A Breath of Fresh Air

Posted on February 27, 2014 by jackheidel

U.S. Representative David Camp (R, Michigan), Chair of the House Committee on Ways and Means, has just introduced the “Tax Reform Act of 2014” and describes it in a column in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, “How to Fix Our Appalling Tax Code”. This legislation, developed over the past three years by the committee he chairs, has lots of attractive features. Mainly, however, it would give the economy a substantial boost. Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that it would increase GDP by $3.4 trillion over the next ten years and create 1.8 million new jobs.
It will accomplish this goal by trimming or eliminating tax breaks and loopholes for the wealthy in order to reduce tax rates for almost everyone. For example, the home mortgage deduction will be cut, for new homeowners, from the current value of $1,000,000 to $500,000. The deduction for state and local taxes will be eliminated. The charitable deduction will only apply for contributions in excess of 2% of income. The middle class is protected by raising the standard deduction to $11,000 per individual or $22,000 per couple. This means that 95% of taxpayers will be able to avoid itemizing.
The two basic tax rates would be 10% up to $75,000 in income, then 25% up to $400,000. Over $400,000 there would be a 10% surcharge on salaried or “non-production” income. The corporate tax rate would be cut from 35% to 25%, again by eliminating special exemptions and loopholes.
All of these features add up to a dramatic simplification of our tax code which will save an estimated $168 billion annually in preparation fees.
But always keep in mind the larger purpose of broad based tax reform like this. In the words of the economist Glenn Hubbard, it is “a policy shift in favor of mass prosperity – dynamism and inclusion.” It will do more for the poor than raising the minimum wage because it will actually create new jobs and better paying jobs.
This legislation represents a fantastic starting point for a national discussion on pro-growth tax reform. Let’s get on with it!

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!

Is a Bad Deal Better Than No Deal At All?

Posted on December 12, 2013 by jackheidel

Beltway insiders are praising the just announced budget deal between the Democrats and the Republicans. For example, a news analysis in today’s Wall Street Journal, “Accord Is Departure for Capitol”, suggests that budget politics may be changing, getting any deal is very hard, that perhaps bipartisanship isn’t dead in Washington but that there is still unfinished business. This is a purely euphemistic assessment. All this deal really does is to let the big spenders off the hook.
What it does is to relax the sequester by $63 billion for the next two years for very little in return. The $84 billion in new fees over ten years “officially” reduces the deficit by $21 billion but two year’s worth of new fees is just $16.8 billion. This means that the deficit will actually increase by $46 billion over the next two years.
But the real problem is that the leverage represented by the sequester is being thrown away for the next two years and this sets a bad precedent for the future. For example, we can now assume that the debt limit will also be raised for two more years in February 2014 because there will no longer be any leverage for bargaining for any other changes.
This in turn means that entitlement reform is for all practical purposes dead for the next two years. This is the really hard problem to solve. Big spenders will do anything to avoid dealing with it. Responsible fiscal conservatives know it must be addressed and need all the help they can muster to get something done.
What happens if the budget deal is not passed by Congress? It simply means that the sequester remains in effect and that discretionary spending will be $43 billion lower this current budget year than otherwise. The value of the sequester is to force action on the really thorny issue of reducing entitlement spending. Let’s preserve it for this purpose and not throw it away for nothing significant in return.
Leaders are supposed to address issues, not walk away from them!

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!

A Much Better Republican Strategy for Obama Care

Posted on September 23, 2013 by jackheidel

On the eve of its implementation, the Affordable Care Act (aka Obama Care) is more unpopular than ever amongst the general public. But the House Republican strategy of trying to defund the ACA as part of a continuing resolution to fund the government for the new fiscal year is a very poor idea. It will never pass both houses of Congress and be signed by the President. All it can possibly do is lead to a temporary shutdown of the government and therefore cause mass confusion.
The Wall Street Journal recently suggested a much more effective way for the House Republicans to proceed in “Carve-0uts for Congress”. The legislation establishing the ACA contains a provision requiring all members of Congress and their staffs (11,000 people in all) to purchase their own health insurance on the new exchanges which are being set up to enroll uninsured Americans. The idea behind this provision is to insure that members of Congress and their staffs and their families will obtain their insurance just like everyone else so that they will fully experience how healthcare reform actually works in practice.
But just a month ago the Administration personnel team issued a regulation exempting all Members and aides from the requirement to use the exchanges. A recent poll taken by Independent Women’s Voice shows that 92% of likely voters, regardless of their views of the ACA, think that this exemption is unfair.
The implication is clear. Republicans should show their dissatisfaction with the ACA by attaching the repeal of this exemption, which is contrary to law, as well as highly unpopular, to the continuing resolution to fund the government for the next fiscal year. Let the Democratic Senate defend this exemption if it wants too. It’s an opportunity for the House Republicans to do the right thing and also to stand with the “little guy” against the Washington elite.

How To Do Intelligent Budget Cutting in Washington

Posted on September 9, 2013 by jackheidel

The July/August 2013 issue of the Atlantic Magazine has an article “Can Government Play Moneyball?”, by two former budget officials, Peter Orszag (under President Obama) and John Bridgeland (under President Bush), which describes the very careless spending atmosphere in the federal government in recent years. “Based on our rough calculations”, they write, “less than $1 out of every $100 of government spending is backed by even the most basic evidence that the money is being spent wisely.” They describe in great detail their efforts to introduce mechanisms to evaluate the performance of social service programs of various types and how difficult this has been to accomplish.
“Since 1990, the federal government has put 11 large social programs, collectively costing taxpayers more than $10 billion a year, through randomized controlled trials, the gold standard of evaluation. Ten out of the eleven – including Upward Bound and Job Corps – showed “weak or no positive effects on their participants.” Here’s another example. “The federal government’s long running after school program, 21^st Century Community Learning Centers, has shown no effect on academic outcomes on elementary-school students – and significant increases in school suspensions and incidents requiring other forms of discipline. The Bush administration tried to reduce funding for the program” but was overruled by Congress. “Today the program still gets more than $1 billion a year in federal funds.”
Lots of people complain that the sequester is a “dumb” way to cut federal spending. Of course, it would make far more sense to cut back spending in a rational way by evaluating all programs, keeping the effective ones and eliminating the ineffective ones. As the sequester takes bigger and bigger across-the-board spending cuts each year for nine more years (it’s a program to cut $1 trillion over ten years), the big spenders in Congress are going to start crying “Uncle”! because their own favorite programs will be effected more and more deeply each year. Maybe then, hopefully sooner than later, Congress will gain some collective common sense and accept the fact that there is a better way to make the significant budget cuts that are necessary.
Let’s hope so!

One Way to Solve the National Debt Problem

Posted on August 12, 2013 by jackheidel

In today’s New York Times, the economists Glenn Hubbard and Tim Kane write that “Republicans and Democrats Both Miscalculated”. They say that “when the Congressional Budget Office recently lowered its forecast of future deficits, many voices on the left claimed that the problem had been overblown by ‘austerity scaremongers’” and that “some voices on the right have renewed calls to ‘starve the beast’ now that deficits are under control.” But they point out that just because the deficit is likely to shrink for the next couple of years, CBO also projects that it will soon be back up to a trillion dollars per year indefinitely into the future. And this is all optimistically assuming full employment, robust growth and moderate interest rates.
The Hubbard/Kane solution is to amend the Constitution with a flexible Balanced Budget Amendment. Its features would include: 1) a provision that spending in a given year would not exceed income averaged over the previous seven years, 2) no restriction on tax rates which would have to be hashed out by Congress and 3) an exception to spending restraint for national emergencies.
There are, of course, valid objections to a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution. It reduces the flexibility of Congress and the President to act as needed. It would be much better for Congress to act in a fiscally responsible manner on its own initiative. But we all know that this doesn’t happen. The pressure is always to adopt new spending programs and never to cut existing programs, no matter how ineffective they are.
Debt is the “single biggest threat to our national security” declared Admiral Mike Mullen, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Many other prominent citizens express similar thoughts on a regular basis. It is really just basic common sense that no governmental unit can flagrantly ignore this fundamental economic principle year after year without very serious repercussions. It is (well past) time to force our national leaders to bite the bullet and do what almost every sane person knows what must be done.

Is a ‘Do Nothing’ Congress Really a Serious Problem?

Posted on August 9, 2013 by jackheidel

Today’s Omaha World Herald reprints the article “Get-nothing-done Congress is disrespectful to democracy” by the Baltimore Sun writer, Andrew Yarrow. Mr. Yarrow says that “the 112^th Congress, which ended in 2012, passed fewer bills than any Congress in recent memory, and the current 113^th Congress is on track to do just as badly. … What Congress does do often seems patently ridiculous. … We need to … ramp up public pressure to get something done, rather than just fight.”
But is the problem just to do something, anything, or is it rather to do something worthwhile? And what if there is a fundamental disagreement, as there is today, about what is worthwhile? One party thinks that the way to boost the economy and speed up the recovery is to increase artificial stimulus (government spending) and to pay for it by raising taxes on the rich. The other party is appalled by the $6 trillion in deficit spending racked up so far by the current administration and wants to slam on the brakes. Each side is working as hard as it can to prevail, especially by discrediting and embarrassing the other side. How do you resolve a dispute like this?
There is really only one person who has the clout and visibility to get this done and that is the President. But when the President is the divider-in-chief, spending much of his time and effort proposing unsound economic and fiscal policies, intended primarily for short term political gain, what is the other party supposed to do? Acquiesce by passing new laws that will just make things worse? Or by standing firm on principle and hoping that the general public will be able to understand and appreciate its opposition to bad policies?
This is the situation which we are currently in. It makes for a difficult and unpleasant time. The economy is slowly recovering from the Great Recession on its own. Let’s hope that this trend continues and that we can muddle through our present political predicament.

It Does Not Add Up

Jack Heidel's blog on fiscal responsibility

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