Tag: taxes

Economics Puzzler of the Day

Gretchen Morgenson of The New York Times (hat tip Calculated Risk) reports that the recent Worker, Homeownership and Business Assistance Act of 2009 (which included the expansion of the homebuyer tax credit) included a curious tax break for money-losing companies:

“a tax break that lets big companies offset losses incurred in 2008 and 2009 against profits booked as far back as 2004. The tax cuts will generate corporate refunds or relief worth about $33 billion, according to an administration estimate.

“Before the bill became law, the so-called look-back on losses was limited to small businesses and could be used to counterbalance just two years of profits. Now the profit offset goes back five years, and the law allows big companies to take advantage of it, too.”

Morgenson focuses on the fact that some of the biggest beneficiaries will be the massive home-building companies that raked in huge profits during the height of the boom, and that they have no apparent plans to hire new workers. “After spending its $210,000, Pulte will receive $450 million in refunds. And Hovnanian, after spending its $222,000, will get as much as $275 million.” (If you’re not enraged by the behavior of some of these companies, you should read Chapter Five of Our Lot by Alyssa Katz.)

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People Who Think Taxes Will Have to Go Up

David Leonhardt has started a new club, which has already attracted some additional members.

Count me in, in spirit at least (there must be dozens of more prominent people for the Times to bother with). Because, ultimately, I think we Americans are a decent people (or at least a squeamish people), and we will not be able to endure the sight of millions of seniors being thrown onto the streets or deprived of medical care. And so the looming combined shortfall of Medicare, public pensions, private pensions,  and individual savings will at some point motivate us to raise taxes on ourselves.

By James Kwak

$3.5 Million or $5 Million?

In the midst of a severe economic crisis that is, among other things, depressing federal tax revenues and adding to the national debt, the debate over the estate tax has flared up again. The basic question is whether the exemption will be raised from $1 million – where it was in 2002-03 and where it is scheduled to return after the Bush tax cuts expire – to $3.5 million (Obama) or $5 million (Lincoln-Kyl) per person; there is also disagreement over whether the marginal rate should be 35% or 45%. (Note that even with Obama’s proposed 45% tax rate, the average effective tax rate on estate would be 19%, because of the $3.5 million exemption.)

There is plenty of debate over this already, so I will confine myself to three points.

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Causes: Econbrowser Speaks

Other posts in this occasional series.

As you might imagine, I read (or skim) a lot of economics blogs. One of my favorites is Econbrowser, written by James Hamilton and Menzie Chinn. Whereas many blogs tell me good ideas that I didn’t think of but that theoretically I might have come up with (given infinite time and mental alertness), Econbrowser almost invariably teaches me something I absolutely couldn’t have known beforehand.

In the last week, both Hamilton and Chinn have written about the causes of the current economic crisis.

Menzie Chinn

For Chinn, the current situation was created by a “toxic mixture” of:

  • Monetary policy
  • Deregulation
  • Criminal activity and regulatory disarmament
  • Tax cuts and fiscal profligacy
  • Tax policy

He thinks that lax monetary policy was not particularly significant (or, more specifically, the policy was not lax given the information available at the time). He says that some examples of deregulation were more significant than others (repealing Glass-Steagall OK, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act not so much, which is the distinction I also made in an earlier post). Deregulation bleeds into the third point – the abandonment of regulatory agencies of their policing functions, along with examples where regulators committed actual fraud to aid the companies they were supposedly regulating (IndyMac being the prime example).

But the last two points are the ones you don’t hear a lot about. The Bush tax cuts fueled the asset price bubble, especially the second one (in 2003), which came long after the recession had ended and when housing prices were on the steep part of their climb. Under tax policy, Chinn takes aim at the tax deductibility of second homes; combined with tax cuts that largely favored the rich, this increased demand for second homes, and therefore the prices of homes. Right now many people are calling for tax cuts as a way to stimulate the economy, and while you can debate whether tax cuts are more effective than increased spending, that is a reasonable debate to have. In retrospect, the error Chinn is pointing to is cutting taxes – providing a fiscal stimulus, in other words – when it wasn’t needed, at the same time that interest rates were low. Since the Reagan administration, the argument for tax cuts has been to shrink the size of government, increase the incentive to work, and return money to people who know how to spend it better than the government. Only this time, we’ve reached a point where (almost) everyone agrees we need a fiscal stimulus, and the need is so pressing we’re going to ignore the fiscal handcuffs created by the Bush tax cuts, which makes no one happy.

James Hamilton

In a November 2008 lecture, current IMF chief economist Olivier Blanchard discusses the boom in oil prices in a footnote:

How could the very large increase in oil prices from the early 2000s to mid-2008 have such a small apparent impact on economic activity? After all, similar increases are typically blamed for the very deep recessions of
the 1970s and early 1980s.

Hamilton takes almost the opposite approach: maybe it was high oil prices that tipped the global economy into recession. While this may sound preposterous (everyone knows it was housing, right?), remember that the U.S. housing bubble has been front-page news since at least early 2007, yet the peak of financial panic didn’t occur until September-October 2008. Was there really a lot of new information about the subprime mortgage market that appeared during that time? Christopher Dodd was already holding hearings on the subprime meltdown in March 2007 (thanks to Michael Lewis’s book Panic! for reminding me of that.) Or was it something else?

Hamilton takes a 2007 model created by Lutz Kilian and Paul Edelstein of how changes in energy prices affect personal consumption. (Summary: an increase in energy prices that would require a 1% reduction in other purchases to buy the same amount of energy actually leads to a 2.2% decrease in consumption over 15 months.) He then applies the model to actual energy prices since the middle of 2007 and (according to my eyeballing the chart) shows that about half of the falloff in consumption over the period is due to increased energy prices.

The (possible) implication is that if oil had remained at its early 2007 prices, the decline in housing prices that was already clearly visible would not have been enough to cripple the financial system and bring the global economy to its knees. In the process, of course, we ended up with oil in the $30s, but the damage has clearly been done. Hamilton promises to continue this topic in a future post, and I’ll be watching out for it.