making the tax cuts effectively permanent. (I don’t agree, but it’s not a crazy argument.)

But that’s not Austan Goolsbee’s argument on YouTube.

Here’s his slide:

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Tax Cut Ironies

Posted on December 6, 2010 by | 117 Comments

By James Kwak

From The New York Times:

“Congressional Republicans in recent days have blocked efforts by Democrats to extend the jobless aid, saying they would insist on offsetting the $56 billion cost with spending cuts elsewhere.”

Instead, as it turns out, they agreed to offset the cost with tax cuts elsewhere.

Still, though, I place the blame for this one squarely on the White House. The Republicans are just doing what Republicans do: arguing for lower government spending and lower taxes. The fact that they justify the former by saying it will cut the deficit and the latter by saying it will stimulate the economy (when you could just as easily switch the arguments and make them point the other way) is just a detail.

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Why Our Tax Code?

Posted on November 17, 2010 by | 45 Comments

By James Kwak

In honor of the deficit commission, Ezra Klein is running a number of posts about the commission’s proposals and our tax code, including one about the mortgage interest tax deduction. Although this is often defended as a middle-class tax break, on a percentage-of-income basis it mainly benefits people between the 80th and 99th income percentiles; above that they make so much money that they can’t buy big enough houses to keep up. (On a dollar basis, of course, the correlation between income and tax savings is perfect.)

This should not be surprising, since like any itemized deduction (a) it’s worthless if you have a small house and take the standard deduction instead, (b) it’s proportional to the size of your mortgage, and (c) it’s proportional to your tax bracket. Klein says, “I’m not really clear why we’re giving people making hundreds of thousands a year large subsidies to buy a house, but I’m sure there’s a good reason.” I’m sure he knows the reason, but I’ll spell it out anyway.

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