Ronald Reagan

We are in a golden age of corporate profits

pnrj current events, inequality, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 2 JDN 245836

Take a good look at this graph, from the Federal Reserve Economic Database:

corporate_profits
The red line is corporate profits before tax. It is, unsurprisingly, the largest. The purple line is corporate profits after tax, with the standard adjustments for inventory depletion and capital costs. The green line is revenue from the federal corporate tax. Finally, I added a dashed blue line which multiplies before-tax profits by 30% to compare more directly with tax revenues. All these figures are annual, inflation-adjusted using the GDP deflator. The units are hundreds of billions of 2012 dollars.

The first thing you should notice is that the red and purple lines are near the highest they have ever been. Before-tax profits are over $2 trillion. After-tax profits are over $1.6 trillion.

Yet, corporate tax revenues are not the highest they have ever been. In 2006, they were over $400 billion; yet this year they don’t even reach $300 billion. The obvious reason for this is that we have been cutting corporate taxes. The more important reason is that corporations have gotten very good at avoiding whatever corporate taxes we charge.

On the books, we used to have a corporate tax rate of about 35%, which Trump just cut to 21%. But if you look at my dashed line, you can see that corporations haven’t actually paid more than 30% of their profits in taxes since 1970—and back then, the rate on the books was almost 50%.

Corporations have always avoided taxes. The effective tax rate—tax revenue divided by profits—is always much lower than the rate on the books. In 1951, the statutory tax rate was 50.75%; the effective rate was 47%. In 1970, the statutory rate was 49.2%; the effective rate was 31%. In 1993, the statutory rate was 35%; the effective rate was 26%. On average, corporations paid about 2/3 to 3/4 of what the statutory rate said.

corporate_tax_rate

You can even see how the effective rate trended steadily downward, much faster than the statutory rate. Corporations got better and better at finding and creating loopholes to let them avoid taxes. In 1950, the statutory rate was 38%—and sure enough, the effective rate was… 38%. Under Truman, corporations actually paid what they said they paid. Compare that to 1987, under Reagan, when the statutory rate was 40%—but the effective rate was only 26%.

Yet even with that downward trend, something happened under George W. Bush that widened the gap even further. While the statutory rate remained fixed at 35%, the effective rate plummeted from 26% in 2000 to 16% in 2002. The effective rate never again rose above 19%, and in 2009 it hit a minimum of just over 10%—less than one-third the statutory tax rate. It was trending upward, making it as “high” as 15%, until Trump’s tax cuts hit; in 2017 it was 13%, and it is projected to be even lower this year.

This is why it has always been disingenuous to compare our corporate tax rates with other countries and complain that they are too high. Our effective corporate tax rates have been in line with most other highly-developed countries for a long time now. The idea of “cutting rates and removing loopholes” sounds good in principle—but never actually seems to happen. George W. Bush’s “tax reforms” which were supposed to do this added so many loopholes that the effective tax rate plummeted.

I’m actually fairly ambivalent about corporate taxes in general. Their incidence really isn’t well-understood, though as Krugman has pointed out, so much of corporate profit is now monopoly rent that we can reasonably expect most of the incidence to fall on shareholders. What I’d really like to see happen is a repeal of the corporate tax combined with an increase in capital gains taxes. But we haven’t been increasing capital gains taxes; we’ve just been cutting corporate taxes.

The result has been a golden age for corporate profits. Make higher profits than ever before, and keep almost all of them without paying taxes! Nevermind that the deficit is exploding and our infrastructure is falling apart. America was founded in part on a hatred of taxes, so I guess we’re still carrying on that proud tradition.

Tax plan possibilities

pnrj core principles, current events, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Mar 26, JDN 2457839

Recently President Trump (that phrase may never quite feel right) began presenting his new tax plan. To be honest, it’s not as ridiculous as I had imagined it might be. I mean, it’s still not very good, but it’s probably better than Reagan’s tax plan his last year in office, and it’s not nearly as absurd as the half-baked plan Trump originally proposed during the campaign.

But it got me thinking about the incredible untapped potential of our tax system—the things we could achieve as a nation, if we were willing to really commit to them and raise taxes accordingly.

A few years back I proposed a progressive tax system based upon logarithmic utility. I now have a catchy name for that tax proposal; I call it the logtax. It depends on two parameters—a poverty level, at which the tax rate goes to zero; and what I like to call a metarate—the fundamental rate that sets all the actual tax rates by the formula.

For the poverty level, I suggest we use the highest 2-household poverty level set by the Department of Health and Human Services: Because of Alaska’s high prices, that’s the Alaska poverty level, and the resulting figure is $20,290—let’s round to $20,000.

I would actually prefer to calculate taxes on an individual basis—I see no reason to incentivize particular household arrangements—but as current taxes are calculated on a household basis, I’m going to use that for now.

The metarate can be varied, and in the plans below I will compare different options for the metarate.

I will compare six different tax plans:

  1. Our existing tax plan, set under the Obama administration
  2. Trump’s proposed tax plan
  3. A flat rate of 30% with a basic income of $12,000, replacing welfare programs and Medicaid
  4. A flat rate of 40% with a basic income of $15,000, replacing welfare programs and Medicaid
  5. A logtax with a metarate of 20%, all spending intact
  6. A logtax with a metarate of 25% and a basic income of $12,000, replacing welfare programs and Medicaid
  7. A logtax with a metarate of 35% and a basic income of $15,000, cutting military spending by 50% and expanding Medicare to the entire population while eliminating Medicare payroll taxes

To do a proper comparison, I need estimates of the income distribution in the United States, in order to properly estimate the revenue from each type of tax. For that I used US Census data for most of the income data, supplementing with the World Top Incomes database for the very highest income brackets. The household data is broken up into brackets of $5,000 and only goes up to $250,000, so it’s a rough approximation to use the average household income for each bracket, but it’s all I’ve got.

The current brackets are 10%, 15%, 25%, 28%, 33%, 35%, and 39.6%. These are actually marginal rates, not average rates, which makes the calculation a lot more complicated. I did it properly though; for example, when you start paying the marginal rate of 28%, your average rate is really only 20.4%.

Worst of all, I used static scoring—that is, I ignored the Laffer Effect by which increasing taxes changes incentives and can change pre-tax incomes. To really do this analysis properly, one should use dynamic scoring, taking these effects into account—but proper dynamic scoring is an enormous undertaking, and this is a blog post, not my dissertation.

Still, I was able to get pretty close to the true figures. The actual federal budget shows total revenue net of payroll taxes to be $2.397 trillion, whereas I estimated $2.326 trillion; the true deficit is $608 billion and I estimated $682 billion.

Under Trump’s tax plan, almost all rates are cut. He also plans to remove some deductions, but all reports I could find on the plan were vague as to which ones, and with data this coarse it’s very hard to get any good figures on deduction amounts anyway. I also want to give him credit where it’s due: It was a lot easier to calculate the tax rates under Trump’s plan (but still harder than under mine…). But in general what I found was the following:

Almost everyone pays less income tax under Trump’s plan, by generally about 4-5% of their income. The poor benefit less or are slightly harmed; the rich benefit a bit more.

For example, a household in poverty making $12,300 would pay $1,384 currently, but $1,478 under Trump’s plan, losing $94 or 0.8% of their income. An average household making $52,000 would pay $8,768 currently but only $6,238 under Trump’s plan, saving $2,530 or about 4.8% of their income. A household making $152,000 would pay $35,580 currently but only $28,235 under Trump’s plan, saving $7,345 or again about 4.8%. A top 1% household making $781,000 would pay $265,625 currently, but only $230,158 under Trump’s plan, saving $35,467 or about 4.5%. A top 0.1% household making $2,037,000 would pay $762,656 currently, but only $644,350 under Trump’s plan, saving $118,306 or 5.8% of their income. A top 0.01% household making $9,936,000 would pay $3,890,736 currently, but only $3,251,083 under Trump’s plan, saving $639,653 or 6.4% of their income.

Because taxes are cut across the board, Trump’s plan would raise less revenue. My static scoring will exaggerate this effect, but only moderately; my estimate says we would lose over $470 billion in annual revenue, while the true figure might be $300 billion. In any case, Trump will definitely increase the deficit substantially unless he finds a way to cut an awful lot of spending elsewhere—and his pet $54 billion increase to the military isn’t helping in that regard. My estimate of the new deficit under Trump’s plan is $1.155 trillion—definitely not the sort of deficit you should be running during a peacetime economic expansion.

Let’s see what we might have done instead.

If we value simplicity and ease of calculation, it’s hard to beat a flat tax plus basic income. With a flat tax of 30% and a basic income of $12,000 per household, the poor do much better off because of the basic income, while the rich do a little better because of the flat tax, and the middle class feels about the same because the two effects largely cancel. Calculating your tax liability now couldn’t be easier; multiply your income by 3, remove a zero—that’s what you owe in taxes. And how much do you get in basic income? The same as everyone else, $12,000.

Using the same comparison households: The poor household making $12,300 would now receive $8,305—increasing their income by $9,689 or 78.8% relative to the current system. The middle-class household making $52,000 would pay $3,596, saving $5,172 or 10% of their income. The upper-middle-class household making $152,000 would now pay $33,582, saving only $1998 or 1.3% of their income. The top 1% household making $782,000 would pay $234,461, saving $31,164 or 4.0%. The top 0.1% household making $2,037,000 would pay $611,000, saving $151,656 or 7.4%. Finally, the top 0.01% household making $9,936,000 would pay $2,980,757, saving $910,000 or 9.1%.

Thus, like Trump’s plan, the tax cut almost across the board results in less revenue. However, because of the basic income, we can now justify cutting a lot of spending on social welfare programs. I estimated we could reasonably save about $630 billion by cutting Medicaid and other social welfare programs, while still not making poor people worse off because of the basic income. The resulting estimated deficit comes in at $1.085 trillion, which is still too large—but less than what Trump is proposing.

If I raise the flat rate to 40%—just as easy to calculate—I can bring that deficit down, even if I raise the basic income to $15,000 to compensate. The poverty household now receives $10,073, and the other representative households pay $5,974; $45,776; $297,615; $799,666; and $3,959,343 respectively. This means that the poor are again much better off, the middle class are about the same, and the rich are now substantially worse off. But what’s our deficit now? $180 billion—that’s about 1% of GDP, the sort of thing you can maintain indefinitely with a strong currency.

Can we do better than this? I think we can, with my logtax.

I confess that the logtax is not quite as easy to calculate as the flat tax. It does require taking exponents, and you can’t do it in your head. But it’s actually still easier than the current system, because there are no brackets to keep track of, no discontinuous shifts in the marginal rate. It is continuously progressive for all incomes, and the same formula can be used for all incomes from zero to infinity.
The simplest plan just replaces the income tax with a logtax of 20%. The poor household now receives $1,254, just from the automatic calculation of the tax—no basic income was added. The middle-class household pays $9,041, slightly more than what they are currently paying. Above that, people start paying more for sure: $50,655; $406,076; $1,228,795; and $7,065,274 respectively.

This system is obviously more progressive, but does it raise sufficient revenue? Why, as a matter of fact it removes the deficit entirely. The model estimates that the budget would now be at surplus of $110 billion. This is probably too optimistic; under dynamic scoring the distortions are probably going to cut the revenue a little. But it would almost certainly reduce the deficit, and very likely eliminate it altogether—without any changes in spending.

The next logtax plan adds a basic income of $12,000. To cover this, I raised the metarate to 25%. Now the poor household is receiving $11,413, the middle-class household is paying a mere $1,115, and the other households are paying $50,144; $458,140; $1,384,475; and $7,819,932 respectively. That top 0.01% household isn’t going to be happy, as they are now paying 78% of their income where in our current system they would pay only 39%. But their after-tax income is still over $2 million.

How does the budget look now? As with the flat tax plan, we can save about $630 billion by cutting redundant social welfare programs. So we are once again looking at a surplus, this time of about $63 billion. Again, the dynamic scoring might show some deficit, but definitely not a large one.

Finally, what if I raise the basic income to $15,000 and raise the metarate to 35%? The poor household now receives $14,186, while the median household pays $2,383. The richer households of course foot the bill, paying $64,180; $551,031; $1,618,703; and $8,790,124 respectively. Oh no, the top 0.01% household will have to make do with only $1.2 million; how will they survive!?

This raises enough revenue that it allows me to do some even more exciting things. With a $15,000 basic income, I can eliminate social welfare programs for sure. But then I can also cut military spending, say in half—still leaving us the largest military in the world. I can move funds around to give Medicare to every single American, an additional cost of about twice what we currently pay for Medicare. Then Medicaid doesn’t just get cut; it can be eliminated entirely, folded into Medicare. Assuming that the net effect on total spending is zero, the resulting deficit is estimated at only $168 billion, well within the range of what can be sustained indefinitely.

And really, that’s only the start. Once you consider all the savings on healthcare spending—an average of $4000 per person per year, if switching to single-payer brings us down to the average of other highly-developed countries. This is more than what the majority of the population would be paying in taxes under this plan—meaning that once you include the healthcare benefits, the majority of Americans would net receive money from the government. Compared to our current system, everyone making under about $80,000 would be better off. That is what we could be doing right now—free healthcare for everyone, a balanced budget (or close enough), and the majority of Americans receiving more from the government than they pay in taxes.

These results are summarized in the table below. (I also added several more rows of representative households—though still not all the brackets I used!) I’ve color-coded who would be paying less in tax in green and who would be more in tax in red under each plan, compared to our current system. This color-coding is overly generous to Trump’s plan and the 30% flat tax plan, because it doesn’t account for the increased government deficit (though I did color-code those as well, again relative to the current system). And yet, over 50% of households make less than $51,986, putting the poorest half of Americans in the green zone for every plan except Trump’s. For the last plan, I also color-coded those between $52,000 and $82,000 who would pay additional taxes, but less than they save on healthcare, thus net saving money in blue. Including those folks, we’re benefiting over 69% of Americans.

Household

pre-tax income

 Current tax system Trump’s tax plan Flat 30% tax with $12k basic income Flat 40% tax with $15k basic income Logtax 20% Logtax 25% with $12k basic income Logtax 35% with $15k basic income, single-payer healthcare
$1,080 $108 $130 -$11,676 -$14,568 -$856 -$12,121 -$15,173
$12,317 $1,384 $1,478 -$8,305 -$10,073 -$1,254 -$11,413 -$14,186
$22,162 $2,861 $2,659 -$5,351 -$6,135 $450 -$9,224 -$11,213
$32,058 $4,345 $3,847 -$2,383 -$2,177 $2,887 -$6,256 -$7,258
$51,986 $8,768 $6,238 $3,596 $5,794 $9,041 $1,115 $2,383
$77,023 $15,027 $9,506 $11,107 $15,809 $18,206 $11,995 $16,350
$81,966 $16,263 $10,742 $12,590 $17,786 $20,148 $14,292 $17,786
$97,161 $20,242 $14,540 $17,148 $23,864 $26,334 $21,594 $28,516
$101,921 $21,575 $15,730 $18,576 $27,875 $30,571 $23,947 $31,482
$151,940 $35,580 $28,235 $33,582 $45,776 $50,655 $50,144 $64,180
$781,538 $265,625 $230,158 $222,461 $297,615 $406,076 $458,140 $551,031
$2,036,666 $762,656 $644,350 $599,000 $799,666 $1,228,795 $1,384,475 $1,618,703
$9,935,858 $3,890,736 $3,251,083 $2,968,757 $3,959,343 $7,065,274 $7,819,932 $8,790,124
Change in federal spending $0 $0 -$630 billion -$630 billion $0 -$630 billion $0
Estimated federal surplus -$682 billion -$1,155 billion -$822 billion -$180 billion $110 billion $63 billion -$168 billion

Why did we ever privatize prisons?

pnrj public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457103 EDT 10:24.

Since the Reagan administration (it’s always Reagan), the United States has undergone a spree of privatization of public services, in which services that are ordinarily performed by government agencies are instead contracted out to private companies. Enormous damage to our society has been done by this sort of privatization, from healthcare to parking meters.

This process can vary in magnitude.

The weakest form, which is relatively benign, is for the government to buy specific services like food service or equipment manufacturing from companies that already provide them to consumers. There’s no particular reason for the government to make their own toothpaste or wrenches rather than buy them from corporations like Proctor & Gamble and Sears. Toothpaste is toothpaste and wrenches are wrenches.

The moderate form is for the government to contract services to specific companies that may involve government-specific features like security clearances or powerful military weapons. This is already raising a lot of problems: When Northrop-Grumman makes our stealth bombers, and Boeing builds our nuclear ICBMs, these are publicly-traded, for-profit corporations manufacturing some of the deadliest weapons ever created—weapons that could literally destroy human civilization in a matter of minutes. Markets don’t work well in the presence of externalities, and weapons by definition are almost nothing but externalities; their entire function is to cause harm—typically, death—to people without their consent. While this violence may sometimes be justified, it must never be taken lightly; and we are right to be uncomfortable with the military-industrial complex whose shareholders profit from death and destruction. (Eisenhower tried to warn us!) Still, there are some good arguments to be made for this sort of privatization, since many of these corporations already have high-tech factories and skilled engineers that they can easily repurpose, and competitive bids between different corporations can keep the price down. (Of course, with no-bid contracts that no longer applies; and it certainly hasn’t stopped us from spending nearly as much on the military as the rest of the world combined.)

What I’d really like to focus on today is the strongest form of privatization, in which basic government services are contracted out to private companies. This is what happens when you attempt to privatize soldiers, SWAT teams, and prisons—all of which the United States has done since Reagan.

I say “attempt” to privatize because in a very real sense the privatization of these services is incoherent—they are functions so basic to government that simply to do them makes you, de facto, part of the government. (Or, if done without government orders, it would be organized crime.) All you’ve really done by “privatizing” these services is reduced their transparency and accountability, as well as siphoning off a portion of the taxpayer money in the form of profits for shareholders.

The benefits of privatization, when they exist, are due to competition and consumer freedom. The foundation of a capitalist economy is the ability to say “I’ll take my business elsewhere.” (This is why the notion that a bank can sell your loan to someone else is the opposite of a free market; forcing you to write a check to someone you never made a contract with is antithetical to everything the free market stands for.) Actually the closest thing to a successful example of privatized government services is the United States Postal Service, which collects absolutely no tax income. They do borrow from the government and receive subsidies for some of their services—but so does General Motors. Frankly I think the Postal Service has a better claim to privatization than GM, which you may recall only exists today because of a massive government bailout with a net cost to the US government of $11 billion. All the Postal Service does differently is act as a tightly-regulated monopoly that provides high-quality service to everyone at low prices and pays good wages and pensions, all without siphoning profits to shareholders. (They really screwed up my mail forwarding lately, but they are still one of the best postal systems in the world.) It is in many ways the best of both worlds, the efficiency of capitalism with the humanity of socialism.

The Corrections Corporation of America, on the other hand, is the exact opposite, the worst of both worlds, the inefficiency of socialism with the inhumanity of capitalism. It is not simply corrupt but frankly inherently corrupt—there is simply no way you can have a for-profit prison system that isn’t corrupt. Maybe it can be made less corrupt or more corrupt, but the mere fact that shareholders are earning profits from incarcerating prisoners is fundamentally antithetical to a free and just society.

I really can’t stress this enough: Privatizing soldiers and prisons makes no sense at all. It doesn’t even make sense in a world of infinite identical psychopaths; nothing in neoclassical economic theory in any way supports these privatizations. Neoclassical theory is based upon the presumption of a stable government that enforces property rights, a government that provides as much service as necessary exactly at cost and is not attempting to maximize any notion of its own “profit”.

That’s ridiculous, of course—much like the neoclassical rational agent—and more recent work has been done in public choice theory about the various interest groups that act against each other in government, including lobbyists for private corporations—but public choice theory is above all a theory of government failure. It is a theory of why governments don’t work as well as we would like them to—the main question is how we can suppress the influence of special interest groups to advance the public good. Privatization of prisons means creating special interest groups where none existed, making the government less directed at the public good.

Privatizing government services is often described as “reducing the size of government”, usually interpreted in the most narrow sense to mean the tax burden. But Big Government doesn’t mean you pay 22% of GDP instead of 18% of GDP; Big Government means you can be arrested and imprisoned without trial. Even using the Heritage Foundation’s metrics, the correlation between tax burden and overall freedom is positive. Tyrannical societies don’t bother with taxes; they own the oil refineries directly (Venezuela), or print money whenever they want (Zimbabwe), or build the whole society around doing what they want (North Korea).

The incarceration rate is a much better measure of a society’s freedom than the tax rate will ever be—and the US isn’t doing so well in that regard; indeed we have by some measures the highest incarceration rate in the world. Fortunately we do considerably better when it comes to things like free speech and freedom of religion—indeed we are still above average in overall freedom. Though we do imprison more of our people than China, I’m not suggesting that China has a freer society. But why do we imprison so many people?

Well, it seems to have something to do with privatization of prisons. Indeed, there is a strong correlation between the privatization of US prisons and the enormous explosion of incarceration in the United States. In fact privatized prisons don’t even reduce the tax burden, because privatization does not decrease demand and “privatized” prisons must still be funded by taxes. Prisons do not have customers who choose between different competing companies and shop for the highest quality and lowest price—prisoners go to the prison they are assigned to and they can’t leave (which is really the whole point). Even competition at the purchase end doesn’t make much sense, since the government can’t easily transfer all the prisoners to a new company. Maybe they could transfer ownership of the prison to a different company, but even then the transition costs would be substantial, and besides, there are only a handful of prison corporations that corner most of the (so-called) market.

There is simply no economic basis for privatization of prisons. Nothing in either neoclassical theory or more modern cognitive science in any way supports the idea. So the real question is: Why did we ever privatize prisons?

Basically there is only one reason: Ideology. The post-Reagan privatization spree was not actually based on economics—it was based on economic ideology. Either because they actually believed it, or by the Upton Sinclair Principle, a large number of economists adopted a radical far-right ideology that government basically should not exist—that the more we give more power to corporations and less power to elected officials the better off we will be.

They defended this ideology on vaguely neoclassical grounds, mumbling something about markets being more efficient; but this isn’t even like cutting off the wings of the airplane because we’re assuming frictionless vacuum—it’s like cutting off the engines of the airplane because we simply hate engines and are looking for any excuse to get rid of them. There is absolutely nothing in neoclassical economic theory that says it would be efficient or really beneficial in any way to privatize prisons. It was all about taking power away from the elected government and handing it over to for-profit corporations.

This is a bit of consciousness-raising I’m trying to do: Any time you hear someone say that something should be apolitical, I want you to substitute the word undemocratic. When they say that judges shouldn’t be elected so that they can be apolitical—they mean undemocratic. When they say that the Federal Reserve should be independent of politics—they mean independent of voting. They want to take decision power away from the public at large and concentrate it more in the hands of an elite. People who say this sort of thing literally do not believe in democracy.

To be fair, there may actually be good reasons to not believe in democracy, or at least to believe that democracy should be constrained by a constitution and a system of representation. Certain rights are inalienable, regardless of what the voting public may say, which is why we need a constitution that protects those rights above all else. (In theory… there’s always the PATRIOT ACT, speaking of imprisoning people without trial.) Moreover, most people are simply not interested enough—or informed enough—to vote on every single important decision the government makes. It makes sense for us to place this daily decision-making power in the hands of an elite—but it must be an elite we choose.

And yes, people often vote irrationally. One of the central problems in the United States today is that almost half the population consistently votes against rational government and their own self-interest on the basis of a misguided obsession with banning abortion, combined with a totally nonsensical folk theory of economics in which poor people are poor because they are lazy, the government inherently destroys whatever wealth it touches, and private-sector “job creators” simply hand out jobs to other people because they have extra money lying around. Then of course there’s—let’s face it—deep-seated bigotry toward women, racial minorities, and LGBT people. (The extreme hatred toward Obama and suspicion that he isn’t really born in the US really can’t be explained any other way.) In such circumstances it may be tempting to say that we should give up on democracy and let expert technocrats take charge; but in the absence of democratic safeguards, technocracy is little more than another name for oligarchy. Maybe it’s enough that the President appoints the Federal Reserve chair and the Supreme Court? I’m not so sure. Ben Bernanke definitely handled the Second Depression better than Congress did, I’ll admit; but I’m not sure Alan Greenspan would have in his place, and given his babbling lately about returning to Bretton Woods I’m pretty sure Paul Volcker wouldn’t have. (If you don’t see what’s wrong with going back to Bretton Woods, which was basically a variant of the gold standard, you should read what Krugman has to say about the gold standard.) So basically we got lucky and our monetary quasi-tyrant was relatively benevolent and wise. (Or maybe Bernanke was better because Obama appointed him, while Reagan appointed Greenspan. Carter appointed Volcker, oddly enough; but Reagan reappointed him. It’s always Reagan.) And if you could indeed ensure that tyrants would always be benevolent and wise, tyranny would be a great system—but you can’t.

Democracy doesn’t always lead to the best outcomes, but that’s really not what it’s for. Rather, democracy is for preventing the worst outcomes—no large-scale famine has ever occurred under a mature democracy, nor has any full-scale genocide. Democracies do sometimes forcibly “relocate” populations (particularly indigenous populations, as the US did under Andrew Jackson), and we should not sugar-coat that; people are forced out of their homes and many die. It could even be considered something close to genocide. But no direct and explicit mass murder of millions has ever occurred under a democratic government—no, the Nazis were not democratically elected—and that by itself is a fully sufficient argument for democracy. It could be true that democracies are economically inefficient (they are economically efficient), unbearably corrupt (they are less corrupt), and full of ignorant idiotic hicks (they have higher average educational attainment), and democracy would still be better simply because it prevents famine and genocide. As Churchill said, “Democracy is the worst system, except for all the others.”

Indeed, I think the central reason why American democracy isn’t working well right now is that it’s not very democratic; a two-party system with a plurality “first-past-the-post” vote is literally the worst possible voting system that can still technically be considered democracy. Any worse than that and you only have one party. If we had a range voting system (which is mathematically optimal) and say a dozen parties (they have about a dozen parties in France), people would be able to express their opinions more clearly and in more detail, with less incentive for strategic voting. We probably wouldn’t have such awful turnout at that point, and after realizing that they actually had such a strong voice, maybe people would even start educating themselves about politics in order to make better decisions.

Privatizing prisons and soldiers takes us in exactly the opposite direction: It makes our government deeply less democratic, fundamentally less accountable to voters. It hands off the power of life and death to institutions whose sole purpose for existence is their own monetary gain. We should never have done it—and we must undo it as soon as we possibly can.