Tax Reform Is Calling

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by Steve Stofka

December 17, 2016

On our journey on the sea of life, we sometimes hear the siren call of politicians who promise simple taxes. “File your taxes on a postcard” their voices echo across the waters as they invite us to their island. Our journey is long and treacherous, so we are drawn to the prospect of simple tax filing.

Some taxpayer boats weave through the sharp rocks that lay just off the sandy shores of the simple tax island. They are greeted by the politicians who give them postcards to celebrate their arrival. Many boats are caught in the turbulent waters and are swallowed up by the tax monsters lurking in the sea.  “Alas!” they wail as they curse themselves for their attraction to the politicians’ call.

So the story goes with the tax bill that Republicans hope to pass next week. I didn’t think that the bill would get this far.

Many paycheck employees will find the new tax rule simpler. Student loan interest will continue to be an “above the line” deduction from income. The child tax credit will be doubled to $2000. To satisfy Republican Sen. Marco Rubio’s demands, more of this credit will be refundable to those taxpayers who pay little or no income tax.

Those in high tax states will suffer under the new tax bill, which allows only $10,000 in combined deductions for state, local and property taxes (SALT). Deductible mortgage interest will be capped as well. Tax policy has long subsidized homeowners over renters and favored those in coastal states (NY Times article).

Many taxpayers will find it more advantageous to take the newly doubled standard deduction of $24,000.  Under the new law, 529-college funds can now be used for K-12 tuition and qualified expenses.

Caught in the rocks and turbulent waters are professionals and business owners, who have adopted “pass-through” ownership structures to legally minimize taxes under current law. This group accounts for 30% of all business income. As this Journal of Accountancy article notes, court rulings and IRS guidance can be complex and contradictory. The new tax bill only complicates the familiarity of the existing complexity.

These non-paycheck earners receive all or part of their business income through a Sub-S corporation, an LLC, or partnership. Unlike a conventional C-corporation, these businesses “pass through” their profits to the owner/partners who pay at a personal tax rate. Under the new tax bill, some of that income may be subject to a 20% exclusion from taxes.

Under the new tax bill, the tax rate for C-corps will be reduced to 21%. Depending on individual circumstances, some owner groups may find it advantageous to adopt a C-corp ownership structure.

25 million sole proprietors  account for 11% of non-farm business income. Many are low-profit or part-time businesses which will remain sole proprietors. Higher volume businesses may want to revisit their ownership strategies with their accountants.

Corporations will benefit from the reduced tax rate but the accountants for publicly held corporations are dreading the prospect that the new tax law will be signed before the new year. Under GAAP accounting rules, those corporations must estimate the effect of the tax changes and present those estimates at the next earnings announcement which are scheduled for late January or February. Number crunchers can cancel that Cabo vacation during Christmas week.

The rich benefit because they pay an outsize portion of income taxes. According to the IRS (2016 tax stats on this page) , taxpayers with adjusted gross incomes (AGI) above $500K were only .8% of the 150 million individual returns. Their AGI was 19.4% of the $10 trillion in income reported, but they paid 36.5% of the $1.4 trillion in Federal income taxes.

TaxSumByAGI2016

These high incomes will get a reduction in taxes from 39.6% to 37%. The very rich – those with an AGI above $10 million – get half of their income from capital gains, which are not affected by the new tax law. Despite promising to do so, lawmakers did not reduce or repeal the 3.8% Obamacare tax on investment income for high income taxpayers. Based on 2016 tax data, they probably could not forgo the tax revenue and keep the ten-year cost of the bill under $1.5 trillion.

In short, the new bill will create two classes of taxpayers – the postcard and non-postcard payers. Some tax preparers and accountants may worry that the new law will reduce their business. Rest assured – Congress does not know how to write tax laws that are not complex. Thank God for politics!

Trump To The Rescue

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by Steve Stofka

December 10, 2017

This blog post goes to what may be a dark place for some readers. The election of Donald J. Trump may have stopped a year-long slide into recession. I didn’t start out with that conclusion. I meant to point out some interesting correlations in the velocity of money. Yeh, yawn. By the time I was done, not yawn.

If I mention the change in the velocity of money, do you groan at the prospect of a wonky economics topic? Take heart. Anyone who has slowed down from 65 MPH on a highway to 15 MPH in rush hour traffic is familiar with a change in velocity.

The velocity of money measures the amount of time that money stays in our pockets. It signals the willingness of buyers and sellers to make transactions. When buyers and sellers can’t agree on price, transactions fall and the change in velocity goes negative. In the chart below, the change in the velocity of money (blue line) often has a similar pattern to the change in real GDP (red line).

VelocityVsGDP

Both recent recessions were preceded by declines in GDP growth and the speed of money. Following the financial crisis, the Fed began to inflate the money supply in a series of policies dubbed “QE,” or Quantitative Easing. In 2011, after two rounds of QE, the Fed worried that the recovery might stall out.

Let’s turn to the green square in the chart labelled Operation Twist. Obama and a do-nothing Republican Congress were at odds so there was little chance of Congress enacting any fiscal policy to come to the economic rescue. That task was left – once again – to the Federal Reserve to use its monetary tools.

In Congressional hearings, then Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke advised the Senate Finance Committee that the short term interest rate was already zero and the Fed was out of monetary tools. The Congress should step in with a stimulative fiscal policy. The Committee members somberly hung their heads. We are incompetent, they said, so the Federal Reserve will have to rescue the country.

If it expanded the money supply further, the Fed was concerned that they would spark inflation. In hindsight, that fear was unfounded, but none of us has the luxury of making decisions while looking in the rearview mirror. Economic identities like M*V = P*Q (notes at end) are just that – looking in the rearview mirror.

The Fed resurrected a monetary tool from the 1960s dubbed Operation Twist, after the dance craze the Twist (Fed paper).  Early Boomers will remember Chubby Checker. The Fed began selling the short-term Treasuries they owned and buying long term Treasuries. By increasing the demand for long term Treasuries, the Fed drove down long-term interest rates as an inducement for businesses and consumers to borrow. Despite the low rates, consumers continued to shed debt for another year. How effective was Operation Twist – maybe a little bit (Survey).

As the price of oil declined in late 2014 and the Fed ended yet another round of QE (QE3), there was a real danger of moving into a recession. Notice the decline in GDP growth (red) and money velocity (blue).

The downward trend barely reversed itself in the 3rd quarter of 2016, just before the election, but not by much.

MoneyGDPGrowth2013-2017

The election of Donald J. Trump and a single party controlling both houses of Congress kindled hope of a looser regulatory environment and tax reform. Only then did the speed of money turn consistently upward. But we are not out of the woods yet. A year later, in late 2017, money velocity is still negative. As I said earlier, buyers and sellers still cannot agree on price. There is a mismatch in confidence and expectations. Until that blue line turns positive, GDP growth will remain tepid or turn negative.

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M*V = P*Q is an identity that equates money supply (M) and demand (V) to inflation (P) and output (Q).

 

 

Expectations

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by Steve Stofka

December 3, 2017

What can I expect from my portfolio mix? Portfolio Visualizer has a free tool  to analyze an asset mix. We can also get a quick approximation by looking at a fund with that mix.
An investor with a 40/60 stock/bond mix might go to the performance page of Vanguard’s Wellesley Income fund VWINX. It’s 50-year return is close to 10% but that includes the heady days of the 1970s and early 1980s when both interest rates and inflation were high. The ten-year performance of this fund includes the financial crisis and is close to 7%.

An investor with a slightly aggressive 65/35 stock bond mix could look to Vanguard’s Wellington Fund VWELX, which has a similar weighting. It’s 90-year return is 8.3% but that includes the Great Depression and WW2. It’s 10-year return is – wait for it – close to 7%.

Two funds – a conservative 40/60 and a slightly aggressive 65/35 – both had the same ten-year returns. All it took was one bad year in the stock market – 2008 – to even up the returns between these two very different allocations. On a year-by-year comparison of the two funds we see a trend. During the two negative years of this fifteen period, I charted the absolute value to better show that trend. Also, compare the absolute values of the returns in 2008 and 2009. The collapse and bounce back was about the same level.

VWELX-VWINXComp

During this fifteen year period, the cautious mix earned 88 cents to the $1 earned by the slightly aggressive mix. Looking back thirty years, cautious made only 75 cents. In the past fifteen years, the difference between positive and negative years was important. In good years, cautious earned 20 cents less. But in negative years, like 2002 and 2008, cautious made 73 cents more by losing that much less.

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Personal Saving Rate

The savings rate is near all-time lows. We’ve seen a similar lack of caution in 2000 and 2006. As housing and equities rise, families may count those gains in their mental piggy bank. Asset gains are not savings. Asset prices, particularly equities, will decline during a recession. Jobs are lost. Without an adequate financial cushion, families struggle to weather the downturn. The rise in bankruptcies and foreclosures further exacerbates the downturn.
SavingsRate1998-2017

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Annuity

A good explanation of the various types of annuities.  The graphics that the author presents might help some readers understand the role of annuities, and the advantages of deferred vs. immediate annuitues.  I have also posted this on the Tools page for future reference.

http://www.theretirementcafe.com/2017/11/income-annuities-immediate-and-deferred.html

The Bubble of Average

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November 26, 2017

by Steve Stofka

December is the 10-year anniversary of the start of the recession that culminated in the Financial Crisis of 2008. Four years later, an investor finally broke even.

Since that breakeven point in early 2012, the total return of the SP500 has more than doubled.  The rising market and historically low volatility sparks predictions of a bubble and a crash. The Shiller CAPE ratio, an inflation adjusted measure of price-earnings, is not as high as the ratio of the dot-com boom but it is very high.  Stocks are expensive.

Let’s turn to some long-term returns for a different perspective. The 10-year annual return is only 8.13%, almost 2% less than the average for the past 90 years. The 20-year return is even worse – just 7%.

From July 2000 to August 2006 an investor made nothing. As a rule of thumb, savings needed in the next five years should not be invested in the stock market. Both downturns are good examples. The 2000-2006 downturn lasted six years. The 2007-2012 lasted more than four years.

Let’s turn to a 30-year period, 1988 to 2017. The period begins just after the October 1987 meltdown. All the froth has been taken out of the market. The 1990s included the historic run up of the dot-com boom. The 30-year return is above average but not by much – .6%.

The most disturbing truth about these averages is the average or below average returns of these periods.  Investor surveys regularly show that people disregard averages and overestimate future returns.  That fantasy is the true bubble.

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Corporate Taxes

Next week the Senate will attempt to pass a tax cut bill. As I noted last week, both the Senate and House bills cut the corporate income tax to 20%. The administration and Republican lawmakers state that this tax cut will help working families the most. They must be too busy to read the analysis of their own Treasury department.

The Department periodically analyzes the distribution of the tax burden on various types of taxpayers. In their latest analysis, they estimate that labor income bears only 19% of the costs of corporate income taxes. Steve Mnuchin, the head of the department, claims that workers bear 2/3rds of the cost of the corporate tax. He uses this fantasy number to support a corporate tax cut.

Who will benefit most from a cut in the corporate income tax? The report states “the top 10 percent of families bears 72.5 percent of the burden” and will be the winners.

Over the decades, through Republican and Democratic administrations, the cost burden of labor has changed only slightly. Economists might argue the finer points, but the distribution is well understood. Mnuchin’s job is to sell the boss’s tax cuts. Facts be damned and full steam ahead.

Rocky Tax Road

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November 19, 2017

The House passed a tax cut bill this week as the Senate Finance Committee passed a separate version that must still go to the full Senate for a vote. There’s a hard road ahead for this bill to reach the President’s desk.

The Process…

The full Senate will take up the bill after Thanksgiving. If the Senate passes the bill, there are still more steps. Bills submitted by Congress must have identical language from both the House and Senate.

The House passed its tax bill first, so the Senate could adopt the House version and approve it. Highly unlikely. If the Senate passes a bill, both bills will likely go to a House-Senate conference committee to resolve differences in the two bills and produce a unified bill. The Republicans will hold a majority on that committee and do not need Democratic votes.

If the committee can produce a unified bill, it will be sent to the House and Senate for a vote. If either body rejects the bill, it can be sent back to the joint committee, but that rarely happens. The bill would be effectively dead.

Republican leaders regard passage of the bill as critical to the 2018 Senate races. After the Republican majority failed to pass a health care bill earlier this year, big dollar donors have advised party leaders that they are closing their wallets if the party cannot pass a tax bill. Fundraising for the 2018 campaigns kicks off in a month.

The Provisions…for business

Both bills cut the corporate income tax to 20%. Both bills will tax pass-through and passive income at 25% or 32%.

Pass-through income consists of profits earned by businesses that flow to the business owner as personal income. Half of all pass-through income goes to the top 1% of incomes.

Passive income can be the profits from rental property, or dividends paid by an REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust). Under current law, such income is taxed at personal rates as high as 40%.

Republican Senator Ron Johnson opposes the bill as it came out of the Finance Committee. The bill gives an estimated $1.3 trillion in tax cuts to corporations, more than three times the $362 billion in tax cuts to taxpayers with pass-through income. Each sector currently pays half of the taxes on business profits. Small businesses and farmers get 25 cents of the tax cut dollar, while big corporations get 75 cents.

With only a two-person majority, Senate Republicans cannot afford to lose more than two votes and pass this bill. Susan Collins from Maine, a state dominated by small businesses, has echoed Johnson’s objections. Rand Paul from Kentucky says he will not vote for a bill that increases the deficit, which this bill does. Unless there are some key changes made to the Senate bill during the Thanksgiving break, the bill is unlikely to pass.

Both bills keep the 1031 exchange clause which allows real estate owners to avoid capital gains taxes on the sale of a property when they reinvest the gains in a similar class property. Owners of equities do not enjoy this tax subsidy. An investor who sells a stock, mutual fund, or ETF must pay any capital gains even if the investor buys another equity with the gains.

The Provision…for individuals

The House bill promises to save a median income family $1182 in taxes. Not about $1200. $1182. The precision of that number indicates that it is more a selling tool than a reality. The Senate version will likely tout something similar.

Half of taxpayers will notice little change in either bill because they pay almost no income taxes. Both bills retain the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). Lower income taxpayers will see no relief from the bite of FICA taxes.

The standard deduction is doubled but personal exemptions are eliminated and the child tax credit is increased by $600 per child but only for five years. Have you got that? Paul Ryan, the House Majority Leader, assured us that the tax bill would be simpler. Sound simple to you?

The Senate bill includes a repeal of Obamacare penalties for not having health insurance. Oddly enough, this saves the government $332 billion over ten years. Wait, how does that happen? The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that many younger people who would be eligible for subsidies under Obamacare will simply forgo insurance if the penalty is eliminated. Republican leaders get two birds with one tax stone. Senators can register their disapproval of the most hated part of Obamacare and the savings enable the Senate bill to meet the deficit requirements under reconciliation rules.  These rules allow the Senate to pass legislation with a simple majority.

As I noted two weeks ago, both bills eliminate or reduce the current deduction for state and local taxes (SALT). High tax states like California, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts have no Republican Senators. If Republican leaders lose the votes of Johnson, Collins and Paul, they would have to reinstate a full SALT deduction to have any hope of gaining one or two Democratic votes.

The Senate eliminates the SALT deduction entirely and uses the tax money to continue the deductions for medical expenses, student loans, mortgage interest and charitable donations. The House bill eliminated these deductions but allowed some SALT deduction in order to appease Republican House members from high tax states.

The House bill simplifies the tax brackets from the current seven to four. The Senate version has seven brackets.

The Conclusion…

Imagine a rough dirt road after a lot of rain. The tax bill has just turned off the paved highway and onto the dirt road. Expect a lot of muttered cursing, pushing and digging to move a tax bill to its final destination, the desk of President Trump.

 

Phillips Curve

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November 12, 2017

For the past 16 decades, there has been a least one recession per decade. Given that this bull market is eight years old without a recession, some investors may be concerned that their portfolio mix is a bit on the risky side. Here’s something that can help investors map the road ahead.

For several decades, the Federal Reserve has used the Phillips Curve to help guide monetary policy. The curve is an inverse relationship between inflation and unemployment. Picture a see saw. When unemployment is low, demand for labor and inflation are high. When unemployment is high, demand for labor and inflation are low (See wonky notes at end).

The monetary economist Milton Friedman said the relationship of the Phillips curve was weak, and economists continue to debate the validity of the curve. As we’ll see, the curve is valid until it’s not. The breakdown of the relationship between employment and inflation signals the onset of a recession.

Let’s compare the annual change in employment, the inverse of unemployment, and inflation. We should see these two series move in lockstep. As these series diverge, the onset of a recession draws near.

In a divergence, one series goes up while one series goes down.  The difference, or spread, between the two grows larger. Spread is a term usually associated with interest rates, so I’ll call this difference the GAP.

In the chart below, I have marked fully developed divergences with an arrow marked “PC”. Each is a recession. I’ll show both series first, so you can see the divergences develop. I’ll show a graph of the GAP at the end.

PhillipsCurveRecession

As you can see to the right of the graph, no divergences have formed since the financial crisis.

Shown in the chart below are the beginnings of divergences, marked with an orange square. I’ve also included a few convergences, when the series move toward each other. These usually precede a drop in the stock market but no recession.

PhillipsCurveDiverge

Here’s a graph of the difference, or GAP, between the two series in the last 11 years.

PhillipsGap

Fundamental economic indicators like this one can help an investor avoid longer term meltdowns. Can investors avoid all the bear markets? No. Financial, not economic, causes lay behind the sharp downturns of the 1987 October meltdown and 1998 Asian financial crisis.

What about the 2008 financial crisis? A year earlier, in October 2007, this indicator had already signaled trouble ahead based on the high and steadily growing GAP.

What about the dot com crash? In February 2001, several months after the market’s height, the growing GAP warned of a rocky road ahead. A recession began a month later. The downturn in the market would last another two years.

Readers who want to check on this indicator themselves can follow this link.

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Wonky Stuff

In Econ101, students become familiar with a graph of this curve. Readers who want to dive deeper can see this article from Dr. Econ at the Federal Reserve. There is also a Khan Academy video .

Numbers and Feelings

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November 5, 2017

How do numbers feel to us? Numbers are hard like rocks. Feelings are squishy. Numbers are left-brained. Feelings are right-brained. Deep in the vaults of our brains, tiny elves translate one into another. Here’s an example.

This past week, House Republicans released an initial proposal of tax reform. A feature of the plan is the limitation of state and local tax deductions (SALT) to $10,000. Under current tax law, taxpayers have been able to deduct state and local taxes without limit.

This will hurt taxpayers in high-tax blue states which are overwhelmingly Democratic. Wisconsin, a purple state, is the lone exception among the top ten states (Forbes ranking of state tax burden).

Expecting no votes from Democrats in passing a tax reform/cut bill, Republicans included few provisions in the bill that would pacify voters in Blue Democratic states. Republican congresspersons in those states are faced with a dilemma. One Republican congressperson in New Jersey, one of the top high tax states, claimed that the average SALT deduction in his district was $21,000, more than double the allowance in the tax reform proposal.

Knowing that the SALT limitation will hurt their constituents, do Republican House members vote with their party or in the interests of their constituents? Numbers can make politicians anxious.

For some taxpayers in those states, the feeling is anger. “I don’t want to pay taxes on my taxes,” one New Jersey resident growled.

That same N.J. congressperson claimed that incomes less than $200,000 were middle-class. According to this calculator based on the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, an income of $200K is in the 97th percentile of all incomes. Less than 3% of households have incomes greater than $200K. Hardly middle-class.

What is middle class? Some studies use the 25th – 75th percentile. Some use the 30th – 80th percentile. Using the latter definition, 2016 incomes from $24,000 to $75,000 were considered middle-class. These classifications use national data. Many coastal states have far higher incomes and living costs.

People living in some east and west coastal states feel middle class even though the income numbers do not classify them as such. Take for example, a household in Silicon Valley, where the median household income is almost $100K,  $40K more than the national median. They are rich, right?

Not so fast. The median price of a home in Santa Clara County (San Jose) is almost $1.2 million (See here ). Spending $40,000 annually for housing on an income of $95,000 feels middle class. The percentage of housing cost to income, 42%, is far higher than the 30% HUD guideline, and is more typical of poor working-class families.

Californians have counties with the highest incomes in the U.S. – and some of the poorest. The state has a median household income that is 12% higher than the national average.

CalUSHouseholdIncComp

But that’s not how it feels. That extra income is eaten up by higher housing costs, high car insurance premiums, and higher taxes at all levels. California sends about 12% more taxes to Washington than it gets back in various national programs. The additional federal taxes paid by higher income coastal states helps pay for benefits to those in lower income states, particularly those in southern states. Blue states subsidize Red states.

The Red states control the national agenda in Washington. The Republican tax proposal in its current form takes tax pebbles from the Red scale and puts them on the Blue scale. That feels spiteful.  Voters in those Blue states feel angry.

Interest groups around the country feel angry. The National Association of Home Builders claims that the SALT limit will lower home valuations, particularly in coastal states. They have promised a considerable effort and expense to defeat this version of the tax proposal.

When I recalculated my family’s 2016 taxes using the new proposal, we saved $752, a bit less than the $1200 average savings for a family of four. The monthly tax savings – the numbers – are relatively small. I feel neither angry or joyful. Those of us who are little affected by the proposal are unlikely to raise our voices in protest or support.

Angry people act. They call, they shout, they organize.

Joyful people – the CEOs of large corporations who will benefit greatly from this proposal – are not shouting. They calmly make claims that lower taxes will create more jobs, although the evidence is rather weak. They are organizing. They are calling talk shows. But most of all they are donating.

Political donations can speak more loudly than the shouts of angry people. In the political game of Rock, Scissors, Paper, cash covers a rock thrown in anger. Angry people must take up the more precise and patient tool of the scissors if they hope to best cash in a contest.

Lastly, this tax proposal further divides earners into groups. Income earners above the median will learn that this $1 is not the same as that $1 to the taxman.  According to an analysis done for the Wall St. Journal,
The $1 earned in wages and salary will be taxed more than
The $1 earned by the small manufacturer, which will be taxed more than
The $1 earned by the real estate investor, which will be taxed more than
The $1 earned by a stock or bond investor, which will be taxed more than
The $1 paid to an inheritor, who will pay $0.

Republicans criticize the identity politics practiced by Democrats. With this tax proposal, Republicans have stamped identities on the very $$$$ we earn. Those numbers don’t feel good.

 

 

A Graduated System of Benefits

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October 29, 2017

My kids will learn that they are the sons and daughters of charity parents.

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the measurement of the poverty rate in America. Why is our standard different than the one adopted by all other developed countries? What efforts have we made to alleviate poverty, and have those programs helped or hurt the poor?

Qualifications for benefits under various programs rely primarily on paid income. As a person exceeds certain thresholds of income, benefits are reduced or stopped entirely. Regardless of how we define a reduction in benefits, it feels like a tax to the recipients. Under these programs, the poor pay the highest tax – 100%. $1 earned above a certain threshold results in a $1 reduction in benefits. There is a very real incentive to hide reported income.

As I showed earlier, the poverty standard adopted by the U.S. undercounts the number of poor. On the other hand, income earned in the underground economy is not counted and results in an overcount of the poor.

We may associate “underground” with “illegal” but it includes both legal and illegal activities. A better synonym would be “unreported.” Workers in the unreported economy may include the kid down the block who mows our lawn, the guy who repaired our fence, the woman who walks our dog when we work late.

Almost all of us are part of the unreported economy whether we realize it or not. Recent estimates of the size of this shadow economy in the U.S. are from 7% to 11%. In dollar amounts, that’s $1.4 trillion to over $2 trillion. In less developed economies, it can be as much as 25%.

The tragedy of current programs is that they often discourage recipients from getting more work, or better paid work. The loss of Medicaid benefits dissuades a single mom with children from taking on employment unless she can find an employer who provides health insurance for her and her children. Many don’t.

Income above a certain threshold may disqualify someone from housing benefits. Under a Section 8 housing program, a low-income person pays 30% of their monthly income for housing (Section 8 FAQs). HUD, a Federal agency, and state agencies pay the rest of the rent. Section 8 housing is in short supply. The amount of paperwork and inspections required by HUD dissuades many real estate owners from enrolling their properties in the program.

These programs would improve by paying benefits on a graduated scale rather than using a qualifying threshold. Under the current system, a person making less than half the area’s median income, let’s say $24,000, gets housing assistance and other benefits. If they make above that, they may receive nothing under some Federal and state programs. That is the equivalent of a 100% – or higher – tax.

This graduated scale should apply to everyone. That includes the richest people on the planet like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, who would also be eligible for housing vouchers, food stamps, for supplemental income and Medical benefits. As income increased, benefits would be gradually decreased. Bill Gates would be eligible for housing assistance, but his monthly benefit would be $0. For many of us, there would be no incentive to apply.

A graduated scale would help eliminate the quiet shame that some people experience when they receive public assistance. Like it or not, there is a stigma attached to being poor and receiving benefits.

A person with a disability can receive Social Security and Medicare. They can be quick to point out the fact. They are not on SSI, a program for low-income people. They are on Social Security. They paid into the insurance system. They got hurt. They are collecting on the insurance payments they made during a lifetime of work. Because they are disabled, they are on Medicare, not Medicaid. Medicaid is for poor people. If they are poor, it is only because they became disabled.

If I am a worker with a family to support and I make $11 per hour, or about $450 a week, my family is qualified to receive housing, food, medical and other assistance programs. I may be experienced in a few construction trades, but my tools were stolen last year. Perhaps I don’t have reliable transportation. I could make more money if I could get some tools or a more reliable car, but I can barely take care of my family. How can I get ahead?

A concrete contractor offers me a job paying $20 an hour for a project that will last the summer months for sure. However, the winter months may be a bit lean. The additional income will put me over the income threshold and my family will lose most of the benefits.

If I calculate the benefit my family currently receives in addition to my current $11 per hour wage as a janitor, I am receiving the equivalent of about $20 an hour. Even though I prefer to take the new job, I should continue to work at my current job for the sake of my family. Perhaps I can find a few jobs on the side, or “under the table,” but these are sporadic.

If I continue to stay out of the construction trades, my skills will atrophy. My self-confidence will erode. My kids will learn that they are the sons and daughters of charity parents.

The example above is all too common. If we had a gradual system of benefit awards, such a worker would be more inclined to take that better paying job. With a higher income, they might be able to get a loan for more reliable transportation. Their family might be able to afford more housing choices.

Who benefits under the current system? Whenever a poorly performing system stays in place, there is usually a small group of people who benefit under that system. They don’t want it to change.

Am I being a bit too cynical? No. It is Realpolitik. The practical benefits for one group of people outweigh any moral considerations by that group. In a later blog, I’ll look at who benefits from the current system.

Sacred Cow

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October 22, 2017

Moo. One of the sacred cows of tax law has been the mortgage interest deduction. There is talk that the proposed Tax Reform law will erase this deduction. Who benefits from the deduction? Before I look at that, here’s some groundwork.

Two months ago the IRS released aggregated income tax data for 2015. Pew Research analyzed the data and produced this  chart of who pays how much in individual income taxes.   I took the liberty of marking up  their chart.

TaxAnalysis2015Pew

The Tax Reform bill that is being tortured to death in the back rooms of Congress proposes to double the standard deduction, making the first $50K that a couple earns tax-free. About 50% of tax returns will pay little or no federal income tax. That leaves the other half to pick up the tab for the 5% of taxes paid by the lower half of incomes. 1% of tax returns paid 40% of taxes in 2015 and they will argue that they are already paying their fair share.

As the Congress tries to craft a Tax Reform bill, one of the hot button topics is the mortgage interest deduction. According to IRS analysis of 2015 tax data, 33 million returns, about 20% of total returns, took the mortgage interest deduction totaling $304 billion, averaging over $9000, or $770 a month. The annual cost to the Treasury is about $70 billion in taxes not paid.

The bulk of this tax giveaway goes to wealthy families, but the program is popular among middle class families in expensive housing markets, particularly on the east and west coasts. The Tax Reform package proposes to double the standard deduction.  For many married couples, this would exclude another $25K of their income. This $25K is far more than the $9K average mortgage interest deduction.  However, there will be about 8 million returns, mostly wealthier Americans, who will pay more.  Those 8 million will certainly raise a campaign of alarm and outrage as they try to convince the vast majority of Americans that this reform is so un-American. Those in the real estate sector will claim that this will cripple a recovering homebuilding sector and prevent many American families from owning a home.  It won’t.  Each sector of the economy wants to preserve their tax carve outs because their business model has come to depend on it.

Notice that the analysis included effective, not marginal, tax rates. What is the difference? The effective rate is the net tax divided by adjusted gross income. It is the average tax paid for all the income received. For those who use tax preparation software, the program calculates the effective rate and prints it out on the summary page.

The marginal rate is the highest tax rate paid on the last dollar. When we hear someone complain that they are in the 33% tax bracket, for example, we think that the person pays 33% on all their income. They don’t. A two-earner family making $130K, filing jointly, two deductions, would be in the 25% bracket in 2017, but their effective tax rate is 12.89%, almost half of the marginal rate. (Dinky Town calculator)

Why is this important? Let’s return to the difference between effective and marginal tax rates. Let’s say our hypothetical couple making $130K wants to buy a new house for $300K. After $60K down, they will pay about $7800 per year in interest for the first 20 years of a 30-year mortgage (Zillow mortgage calculator). What they tell themselves is that they are “saving” over $160 per month, almost $2000 per year, because they are in the 25% tax bracket.

What is the fallacy? The couple assumes that the first dollars they earn buy the groceries, buy clothes for the kids, or make the car payment. It’s the last money earned, the money that is taxed at a 25% rate, that they will use to pay the mortgage. It’s sounds silly, but it’s effectively what we do when we use the marginal rate to analyze costs. Real estate salespeople sometimes use this technique to upsell a couple into a more expensive house, one that earns the salesperson a higher commission. If our couple uses the effective tax rate of less than 13%, the savings on that monthly mortgage payment is only $83. Many financial decisions are made “at the margin” but this is not one of them.

Also on the cutting board is a reduction in the amount of pre-tax contributions a person can make to a 401K retirement program.  Higher income earners would be trading in that tax break for lower tax rates, but the finance industry is sure to balk.  They make billions of dollars in administrative and trading fees for these retirement programs. In addition to the taxpayers who receive the benefits directly, tax breaks have protectors who benefit indirectly from the break. Together, this minority fights for their interests.

Soon after the last tax reform was passed in 1986, members of Congress began adding tax exclusions. Republicans may be able to pass a reform bill under a Budget Reconciliation rule in the Senate, which requires only a 50-vote threshold. Their slim majority in the Senate and a lack of cooperation from Democrats means that passage of a reform bill is vulnerable to just a few Republican defections. This is how health care repeal or reform was defeated earlier.  It can happen again.

The Poor and the Not Poor

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October 15, 2017

No worries. Among the 25 OECD countries, Americans have historically had the lowest percentage of their financial assets in cash and savings deposits. After the financial crisis, we became the second lowest, just ahead of Chile. The percentage for the most recent available year (2015) was 13.5%.

In the heady optimism of the dot-com boom in 1999-2000, Americans had less than 10% of their assets in cash and savings. In the long downturn from 2000 – 2003, Americans bumped up their percentage in safe assets to almost 13%. As the economy recovered, that need for safety declined slightly but not to the levels of the 1990s. The financial crisis in 2008 caused Americans to reach for safety. Safe assets rose to 14.3% of total financial assets and we have still not recovered the level of confidence we once had.

You can click on this OECD link to see a comparison of current percentages. On the bottom right below the chart you can drag the year slider and look at some historical data.

Below the chart on the left is a category labeled “Perspectives.” Select “Total” to see total financial assets, which does not include home equity. Americans have the second highest total, just below Switzerland.

On the other hand, the U.S. has a comparatively high poverty rate of 17.5% using the OECD standard,  a simple measure that an economist would use.The poverty threshold is half the median income.

The U.S. publishes a poverty rate that is several percent lower because it uses a complex definition first set in 1963 when families spent an estimated 1/3 of their income on food. The complexity of the definition hints that politicians had a hand in crafting the definition but it is attributed to one person in the Social Security Administration, who based her standard on a combination of foods that the Department of Agriculture thought would meet minimum nutritional needs. The history of this standard and its many revisions is an interesting read.

The threshold is set at three times the cost of this 1960s era minimum food diet. Efficiencies in food production over the past 50 years have dramatically lowered food costs for U.S. families. In 1978, the BLS estimated that the average family spent only 18% of their income on food. In 2014, it was a bit more than 14% (BLS).

Using food costs as the basis for measuring poverty has enabled politicians in this country to claim success in lowering poverty over the past half century. In 1978, the calculation of the U.S. poverty threshold produced one that was slightly more than the OECD standard. Today, the U.S. threshold is 16% less than the OECD standard.

Let’s look at a family of four making $28K in 2016. They were above the official U.S. poverty threshold of $24,300 for a family of four. By the OECD definition, that American family was below half of the median $59K in income and would be counted as poor.

Housing costs are higher in urban areas, where half of the U.S. population lives. That family of four living in Chicago might pay $15000 per year for a 2 BR apartment in Chicago. Further south in the same state, Springfield, IL, they might pay $11,000. That $4000 difference in housing cost is not calculated into the poverty rate that the U.S. publishes. In effect, poverty is undercounted in urban areas and overcounted in rural areas.

The simplicity of the OECD standard better captures poverty among both urban and rural low-income families because it is based on median income. So why doesn’t the U.S. adopt this much clearer standard? We can turn to the last sentence of the previous paragraph for a clue. Politicians in rural areas want a standard that overcounts poverty in their districts. A higher headcount of poverty equals more subsidies for their constituents. When this standard was set, rural areas in the southern states were primarily Democratic and Democrats dominated the Congress under a Democratic President, Lyndon Johnson. Those politicians wanted the adoption of a food based standard that overcounted those voters.

Today, most rural areas are predominantly Republican and the standard works to the advantage of Republicans and the disadvantage of Democrats. As a rule of thumb, whenever we see excessive complexity in rule-making, there’s usually a very sound political reason for that obfuscation. Former President John Adams lamented this unfortunate characteristic of lawmaking in the crafting of the Constitution itself.

The intentional lack of clarity in lawmaking ensures that any nation’s population will be at odds with each other. A small and smart part of the population makes money from conflict and confusion. People argue on Facebook; Facebook makes money. Trump did what? There’s a video. Got to see that, right? Click bam boom, Google makes money by placing some ads next to the video.  Controversy is profitable. Politics as carnival show.

Crown Publishing, a division of Random House, publishes both the fringe right author Ann Coulter, and the way out on the left author and MSNBC host, Rachel Maddow. Worried that the liberals are taking over the country? Frightened that the conservatives will destroy the very institutions that have made America the greatest nation on earth?  Crown has something for you.

On the other hand, the record low volatility of the stock and bond markets in the past year have made it difficult for financial firms who depend on controversy to make a good profit.  Active fund managers have struggled to outperform their benchmark indexes.  The volume of derivatives and other products that insure against volatility have fallen.  People are not worried enough.  That’s the problem.  We need to worry about not being worried.

And those poor families?  If we lower the poverty threshold even more, we won’t have to worry about those poor people as much.