Modern Snake Oil: “We Have No Revenue Problem”
OK, this is the day everyone hates. You have to pay your taxes. Who wants to write that check? Nobody, probably.
The truth, however, is that Rep. Paul Ryan, the Tea Party, and most politicians are not being honest when they tell us there is no revenue problem, only a spending problem.
The Associated Press reports today that an IRS analysis tells us that 45 percent of Americans will pay no federal income taxes for 2010. Plus, the 400 Americans with the highest adjusted gross incomes averaged $345 million for the year. Their average federal income tax rate was 17 percent, down from 26 percent in 1992. Wow, and they need another tax break?!
This confirms the Warren Buffett line that his secretary pays a higher percentage of her income in taxes than he does.
But here is our problem: We cannot come close to dealing with this deficit unless we both cut spending and raise revenue. We certainly won’t accomplish anything unless we deal with the tax problem and reform our tax code.
I firmly believe that every American who works or gets income should pay something in federal taxes. Even if it is a small amount. This by itself won’t do much to dent the deficit, but it would be important as a symbol that everyone is in this together. Second, and most important, the gap between rich and poor and the middle class is widening in this country. Those who earn over a million dollars did not deserve an average tax cut of $120,000 under George Bush; they certainly don’t need that raised to $200,000 under the Ryan plan.
We need to recognize that the richest 2 percent of Americans should pay more, but we also need to make this tax system make sense. How can you have a society where nearly half the income earners pay no income taxes, due to deductions, loopholes, and special deals?
I am not arguing that struggling families should be hit with a whooping tax bill, but, rather, that our politicians should be honest with the American people. If you are fighting two wars, you have to pay for them. If you have to save the car companies and our financial institutions, you have to pay, at least initially. If you are going to provide Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, education, bridges, roads, and air traffic controllers, for that matter, you have to have the revenue.
It is just plain dishonest to put forth a budget and a plan that says “we have no revenue problem.” That is modern snake oil. It is time that we dealt with our tax problem, otherwise we won’t really be dealing with our deficit at all.
By: Peter Fenn, U.S. News and World Report, April 18, 2011
What A Government Shutdown Could Cost Us
I don’t want to start a market panic here. I’ve no desire to be known for “The Klein Crash of 2011.” But it’s safe to say that much of Washington finds the low, low yields on Treasurys — which represent the market’s serene confidence that the U.S. can handle its debts — a little baffling. Senior government officials have told me they think Treasurys are probably a bit overpriced, which is a bit like the executives of GE privately wondering why investors are so sure they won’t go bankrupt. The investors might be right, but it’s not comforting to hear.
The market isn’t totally wrong, of course. The federal government probably won’t default on its debt. But it’s actually pretty hard to explain how we get the spending line and the revenues line to match each other. And we have a really dysfunctional political system. We’ll figure it out somehow. We always do. But our low borrowing costs are an advantage we want to preserve for as long as possible. That means keeping the market from realizing that partisan polarization mixed with our weird legislative system makes insane outcomes easily imaginable.
This is why a shutdown would be so dangerous. A last-minute deal tells the market that America is a country that dithers and procrastinates and anguishes but eventually makes the necessary decisions to avert terrible consequences. We can be trusted to follow through, even if only at the last minute. A shutdown tells the market that our political system has become so dysfunctional that we actually can’t be trusted.
Asger Lau Andersen, David Dreyer Lassen and Lasse Holbøll Westh Nielsen — remember them? — have looked into how the market treats late budgets in the states — and late budgets in the states, it should be noted, are considerably less public and psychologically disruptive than a shutdown of the federal government during a weak economy. The answer is: not kindly (pdf). “We estimate that a budget delay of 30 days has a long run impact on the yield spread between 2 and 10 basis points,” they conclude. To put that in context, economists estimated that if the Federal Reserve pumped $400 billion into the economy, it’d lower yield spreads by about 20 basis points, or two-tenths of a percent. And it actually gets worse than that: “Markets also punish late budgets much more harshly if they occur during times of fiscal stress.”
I think it’d be fair to characterize this as a time of fiscal stress, don’t you?
There are some reasons for optimism here. Markets seem to punish fiscal mismanagement more lightly if the state has access to lots of money, which usually means reserves. The federal government has access to lots of money — though through borrowing, not reserves — so it’s possible we’d get off lightly, too. If you look back to Treasury yields in 1995, you don’t see an obvious change, but (a) perhaps yields would have been lower without the shutdown and (b) the economy is a lot weaker today than it was in 1995. At any rate, do we really want to test this? And if so, how many times? The tea party types are already promising to oppose an increase in the debt ceiling in the absence of massive entitlement cuts. Sen. Marco Rubio says he’ll oppose lifting the debt ceiling unless it’s accompanied by “a plan for fundamental tax reform, an overhaul of our regulatory structure, a cut to discretionary spending, a balanced-budget amendment, and reforms to save Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.” That’s quite a list of demands in order to avoid economic catastrophe.
The irony of all this comes clear if you consider why we’re afraid of deficits in the first place. If the market comes to believe our debt is too large for our political system to pay back, they’ll become more skittish about buying government debt, and that’ll send interest rates higher and the economy lower. But if we have a series of shutdowns while we argue over how much to cut and how fast, our paralysis will convince the market we can’t get our act together in time to pay off our debts and they’ll send interest rates skyrocketing anyway. We’ll have caused exactly what we sought to prevent, and done it now, when the economy is weak, rather than later, when the economy is stronger. As I said at the beginning of this piece, I’d sure hate to be known for causing an economic crash. How about you, Congress?
By: Ezra Klein, The Washington Post, March 30, 2011
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