Jon Stewart

How about we listen to the Nobel Laureate when we set our taxes?

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JDN 2457321 EDT 11:20

I know I’m going out on a limb here, but I think it would generally be a good thing if we based our tax system on the advice of Nobel Laureate economists. Joseph Stiglitz wrote a tax policy paper for the Roosevelt Institution last year that describes in detail how our tax system could be reformed to simultaneously restore economic growth, reduce income inequality, promote environmental sustainability, and in the long run even balance the budget. What’s more, he did the math (I suppose Nobel Laureate economists are known for that), and it looks like his plan would actually work.

The plan is good enough that I think it’s worth going through in some detail.

He opens by reminding us that our “debt crisis” is of our own making, the result of politicians (and voters) who don’t understand economics:

“But we should be clear that these crises – which have resulted in a government shutdown and a near default on the national debt – are not economic but political. The U.S. is not like Greece, unable to borrow to fund its debt and deficit. Indeed, the U.S. has been borrowing at negative real interest rates.”

Stiglitz pulls no punches against bad policies, and isn’t afraid to single out conservatives:

“We also show that some of the so-called reforms that conservatives propose would be counterproductive – they could simultaneously reduce growth and economic welfare and increase unemployment and inequality. It would be better to have no reform than these reforms.”

A lot of the news media keep trying to paint Bernie Sanders as a far-left radical candidate (like this article in Politico calling his hometown the “People’s Republic of Burlington”), because he says things like this: “in recent years, over 99 percent of all new income generated in the economy has gone to the top 1 percent.”

But the following statement was not said by Bernie Sanders, it was said by Joseph Stiglitz, who I will remind you one last time is a world-renowned Nobel Laureate economist:

“The weaknesses in the labor market are reflected in low wages and stagnating incomes. That helps explain why 95 percent of the increase in incomes in the three years after the recovery officially began went to the upper 1 percent. For most Americans, there has been no recovery.”

It was also Stiglitz who said this:

“The American Dream is, in reality, a myth. The U.S. has some of the worst inequality across generations (social mobility) among wealthy nations. The life prospects of a young American are more dependent on the income and education of his parents than in other advanced countries.”

In this country, we have reached the point where policies supported by the analysis of world-renowned economists is considered far-left radicalism, while the “mainstream conservative” view is a system of tax policy that is based on pure fantasy, which has been called “puppies and rainbows” by serious policy analysts and “voodoo economics” by yet another Nobel Laureate economist. A lot of very smart people don’t understand what’s happening in our political system, and want “both sides” to be “equally wrong”, but that is simply not the case: Basic facts of not just social science (e.g. Keynesian monetary policy), but indeed natural science (evolutionary biology, anthropogenic climate change) are now considered “political controversies” because the right wing doesn’t want to believe them.

But let’s get back to the actual tax plan Stiglitz is proposing. He is in favor of raising some taxes and lowering others, spending more on some things and less on other things. His basic strategy is actually quite simple: Raise taxes with low multipliers and cut taxes with high multipliers. Raise spending with high multipliers and cut spending with low multipliers.

“While in general taxes take money out of the system, and therefore have a deflationary bias, some taxes have a larger multiplier than others, i.e. lead to a greater reduction in aggregate demand per dollar of revenue raised. Taxes on the rich and superrich, who save a large fraction of their income, have the least adverse effect on aggregate demand. Taxes on lower income individuals have the most adverse effect on aggregate demand.”

In other words, by making the tax system more progressive, we can directly stimulate economic growth while still increasing the amount of tax revenue we raise. And of course we have plenty of other moral and economic reasons to prefer progressive taxation.

Stiglitz tears apart the “job creator” myth:

“It is important to dispel a misunderstanding that one often hears from advocates of lower taxes for the rich and corporations, which contends that the rich are the job producers, and anything that reduces their income will reduce their ability and incentive to create jobs. First, at the current time, it is not lack of funds that is holding back investment. It is not even a weak and dysfunctional financial sector. America’s large corporations are sitting on more than $2 trillion in cash. What is holding back investment, especially by large corporations, is the lack of demand for their products.”

Stiglitz talks about two principles of taxation to follow:

First is the Generalized Henry George Principle, that we should focus taxes on things that are inelastic, meaning their supply isn’t likely to change much with the introduction of a tax. Henry George favored taxing land, which is quite inelastic indeed. The reason we do this is to reduce the economic distortions created by a tax; the goal is to collect revenue without changing the number of real products that are bought and sold. We need to raise revenue and we want to redistribute income, but we want to do it without creating unnecessary inefficiencies in the rest of the economy.

Second is the Generalized Polluter Pays Principle, that we should tax things that have negative externalities—effects on other people that are harmful. When a transaction causes harm to others who were not party to the transaction, we should tax that transaction in an amount equal to the harm that it would cause, and then use that revenue to offset the damage. In effect, if you hurt someone else, you should have to pay to clean up your own mess. This makes obvious moral sense, but it also makes good economic sense; taxing externalities can improve economic efficiency and actually make everyone better off. The obvious example is again pollution (the original Polluter Pays Principle), but there are plenty of other examples as well.

Stiglitz of course supports taxes on pollution and carbon emissions, which really should be a no-brainer. They aren’t just good for the environment, they would directly increase economic efficiency. The only reason we don’t have comprehensive pollution taxes (or something similar like cap-and-trade) is again the political pressure of right-wing interests.

Stiglitz focuses in particular on the externalities of the financial system, the boom-and-bust cycle of bubble, crisis, crash that has characterized so much of our banking system for generations. With a few exceptions, almost every major economic crisis has been preceded by some sort of breakdown of the financial system (and typically widespread fraud by the way). It is not much exaggeration to say that without Wall Street there would be no depressions. Externalities don’t get a whole lot bigger than that.

Stiglitz proposes a system of financial transaction taxes that are designed to create incentives against the most predatory practices in finance, especially the high-frequency trading in which computer algorithms steal money from the rest of the economy thousands of times per second. Even a 0.01% tax on each financial transaction would probably be enough to eliminate this particular activity.

He also suggests the implementation of “bonus taxes” which disincentivize paying bonuses, which could basically be as simple as removing the deductions placed during the Clinton administration (in a few years are we going to have to say “the first Clinton administration”?) that exempt “performance-based pay” from most forms of income tax. All pay is performance-based, or supposed to be. There should be no special exemption for bonuses and stock options.

Stiglitz also proposes a “bank rescue fund” which would be something like an expansion of the FDIC insurance that banks are already required to have, but designed as catastrophe insurance for the whole macroeconomy. Instead of needing bailed out from general government funds, banks would only be bailed out from a pool of insurance funds they paid in themselves. This could work, but honestly I think I’d rather reduce the moral hazard even more by saying that we will never again bail out banks directly, but instead bail out consumers and real businesses. This would probably save banks anyway (most people don’t default on debts if they can afford to pay them), and if it doesn’t, I don’t see why we should care. The only reason banks exist is to support the real economy; if we can support the real economy without them, they deserve to die. That basic fact seems to have been lost somewhere along the way, and we keep talking about how to save or stabilize the financial system as if it were valuable unto itself.

Stiglitz also proposes much stricter regulations on credit cards, which would require them to charge much lower transaction fees and also pay a portion of their transaction revenue in taxes. I think it’s fair to ask whether we need credit cards at all, or if there’s some alternative banking system that would allow people to make consumer purchases without paying 20% annual interest. (It seems like there ought to be, doesn’t it?)

Next Stiglitz gets to his proposal to reform the corporate income tax. Like many of us, he is sick of corporations like Apple and GE with ten and eleven-figure profits paying little or no taxes by exploiting a variety of loopholes. He points out some of the more egregious ones, like the “step up of basis at death” which allows inherited capital to avoid taxation (personally, I think both morally and economically the optimal inheritance tax rate is 100%!), as well as the various loopholes on offshore accounting which allow corporations to design and sell their products in the US, even manufacture them here, and pay taxes as if all their work were done in the Cayman Islands. He also points out that the argument that corporate taxes disincentivize investment is ridiculous, because most investment is financed by corporate bonds which are tax-deductible.

Stiglitz departs from most other economists in that he actually proposes raising the corporate tax rate itself. Most economists favor cutting the rate on paper, then closing the loopholes to ensure that the new rate is actually paid. Stiglitz says this is not enough, and we must both close the loopholes and increase the rate.

I’m actually not sure I agree with him on this; the incidence of corporate taxes is not very well-understood, and I think there’s a legitimate worry that taxing Apple will make iPhones more expensive without actually taking any money from Tim Cook. I think it would be better to get rid of the corporate tax entirely and then dramatically raise the marginal rates on personal income, including not only labor income but also all forms of capital income. Instead of taxing Apple hoping it will pass through to Tim Cook, I say we just tax Tim Cook. Directly tax his $4 million salary and $70 million in stock options.

Stiglitz does have an interesting proposal to introduce “rent-seeking” taxes that specifically apply to corporations which exercise monopoly or oligopoly power. If you can actually get this to work, it’s very clever; you could actually create a market incentive for corporations to support their own competition—and not in the sense of collusion but in the sense of actually trying to seek out more competitive markets in order to avoid the monopoly tax. Unfortunately, Stiglitz is a little vague on how we’d actually pull that off.

One thing I do agree with Stiglitz on is the use of refundable tax credits to support real investment. Instead of this weird business about not taxing dividends and capital gains in the hope that maybe somehow this will support real investment, we actually give tax credits specifically to companies that build factories or hire more workers.

Stiglitz also does a good job of elucidating the concept of “corporate welfare”, officially called “tax expenditures”, in which subsidies for corporations are basically hidden in the tax code as rebates or deductions. This is actually what Obama was talking about when he said “spending in the tax code”, (he did not invent the concept of tax expenditures), but since he didn’t explain himself well even Jon Stewart accused him of Orwellian Newspeak. Economically a refundable tax rebate of $10,000 is exactly the same thing as a subsidy of $10,000. There are some practical and psychological differences, but there are no real economic differences. If you’re still confused about tax expenditures, the Center for American Progress has a good policy memo on the subject.

Stiglitz also has some changes to make to the personal income tax, all of which I think are spot-on. First we increase the marginal rates, particularly at the very top. Next we equalize rates on all forms of income, including capital income. Next, we remove most, if not all, of the deductions that allow people to avoid paying the rate it says on paper. Finally, we dramatically simplify the tax code so that the majority of people can file a simplified return which basically just says, “This is my income. This is the tax rate for that income. This is what I owe.” You wouldn’t have to worry about itemizing your student loans or mortgage payments or whatever else; just tally up your income and look up your rate. As he points out, this would save a lot of people a lot of stress and also remove a lot of economic distortions.

He talks about how we can phase out the mortgage-interest deduction in particular, because it’s clearly inefficient and regressive but it’s politically popular and dropping it suddenly could lead to another crisis in housing prices.

Stiglitz has a deorbit for anyone who thinks capital income should not be taxed:

“There is, moreover, no justification for taxing those who work hard to earn a living at a higher rate than those who derive their income from speculation.”

By equalizing rates on labor and capital income, he estimates we could raise an additional $130 billion per year—just shy of what it would take to end world hunger. (Actually some estimates say it would be more than enough, others that it would be about half what we need. It’s definitely in the ballpark, however.)

Stiglitz actually proposes making a full deduction of gross household income at $100,000, meaning that the vast majority of Americans would pay no income tax at all. This is where he begins to lose me, because it necessarily means we aren’t going to raise enough revenue by income taxes alone.

He proposes to make up the shortfall by introducing a value-added tax, a VAT. I have to admit a lot of countries have these (including most of Europe) and seem to do all right with them; but I never understood why they are so popular among economists. They are basically sales taxes, and it’s very hard to make any kind of sales tax meaningfully progressive. In fact, they are typically regressive, because rich people spend a smaller proportion of their income than poor people do. Unless we specifically want to disincentivize buying things (and a depression is not the time to do that!), I don’t see why we would want to switch to a sales tax.

At the end of the paper Stiglitz talks about the vital difference between short-term spending cuts and long-term fiscal sustainability:

“Thus, policies that promote output and employment today also contribute to future growth – particularly if they lead to more investment. Thus, austerity measures that take the form of cutbacks in spending on infrastructure, technology, or education not only weaken the economy today, but weaken it in the future, both directly (through the obvious impacts, for example, on the capital stock) but also indirectly, through the diminution in human capital that arises out of employment or educational experience. […] Mindless “deficit fetishism” is likely to be counterproductive. It will weaken the economy and prove counterproductive to raising revenues because the main reason that we are in our current fiscal position is the weak economy.”

It amazes me how many people fail to grasp this. No one would say that paying for college is fiscally irresponsible, because we know that all that student debt will be repaid by your increased productivity and income later on; yet somehow people still think that government subsidies for education are fiscally irresponsible. No one would say that it is a waste of money for a research lab to buy new equipment in order to have a better chance at making new discoveries, yet somehow people still think it is a waste of money for the government to fund research. The most legitimate form of this argument is “crowding-out”, the notion that the increased government spending will be matched by an equal or greater decrease in private spending; but the evidence shows that many public goods—like education, research, and infrastructure—are currently underfunded, and if there is any crowding-out, it is much smaller than the gain produced by the government investment. Crowding-out is theoretically possible but empirically rare.

Above all, now is not the time to fret about deficits. Now is the time to fret about unemployment. We need to get more people working; we need to create jobs for those who are already seeking them, better jobs for those who have them but want more, and opportunities for people who have given up searching for work to keep trying. To do that, we need spending, and we will probably need deficits. That’s all right; once the economy is restored to full capacity then we can adjust our spending to balance the budget (or we may not even need to, if we devise taxes correctly).

Of course, I fear that most of these policies will fall upon deaf ears; but Stiglitz calls us to action:

“We can reform our tax system in ways that will strengthen the economy today, address current economic and social problems, and strengthen our economy for the future. The economic agenda is clear. The question is, will the vested interests which have played such a large role in creating the current distorted system continue to prevail? Do we have the political will to create a tax system that is fair and serves the interests of all Americans?”

Should we raise the minimum wage?

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JDN 2456949 PDT 10:22.

The minimum wage is an economic issue that most people are familiar with; a large portion of the population has worked for minimum wage at some point in their lives, and those who haven’t generally know someone who has. As Chris Rock famously remarked (in the recording, Chris Rock, as usual, uses some foul language), “You know what that means when they pay you minimum wage? You know what they’re trying to tell you? It’s like, ‘Hey, if I could pay you less, I would; but it’s against the law.’ ”

The minimum wage was last raised in 2009, but adjusted for inflation its real value has been trending downward since 1968. The dollar values are going up, but not fast enough to keep up with inflation.

So, should we raise it again? How much? Should we just match it to inflation, or actually raise it higher in real terms? Productivity (in terms of GDP per worker) has more than doubled since 1968, so perhaps the minimum wage should double as well?

There are two major sides in this debate, and I basically disagree with both of them.

The first is the right-wing view (here espoused by the self-avowed “Objectivist” Don Watkins) that the minimum wage should be abolished entirely because it is an arbitrary price floor that prevents workers from selling their labor at whatever wage the market will bear. He argues that the free market is the only way the value of labor should be assessed and the government has no business getting involved.

On the other end of the spectrum we have Robert Reich, who thinks we should definitely raise the minimum wage and it would be the best way to lift workers out of poverty. He argues that by providing minimum-wage workers with welfare and Medicaid, we are effectively subsidizing employers to pay lower wages. While I sympathize a good deal more with this view, I still don’t think it’s quite right.

Why not? Because Watkins is right about one thing: The minimum wage is, in fact, an arbitrary price floor. Out of all the possible wages that an employer could pay, how did we decide that this one should be the lowest? And the same applies to everyone, no matter who they are or what sort of work they do?

What Watkins gets wrong—and Reich gets right—is that wages are not actually set in a free and competitive market. Large corporations have market power; they can influence wages and prices to their own advantage. They use monopoly power to raise prices, and its inverse, monopsony power, to lower wages. The workers who are making a minimum wage of $7.25 wouldn’t necessarily make $7.25 in a competitive market; they could make more than that. All we know, actually, is that they would make at least this much, because if a worker’s marginal productivity is below the minimum wage the corporation simply wouldn’t have hired them.

Monopsony power doesn’t just lower wages; it also reduces employment. One of the ways that corporations can control wages is by controlling hiring; if they tried to hire more people, they’d have to offer a higher wage, so instead they hire fewer people. Under these circumstances, a higher minimum wage can actually create jobs, as Reich argues it will. And in this particular case I think he’s right about that, because corporations have enormous market power to hold wages down and in the Second Depression we have a huge amount of unused productive capacity. But this isn’t true in general. If markets are competitive, then raising minimum wage just causes unemployment. Even when corporations have market power, if there isn’t much unused capacity then raising minimum wage will just lead them to raise prices instead of hiring more workers.

Reich is also wrong about this idea that welfare payments subsidize low wages. On the contrary, the stronger your welfare system, the higher your wages will be. The reason is quite simple: A stronger welfare system gives workers more bargaining power. If not getting this job means you turn to prostitution or starve to death, then you’re going to take just about any wage they offer you. (I don’t entirely agree with Krugman’s defense of sweatshops—I believe there are ways to increase trade without allowing oppressive working conditions—but he makes this point quite vividly.) On the other hand, if you live in the US with a moderate welfare system, you can sometimes afford to say no; you might end up broke or worse, homeless, but you’re unlikely to starve to death because at least you have food stamps. And in a nation with a really robust welfare system like Sweden, you can walk away from any employer who offers to pay you less than your labor is worth, because you know that even if you can’t find a job for awhile your basic livelihood will be protected. As a result, stronger welfare programs make labor markets more competitive and raise wages. Welfare and Medicaid do not subsidize low-wage employers; they exert pressure on employers to raise their low wages. Indeed, a sufficiently strong welfare system could render minimum wage redundant, as I’ll get back to at the end of this post.

Of course, I am above all an empiricist; all theory must bow down before the data. So what does the data say? Does raising the minimum wage create jobs or destroy jobs? Our best answer from compiling various studies is… neither. Moderate increases in the minimum wage have no discernible effect on employment. In some studies we’ve found increases, in others decreases, but the overall average effect across many studies is indistinguishable from zero.

Of course, a sufficiently large increase is going to decrease employment; a Fox News reporter once famously asked: “Why not raise the minimum wage to $100,000 an hour!?” (which Jon Stewart aptly satirized as “Why not pay people in cocaine and unicorns!?”) Yes, raising the minimum wage to $100,000 an hour would create massive inflation and unemployment. But that really says nothing about whether raising the minimum wage to $10 or $20 would be a good idea. Covering your car with 4000 gallons of gasoline is a bad idea, but filling it with 10 gallons is generally necessary for its proper functioning.

This kind of argument is actually pretty common among Republicans, come to think of it. Take the Laffer Curve, for instance; it’s basically saying that since a 99% tax on everyone would damage the economy (which is obviously true) then a 40% tax specifically on millionaires must have the same effect. Another good one is Rush Limbaugh’s argument that if unemployment benefits are good, why not just put everyone on unemployment benefits? Well, again, because there’s a difference between doing something for some people sometimes and doing it for everyone all the time. There are these things called numbers; they measure whether something is bigger or smaller instead of just “there” or “not there”. You might want to learn about that.

Since moderate increases in minimum wage have no effect on unemployment, and we are currently under conditions of extremely low—in fact, dangerously low—inflation, then I think on balance we should go with Reich: Raising the minimum wage would do more good than harm.

But in general, is minimum wage the best way to help workers out of poverty? No, I don’t think it is. It’s awkward and heavy-handed; it involves trying to figure out what the optimal wage should be and writing it down in legislation, instead of regulating markets so that they will naturally seek that optimal level and respond to changes in circumstances. It only helps workers at the very bottom: Someone making $12 an hour is hardly rich, but they won’t benefit from increasing minimum wage to $10; in fact they might be worse off, if that increase triggers inflation that lowers the real value of their $12 wage.

What do I propose instead? A basic income. There should be a cash payment that every adult citizen receives, once a month, directly from the government—no questions asked. You don’t have to be unemployed, you don’t have to be disabled, you don’t have to be looking for work. You don’t have to spend it on anything in particular; you can use it for food, for housing, for transportation; or if you like you can use it for entertainment or save it for a rainy day. We don’t keep track of what you do with it, because it’s your own freedom and none of our business. We just give you this money as your dividends for being a shareholder in the United States of America.

This would be extremely easy to implement—the IRS already has all the necessary infrastructure, they just need to turn some minus signs into plus signs. We could remove all the bureaucracy involved in administering TANF and SNAP and Medicaid, because there’s no longer any reason to keep track of who is in poverty since nobody is. We could in fact fold the $500 billion a year we currently spend on means-tested programs into the basic income itself. We could pull another $300 billion from defense spending while still solidly retaining the world’s most powerful military.

Which brings me to the next point: How much would this cost? Probably less than you think. I propose indexing the basic income to the poverty line for households of 2 or more; since currently a household of 2 or more at the poverty line makes $15,730 per year, the basic income would be $7,865 per person per year. The total cost of giving that amount to each of the 243 million adults in the United States would be $1.9 trillion, or about 12% of our GDP. If we fold in the means-tested programs, that lowers the net cost to $1.4 trillion, 9% of GDP. This means that an additional flat tax of 9% would be enough to cover the entire amount, even if we don’t cut any other government spending.

If you use a progressive tax system like I recommended a couple of posts ago, you could raise this much with a tax on less than 5% of utility, which means that someone making the median income of $30,000 would only pay 5.3% more than they presently do. At the mean income of $50,000, you’d only pay 7.7%. And keep in mind that you are also receiving the additional $7,865; so in fact in both cases you actually end up with more than you had before the basic income was implemented. The break-even point is at about $80,000, where you pay an extra 9.9% ($7,920) and receive $7,865, so your after-tax income is now $79,945. Anyone making less than $80,000 per year actually gains from this deal; the only people who pay more than they receive are those who make more than $80,000. This is about the average income of someone in the fourth quintile (the range where 60% to 80% of the population is below you), so this means that roughly 70% of Americans would benefit from this program.

With this system in place, we wouldn’t need a minimum wage. Working full-time at our current minimum wage makes you $7.25*40*52 = $15,080 per year. If you are a single person, you’re getting $7,865 from the basic income, this means that you’ll still have more than you presently do as long as your employer pays you at least $3.47 per hour. And if they don’t? Well then you can just quit, knowing that at least you have that $7,865. If you’re married, it’s even better; the two of you already get $15,730 from the basic income. If you were previously raising a family working full-time on minimum wage while your spouse is unemployed, guess what: You actually will make more money after the policy no matter what wage your employer pays you.

This system can adapt to changes in the market, because it is indexed to the poverty level (which is indexed to inflation), and also because it doesn’t say anything about what wage an employer pays. They can pay as little or as much as the market will bear; but the market is going to bear more, because workers can afford to quit. Billionaires are going to hate this plan, because it raises their taxes (by about 40%) and makes it harder for them to exploit workers. But for 70% of Americans, this plan is a pretty good deal.