Month: August 2018

Tax Brawl

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Taxation with representation ain’t so hot either – Gerald Barzan

August 26, 2018

by Steve Stofka

The debate over taxes focuses on the size of national programs, and the Federal taxes collected for those programs. In the past fifty years, state and local government (SLG) taxes have risen to equal the burden of Federal taxes. Despite this rise, SLGs must increase tax revenues to meet obligations and historic growth rates. Republicans control most states and will turn to property and sales tax for the additional revenue.

Fifty years ago, SLG tax receipts were half of all Federal tax receipts, including Social Security. For every tax dollar a worker sent to Washington, he sent fifty cents to his SLG. During the past decade, the SLG tax share has averaged ninety cents.

StatePctFed

In the engine model I first introduced in July, Federal taxes were drained from the economic engine. Because SLGs do not have super powers to create money, their taxes stay within the engine and grease the gears. 72% of SLG taxes are under the category of mandatory business production – they are levied on goods and services received by the taxpayers. These include property, sales and business taxes and a plethora of licensing fees. A family who cannot pay their property taxes loses their home. Sales taxes are mandatory at the time of purchase. When SLG taxes are high, households must work more hours or cut expenses to meet the burden. Unlike Federal taxes, higher SLG taxes can force families to work more and increase GDP (Note#1).

For the past thirty years, SLG taxes have grown 6.6% each year, 1-1/2% above the 5.2% annual growth in spending. In the past ten years, tax receipts have grown at half that rate – 3.2%, barely above the 3.0% growth in spending. SLGs have not saved enough to meet the pension benefits and medical care promised the Boomer generation. SLGs will need to raise revenues, cut spending or both.

23% of total SLG tax receipts are taxes collected on personal income. Taxes on business income make up an additional 5%. Sixty years ago, those personal and business shares of the SLG tax pie were 7% and 3%.

SLGIncPctSLGTotal

Republicans oppose raising taxes, especially income taxes, and they control the legislatures in 32 states. In 26 of those states, they control the governorship as well (Note #2).  Democrats have total control of only six states, one of them California, where income and sales tax make up a whopping 50% of state revenues (Note #3). Many SLGs will cut spending and raise additional revenue through higher property and sales taxes and licensing fees. This lowering of the income tax share will move the mix of income and production taxes to the model of sixty years ago when production taxes were 87% of total SLG tax receipts.

In 2017, single family homeowners averaged $3300 in property taxes. Some states like Colorado have low property taxes averaging only $2000 (Note #4). Personal property taxes have averaged almost 7% annual growth during the past thirty years. Expect 8 – 10% annual growth in the next decade and a population shift to those states which can curb the growth of their taxes. Angry homeowners and taxpayers are sure to kick up a ruckus at City Councils and State Legislatures around the country.

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  1. In 2007, Christina and David Romer analyzed the effect of tax changes on GDP. They found that a 1% exogenous tax increase resulted in a 2 – 3% reduction in real GDP. They classified tax changes implemented for long-term growth as exogenous. Here is a one page summary of the PDF.
  2. One of several sources on Republican dominance of state legislatures. The Hill.
  3. Income and sales tax make up 50% of California’s tax revenues (CA Research Bureau)
  4. Denver Post article on property taxes

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Miscellaneous

NYT had an article on senior scams this week. Because those older than 50 own 70% of deposit balances, they are prime targets of fraud. This was novel: a retired IT pro who thought he was working from home as an employee gave his new “employer” his bank information so that his paycheck could be direct deposited. Common scams: Check fraud is still common, as are overpayments and other excuses to get you to give up your bank account information. Only you should be initiating such a transaction.

Vanguard’s projections of expected returns for various asset classes over the next ten years. Domestic stocks 3.9%. Bonds 3.3%

 

 

Taxes – the Necessary Good

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Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. – Franklin D. Roosevelt

August 19, 2018

by Steve Stofka

In the aggregate taxes are necessary and beneficial to everyone. Because Federal taxes act as a drain from the economic engine, they are different from state and local taxes. How those taxes are levied is a matter of policy debate, but they are necessary for the survival of a nation’s government and its economy. Revenue from natural resource production that is owned by a national government acts as a tax. Failing to understand that concept weakens and cracks governments around the world.

The inability to create money constrains state and local governments (Note #1). Taxes paid act as income for goods and services received from those governments. The Federal government has no such constraints. It does not need tax income as such. Rather, it must drain taxes to offset the amount of spending that it pumps into an economy. Inflation, the chief measure of extra money in an economy, rises when the Federal government doesn’t drain enough in taxes. As inflation rises, people turn to goods and service exchange that is not recorded and not taxed. The underground economy tries to offset the hidden tax of inflation.

As Venezuelans flee the runaway inflation in their country, they are running from too much spending and not enough taxation. Yes, it is counterintuitive. Venezuela owns the world’s largest reserve of oil. The net revenue from that oil competes with the taxes that a private oil company would pay to the government. The national government “owes” itself the tax revenues that it would have collected from a private company. Oil production has declined from 2.4 million barrels per day in 2008 to 1.2 million barrels in 2018 (see Note #2). Corruption and incompetence are the chief causes of the decline. Net oil revenue has declined by 95% from the bull market levels of the mid-2000s. Because the national government has not been paying their taxes, inflation has exploded the economy.

Because national politicians begin their careers in local politics, they regard a nationalized resource (NR) as a source of income, not an economic drain. That drain must be kept open through spending in oil infrastructure, training and transportation. In Venezuela, 2016 gross oil revenues were 20% of GDP and a net of less than 5% (see Note #3). Inflation taxes 100% of an economy. Because NR revenue acts as a pressure relief on inflation, that 20% portion of GDP affects 100% of the economy. A lack of understanding of the nature of a NR led to the crisis and decline of Great Britain in the 1970s, China in the 1960s and 1970s, and Zimbabwe in 2008.

How should a national government levy taxes on the taxpayers within the economy? FDR suggested “ability to pay.” For the past one hundred years we have measured ability to pay by income. Is that a good measure? French economist Thomas Piketty suggests that assets are a better measure. Local governments use this method to collect property taxes. Consider a retiree with $500K in liquid assets, who is taxed on $10K in interest and dividends earned each year. Clearly, the retiree’s assets are a better indication of his ability to pay. Should Congress abolish the income tax and tax people and corporations a multiple of what they pay in property taxes on their primary residence or business locations? Those living in high tax suburban and ex-urban areas might move toward lower-taxed urban areas. Would suburban areas actively recruit businesses to widen their tax base and lower property taxes? An intriguing thought.

Tax levies are the subject of endless debate because people cannot agree on what constitutes a fair tax. In the aggregate, the pressure reducing function of taxes benefits everyone, but is especially beneficial to those with less income. Should a national government impose a head tax on everyone? It could. That would amount to $15,000 per person this year, more than some families make. How does a national government extract tax money from its poor? It doesn’t. From 1958 – 1962, China forced taxes out of poor farmers in Mao’s Great Leap Forward (Note #4). Millions starved as a result.

Everyone should contribute equally to shared benefits, but practicality triumphs over principle. The survival of the national government becomes paramount. Some form of redistributive taxation must ensue. How to shape that redistribution? A government could take all the wealth of the ten richest people in America and still be short $3.8 trillion (Note #5). All the debate falls between total equality and total unfairness, and neither accomplishes the task of draining enough taxes out of the engine. A government could spend nothing: no defense, no research, no border or shore protection, no pension, medical or education spending. That’s a government in name only, and not for long. Other governments will want to capture control of that country’s resources.

The vast middle of the debate is an endless variety of proposals of “fairness” in both taxing and spending, a debate that has changed little since Cicero argued for his proposals in the Roman Senate in the first century B.C.E. What is not debatable is that a nation’s taxes must be roughly guided by its spending. A nation like Venezuela, which taxes half of what it spends, was headed for an economic tsunami of high inflation and inevitable collapse.

The debate is important. Just as it did in Rome two thousand years ago, consolidated party power corrupts. Because the current Presidency and House are held by the same party, we can expect a strong growth rate of net input, spending less taxes, and the data confirms the prediction. Net Federal input in the first full year of the Trump administration, April 2017 – March 2018, grew at a record-breaking annual pace of 19.6%, far above the sixty-year average of 8%. However – because Federal input has been so low this decade, the Federal government must continue this torrid pace of input in 2018 and 2019 just to reach the 8% average.

Republicans have held the House for the majority of the past three decades. Neither party agrees with the other party’s priorities, so the Republican strategy has been simple. They talk fiscal discipline and curtail Federal spending during Democratic administrations so that Republicans can spend big on their priorities when they have the Presidency. The Democrats did this for forty years when they held the House from 1954-1994 and will do so again when they have their next Congressional “run.”

To sum up: taxes are good, in general, but bad in the particular. No nation’s leader has stood on the world stage and said, “To tax or not to tax, that is the question.” For a nation and its economy, “to tax” is synonymous wtih “to be.”

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Notes:

1. Before the Civil War, each state controlled banking within its border (National Bank Act). For a deeper dive into state financing, try this Brookings Institute article.

2. A background paper on Venezuela oil (PDF). Crude oil production in the first quarter 2018 fell to 2.19 million barrels, a thirty-year low (Reuters). The Venezuela government spends more than 40% of GDP but collects only 20% in taxes (Statistica). During the 1997-2006 oil bull market, net revenues to the Venezuelan government averaged $20B per year (background paper above). Last year it was less than $1B. On August 20th, Venezuelans will lose their gasoline subsidies and pay a competitive price for gasoline (PDVSA article).

3. Gross oil revenue in 2016 was $48B, 20% of GDP of $236B (Reuters article). Exxon Mobil had a net profit of 6.5% in 2011. Venezuela would greatly benefit if the oil production was owned privately and paid 25-30% in income and other taxes.

4. Frank Dikotter was one of several historians afforded access to People’s Party records of the Great Leap Forward. He wrote an exhaustive account of human folly in Mao’s Great Famine .

5. Richest people in America  – Wikipedia 

Miscellaneous

Gold is down more than 10% in the past few months. BAR is a gold ETF launched in the past year. As an alternative to GDL and IAU, it has the lowest expense ratio at .2%. Here is a June 2018 article on the ETF.

Taxes – A Nation’s Tiller

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Printing money is merely taxation in another form. – Peter Schiff

 

August 12, 2018

by Steve Stofka

The Federal government does not need taxes to fund its spending, so why does it impose them? Taxes act as a natural curb on the price pressures induced by Federal spending. Taxes can promote steady growth and allow the government to introduce more entropy into the economic system.

During World War 2, the Federal government ran deficits that were 25% of the entire economy (Note #1) and five times current deficit levels as a percent of the economy. Despite its monetary superpowers, the government imposes a wide range of taxes. Why?

Using the engine model I first introduced a few weeks ago (Note #2), taxes drain pressure from the economic system and act as a natural check on price inflation. During WW2, the government spent so much more than it taxed that it needed to impose wage and price controls to curb inflationary pressures. Does it matter how inflation is checked? Yes.

When price pressures are curbed by law, people turn to other currencies or barter. During WW2, the alternative was barter and do-it-yourself. Because neither of these is a recorded exchange of money, the government collected fewer taxes which further increased price pressure in the economic engine. After the war was over and price controls lifted, tax collections relieved the accumulated price pressures. As a percent of GDP, taxes collected were 50% more than current levels.

For the past fifty years, Federal tax collections have ranged from 10-12% of GDP, but they are not an isolated statistic. What matters is the difference between Federal spending and tax collections, or net Federal input. During the past two decades Federal input has become a growing share of GDP.

FedSpendLessTaxPctGDP

During the past sixty years, that net input has grown 8% per year. The growth rates have varied by decade but the strongest rates of input growth rates have occurred when the same party has held the Presidency and House. Neither party knows restraint. The lowest input growth has occurred when a Republican House restrains a Democratic President (Note #3).

FedNetInputGrowth

Let’s compare net Federal input to the growth of credit. As I wrote last week, the Federal government took a more dominant role in the economy in the late 1960s. By the year 2000, net Federal input grew at an annual rate of 10.3%, over one percent higher than credit growth. During all but six of those years, Democrats controlled the House and the purse. During those forty years, inequality grew.

FedNetInputCreditGrowth

During the 1990s and 2010s, government should have increased its net input to offset the lack of credit growth. To increase input, the government can increase spending, reduce taxes or a combination of both. When GDP growth is added to the chart, we can see why this decade’s GDP growth rate has been the lowest of the past six decades. It’s not rocket science; the inputs have been low.

FedNetInputCreditGrowthGDPGrowth

A universe with maximum entropy is a still universe because all the energy is uniformly distributed. At a minimum entropy, the universe exploded in the Big Bang. Too much clumping of money energy provokes rebellion. Too little clumping hampers investment and interest and condemns a nation to poverty. As an act of self-preservation, a government adopts redistributive tax policies. Among the developed nations, the U.S. is second only to France in the percent of disposable income it redistributes to its people (Note #4).

A nation can either tax its citizens directly, or add so much net input that it provokes higher inflation, which taxes people indirectly through the loss of purchasing power. Of the two alternatives, the former is the more desirable. In a democracy we can vote for those who spend our tax dollars. Inflation is both a tax and an unmanaged redistribution of money from the poor to the rich. How so? Credit is money. Higher inflation rates lead to higher interest rates which reduce access to credit for lower income households, and give households with greater assets a higher return on their savings.

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Notes:
1. Federal Income and Outlays at the Office Management and Budget, Historical Tables

2. The “engine” was first introduced in Hunt For Inflation, and continued in Hunt, Part 2 , Engine Flow , and Washington’s Role.

3. Federal spending less tax collections grew at a negative annual rate during the Clinton and Obama administrations. Both had to negotiate with a hostile Republican House in the last six years of their administrations.

4. “U.S. transfer payments constitute 28.5% of Americans’ disposable income—almost double the 15% reported by the Census Bureau. That’s a bigger share than in all large developed countries other than France, which redistributes 33.1% of its disposable income.” (WSJ – Paywall) The OECD’s computation of the GINI coefficient is based on disposable personal income, which is calculated differently in the U.S.

Miscellaneous:

Average GDP growth for the past sixty years has been 3.0%. The average inflation rate has been 3.3%. The 60-year median is 2.6%. The average inflation rate of the past two decades have been only 2.1%.

A good recap of the after effects of the financial crisis.

 

Washington’s Role

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“The rich are much better placed to feed at the public trough. The poor get crumbs.” – Steve Hanke, American Economist, 1942 –

August 5, 2018

by Steve Stofka

In the past fifty years, the increasing role of the Federal government in the economy has been the chief contributor to inequality. In the last years of the Bush administration, America became a socialist economy. Credit growth under the Trump administration has not changed from the levels during the Obama administration. On this score, Trump is Obama II.

Since the Great Recession, the federal government has far surpassed the role of banks in net input into the economic engine. In the post WW2 period, the annual growth in credit outstanding (see Notes #1) to households, corporations, state and local government surpassed the net input of the federal government, its spending less the taxes it drained out of the engine. The blue line in the graph below is the growth in bank credit.

CreditGrowthvsFedInput1953-1970

The Great Society and the escalation of the Vietnam War in the 1960s marked a changing role for the Federal government. Bernie Sanders marked the early 1970s as the beginning of the increase in inequality. Bernie suggested that the Federal government should have a greater role in the economy to correct the problem. Bernie has it backwards, as I will show. It is the greater role of the Federal government in the economy that has contributed to inequality. The hand that feeds the poor becomes the hand that feeds the rich.

Under subsequent presidents after 1968, both Republican and Democratic, the Federal input into the economy dominated the net – loans minus payments – input of bank credit. When the Federal government spends more than it taxes, it becomes a proxy debtor for individuals, state and local governments who cannot borrow enough to meet their needs. As the net credit input into the economy sank in the last two years of the Bush administration, 2007-2008, the role of the Federal government approached the levels of western European socialist governments.

CreditGrowthVsFedInput

The Obama Administration and super-majority Democratic Congress of 2009-2010 simply held that input level established earlier by the Bush Administration and a Democratic House. When Republicans took control of the House in 2011, they fought with the Obama Administration to reduce the input level. From 2012 through 2015, the growth in credit eclipsed the net input of the Federal government. Since early 2016, the growth in Federal input has once again dominated the role of the banks in the private economy. After the tax cuts passed last year, the Federal government will drain less taxes out of the economy and further cement its dominant role as an input into the engine.

For the past 65 years, quarterly credit growth has averaged 1.9%. In the last ten years, it has averaged .4%. From April 2017, two months after Trump took office, through March 2018, quarterly net credit growth averaged the same .4% as it did during the Obama years. Banks may express confidence in the Trump presidency, but their credit policies indicate that they have as little confidence in Trump’s Washington as they had in Obama’s Washington. Unless Trump can turn that sentiment, his administration will suffer the same lackluster growth as the Obama administration. If the Federal government continues to dominate economic input, Trump’s pledge to drain the swamp will be broken. Federal economic power only feeds the K-Street crocodiles lurking in the swamp waters.

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Notes

  1. The growth of credit outstanding (net input) is a function of new credit issued (input), debtors’ payments on existing loans (drain) and the write-off of non-performing loans (drain).

K-Street in Washington is the location of many of the nation’s most powerful lobbying firms.