Results for “corporate tax” 261 found
Secession
Recently Killington voted to secede from Vermont and join New Hampshire. Some people find this desire quixotic since Killington is smack dab in the middle of Vermont. The classic Tiebout argument says that voting with one’s feet helps to discipline government and provide a better match between government and citizen preferences. But why should the dissidents have to pack their bags? It’s the Vermont taxes that the residents of Killington want to escape not the skiing. Wouldn’t it be less costly to switch governance rather than citizens?
Does such a system sound crazy? Perhaps, but it is essentially the same supra-competitive federalism that has worked well for corporate law, so maybe we ought to give it a try.
And remember, if at first you don’t secede, try, try again.
The jobless recovery
This week’s Business Week had a useful though non-revelatory feature article on the jobless recovery (note that the paper edition has much more than the link).
The bottom line? Two root causes — productivity gains and fear — appear to be causing our economy’s weak employment performance.
Rapid productivity gains mean that a business can produce the same output with fewer workers. So unless demand is truly booming, why hire more people?
At the same time uncertainties have kept business cautious. Terrorism, corporate scandals, and the bursting of the high-tech bubble all provide extra reasons to wait. Counterintuitively, largely positive changes, such as productivity boosts and their accompanying sectoral shifts, can spur caution as well. Why make your irreversible investment today when you will know more two years’ down the road?
Some research sources suggest that outsourcing has cost the U.S. only 300,000 jobs in three years, though all such figures should be taken with a grain of salt (for instance, when calculating the number, what is the relevant counterfactual?). A Wall Street Journal survey (12 March 2004) found that only sixteen percent of responding economists blamed outsourcing as a significant source of job losses. More importantly, outsourcing creates more jobs than it destroys; let us not forget the positive role of insourcing as well, the U.S. receives massive capital flows from outside.
And who is to blame for the jobless recovery? Paul Krugman finds a not unsurprising culprit:
…should we blame the Bush administration? Yes – because it refuses to learn from experience. Franklin Roosevelt, in his efforts to combat economic woes, was famously willing to try anything until he found something that worked. George Bush, by contrast, seems determined to try the same thing, over and over again.
I hope Krugman does not really mean the Roosevelt point. Recall that the Great Depression was by many measures worse in 1937-8 than in 1932. A willingness to “try anything” is hardly a recipe for economic success.
And while I buy the Krugman line on Bush’s fiscal irresponsibility, we don’t find it priced in the bond market. So why should we think those bad policies are driving the labor market?
Brad DeLong suggests that the tax cut was ill-targeted for the purposes of stimulating aggregate demand. Point granted. That being said, government is better at stimulating nominal rather than real aggregate demand. In times of structural uncertainty, often the latter is more badly needed. So I don’t blame Bush fiscal policy, whatever its flaws, for the jobless nature of recovery.
The Democrats have little to offer in the way of short-run cures. Perhaps assisting the jobless can be defended on distributional grounds, but it can delay reemployment as much as boost it. A new President, whether or not you favor the idea, would increase rather than lower uncertainty, at least at first. Greater fiscal responsibility will pay off in the future (I am all for it), but I don’t see how it will boost employment over the course of, say, two years. Most of the relevant uncertainties are real and structural in nature.
Read this post on why many people are no longer looking for jobs. Reeducation is a significant reason why many people have stopped looking for work. This might someday kick in with higher productivity. But note also that workers fear being locked into jobs that will later brand them as losers. So in times of uncertainty they, like businesses, often will simply prefer to wait.
The bottom line: There is a potential silver lining in the cloud that we call the jobless recovery. Once those people get to work, output could be especially high, provided we don’t mess up in the meantime. That being said, responsible economists all along the political spectrum remain puzzled by the jobless recovery. We can cite and roughly agree on its causes. But at the end of the day, relative to other recoveries, we all remain surprised by the slowness of employment to adjust.
Addendum: Here is Alex on productivity and employment.
The new Michelin winners
The Michelin dining guide will upgrade three restaurants, all in France, to three-star status. One three-star restaurant will be demoted to two stars. The Michelin three-star designation is the highest a restaurant can obtain, right now there are only twenty-seven three-star restaurants in the world.
Perhaps it is no accident that only three stars are used for the world’s most rigorous restaurant system (Gault-Milleau, in contrast, has a scale up to twenty). The smaller the number of stars, the harder it is to inflate the standard. If the scale has one hundred steps, no one can really tell if a “73” restaurant is pushed up to a “75” rating by mistake. Ratings inflation can slip in over time. But everyone knows if a restaurant is elevated to three-star status by mistake.
Michelin precommits to quality rankings and takes great care to preserve its name as a restaurant “gold standard.” It is commonly believed that the number of three-star restaurants in France is capped, in fact it has remained close to twenty-one since the mid-1930s. Furthermore it is harder to get back a third star once you have lost it, than to win it in the first place, see the first link for more information.
French cooking may be suffering under excess taxes and labor market regulation, but French food criticism is alive and well, in this case under corporate auspices and subsidy. The Red Guide does not make money on its own terms, but rather serves to advertise the parent company and burnish its image. It is a classic instance of the private production of public goods.
So the next time that Roger Ebert gives a movie either a “thumbs up” or a “thumbs down,” this is a signal that he is offering a truly important evaluation.
The case for lifetime savings accounts
Glenn Hubbard, former chair of the CEA, argues that we should not tax savings:
While the Lifetime Saving Account (LSA) offers substantial simplification benefits, it also offers a vehicle to save more easily for a downpayment on a home, children’s education, or for medical expenses. With no withdrawal penalties, the account’s greater liquidity will encourage individuals to save, particularly moderate-income households worried about tying up funds for a long period of time. Like the president’s proposal to eliminate investor-level taxes on dividends, the LSA lays claim to the idea that income should be taxed only once. Indeed, given the generous contribution limits, most households could avail themselves of a consumption tax akin to the Flat Tax. They would pay taxes once when they earned wages or business income, but not again on returns to saving. This is an important step toward fundamental tax reform, particularly if the administration continues its recognition of the costs of double taxation of corporate income.
How much would capital accumulation go up?
To assess the impact on capital formation, one should compare the present value of additional private capital formation to the present value of lost tax revenue. Jonathan Skinner of Dartmouth College and I estimated that with even 25 cents of each dollar contribution as new saving, IRA contributions generate $2.21 of new capital per dollar of net revenue cost. If, as suggested by Harvard economist Martin Feldstein, one includes corporate income tax revenue from the higher capital stock made possible by the saving incentives, the ratio rises to $4.84 of net capital per dollar of new revenue cost. If each dollar of contributions contains 40 cents of new saving and one incorporates higher corporate income tax receipts, the savings incentives are actually self-financing.
My take: I’m totally on board kind of sort of. Until we address runaway government spending, tax changes will only bust the budget in the shorter run. Even with elasticity optimism, we won’t ever arrive at the self-financing equilibrium. Furthermore I will never have that much faith in any particular numerical projection. My main worry is stopping the current drain of resources from the private sector. And no, a trip to Mars is not just what the doctor ordered. Right now U.S. fiscal policy needs credibility and needs it badly. Won’t markets just think that any revenue boost will fly out the window as quickly as it comes in? Isn’t politics, and thus economics, first and foremost about subjective perceptions? Hubbard’s proposal, for all its merits, doesn’t address the core problems.
Addendum: Here is Brad DeLong’s recent post on the fiscal costs of social security privatization plans.
The forthcoming energy bill
Here is Andrew Sullivan, quoting John McCain and commenting on him:
“I’m not saying that this bill won’t generate some energy. It will certainly fuel the coffers of big oil and gas corporations. It will propel the wealthy special interests. And it will boost the deficit into the stratosphere. Indeed, this legislation can be fairly called the Leave no Lobbyist Behind Act of 2003.
There are also four proposals known as ‘green bonds’ for construction of commercial buildings that will cost taxpayers $227 million to finance approximately $2 billion in private bonds. One of my favorite green bond proposals is a $150 million riverfront area in Shreveport, Louisiana. This river walk has about 50 stores, a movie theater and a bowling alley. One of the new tenants in this Louisiana Riverwalk is a Hooters restaurant. Yes my friends. Here we have an energy bill subsidizing both hooters and polluters.” – Senator John McCain, on the monstrosity otherwise known as the Energy Bill. How any principled, small-government, free-market Republican could vote for this vast waste of public money is beyond me. But we’re beginning to realize that GOP has nothing to do with small government or fiscal sobriety. It’s a vehicle for massive debt and catering to the worst forms of corporate welfare. Thank God for McCain. Bush should veto this bill, until it is de-porked. He won’t, of course. He has yet to veto a single big-spending bill. He doesn’t seem to give a damn about what is happening to the fiscal health of this country.
For a less polemical assessment, but ultimately a similar evaluation of the substance, see the ever-reliable Lynne Kiesling, start at this permalink and scroll downwards for running commentary and links.
Addendum: Senators from both parties criticize the bill as well, read here.
Glenn Hubbard’s consistency test
Glenn Hubbard (registration required), in a Financial Times review of Robert Rubin’s new book, throws down the gauntlet. You might recall that Hubbard was one of the architects of Bush’s dividend tax cut plan.
Hubbard argues that deficit-cutting is motivated by the view that lower real interest rates will stimulate private investment. But then private investment must be sensitive to price incentives, and a tax cut on investment returns should stimulate investment as well. He describes Rubin (and others) as believing in an asymmetric response, whereby investment is interest-sensitive but not tax-sensitive. Either investment is price-sensitive or it is not, and we should hold a consistent attitude for either lower interest rates and lower tax rates.
My take: Hubbard is right. We should not hastily conclude, however, that a tax cut on dividends was the best way to go. Dividends transfer money from one pot to another, and this is distinct from constituting a real net rate of return. I would sooner have cut and reformed the corporate income tax. In the meantime, however, let us all apply this consistency test to ourselves, are you listening deficit hawks?