Fundamental Tax Reform Is the Key to Solving Our Economic and Fiscal Problems II. The Graetz Plan

Posted on January 7, 2014 by jackheidel

The Yale Tax Law Professor, Michael Graetz, has proposed a new tax system “100 Million Unnecessary Returns: A Simple, Fair, and Competitive Tax Plan for the United States” which would do wonders towards straightening out the huge fiscal and economic problems now facing our country.
How do we rev up the national economy in order to put more people back to work and, at the same time, raise the revenue needed to operate the government in the 21^st century without mountains of debt? Mr. Graetz’s basic idea is to tax consumption rather than relying totally on an income tax. Under his plan both savings and investments will be taxed at a lower rate which will encourage more of both. The Plan has these features:

A broad based Value Added Tax of about 14% is enacted on goods and services. The U.S. is the only advanced economy without a VAT.
Families earning less than $100,000 are exempted from the income tax. For incomes between $100,000 and $250,000, the tax rate would be 15%. For income over $250,000, the rate would be 25%.
The corporate income tax rate is lowered to 15%.
The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is used to provide relief from the VAT burden to low-income families by using payroll tax offsets.
The plan is designed to be revenue neutral as verified by the Tax Policy Center.

This plan has many advantages including:

Taxing consumption and lowering the corporate tax rate to 15% from its current level of 35% would dramatically encourage investment in the U.S. thereby stimulating the economy and creating both new jobs and higher wages for American workers.
It would eliminate more than 100 million of the 140 million U.S. tax returns.
With many fewer Americans paying income taxes there would be far less temptation for Congress to use income tax exclusions, deductions and credits to try to address social and economic problems.
The plan retains all of the progressive features of our current tax system whereby higher income earners pay higher tax rates.

The point of describing the Graetz Plan in some detail is not to suggest that it is the best way to implement tax reform but rather that here, at least, is one attractive way to do it. The purpose is to move the discussion forward. We badly need to make changes along these lines!

Oklahoma’s Senator Tom Coburn: We Need More like Him!

Posted on January 2, 2014 by jackheidel

Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma has an Op Ed column in the Wall Street Journal from two days ago “The Year Washington Fled Reality”, discussing many of the things that are wrong with our national government. Granted that all elected officials “play politics” to some extent or another, nevertheless Dr. Coburn, an obstetrician, is amazingly independent of the reigning political culture. He spent three consecutive terms in the House of Representatives, left Congress for four years, and now is back serving his second term in the Senate. He has announced that he will not run for re-election in 2016 when his present term ends.
Dr. Coburn is constantly drawing attention to, and attacking, the enormous amount of wasteful and inefficient spending approved by Congress. The Popular Romance Project, pictured above, is an example. His office has just published its fourth annual report on government waste, “Wastebook 2013”, detailing 100 different “examples of government mismanagement and stupidity. … Collectively these cost nearly $30 billion in a year when Washington would have you believe everything that could be done, has been done to control unnecessary spending.”
Dr. Coburn has prevailed upon the Government Accounting Office to issue annual reports called “Actions Needed to Reduce Fragmentation, Overlap and Duplication and Achieve Other Financial benefits.” Three of these reports have now been issued. Altogether they list almost 400 individual actions which could be taken to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of 162 different program areas.
In spite of all the good work he is doing, Dr. Coburn would be even more effective if he had more help. Fiscal conservatives should stop wasting their time on senseless gestures like trying to defund Obamacare. They need to get down in the trenches with serious deficit hawks like Tom Coburn and whittle away at wasteful programs one by one.

An Optimistic View of America’s Future!

Posted on December 30, 2013 by jackheidel

In the latest issue of Barron’s, Frederick Rowe, the managing partner of Greenbrier Partners Capital Management, asks in “More Than a Sugar High?” , “Can you imagine a country that is managed in an economically rational manner, creating the wealth that’s necessary to take proper care of the citizens who get left behind? … What if our economic recovery is more than a sugar high? What if there is more here than insanely stimulative monetary policy from the Federal Reserve? What if the U.S. has already begun to steer an economic course to a period of unprecedented and genuine prosperity, achievement, and problem solving?”
Here are eight factors which Mr. Rowe gives to point us in the right direction:

North American Energy Independence (already on the horizon).
Sensible Immigration Reform: encouraging our most enterprising and hard-working people to become citizens rather than chasing them away.
Repatriation of Corporate Income: if a company domiciled in the U.S. makes money in Argentina and wants to invest it in the U.S. we double-tax the daylights out of it. It would be hard to imagine a more counterproductive tax policy.
Changing Directors and Their Thinking: the once unthinkable mindset of corporate directors acting on behalf of long-term owners (rather than the CEOs with whom they play golf) is actually gaining traction.
Lowering Corporate Taxes: the tax-writing committees in Congress are working on this.
Increasing Technological Leadership: the most dynamic technology companies in the world are domiciled in the U.S. Technology, in the short run, displaces workers. But eventually workers catch up because new technology creates new kinds of jobs that were never imagined before.
Americanization of the World: more than three billion people around the world will soon be able to afford to live much more like the 300 million Americans do. So companies which make it big here have an automatic global opportunity.
Obamacare: Even this bureaucratic catastrophe provides a large opportunity for economic opportunity. Think of Jimmy Carter’s failures which led to Ronald Reagan’s successes.

“Let your imagination run and consider all the things that can be accomplished by an energy-independent, cash-generating, cash-repatriating country that is a hotbed of technological innovation.”
I can’t possibly say it any better than this!

Inequality III: Is the Game Rigged?

Posted on December 22, 2013 by jackheidel

The economist Joseph Stiglitz has an Op Ed column in today’s New York Times, “In No One We Trust”, blaming the financial crisis on the banking industry. “In the years leading up to the crisis our traditional bankers changed drastically, aggressively branching out into other activities, including those historically associated with investment banking. Trust went out the window. … When 1 percent of the population takes home more than 22 percent of the country’s income – and 95 percent of the increase in income in the post-crisis recovery – some pretty basic things are at stake. … Reasonable people can look at this absurd distribution and be pretty certain that the game is rigged. … I suspect that there is only one way to really get trust back. We need to pass strong regulations, embodying norms of good behavior, and appoint bold regulators to enforce them.”
Mr. Stiglitz is partially correct. Although the housing bubble, caused by poor government policy – loose money, subprime mortgages, and lax regulation – was the primary cause of the financial crisis, nevertheless, poorly regulated banking practices made the crisis much worse. But this is all being fixed with Dodd-Frank, a just recently implemented Volker Rule, and a soon coming wind-down of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Mr. Stiglitz concludes, “Without trust, there can be no harmony, nor can there be a strong economy. Inequality is degrading our trust. For our own sake, and for the sake of future generations, it is time to start rebuilding it.
But how do we reduce the inequality in order to restore the trust which is necessary for a strong economy? Mr. Stiglitz doesn’t say!
What we need is faster economic growth in order to create more new jobs. The last four years have demonstrated that the Federal Reserve can’t accomplish this with quantitative easing. It needs to be done by private business and entrepreneurship. Tax reform and the easing of regulations on new businesses is what we need. It’s too bad that ideological blinders prevent so many people from understanding this basic truth!

How Do We Fight Economic Inequality? By Restoring Growth!

Posted on December 17, 2013 by jackheidel

The liberal economist Paul Krugman returns to one of his favorite topics in yesterday’s New York Times, “Why Inequality Matters”. “On average, Americans remain a lot poorer today than they were before the economic crisis. For the bottom 90 percent of families, this impoverishment reflects both a shrinking economic pie and a declining share of that pie.” The problem with Mr. Krugman’s analysis is that he offers no solution beyond more fiscal stimulus: “the premature return to fiscal austerity has done more than anything to hobble the recovery.”
But there is another route to recovery and it is propounded in today’s Wall Street Journal by George Osborne, the United Kingdom’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, “How Britain Returned to Growth”. “We cut spending and top tax rates, and now deficits are down and jobs are being created at a healthy clip … at the rate of 60,000 per month, roughly equivalent to 300,000 in the U.S. … The corporate tax rate is being cut to 20% from 28%. … As a result, more international firms are moving their headquarters to Britain and investment is flowing into our country.”
Yes, as Mr. Krugman says, economic inequality in the U.S. is bad and getting worse. The question is what to do about it. Shall we try to improve the situation with artificial stimulation, increasing government debt, already very high, for future generations? Or shall we address this inequality by encouraging businesses to grow and expand and thereby raise wages and hire more people.
The good news is that America is the success story of the 20^th century. The bad news is that everyone else in the world has figured this out and is now copying our own best methods. Either we can compete, innovate, stay on top and thrive, or else we can get lazy, stagnate and sink down in the pack.
Will it be more inequality or more growth? The choice is up to us!

Why Is It So Hard For Congress To Do Its Job?

Posted on December 15, 2013 by jackheidel

In response to the recent budget deal which has already passed the House of Representatives, Taxpayers for Common Sense has issued a new report “Real Savings, Real Deficit Reduction: Relieving Budget Caps with Common Sense Savings in Fiscal Year 2014”, showing how $100 billion could be cut from the federal budget for fiscal 2014, completely offsetting the supposedly onerous cuts required by the sequester. Here is a summary of what TCS has come up with:

Of course there are many ways to achieve $100 billion in savings in a single year and this is only one particular way to do it. But it is a balanced plan making roughly comparable cuts from many different agencies and also including a significant amount of tax expenditure savings. It would, of course, be much better to also include adjustments to entitlement spending such as Social Security and Medicare. A big reason for keeping the sequester in place, or offsetting it with equivalent cuts, as TCS is suggesting, is to create more interest in making necessary changes in entitlement programs.
Yet another way of accomplishing the same goal would be to keep the sequester spending levels in place but to give each government agency the authority to rearrange the spending cuts within its only agency. This is what management should be doing anyway on a routine basis.
It is very disappointing that Congress will not do the job, one way or another, that is required to operate the government on a sound financial basis. Let’s hope that the voters make big changes in the elections coming up in 2014!

How to Get the Economy Back on Track

Posted on December 10, 2013 by jackheidel

Harvard Economist, Martin Feldstein, has an Op Ed column in yesterday’s New York Times, “Saving The Fed From Itself”, which gets our current economic situation half right. First of all, Mr. Feldstein says that the Fed’s quantitative easing policy is inadequate because “the magnitude of the effect has been too small to raise economic growth to a healthy rate. … The net result is that the economy has been growing at an annual rate of less than 2 percent. … Weak growth has also meant weak employment gains. … Total private sector employment is actually less than it was six years ago. … While doing little to stimulate the economy, the Fed’s policy of low long-term interest rates has caused individuals and institutions to take excessive risks that could destabilize the economy just as it did before the 2007-2009 recession.” So far he’s right on the button!
But then he goes on to say, “To get the economy back on track,” Congress should enact a five year plan to spend a trillion dollars or more on infrastructure improvement and that this would “move the growth of gross domestic product to above three percent a year.” An artificial stimulus like this might work temporarily but then it ends and we’re back where we started. We need a self-generating stimulus that will keep going indefinitely on its own. How do we accomplish this?
The answer should be obvious. We do it by stimulating the private sector to take more risk in order to generate more profits. In the process they will hire more employees and boost the economy.
How do we motivate the private sector? By lowering tax rates and loosening the regulations which stifle growth. Closing tax loopholes and lowering deductions (which will raise revenue to offset the lower tax rates) has the added benefit of attacking the corporate cronyism which everyone deplores.
We really do need to put first things first. If we can jump start the economy by motivating the private sector to invest and grow, we will have more tax revenue to spend on new and expanded government programs as well as shrinking the federal deficit.
Why is this so hard for so many people to understand?

Nowhere to Cut?

Posted on November 17, 2013 by jackheidel

After five years of enormous deficits, our national debt now stands at over $17 trillion. The only spending restraint that Congress has been able to achieve so far is an approximately one trillion dollar “sequester” over ten years, therefore amounting to about $100 billion per year in spending cuts. Federal expenditures have actually dropped for two years in a row now so the sequester really does work. Of course, almost everyone complains about cutting spending in such a “dumb” way. Why not make intelligent budget cuts by eliminating the least effective programs instead of having to make small percentage cuts in all discretionary spending, good and bad alike? Well, this really should not be all that difficult to do if Congress would try a little harder.
The Congressional Budget Office has just released a helpful report, “Options for Reducing the Deficit: 2014 to 2023”, which lists 103 ways for either decreasing spending or increasing revenues over the next decade. Amazingly, enacting all of these proposals would amount to a budget savings of $13 trillion over 10 years, ten times what is required by the sequester! Here are some examples of what could be done (along with the 10 year savings):

Eliminate direct payments to agricultural producers $25 billion
Increase federal insurance premiums for private pensions $5 billion
Reduce the amounts of federal pensions $6 billion
Tighten eligibility for food stamps $50 billion
Use more accurate measure of inflation for all mandatory programs $162 billion
Replace some military personnel with civilian employees $19 billion
Limit highway funding to expected highway revenues $65 billion
Eliminate grants to large and medium sized airports $8 billion
Eliminate subsidies for Amtrak $15 billion
Reduce the size of the federal workforce through attrition $43 billion
Tax carried interest as ordinary income $17 billion
Limit medical malpractice torts $57 billion
Raise the age of eligibility for Medicare to 67 $23 billion
Modify Tricare fees for working-age military retirees $71 billion
Total $566 billion

Right here is more than enough to offset half of the sequester. You don’t like these cuts? Then replace them with others from the CBO report. There are lots of options to choose from!

Beyond ObamaCare: Where Do We Go From Here?

Posted on November 14, 2013 by jackheidel

Last Sunday’s Washington Post has an Op Ed column by Jon Kingsdale, “Beyond Healthcare.gov, Obamacare’s Other Challenges” which describes the many challenges confronting ObamaCare besides just the website problems and the millions of individual policies which will be cancelled for not meeting the minimum requirements of the Affordable Care Act. Based on his experience setting up the Massachusetts Health Insurance Exchange from 2006-2010, there will be huge problems in getting enrollment, billing and premium collections working smoothly for such a large government program. For example, an estimated 27% of those who will be eligible for tax credits under the ACA do not have checking accounts. How will their monthly premiums be paid and tracked for these people if they’re late?
Considering all of the problems involved in the implementation of ObamaCare, and the fact that it does not really reform our current very costly healthcare system but rather just extends it to cover more people, it makes much sense to move toward real healthcare reform, which will control costs.
A column in today’s Wall Street Journal by Ramesh Ponnuru and Yuval Levin, “A Conservative Alternative to ObamaCare”, lays out several basic features which should be included in a sensible, market oriented approach to healthcare reform. The principles are:

A flat and universal tax credit for coverage which applies to everyone and not just for employer provided healthcare. The (refundable) credit would be roughly the amount necessary for catastrophic coverage.
Medicaid could be converted into a means-based addition to this tax credit.
Everyone with continuous coverage (which would be provided by the tax credit) would be protected from price spikes or cancellations if they get sick. This provides a strong incentive to buy and retain coverage without the need for a mandate.

A market oriented healthcare system like this is not only preferable to all of the mandates and restrictions of Obamacare, it also improves our current system by both expanding coverage to more people as well as controlling costs by giving health consumers (all of us) a much bigger stake in purchasing healthcare.
The United States spends 18% of GDP on healthcare, twice as much as any other country in the world. Our fiscal stability and future prosperity depend on getting this huge and growing cost under control. The ObamaCare fiasco provides an excellent opportunity to get started on doing this.

Where Are the Jobs? III. The Real Inequality Gap

Posted on November 12, 2013 by jackheidel

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a story “Job Gap Widens in Uneven Recovery”, which shows how unbalanced the economic recovery is. For workers aged 25 and older, unemployment is only 6%, compared to the overall unemployment rate of 7.3%. But for the young, ages 16 – 24, unemployment is 15%. Since the end of the recession in June 2009, wages have risen by 12% for the highest paid 25% of all workers. For the lowest paid 25%, wages have only risen by 6% over this time period.
“Households earning $50,000 or more have become steadily more confident over the past year and a half. Among lower income households, confidence has stagnated. The gap in confidence between the two groups is near its widest ever. That isn’t only bad for those being left behind. It’s also hurting the broader recovery, because it means families are able to spend only on essential items. Consumer spending rose just .1% in September 2013, after adjusting for inflation.”
Unfortunately, this data is entirely consistent with other gloomy economic trends which I have been reporting on recently such as the threat of technology to the middle class, the increased competition from globalization, and the shrinking size of the labor pool because of baby boomer retirements.
The New York Times has a running series of articles on “The Great Divide” and how to address it. Here is a clear cut example of this divide: how older, better trained and more affluent Americans are recovering from the recent recession more quickly than the less well off. This evident unfairness is damaging to the health of our society. The question is how do we address it in an effective manner?
The basic problem is the overall slow growth of the economy, about 2% of GDP per year, since the recession ended in June 2009. There are many things that policy makers can do to speed up this growth if they were only able to set aside ideological differences. The best single action by far is tax reform, for both individuals and corporations, lowering overall rates in exchange for reducing deductions and loopholes which primarily benefit the wealthy.
Here is yet another reason why it is so important to speed up the growth of our economy. How exasperating that our national leaders cannot figure out a way to come to together and get this done!

It Does Not Add Up

Jack Heidel's blog on fiscal responsibility

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