A couple of recent items from the New York Times:
- Gregory Mankiw calculates the total tax rate on $1,000 in 1099 income put aside for a child’s future; with federal income tax, Medicare tax, state income tax, corporate tax, dividend tax, and estate tax, the government collects about 90 percent
- New York state facilities for naughty teenagers cost $220,000 per kid per year ($600/day, or enough to send the kid (along with a friend or two) to the Four Seasons resort of his choice), except when the cost is infinite because the state continues to pay 80 employees at a facility that no longer houses any kids at all.
Mankiw adds some evidence to my theory that competent politicians will extract the maximum amount of taxes that a given economy can produce. When people say, for example, that a particular tax in the U.S. could be higher, my response is that their suggestion is offensive to professional politicians. If there were more blood that could be squeezed from Americans overall, it would already have been collected. Sadly we have let our politicians down to some extent by not building an economy sized appropriately for Medicare, public employee pensions, Social Security, government worker salaries, our various foreign wars, etc. Our politicians’ confidence in us was misplaced. But that doesn’t mean that more could be collected overall from the American people that they are actually stuck with.
The first article makes me curious how inept we are, seeing as how I recently saw on Wikipedia some countries like Norway give all their citizens programs, in fullness, that we always try to give our own citizens but never can, all for some of the lowest tax rates in the world. It doesn’t seem to help that no matter who, and for all the talk, nothing ever seems to be done to reduce any this. The people who want tax cuts at the same time continue to push for huge contracts for businesses in their states and people who want them to expire basically do the same thing, but for social programs – it’s all just a matter of where the money is spent, never should it be spent (or collected).
I’ve actually gotten into verbal fights with people (family included) who don’t seem to grasp the waste of some “prison” systems and the ridiculousness of superfluous administration (whether for corrections, schools, etc.) It’s a touchy subject because everyone wants to feel safe – even when the news story makes it very clear the science shows the facilities are unneeded and make things worse. Others try to argue that without everybody on the planet working for the facilities, hell would break loose and tyrannical monsters would be free on the streets!
How Mankiw earns his upper middle-class income is beyond me. Judging from the fallacious arguments he makes in this opinion piece, his talks and lectures are not worth listening to, and his books and articles not worth reading. For example, he lumps together no less than three separate entities – all of which receive services from the government – in his flawed tax calculation. And this guy is a professor at Harvard?
Note that I do agree that taxes are too high compared to the services we get back from the government. And the 2nd article you list is a great example of the thousands of ways in which our government is squandering away our money. But lets be fair. Mankiw’s arguments are self-serving and duplicitous, and don’t help the debate.
These two articles really go together well. It doesn’t benefit Mankiw to work, but it really, really benefits the director of that empty juvi facility, who is banking on his $100,000/yr public pension, if Mankiw works. Some day some G-men are going to knock on Mankiw’s door and tell him to get off his ass.
Every financial planner tells me to plan on returning 3% on my savings during retirement. I make over $250k/yr but there’s little chance I’ll ever manage to bank away the $3.3 million I’d need to live like that juvi director in retirement. I’d need to make at least $500k per year to live like that, but if I made that much money my president would tell everyone to sneer at me for doing so.
Josh: Norway is not a very practical example for the U.S. to follow. Norway has immense per-capita oil reserves (see http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_oil_res_percap-energy-oil-reserves-per-capita ). I think it is more like Saudi Arabia without the intergenerational marriages (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/saudiarabia/7616836/Saudi-Arabia-to-introduce-minimum-marriage-age-after-11-year-old-wins-divorce.html ), floggings (http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=41507 ), and beheadings (http://articles.cnn.com/2010-03-31/world/saudi.arabia.sorcery_1_appeals-court-saudi-ministry-saudi-city?_s=PM:WORLD ).
Fabian: How does Mankiw keep getting a paycheck? That’s the magic of tenure! As he works at a research university, he need never have been an effective teacher. I’m not sure why you think his calculations are flawed because the taxes go to multiple levels of government. Mankiw did not preface his article by saying that he was looking at federal taxes only. As a taxpayer, does it make a difference if the state government takes $10,000 less from you in taxes while the federal government takes $10,000 more? I think that the main flaw in Mankiw’s argument is that he posits a world in which he could get 8 percent return on investing in a public company. This is the same fantasy island on which public employee pension managers dwell. In a world awash with capital, even an investment in a powerfully growing economy such as China or Brazil would be lucky to earn 8 percent (put another way, banks and bond investors wouldn’t be lending out money at 1-4 percent if they thought that they could earn an easy 8 percent somewhere else). As far as U.S. public companies go, the managers would tend to rake off much or all of return on investment through bonuses, stock options (dilution of a public investor such as Mankiw), and stock grants (more dilution). http://www.moneychimp.com/features/market_cagr.htm shows a Jan 1, 2000 to Dec 31, 2009 return on investment in the S&P 500 of 1.21 percent before inflation, -1.38 percent after inflation. Companies made a lot of profits during those years, but they were paid out to employees, not to investors.
I hope this doesn’t sound too tangential, but every time I read something like Mankiw’s piece I think of what we spend all this tax revenue on. Nothing absorbs our earnings faster and more completely than healthcare so let’s just look at that for two seconds.
Both sides of my family grew up poor and entered the upper middle class (or upper class, I suppose). Both sides of the family never had insurance until about 1975 or so, well after they started having kids. All doctor bills were paid in cash. I’m sure they thought it was expensive, but obviously when most people didn’t have insurance (let alone government-provided healthcare), medical providers could only charge what people could afford to pay on the way out the door or on a reasonable payment plan. Sort of like buying a car pre-2009.
Why do most people think we are better off under the current system? Are the poor so much better off with regard to their health than they were in 1975? Are old people’s sunset years so much better now than before Medicare?
Imagine you are faced with two buttons: button one keeps us on our current healthcare trajectory, leaping us 60 years into the future, and button two takes us back to 1964 before Medicare and government insurance mandates. If you can honestly say that you would press button number one, please tell me why.
Douglas: On page 261 of Libertarianism the issue of what health care for seniors looked like prior to Medicare was addressed. “A 1957 survey by the National Opinion Research Center found that ‘about one person in twenty in the older population [aged 65 years or older] reported that he was doing without needed medical care because he lacked money for such care’.” I think that http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ICPSR/studies/7686 might be the original data.
Phil,
Thanks; I appreciate the link. I’m assuming you recommend the book so I just put in an order (although I’m not Libertarian).
My grandfather, born 1895, died at age 74. Save for a broken arm, my dad can’t remember him ever going to a doctor. I don’t know if he had the money to go (he was a stone mason), but according to my dad he refused to spend his money on going to the doctor. Stupid, I guess. He had hip problems and always had a walking stick in his hand. My dad has the same problems, he’s had a couple surgeries, goes to the doctor all the time, and walks with a cane (4-post).
Douglas: I enjoyed reading the book because it offered a lot of facts that were new to me, so I guess I would recommend it independent of whether or not you think Libertarianism is a viable political idea in the U.S. (going back to the original posting, the U.S. is equipped with a large class of politicians who are skilled at getting reelected and at increasing their power (only possible with ever larger tax collections), so there would not seem to be any practical possibility of the U.S. being reorganized along Libertarian lines).
Huh, you’d think a Tenured Harvard Professor would be intelligent enough to realize that it’s very easy to avoid these taxes at various levels.
First, by forming a corporation to route all his textbook, speaking, and consulting revenue through, he can deduct all sorts of things, paying tax on less than the actual total income he earns, thereby avoiding much income and social security tax. He can show a small profit every year and effectively pay zero in taxes while deducting (probably) tens of thousands of dollars in expenses. Corporations large and small do this all the time. In fact, 2/3 pay little to no tax, according to the GAO. Anyone who has ever spoken to a CPA can figure this much out.
Second, he could gift $13k/yr to each of his children, and their spouses, tax free. If he wanted to get really fancy, he could even set up a GRAT trust.
I suppose, however, his purpose was to be provocative and misleading, rather than correct.
Mike: I don’t believe that Professor Mankiw would need to form a corporation in order to detect business expenses from his business income (Schedule C on a standard personal Form 1040 would suffice for that purpose). If Mankiw had investors he would form a corporation to protect those investors from liability in excess of their investment.
Why are there are a lot of American corporations that pay little or no income tax? The U.S. economy isn’t doing very well. A lot of formerly profitable companies are no longer profitable. GM probably hasn’t paid much income tax for the last 20 years as they took their shareholders down to oblivion (though GM would have paid plenty in payroll taxes). Also, a company that pays its managers tens of millions of dollars (see HP and Mark Hurd for example) will have less of a profit than a company that can find competent people to get out of bed and work for only $1-2 million/year. Apparently in the U.S., public company boards are unable to find competence for much less than $10 million per year per manager.
In a corporate shell or on a Schedule C, your idea that Mankiw can deduct his way to his goal of helping his kids doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t think it is possible to deduct an expense that one has not incurred. So if Mankiw’s goal is saving he can’t accomplish that by spending. If he doesn’t spend, he can’t deduct.
The idea of giving the money to his kids doesn’t work, either, I don’t think. If Mankiw is reasonably rich already he has probably used up his lifetime total gift tax exemption of $1 million (see http://turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tools/tax-tips/tax-planning-and-checklists/5533.html ). Even if he had not used up his gift tax exemption and was able to give a kid the after-tax proceeds from his $1000 project, if the kid were to invest the money in a U.S. corporation it would still be subject to the taxes on corporate income and dividends that Mankiw mentions.
Another way to look at Mankiw’s calculation is to ask “What if he were wrong and it were very profitable (after taxes) to save money and invest?” If so, a lot of Americans would engage in that behavior rather than maxing out their credit cards. In fact, even after the Collapse of 2008, Americans are not saving. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/06/opinion/06gross.html notes that the reduction in Americans’ personal debt is almost entirely due to credit card companies writing off balances and/or refusing to issue more cards. According to the author, Americans are neither paying off their old debts nor voluntarily saving.
If Norway is too exotic an example, try looking at Canada. According to the OECD, Canada’s total government spending (including public health coverage and decent public education) is about 40% of GDP (2007: 39.2%). Canada’s overall tax level is also about 40% of GDP (2007: 40.7%).
Public spending in the US isn’t that much lower (2007: 36.8%), but taxes are considerably lower (2007: 34%).
Mankiw mentions in passing: “… to be sure, the looming budget deficits require hard choices about spending and taxes.” In other words, in order to balance its budget, the US will need to decide on a painful mix of spending cuts and tax increases. (I’m assuming both will be needed.)
How painful would it be for the US to let the Bush tax cuts expire? Despite Mankiw’s argument, I’d suggest that the answer is “not very”; in his tax bracket, we’re talking about a 4.6% increase in the marginal tax rate, from 43.1% to 47.7%. Would being able to keep an extra $46 of his additional $1000 really make that much difference to his incentives? And the US economy did just fine in the 1990s (in fact, it boomed), before the Bush tax cuts.
Conversely, the CBPP estimated back in 2004 that the annual cost of the Bush tax cuts was about $280 billion. I would guess that cutting $280 billion in spending will be extremely painful.
That isn’t to say that the government shouldn’t cut $280 billion in spending; balancing the budget will require both spending cuts and tax increases. But if it keeps the Bush tax cuts, that means it’ll need to cut an additional $280 billion in spending.
Should the government cut $560 billion in spending while keeping the Bush tax cuts, or cut $280 billion in spending and let the Bush tax cuts expire? It seems like a pretty clear choice to me.
(By the way: anyone planning their investments over a 30-year time horizon should be using a Roth IRA.)
Phil: Thanks for the great links.
Mankiw article is dead on. It would have been 10x better if he would have also discussed the impact of the FairTax actually being in place. Given that he does not want to spend the money, they numbers would be wildly more impressive assuming that the tax is based on consumption. http://www.fairtax.org.
Sorry for the double comments. I see a very interesting follow-up posting on Professor Mankiw’s blog:
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2010/10/response-to-queries.html
Russil: In Mankiw’s response, courtesy of Dave Shaver, we learn that in standard economics the harm due to taxes rises as the square of the percentage of the tax. So 48 percent tax would be dramatically worse for the already-crippled economy than 43 percent. Could we replicate the 1990s boom with higher taxes? Sure… all that we would need is a new technology as good as the Internet and smartphones that achieved widespread adoption in the 1990s.
Meanwhile, another fun article has come out of New York State: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/13/business/13retire.html (the state and local governments owe an extra $200 billion in retiree health care costs that they never bothered to account for or disclose to bondholders; the total is almost as much as the total amount of debt issued by New York state and local governments; this would bankrupt the municipalities except that they are already bankrupt due to their pension liabilities). The $200 billion that New Yorkers only now recognize that they owe is more than the annual cost of funding our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War ).
One thing that Mankiw did not note is that higher marginal tax rates seem to have ushered in the era of reduced working hours and longer vacations in Europe (see http://www.forbes.com/2006/05/20/steven-landsburg-labor_cx_sl_06work_0523landsburg.html for example). One could argue that everyone will be happier overall in the U.S. once nobody has an incentive to work more than 9 months per year.
Mankiw’s misleading tax calculation has been debunked all over the web. I think the readers of this site should at least be aware of them.
Kevin Drum summarizes the problems with Mankiw’s calculations:
http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/10/mankiws-taxes
“Basically, the effect of letting the Bush cuts expire is so tiny that the only way to make it noticeable is to compound it over 30 years, which reduces the eventual payout of his writing assignment from $2,000 to $1,700. (And even that’s probably overstated, since it assumes Mankiw pays all his taxes at their full statutory rate, which virtually no one does.) The rest of the reduction down to $1,000 comes solely from the estate tax. But even on the heroic assumption that you should take this year’s zero rate as the baseline for comparison, the estate tax has an exemption of several million dollars. Unless Mankiw leaves his kids a helluva lot more than they need for a down payment on a house, they won’t pay a dime of estate tax.
This is why the tax posse has such a habit of wildly overstating things. If they don’t, there’s no there there. It turns out that the effect of letting the Bush tax cuts on the rich expire is so minuscule that the only way to make it look sensational is to pick a scenario in which you (a) overstate effective tax rates, (b) compound those tax rates over 30 years, (c) slash the final number nearly in half by ignoring the estate tax exemption, and (d) use this year’s highly unusual zero rate as your baseline. It’s a virtuoso performance.”
Phil – With my comment, I was attempting to point out that Mankiw is being inflammatory and overly simplistic with rhetoric about being taxed at a 99% rate.
As one example – Assuming both Mankiw and his children are married, he can give up to $52k/year to each child/spouse combination, tax free. If the annual gifts don’t exceed the annual limit (currently $13,000 per donee per donor), none of the lifetime exclusion (currently $1,000,000) is used up, which is an important aspect of the lifetime limit you cited. http://www.taxguru.org/estate/706.htm
As another example, paying educational institutions directly for tuition expenses is excluded from the annual limit. So seemingly his goal that his children “won’t have to struggle to find down payments to buy their own homes or to send their kids to college.” can easily be met tax free.
Is his marginal tax rate reduced? No. But are his stated goals for earning that $1000 intact? Yes. He can likely contribute the entirety of the $523 after tax income toward his goals. Thats still a large tax, but clearly nowhere near 99%.
Mike: Thanks for the link. I don’t believe that Mankiw claimed he was being taxed at a 99 percent rate. Looking back at the article, I see that he calculated the rate as 90 percent after estate tax (my original posting, which I will now correct, had him retaining 17 percent of what he would have gotten in a tax-free world).
Christian: Thanks for the link to Mother Jones. I don’t know if it is fair to hold Mankiw’s 30 years of compounding against his argument. Most parents hope that a child will live at least 30 years. Also, in the current investment environment, it would take at least 30 years to have a noticeable inflation-adjusted return on investment (http://www.ustreas.gov/offices/domestic-finance/debt-management/interest-rate/real_yield.shtml shows the 30-year TIPS bond yielding 1.46 percent per year; this means that $100 put aside today will turn into $154 in spending power in 2040).
Philip,
Your 1.46% rate 30-year TIPs rate in fact highlights the fallacy of Mankiw’s calculation. Mankiw grossly exaggerates the projected loss of income by assuming an annual rate of eight percent (8%) returns compounded for 30 years. Mankiw is hyping the income returns in order to exagerate the losses to taxes.
Here is Mankiw’s actual assumption:
“If I invested it in the stock of a company that earned, say, 8 percent a year on its capital, then 30 years from now, when I pass on, my children would inherit about $10,000. That is simply the miracle of compounding.”
Christian: If you read my first comment on this posting, fourth comment down from the top, you’ll see that I wrote “I think that the main flaw in Mankiw’s argument is that he posits a world in which he could get 8 percent return on investing in a public company. This is the same fantasy island on which public employee pension managers dwell.”
Let’s not wish too hard that Mankiw is wrong about that 8 percent. If he is wrong, so are public employee pension managers and the U.S. taxpayers will be on the hook for, literally, many trillions of extra dollars to pay retired teachers, policemen, firemen, bureaucrats, et al.
Mankiw’s article includes estate taxes but doesn’t talk about the incentives facing his children. Surely the Mankiw brood would be less likely to work hard if they knew $10,000 was coming their way, for free. That’s the funny thing about estate taxes – Greg Mankiw doesn’t pay them (unless there’s a Greg Jr). Indeed he’ll be six feet under when the check is mailed.
I would argue that high estate taxes have a net positive effect on work incentive. Slight negative for the mother/father, large positive for the daughter/son.
I guess the equation might be close on an NPV basis!
“Russil: In Mankiw’s response, courtesy of Dave Shaver, we learn that in standard economics the harm due to taxes rises as the square of the percentage of the tax. So 48 percent tax would be dramatically worse for the already-crippled economy than 43 percent.”
I found this interesting but counter-intuitive. I did a little searching and found that this refers to the excess burden of taxation. The Encyclopedia of Taxation and Tax Policy does indeed say that excess burden rises as the square of the tax rate, but it also says:
In short, would Mankiw really work significantly more if tax rates were lower? (I find myself wondering why he wouldn’t work less, since his after-tax income from his regular salary would be higher.)
“Could we replicate the 1990s boom with higher taxes? Sure… all that we would need is a new technology as good as the Internet and smartphones that achieved widespread adoption in the 1990s.”
The effects of the Internet (and the mobile Internet) are still working their way through the economy–there’s still a lot of productivity gains to be had.
(I have to say that I find this whole discussion a bit strange: we’re talking about how to get people to work more, and yet you’re semi-retired!)
Russil: Thanks for the link to that encyclopedia. As for your final parenthetical comment… trust me, since the Collapse of 2008 I am not turning down paying work! Relying on a return from investments in public equities no longer seems like a viable strategy for the decades to come.
What happened to that Nobel prize money?
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2010/10/nobel-prize.html
[ROBERT] SIEGEL [host]: [T]he money — what did you do with the money, the prize?
Prof. [MARTIN] CHALFIE [2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry]: Well, the money [$1.4 million] is a funny thing. I think people hear about this massive amount of money that people get. It’s a very nice sum, and I’m very grateful for it. But there’s a number of things that happened to the money. And for my — in my particular case, the exchange rate tanked between the announcement and the distribution. And, of course, it was a prize that was shared with three people. …
rof. CHALFIE: But the lion’s share of the prize money, since the Reagan presidency, when the tax codes were changed, has gone to the government. Because before Reagan, the rule was if you won an international prize, you kept the money. It was tax-free. Now, it’s taxed. So 50% of it went immediately to the city, the state and the federal government. The rest of it is going to help put my daughter through college.
SIEGEL: Yes, there’s an interesting premise there that if you win a Nobel Prize, you can pay your daughter’s tuition in college today in America.
Prof. CHALFIE: Well, I hope to do that. Yes.