Jeb Bush’s Tax Plan: Both Good and Bad

Posted on September 15, 2015 by jackheidel

Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush has just released his tax reform proposal, “My Tax Overhaul to Unleash 4% Growth.” It has many good features such as:

Lowering and consolidating seven current tax brackets into three: 10%, 25% and 28%.
Essentially doubling the standard deduction for most filers, thereby achieving huge simplification for millions of average income filers.
Eliminating the state and local income tax deductions and capping all others, except for charitable deductions, at 2% of Adjusted Gross Income.
Doubling the Earned Income Tax Credit for childless filers, thus encouraging more low income people to work.
Exempting taxpayers over the age of 67 from the employee-side payroll tax, encouraging them to stay in the workforce longer.
Cutting the corporate tax rate from 35% to 20%.
Allowing 100% immediate expensing for all capital investments, including inventories.
Creating a territorial tax system so that multinationals are not taxed on foreign earnings, and therefore incentivized to bring their foreign profits home.
Eliminating the deductibility of interest expenses.

The lower individual and corporate tax rates, together with the separate investment and work incentives, will create a significant economic stimulus estimated to raise GDP by at least .5% per year or higher, depending you who ask.
According to the Tax Foundation, however, the plan would reduce federal revenue on a static basis by $3.66 trillion over ten years, and even by $1.6 trillion on a dynamic basis, taking into account the new tax revenue generated by the plan.
This is, of course, a huge problem. We badly need to speed up economic growth but we also need to lower, not increase, our annual deficit spending in order to put our debt on a downward path as a percentage of GDP.
The resolution of this quandary is to tighten up on those deductions, such as for mortgage interest, remaining in the code and also lessening the amount of the tax cuts if necessary in order to achieve overall revenue neutrality for the plan.

Can We Solve All Our Fiscal and Economic Problems at the Same Time?

Posted on April 2, 2015 by jackheidel

This website, It Does Not Add Up, is devoted to discussing our country’s most serious economic and fiscal problems. They are:

Stagnant Economy. Since the end of the Great Recession in June 2009, the economy has been growing on average at the historically slow rate of about 2.3%. Slow growth means higher unemployment, stagnant wages and less tax revenue.

Massive Debt. U.S. public (on which we pay interest) debt is now 74% of GDP (highest since WW II) and projected by CBO to grow rapidly unless strong measures are taken to reduce it. This puts our country’s future wellbeing and prosperity at great risk.

Increasing Income Inequality. Incomes for the high-skilled and well-educated are increasing much faster than for the low-skilled and less-educated workers.

The new Republican majorities in Congress are stirring the waters by proposing a ten year plan to shrink the deficit down to zero, i.e. to balance the budget by 2025. The opposition claims that this would “sharply cut the scale of domestic spending, which would mostly fall on the poor.”
But the American Enterprise Institute’s James Pethokoukis points out that social spending in the U.S., both public and private, is very generous and second only to France in the entire OECD. So here is how we could proceed to address our basic problems in a unified manner:

Balance the Budget by a combination of Republican spending cuts and cutting back on two major tax deductions: Employer-sponsored Health Insurance (cost: $250 billion per year) and Mortgage Interest (cost: $70 billion per year).
Boost Economic Growth by expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit to encourage more people to accept low paying, entry level jobs. Increase the Social Security eligibility age from 67 to 70, thereby keeping near retirees in the workforce for three additional years (this will also extend the solvency of the Social Security Trust Fund).
Decrease Income Inequality. Cutting back on tax deductions, in part to pay for expansion of the EITC, lessens income inequality as well as shrinking the deficit. A faster growing economy also lessens inequality by providing more opportunities for upward mobility.

In other words, addressing each of these fundamental problems in an intelligent manner contributes to solving the remaining problems as well. This creates a virtuous circle for economic progress!

The President’s Budget: Stabilization of the Debt Is Not Enough!

Posted on February 5, 2015 by jackheidel

President Obama has proposed a $3.99 trillion budget for next year, a $340 billion increase from the current 2015 budget year. As shown in the charts below, it projects deficits of about 2.6% over the next ten years equal to its (optimistic in comparison to the CBO) growth projections for GDP. This means that the debt would stabilize at about 73% of GDP. And, of course, achieving his predicted stabilization of debt will require big tax increases over this ten year period.
Here are the major weaknesses in the budget:

Sequestration. The President declares that “I’m not going to accept a budget that locks in sequestration going forward.” Everyone deplores the mindlessness of sequestration but the only responsible alternative is to make targeted cuts throughout the budget. The President makes no attempt to do this. And he wants to add spending for various new education and research initiatives, as well as an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit for low-income workers.

Infrastructure. Spending over the next six years would increase by $238 billion to be raised from a 14% repatriation tax on the $2 trillion in foreign earnings held overseas by American multinational corporations. The problem is that any repatriation tax should be tied in with overall corporate and business tax reform, exchanging lower tax rates in return for closing loopholes and deductions, in order to make U.S. business taxes competitive with those of other countries. Fundamental tax reform is the key to getting our economy growing faster.

Entitlements. The President’s budget does not even mention the biggest threat to long-term fiscal sustainability, namely the rapidly increasing spending for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. It will be very difficult to make progress on this critical issue without presidential leadership.

Stabilization of the Debt. The President’s budget, with quite optimistic revenue and growth projections, stabilizes the debt over ten years. But this is not nearly good enough. To be satisfied with a public debt of 73% of GDP indefinitely into the future is simply too risky. What’s going to happen when we have another financial crisis, as we surely will? How are we going to cope with our growing rivalry with China with very little budget flexibility? And one can imagine any number of other possible emergencies which might occur. Putting the debt on a clear downward trajectory is the only prudent thing to do!

It’s Paul Krugman Who Is Being Irresponsible!

Posted on February 3, 2015 by jackheidel

The New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman, writes provocatively on fiscal and economic issues and is well-known as a liberal icon. Usually I ignore his diatribes. But his column yesterday, “The Long-Run Cop-Out” goes way overboard.
I will refute several of the statements from this column.

“Think about it: Faced with mass unemployment and the enormous waste it entails, for years the beltway elite devoted all most all its energy not to promoting recovery, but to Bowles-Simpsonism – to devising “grand bargains” that would address the supposedly urgent problem of how we’ll pay for Social Security and Medicare a couple of decades from now.” Worrying about our enormous and rapidly increasing national debt, does not mean ignoring our sluggish economy and the high unemployment it causes. The way to increase economic growth is to enact broad based tax reform by lowering tax rates, offset by closing loopholes and limiting deductions. This will further boost the economy in the same way that lower gasoline prices is already doing.

“Many projections suggest that our major social insurance programs will face financial difficulties in the future (although the dramatic slowing of increases in health costs makes even that proposition uncertain).” Healthcare costs dropped to 4.1% in 2014 but this is still more than double the inflation rate of 1.7%. This isn’t nearly good enough.

“Why, exactly, is it crucial that we deal with the threat of future benefit cuts by locking in plans to cut future benefits?” The point is to protect benefits, not curtail them. If we act now, to increase revenue and/or slow down the growth of entitlement spending, then we won’t have to cut future benefits.

“So why the urge to change the subject (from austerity) to structural reform? The answer, I’d suggest, is intellectual laziness and lack of moral courage.” $6 trillion added to our debt in the last six years is profligacy, not austerity. It is immoral to burden future generations with such massive new debt.

“In today’s economic and political environment, long-termism is a cop-out.” Preparing for the future is just plain common sense. Should we ignore festering problems like global warming, illegal immigration and increasing poverty until they get much worse? Of course not. We should address these problems now and get our debt under control at the same time.

What Will It Take to ‘Fix the Debt’?

Posted on January 22, 2015 by jackheidel

I have recently become a volunteer for the national bipartisan organization, Fix the Debt. It is the outreach arm for the Washington think tank, Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which is an offshoot of the Simpson-Bowles Commission from several years ago.
As such, I give presentations to local civic organizations about our national debt and what needs to be done to get it under control. Typically the audience will readily appreciate the seriousness of our debt problem. What they want to talk about are practical ways to address it. They have their own ideas and want to know what I think as well. My first message is that we don’t have to pay off the debt or even balance the budget going forward. Realistically we need to shrink our annual deficits in order to put the debt on a downward course as a percent of our growing economy, as shown in the chart just below.

It will be a huge challenge to accomplish even this! Here are my ideas, in very general outline, on how to get this done:

Entitlements (Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid) are the biggest single problem because our population is aging so fast. Furthermore, in order to control the growth of Medicare and Medicaid, we have to do a much better job of controlling the overall cost of healthcare in the U.S. For example, even though healthcare costs slowed down to an increase of only 4.1% in 2014, this is still more than twice the rate of inflation!
The second thing we need to do is to make our economy grow faster than the roughly 2.3% growth we have achieved since the end of the Great Recession. The main way to get this done is through broad-based (and revenue neutral) tax reform at both the individual and corporate levels, by reducing tax rates, paid for by closing loopholes and limiting deductions.
Finally, there is enormous waste and inefficiency in the federal budget, with huge redundancy and overlap of programs between different federal departments. Responsibility for such programs as education, community development, transportation and social welfare, for example, should be returned to the states with block-grant funding to replace rigid federal control.

I have discussed each of these major reform ideas in much detail in previous blog posts and will continue to do so. As large as our fiscal problems are, I remain optimistic that they can and will be successfully addressed.

Let’s Keep the Economic Momentum Going

Posted on December 7, 2014 by jackheidel

There has been lots of good economic news lately:

The economy added 321,000 jobs in November, the most in one month since January 2012.
The unemployment rate of 5.8% remains steady and is down from 7% in November 2013.
The average hourly earnings for workers is up by 2.1% from a year earlier.
Economic growth for the third quarter is up 3.9% from the previous quarter.
The deficit for the 2014-2015 fiscal year was “only” 2.8% of GDP and is predicted by the Congressional Budget Office to drop to 2.6% for the current year.
The price of a gallon of gasoline has dropped to $2.71 on average, its lowest level since 2010 and is still dropping.

Capture The New York Times predicts that the “Brighter Economy Raises Odds of Action in Congress.” Jason Furman, Chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisors, is quoted as saying that “At least there will be less of a philosophical debate on infrastructure, tax reforms and expanding exports. You can have that agenda because the economy is not in free fall.” These three items would make a great agenda for the 114^th Congress in the following way:

Infrastructure. The continuing drop in the price of gasoline offers the opportunity to replenish the inadequately funded Highway Trust Fund in a fiscally responsible manner. Congress should raise the federal gasoline tax above its current 18 cents per gallon to a level which is sufficient to fund the entire federal share of highway construction and repair.

Tax reform. Individual and corporate tax reform will give the economy a huge boost. The idea here is to lower tax rates in a revenue neutral way by closing loopholes and deductions.

Expanding Exports. What’s needed here is to give the President fast track negotiating authority so that Congress has to vote any trade agreement up or down without modification. This is the only way to get other countries to make concessions.

Of course there are many other issues which need to be seriously addressed by the new Congress. But relatively quick action on just these three less controversial items would be a great start!

Fix the Debt

Posted on November 18, 2014 by jackheidel

Recently I have had several posts about our national debt, for example, “Why the National Debt Is Such a Threat to the U.S.,” showing graphically that our current public debt at 74% of GDP is very high by historical standards and rising rapidly under current fiscal policies.
Yesterday I attended a workshop in Washington D.C. put on by Fix the Debt. All expenses were paid and, in return, the attendees agree to make at least three presentations to local community groups during the following year. This means that I will soon be sending out a letter to such groups as Kiwanis and Rotary Clubs around the Omaha area where I live, offering my services as a speaker at one of their meetings. The purpose is to build more public awareness of the threat of a huge and growing national debt to the long-term welfare of our country. Here is a summary of talking points from the workshop:

The deficit for the 2013-2014 fiscal year is almost $500 billion.
Under current fiscal policies the debt will increase to 270% of GDP by 2080.
Reasons for our debt problem:

An aging population which means expanded Social Security spending
Healthcare costs are growing for both Medicare and Medicaid
Interest costs will grow rapidly as the economy recovers and interest rates rise

All bipartisan reform plans call for both spending cuts and revenue increases.
The benefits of taking action are:

Increased budget flexibility
Lower exposure to changes in interest rates
Reduced risk of another financial crisis

The longer we wait:

The older our population gets
The higher the debt will rise
The less time we have to phase in changes
The slower our economy will grow
The fewer tools we will have to fix it

How do we bring debt under control?

Enact policies that grow the economy
Health care cost containment
Spending cuts
Tax reform and tax expenditure cuts

Let me know if you’d like a speaker on this topic at your club!

Is It Feasible to Cut Tax Preferences to Pay for Lower Tax Rates?

Posted on November 16, 2014 by jackheidel

I have been focusing lately on America’s two biggest fiscal and economic problems:

How to boost the economy in order to put more people back to work
How to either cut spending or raise revenue in order to shrink the deficit.

A few days ago in “The Great Wage Slowdown and How to Fix It,” I laid out a fairly specific proposal to make a substantial reduction in tax preferences in order to cut tax rates across the board and especially for the 64% of taxpayers who do not itemize deductions. These are the middle- and lower-income workers with stagnant incomes who would likely spend any tax savings they received thereby giving the economy a big boost. Let’s examine whether or not this is a realistic course of action.
The above chart from the Congressional Budget Office document, “The Distribution of Major Tax Expenditures in the Individual Income Tax System,” shows that, for example, the upper 10% of households by income receive about 40% of the total $1 trillion in individual tax expenditures per year. Furthermore, this same top 10% of tax payers have an income of about $140,000 or more (Congressional Research Service). My basic idea is to shrink tax preferences by $250 billion per year and to lower tax rates for middle- and lower-income non-itemizers by this same amount. If we assume that they would spend 2/3 of this new income, it would boost the economy by $170 billion per year which is 1% of GDP.
A reasonable way to achieve this savings is to expect higher income earners to contribute a greater percentage of their tax preference savings. For example:

top 1% contribute $110 billion (2/3 of their total deductions).
top 96^th % to 99^th % contribute $50 billion (1/2 of their total deductions).
top 91^st % to 95^th % contribute $30 billion (1/3 of their total deductions).
top 81^st % to 90^th % contribute $30 billion (1/4 of their total deductions).
top 61^st % to 80^th % contribute $30 billion (1/5 of their total deductions).
this gives a total of $250 billion in tax preference savings.

This back-of-the-envelope calculation is not intended to be definitive but rather to suggest what can be done along these lines. Those who are more well-off need to make bigger sacrifices in getting our economy back on track.

The Great Wage Slowdown and How to Fix It

Posted on November 11, 2014 by jackheidel

With a new Congress just elected, this is a good time to reflect about what changes should be made in public policy. Our biggest economic problem is to speed up growth in order to provide more and better paying jobs. In addition, a faster growing economy would bring in more tax revenue which would help pay our bills and reduce the deficit.
A column in today’s New York Times, “The Great Wage Slowdown, Looming over Politics,” by David Leonhardt, proposes a cut in the marginal tax rate for the middle class as a way of boosting their incomes. As can be seen in the above chart, median household income has been flat since the year 2000, and even lower since the 2008 recession. Mr. Leonhardt goes on to say that any tax cut for the middle class should be balanced by a tax increase for the wealthy.
It so happens that I proposed such a plan several months ago as a way of boosting the economy and reducing inequality at the same time. The idea is to enact broad-based tax reform whereby tax rates are lowered for all, offset by shrinking tax deductions. The 64% of taxpayers who do not itemize deductions will receive a big tax cut. But these are the very middle-class wage earners with stagnant incomes. So they will likely spend their tax savings, thereby giving the economy a big boost.
More specifically:

Individual tax deductions total about $1 trillion per year.
Let’s suppose that these deductions are cut in half to $500 billion per year.
Let’s further suppose that half of this amount, or $250 billion per year, is cut from the taxes of the 64% who do not itemize deductions.
If these 64% spend just 2/3 of their new income (instead of saving it or paying off debt), this will total $170 billion which is 1% of GDP.
This would increase the rate of growth of GDP from the 2.2% average, since the end of the Great Recession, to 3.2%. This represents an enormous boost to the economy and would return average GDP growth to about its 3.3% average since 1947.
Mr. Leonhardt suggests that presidential contenders in 2016 would greatly benefit from proposing a tax rate cut for the middle class. Here’s a specific plan they can use!

How Bad Is Income Inequality and How Do We Fix It?

Posted on October 5, 2014 by jackheidel

The latest news on the American economy is mixed. The unemployment rate fell to 5.9% in September but the labor force also fell by 97,000 last month. The labor participation is now down to 62.7%, a level last seen in 1978. On the plus side 248,000 new jobs were created but the share of the population employed stayed at 59%, less than its 59.4% level at the end of the recession in June 2009. In other words, job growth is definitely picking up but not fast enough.
How about income inequality? One simple way of describing and understanding the degree of income inequality in the U.S. is to look at median household income and how it changes over time. The above chart from the WSJ shows how the median U.S. household income fell from an all-time high of $56,895 in 1999 to $51,939 in 2013. However it also climbed back up to $56,436 in 2007 before dropping precipitously until 2012.
The Global Strategy Group discovered in a recent survey that registered voters overwhelmingly rate economic growth as a higher priority than economic fairness. This means that any policy designed to speed up economic growth is likely to receive favorable support by the electorate.
In a recent post I describe a plan for broad-based tax reform specifically designed to speed up economic growth. It would involve an across-the-board cut in tax rates totaling about $500 billion per year, but completely paid for by closing loopholes and deductions which primarily benefit the wealthy. The 64% of taxpayers who do not itemize deductions would receive a tax cut. And they would likely spend this extra money in their pockets because they are precisely the middle- and lower-income wage earners with falling incomes.
An income tax redistribution like this would greatly reduce inequality but in a way which is designed to give the economy a big boost!

It Does Not Add Up

Jack Heidel's blog on fiscal responsibility

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