Tag Archives: tax system

Lower Corporate Taxes Have Not Led to Higher Real Wages

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A recently released report from the president’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) claims that cutting the headline corporate income tax rate from the current 35% to 20% would lead to a jump in the real incomes of American households by a minimum of $4,000 a year and possibly by as much as $9,000.  Others have criticized those forecasts for a variety of reasons, and Larry Summers has called the estimates “absurd”.

Indeed, they are absurd.  One way to see this is by looking at the historical evidence.  This is not the first time the US would cut its corporate tax rates.  Did such cuts in the past then lead to a jump in real wages?  As the chart above suggests, the answer is no.  This blog post will discuss that evidence, as well as other issues with the CEA analysis prepared under (and it appears largely by) its new chair Kevin Hassett.  But first some background on the CEA and its new chair, and what this recent incident portends for the Council and its previous reputation for professionalism.

The Council of Economic Advisers has, until now, been a highly respected office in the White House, set up to provide the president with objective and professional economic advice on the key economic issues of the day.  The Council was established in 1946 during the Truman administration, and has had as its chair and its members many illustrious and well-respected economists.  A number later received the Nobel Prize in Economics and similar awards.  While the CEA can be and has been political at times (it is located in the Office of the President, after all), it has had an able staff who were expected to provide professional assessments of the issues as a service to the president.  Many came on leave from academic posts.  As an example of the type of staff they could draw, both Larry Summers and Paul Krugman, then young and rising economists, were on the Council staff in the early 1980s during the Reagan administration.

The current chair is Kevin Hassett.  Trump did not nominate someone to the position until April, and Hassett took up his post (following Senate approval) only on September 13.  Prior to this post, Hassett was perhaps best known for co-authoring (with James K. Glassman) the 1999 book titled “Dow 36,000”, in which he forecast the Dow Jones Industrial Average would reach 36,000 by 2002 and certainly no later than by 2004.  In the event, the Dow never exceeded 11,750 (in January 2000) and dropped to 7,200 in October 2002, as the Bush administration’s first recession took hold.

Hassett has now, as one of his first official acts, released a formal CEA study that claims that if the Trump Tax Plan were enacted, with the headline corporate income tax cut from 35% to 20%, household incomes in the US would rise by a minimum of $4,000 per year, and possibly by as much as $9,000.  Larry Summers has termed it “dishonest, incompetent, and absurd”, and other economists have been similarly scathing.

The study really is pretty bad, and must be an embarrassment to the CEA staff. The report starts (Figure 1) with a chart that shows average real wage growth over the last several years (2013 to 2016) among the 10 OECD member countries with the highest statutory corporate income tax rates, as compared to that for the 10 OECD members with the lowest rates.  Between 2013 and 2016 (but essentially just in 2015) the wage growth was higher by a few percentage points in the set of OECD countries with the lower tax rates.  But the 10 OECD member countries with the lowest corporate tax rates were mostly countries from Central and Eastern Europe (Estonia, Latvia, and so on to Slovenia).  They were starting from lower wage rates than in the richer countries, and benefited as they opened up to globalization and in particular to the EU markets.  It is difficult to see how this simplistic correlation tells us much about what would happen if the US cut its corporate income tax rate.

Hassett then quantifies his estimate of the dollar gains per household by citing a number of obscure articles (several of which were never published in a peer-reviewed journal) to come up with estimates of possible elasticities (explained below) that relate how much household incomes would rise if corporate taxes were cut.  He concludes this review by asserting that an elasticity in the range of -0.16 to -0.33 would be reasonable, in his view.  The -0.16 figure came from a study from 2009 published in the “Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City Economic Review”.  That is not exactly a prestigious journal.  And the -0.33 figure came from a 2007 paper that was presented at a conference, and does not appear to have ever been published.

An elasticity of -0.16 means that if the corporate tax rate were cut by 1% (not 1 percentage point, but rather by actually 1%, e.g. from 35% to 34.65%), then real wages would rise by 0.16%.  A 10% cut in the corporate tax rates (e.g. 35% to 31.5%) would lead, according to this assumption, to real wages rising by 1.6%.  And a cut in the corporate income tax rate from 35% to 20% (a 43% fall), as proposed in the Trump tax plan, would raise real wages by 6.9% under this assumption.  Hassett then applies this to the wage portion of household incomes to arrive at his calculated gain of $4,000 per household.  And the $9,000 gain is based on assuming an elasticity of -0.33.

There are numerous problems with this analysis, starting with the assumption that correlations are the same as causation.  There is also a question of what correlations are relevant.  The study that came up with the -0.33 elasticity, for example, looked at correlations across a panel of 50 countries.  It is not clear that such correlations would be of much relevance to judging the impact on real wages of a change in the US on corporate tax rates, as real wages across such a range of countries are driven by many factors (including, not least, the level of development).  And the -0.16 elasticity came from a study that examined correlations between real wages and corporate tax rates across the different states of the US.  But labor is mobile across US states, as is capital, plus the range of variation (state to state) in corporate tax rates is relatively modest as state taxes are relatively modest in size.  And indeed, it is not even clear how many companies actually pay the headline corporate income tax rates on the books, as states routinely grant them special tax holidays and other favors in order to try to get them to move to their states.

One would have thought that the most interesting investigation as to whether changes in corporate income taxes would matter in the US to real wages, would have been to see what actually happened in the US when such rates were cut in the past.  The fact that Hassett ignored this obvious question in the new CEA report is telling.  And there have indeed been earlier changes in the corporate tax rate, most notably (in recent decades) in 1987/88, following from the Tax Reform Act of 1986 during the Reagan administration.

The impact (or rather the lack of it) can be seen in the chart at the top of this post.  As had been discussed in earlier posts on this blog, real wages have been stagnant in the US (for the median wage earner) since around 1980.  The chart at the top of this post is an update of one prepared for a post from February 2015 that looked at the proximate causes of stagnant wages over this period, despite growth of real GDP per capita of more than 80% over the period.  While real GDP per capita is now 82% above what it was at the start of 1979, real wages (as measured by real median weekly earnings of full-time workers) are just 5.7% above where they were at the start of 1979.  Furthermore, the current “peak” of 5.7% growth can all be attributed to growth in the period since mid-2014, as the economy finally approached full employment levels in the later years of the Obama administration (having been held back by government spending cuts from 2010), with this carrying over into 2017.

The top corporate tax rate on profits was cut from 46% in the years up through 1986, to 40% in 1987 and then to just 34% in 1988 and thereafter to 1993 (when it was raised to the current level of 35%).  Did the cuts in 1987/88 lead to a sharp jump in real wages?  There is no indication of that at all in the chart.  Indeed, real wages fell by close to 6% between late 1986 and 1990, and then stayed at close to that low level until they started to rise some in the mid to late 1990s.  And there is no indication that the small increase in the corporate tax rate in 1993 to 35% led to wages then declining – indeed, they started to rise a few years later.

Based on this, one might come to the conclusion that a cut in corporate tax rates will lead to a fall (not an increase) in real wages, as seen following the 1987/88 cuts.  And also that a modest rise in the tax rate (such as in 1993) would lead to a gain in real wages a few years later.  But I would not claim this.  Rather, I would say that real wages and corporate tax rates are simply not closely linked to one another.  But for Hassett and others to claim that cuts in corporate taxes will lead to a significant jump in real wages, the exact opposite outcome following the 1987/88 cuts needs to be explained.

The CEA report was badly done, and must be an embarrassment to the professional staff there who certainly know better.  And as Larry Summers remarked in his blog post:  “Considering all this, if a Ph.D student submitted the CEA analysis as a term paper in public finance, I would be hard pressed to give it a passing grade.”

An Analysis of the Trump Tax Plan: Not a Tax Reform, But Rather a Massive Tax Cut for the Rich

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A.  Introduction

The Trump administration released on September 27 its proposed tax plan.  It was exceedingly skimpy (only nine pages long, including the title page, and with all the white space could have been presented on half that number of pages).  Importantly, it was explicitly vague on many of the measures, such as what tax loopholes would be closed to partially pay for the tax cuts (simply saying they would do this somehow).  One can, however, examine measures that were explicitly presented, and from these it is clear that this is primarily a plan for massive tax cuts for the rich.

It is also clear that this is not a tax reform.  A tax reform would be revenue neutral.  The measures proposed would not be.  And a reform would focus on changes in the structure of the tax system.  There is little of that here, but rather proposals to cut various tax rates (including in several cases to zero), primarily for the benefit of those who are well off.

One can see this in the way the tax plan was approached.  In a true tax reform, one would start by examining the system, and whether certain deductions and tax exemptions are not warranted by good policy (but rather serve only certain vested interests).  Closing such loopholes would lead to higher revenues being collected.  One would then determine what the new tax rates could be (i.e. by how much they could be cut) to leave the overall level of tax collection the same.

But that was not done here.  Rather, they start with specific proposals on what the new tax rates “should” be (12%, 25%, and 35% for individuals, and 20% for corporations), and then make only vague references to certain, unspecified, deductions and tax exemptions being eliminated or reduced, in order not to lose too much in revenues (they assert).  They have the process backward.

And it is clear that these tax cuts, should they be enacted by Congress, would massively increase the fiscal deficit.  While it is impossible to come up with a precise estimate of how much the tax plan would cost in lost revenues, due to the vagueness on the parameters and on a number of the proposals, Republicans have already factored into the long-term budget a reduction in tax revenues of $1.5 trillion over ten years.  And estimates of the net cost of the Trump plan range from a low of $2.2 trillion over ten years ($2.7 trillion when additional interest is counted, as it should be), to as high as $5 trillion over ten years.  No one can really say as yet, given the deliberate lack of detail.

But any of these figures on the cost are not small.  The total federal debt held by the public as of the end of September, 2017, was $14.7 trillion.  The cost in lost revenue could equal more than a third of this.  Yet Republicans in Congress blocked the fiscal expenditures we desperately needed in the years from 2010 onwards during the Obama years, when unemployment was still high, there was excess capacity in our underutilized factories, and the country needed to rebuild its infrastructure (as we still do).  The argument then was that we could not add to our national debt.  But now the same politicians see no problem with adding massively to that debt to cover tax cuts that will primarily benefit the rich.  The sheer hypocrisy is breath-taking.

Not surprisingly, Trump officials are saying that there will be no such cost due to a resulting spur to our economic growth.  Trump himself asserted that his tax plan would lead the economy to grow at a 6% pace.  No economist sees this as remotely plausible.  Even Trump’s economic aides, such as Gary Cohn who was principally responsible for the plan, are far more cautious and say only that the plan will lead to growth of “substantially over 3 percent”.  But even this has no basis in what has been observed historically after the Reagan and Bush tax cuts, nor what one would expect from elementary economic analysis.

The lack of specificity in many of the proposals in the tax plan issued on September 27 makes it impossible to assess it in full, as major elements are simply only alluded to.  For example, it says that a number of tax deductions (both personal and corporate) will be eliminated or reduced, but does not say which (other than that they propose to keep the deductions for home mortgage interest and for charity).  As another example, the plan says the number of personal income tax brackets would be reduced from seven currently to just three broad ones (at 12%, 25%, and 35%), but does not say at what income levels each would apply.  Specifics were simply left out.

For a tax plan where work has been intensively underway for already the eight months of this administration (and indeed from before, as campaign proposals were developed), such vagueness must be deliberate.  The possible reasons include:  1) That the specifics would be embarrassing, as they would make clear the political interests that would gain or lose under the plan; 2) That revealing the specifics would spark immediate opposition from those who would lose (or not gain as others would); 3) That revealing the specifics would make clear that they would not in fact suffice to achieve what the Trump administration is asserting (e.g. that ending certain tax deductions will make the plan progressive, or generate revenues sufficient to offset the tax rate cuts); and/or 4) That they really do not know what to do or what could be done to fix the issue.

One can, however, look at what is there, even if the overall plan is incomplete.  This blog post will do that.

B.  Personal Income Taxes

The proposals are (starting with those which are most clear):

a)  Elimination of the Estate Tax:  Only the rich pay this.  It only applies to estates given to heirs of $10.98 million or more (for a married couple).  This only affects the top 0.2%, most wealthy, households in the US.

b)  Elimination of the Alternative Minimum Tax:  This also only applies to those who are rich enough for it to apply and who benefit from a range of tax deductions and other benefits, who would otherwise pay little in tax.  It would be better to end such tax deductions and other special tax benefits that primarily help this group, thus making the Alternative Minimum Tax irrelevant, than to end it even though it had remained relevant.

c)  A reduction in the top income tax rate from 39.6% to 35%:  This is a clear gain to those whose income is so high that they would, under the current tax brackets, owe tax at a marginal rate of 39.6%.  But this bracket only kicks in for households with an adjusted gross income of $470,700 or more (in 2017).  This is very close to the minimum income of those in the top 1% of the income distribution ($465,626 in 2014), and the average household income of those in that very well-off group was $1,260,508 in 2014.  Thus this would be a benefit only to the top 1%, who on average earn over $1 million a year.

The Trump plan document does include a rather odd statement that the congressional tax-writing committees could consider adding an additional, higher, tax bracket, for the very rich, but it is not at all clear what this might be.  They do not say.  And since the tax legislation will be written by the congressional committees, who are free to include whatever they choose, this gratuitous comment is meaningless, and was presumably added purely for political reasons.

d)  A consolidation in the number of tax brackets from seven currently to just three, of 12%, 25%, and 35%:  Aside from the clear benefit to those now in the 39.6% bracket, noted above, one cannot say precisely what the impact the new tax brackets would have for the other groups since the income levels at which each would kick in was left unspecified.  It might have been embarrassing, or contentious, to do so.  But one can say that any such consolidation would lead to less progressivity in the tax system, as each of the new brackets would apply to a broader range of incomes.  Instead of the rates rising as incomes move up from one bracket to the next, there would now be a broader range at which they would be kept flat.  For example, suppose the Trump plan would be for the new 25% rate to span what is now taxed at 25% or 28%.  That range would then apply to household incomes (for married couples filing jointly, and in 2017) from $75,900 on the low end to $233,350 at the high end.  The low-end figure is just above the household income figure of $74,869 (in 2016) for those reaching the 60th percentile of the income distribution (see Table A-2 of this Census Bureau report), while the top-end is just above the $225,251 income figure for those reaching the 95th percentile.  A system is not terribly progressive when those in the middle class (at the 60th percentile) pay at the same rate as those who are quite well off (in the 95th percentile).

e)  A ceiling on the tax rate paid on personal income received through “pass-through” business entities of just 25%:  This would be one of the more regressive of the measures proposed in the Trump tax plan (as well as one especially beneficial to Trump himself).  Under current tax law, most US businesses (95% of them) are incorporated as business entities that do not pay taxes at the corporate level, but rather pass through their incomes to their owners or partners, who then pay tax on that income at their normal, personal, rates.  These so-called “pass-through” business entities include sole proprietorships, partnerships, Limited Liability Companies (LLCs), and sub-chapter S corporations (from the section in the tax code).  And they are important, not only in number but also in incomes generated:  In the aggregate, such pass-through business entities generate more in income than the traditional large corporations (formally C corporations) that most people refer to when saying corporation.  C corporations must pay a corporate income tax (to be discussed below), while pass-through entities avoid such taxes at the company level.

The Trump tax plan would cap the tax rate on such pass-through income at 25%.  This would not only create a new level of complexity (a new category of income on which a different tax is due), but would also only be of benefit to those who would otherwise owe taxes at a higher rate (the 35% bracket in the Trump plan).  If one were already in the 25% bracket, or a lower one, that ceiling would make no difference at all and would be of no benefit.  But for those rich enough to be in the higher bracket, the benefit would be huge.

Who would gain from this?  Anyone who could organize themselves as a pass-through entity (or could do so in agreement with their employer).  This would include independent consultants; other professionals such as lawyers, lobbyists, accountants, and financial advisors; financial entities and the partners investing in private-equity, venture-capital, and hedge funds; and real estate developers.  Trump would personally benefit as he owns or controls over 500 LLCs, according to Federal Election Commission filings.  And others could reorganize into such an entity when they have a tax incentive to do so.  For example, the basketball coach at the University of Kansas did this when Kansas created such a loophole for what would otherwise be due under its state income taxes.

f)  The tax cuts for middle-income groups would be small or non-existent:  While the Trump tax proposal, as published, repeatedly asserts that they would reduce taxes due by the middle class, there is little to suggest in the plan that that would be the case.  The primary benefit, they tout (and lead off with) is a proposal to almost double the standard deduction to $24,000 (for a married couple filing jointly).  That standard deduction is currently $12,700.  But the Trump plan would also eliminate the personal exemption, which is $4,050 per person in 2017.  Combining the standard deduction and personal exemptions, a family of four would have $28,900 of exempt income in 2017 under current law ($12,700 for the standard deduction, and personal exemptions of four times $4,050), but only $24,000 under the Trump plan.  They would not be better off, and indeed could be worse off.  The Trump plan is also proposing that the child tax credit (currently a maximum of $1,000 per child, and phased out at higher incomes) should be raised (both in amount, and at the incomes at which it is phased out), but no specifics are given so one cannot say whether this would be significant.

g)  Deduction for state and local taxes paid:  While not stated explicitly, the plan does imply that the deduction for state and local taxes paid would be eliminated.  It also has been much discussed publicly, so leaving out explicit mention was not an oversight.  What the Trump plan does say is the “most itemized deductions” would be eliminated, other than the deductions for home mortgage interest and for charity.

Eliminating the deduction for state and local taxes appears to be purely political.  It would adversely affect mostly those who live in states that vote for Democrats.  And it is odd to consider this tax deduction as a loophole.  One has to pay your taxes (including state and local taxes), or you go to jail.  It is not something you do voluntarily, in part to benefit from a tax deduction.  In contrast, a deduction such as for home mortgage interest is voluntary, one benefits directly from buying and owning a nice house, and such a deduction benefits more those who are able to buy a big and expensive home and who qualify for taking out a large mortgage.

h)  Importantly, there was much that was not mentioned:  One must also keep in mind what was not mentioned and hence would not be changed under the Trump proposals.  For example, no mention was made of the highly favorable tax rates on long-term capital gains (for assets held one year or more) of just 20%.  Those with a high level of wealth, i.e. the wealthy, gain greatly from this.  Nor was there any mention of such widely discussed loopholes as the “carried interest” exception (where certain investment fund managers are able to count their gains from the investment deals they work on as if it were capital gains, rather than a return on their work, as it would be for the lawyers and accountants on such deals), or the ability to be paid in stock options at the favorable capital gains rates.

C.  Corporate Income Taxes

More than the tax cuts enacted under Presidents Reagan and Bush, the Trump tax plan focuses on cuts to corporate income (profit) taxes.  Proposals include:

a)  A cut in the corporate income tax rate from the current 35% to just 20%:  This is a massive cut.  But it should also be recognized that the actual corporate income tax paid is far lower than the headline rate.  As noted in an earlier post on this blog, the actual average rate paid has been coming down for decades, and is now around 20%.  There are many, perfectly legal, ways to circumvent this tax.  But setting the rate now at 20% will not mean that taxes equal to 20% of corporate profits will be collected.  Rather, unless the mechanisms used to reduce corporate tax liability from the headline rate of 35% are addressed, those mechanisms will be used to reduce the new collections from the new 20% headline rate to something far less again.

b)  Allow 100% of investment expenses to be deducted from profits in the first year, while limiting “partially” interest expense on borrowing:  This provision, commonly referred to as full “expensing” of investment expenditures, would reduce taxable profits by whatever is spent on investment.  Investments are expected to last for a number of years, and under normal accounting the expense counted is not the full investment expenditure but rather only the estimated depreciation of that investment in the current year.  However, in recent decades an acceleration in what is allowed for depreciation has been allowed in the tax code in order to provide an additional incentive to invest.  The new proposal would bring that acceleration all the way to 100%, which as far as it can go.

This would provide an incentive to invest more, which is not a bad thing, although it still would also have the effect of reducing what would be collected in corporate income taxes.  It would have to be paid for somehow.  The Trump proposal would partially offset the cost of full expensing of investments by limiting “partially” the interest costs on borrowing that can be deducted as a cost when calculating taxable profits.  The interest cost of borrowing (on loans, or bonds, or whatever) is currently counted in full as an expense, just like any other expense of running the business.  How partial that limitation on interest expenses would be is not said.

But even if interest expenses were excluded in full from allowable business expenses, it is unlikely that this would come close to offsetting the reduction in tax revenues from allowing investment expenditures to be fully expensed.  As a simple example, suppose a firm would make an investment of $100, in an asset that would last 10 years (and with depreciation of 10% of the original cost each year).  For this investment, the firm would borrow $100, on which it pays interest at 5%.  Under the current tax system, the firm in the first year would deduct from its profits the depreciation expense of $10 (10% of $100) plus the interest cost of $5, for a total of $15.  Under the Trump plan, the firm would be able to count as an expense in the first year the full $100, but not the $5 of interest.  That is far better for the firm.  Of course, the situation would then be different in the second and subsequent years, as depreciation would no longer be counted (the investment was fully expensed in the first year), but it is always better to bring expenses forward.  And there likely will be further investments in subsequent years as well, keeping what counts as taxable profits low.

c)  Tax amnesty for profits held abroad:  US corporations hold an estimated $2.6 trillion in assets overseas, in part because overseas earnings are not subject to the corporate income tax until they are repatriated to the US.  Such a provision might have made sense decades ago, when information systems were more primitive, but does not anymore.  This provision in the US tax code creates the incentive to avoid current taxes by keeping such earnings overseas.  These earnings could come from regular operations such as to sell and service equipment for foreign customers, or from overseas production operations.  Or such earnings could be generated through aggressive tax schemes, such as from transferring patent and trademark rights to overseas jurisdictions in low-tax or no-tax jurisdictions such as the Cayman Islands.  But whichever way such profits are generated, the US tax system creates the incentive to hold them abroad by not taxing them until they are repatriated to the US.

This is an issue, and could be addressed directly by changing the law to make overseas earnings subject to tax in the year the earnings are generated.  The tax on what has been accumulated in the past could perhaps be spread out equally over some time period, to reduce the shock, such as say over five years.  The Trump plan would in fact start to do this, but only partially as the tax on such accumulated earnings would be set at some special (and unannounced) low rates.  All it says is that while both rates would be low, there would be a lower rate applied if the foreign earnings are held in “illiquid” assets than in liquid ones.  Precisely how this distinction would be defined and enforced is not stated.

This would in essence be a partial amnesty for capital earnings held abroad.  Companies that have held their profits abroad (to avoid US taxes) would be rewarded with a huge windfall from that special low tax rate (or rates), totalling in the hundreds of billions of dollars, with the precise gain on that $2.6 trillion held overseas dependant on how low the Trump plan would set the tax rates on those earnings.

It is not surprising that US corporations have acted this way.  There was an earlier partial amnesty, and it was reasonable for them to assume there would be future ones (as the Trump tax plan is indeed now proposing).  In one of the worst pieces of tax policy implemented in the George W. Bush administration, an amnesty approved in 2004 allowed US corporations with accumulated earnings abroad to repatriate that capital at a special, low, tax rate of just 5.25%.  It was not surprising that the corporations would assume this would happen again, and hence they had every incentive to keep earnings abroad whenever possible, leading directly to the $2.6 trillion now held abroad.

Furthermore, the argument was made that the 2004 amnesty would lead the firms to undertake additional investment in the US, with additional employment, using the repatriated funds.  But analyses undertaken later found no evidence that that happened.  Indeed, subsequent employment fell at the firms that repatriated accumulated overseas earnings.  Rather, the funds repatriated largely went to share repurchases and increased dividends.  This should not, however, have been surprising.  Firms will invest if they have what they see to be a profitable opportunity.  If they need funds, they can borrow, and such multinational corporations generally have no problem in doing so.  Indeed, they can use their accumulated overseas earnings as collateral on such loans (as Apple has done) to get especially low rates on such loans.  Yet the Trump administration asserts, with no evidence and indeed in contradiction to the earlier experience, that their proposed amnesty on earnings held abroad will this time lead to more investment and jobs by these firms in the US.

d)  Cut to zero corporate taxes on future overseas earnings:  The amnesty discussed above would apply to the current stock of accumulated earnings held by US corporations abroad.  Going forward, the Trump administration proposes that earnings of overseas subsidiaries (with ownership of as little as 10% in those firms) would be fully exempt from US taxes.  While it is true that there then would be no incentive to accumulate earnings abroad, the same would be the case if those earnings would simply be made subject to the same current year corporate income taxes as the US parent is liable for, and not taxable only when those earnings are repatriated.

It is also not at all clear to me how exempting these overseas earnings from any US taxes would lead to more investment and more jobs in the US.  Indeed, the incentive would appear to me to be the opposite.  If a plant is sited in the US and used to sell product in the US market or to export it to Europe or Asia, say, earnings from those operations would be subject to the regular US corporate income taxes (at a 20% rate in the Trump proposals).  However, if the plant is sited in Mexico, with the production then sold in the US market or exported from there to Europe or Asia, earnings from those operations would not be subject to any US tax.  Mexico might charge some tax, but if the firm can negotiate a good deal (much as firms from overseas have negotiated such deals with various states in the US to site their plants in those states), the Trump proposal would create an incentive to move investment and jobs to foreign locations.

D.  Conclusion

The Trump administration’s tax plan is extremely skimpy on the specifics.  As one commentator (Allan Sloan) noted, it looks like it was “written in a bar one evening over a batch of beers for a Tax 101 class rather than by serious people who spent weeks working with tax issues”.

It is, of course, still just a proposal.  The congressional committees will be the ones who will draft the specific law, and who will then of necessity fill in the details.  The final product could look quite different from what has been presented here.  But the Trump administration proposal has been worked out during many months of discussions with the key Republican leaders in the House and the Senate who will be involved.  Indeed, the plan has been presented in the media not always as the Trump administration plan, but rather the plan of the “Big Six”, where the Big Six is made up of House Speaker Paul Ryan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, plus National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin of the Trump administration.  If this group is indeed fully behind it, then one can expect the final version to be voted on will be very similar to what was outlined here.

But skimpy as it is, one can say with some certainty that the tax plan:

a)  Will be expensive, with a ten-year cost in the trillions of dollars;

b)  Is not in fact a tax reform, but rather a set of very large tax cuts;

and c)  Overwhelmingly benefits the rich.

Tax Cuts Do Not Spur Growth – There Are Income as well as Substitution Effects, and Much More Besides: Econ 101

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gdp-growth-and-top-marg-tax-rate-1930-to-2015

A.   Introduction, and a Brief Aside on the Macro Issues

While there is much we do not yet know on what economic policies Donald Trump will pursue (he said many things in his campaign, but they were often contradictory), one thing we can be sure of is that there will be a major tax cut.  Republicans in Congress (led by Paul Ryan) and in the Senator want the same.  And they along with Trump insist that the cuts in tax rates will spur a sharp jump in GDP growth, with the result that net tax revenues in the end will not fall by all that much.

But do tax cuts spur growth?  The chart above suggests not.  Marginal tax rates of those in the top income brackets have come down sharply since the 1950s and early 1960s, when they exceeded 90%.  They reached as low as 28% during the later Reagan years and 35% during the administration of George W. Bush.  But GDP growth did not jump to some higher rate as a result.

This Econ 101 post will discuss the economics on why this is actually what one should expect.  It will focus on the microeconomics behind this, as the case for income tax cuts is normally presented by the so-called “supply siders” as a micro story of incentives.  The macro case for tax cuts is different.  Briefly, in times of high unemployment when the economy is suffering from insufficient demand in the aggregate to purchase all that could be produced if more labor were employed, a cut in income taxes might spur demand by households, as they would then have higher post-tax incomes to spend on consumption items.  This increase in demand could then spur production and hence GDP.

Critically, this macro story depends on allowing the fiscal deficit to rise by there not being simultaneously a cut in government expenditures along with the tax cuts.  If there is such a cut in government expenditures, demand may be reduced by as much as or even more than demand would be increased by households.  But the economic plans of both Trump and Congressman (and Speaker) Paul Ryan do also call for large cuts in government expenditures.  While both Trump and Ryan have called for government expenditures to increase on certain items, such as for defense, they still want a net overall reduction.

The net impact on demand will then depend on how large the government expenditure cuts would be relative to the tax cuts, and on the design of the income tax cuts.  As was discussed in an earlier post on this blog on the size of the fiscal multiplier, If most of the income tax cuts go to those who are relatively well off, who will then save most or perhaps all of their tax windfall, there will be little or no macro stimulus from the tax cuts.  Any government expenditure cuts on top of this would then lead not to a spur in growth, but rather to output growing more slowly or contracting.  And the tax plan offered by Donald Trump in his campaign would indeed direct the bulk of the tax cuts to the extremely well off.  A careful analysis by the non-partisan Tax Policy Center found that 71% of the tax cuts (in dollar value) from the overall plan (which includes cuts in corporate and other taxes as well) would go to the richest 5% of households (those earning $299,500 or more), 51% would go to the top 1% (those earning $774,300 or more), and fully 25% would go to the richest 0.1% (those earning $4.8 million or more).

[A side note:  To give some perspective on how large these tax cuts for the rich would be, the 25% going to the richest 0.1% under Trump’s plan would total $1.5 trillion over the next ten years, under the Tax Policy Center estimates.  By comparison, the total that the Congressional Budget Office projects would be spent on the food stamp program (now officially called SNAP) for the poor over this period would come to a bit below $700 billion (see the August 2016 CBO 10-year budget projections).  That is, the tax breaks to be given under Trump’s tax plan to the top 0.1% (who have earnings of $4.8 million or more in a year) would be more than twice as large as would be spent on the entire food stamp program over the period.  Yet the Republican position is that we have to cut the food stamp program because we do not have sufficient government revenues to support it.]

The macro consequences of tax cuts that mostly go to the already well off, accompanied by government expenditure cuts to try to offset the deficit impact, are likely therefore to lead not to a spur in growth but to the opposite.

The microeconomic story is separate, and the rest of this blog post will focus on the arguments there.  Those who argue that cuts in income taxes will act as a spur to growth base their argument on what they see as the incentive effects.  Income taxes are a tax on working, they argue, and if you tax income less, people will work longer hours.  More will be produced, the economy will grow faster, and people will have higher incomes.

This micro argument is mistaken in numerous ways, however.  This Econ 101 post will discuss why.  There is the textbook economics, where it appears these “supply siders” forgot some of the basic economics they were taught in their introductory micro courses. But we should also recognize that the decision on how many hours to work each week goes beyond simply the economics.  There are important common social practices (which can vary by the nature of the job, i.e. what is a normal work day, and what do you do to get promoted) and institutional structures (the 40 hour work week) which play an important and I suspect dominant role. This blog post will review some of them.

But first, what do we know from the data, and what does standard textbook economics say?

B.  Start with the Data

It is always good first to look at what the data is telling us.  There have been many sharp cuts in income tax rates over the last several decades, and also some increases.  Did the economy grow faster after the tax cuts, and slower following the tax increases?

The chart at the top of this post indicates not.  The chart shows what GDP growth was year by year since 1930 along with the top marginal income tax rate of each year.  The top marginal income tax rate is the rate of tax that would be paid on an additional dollar of income by those in the highest income tax bracket.  The top marginal income tax rate is taken by those favoring tax cuts as the most important tax rate to focus on.  It is paid by the richest, and these individuals are seen as the “job creators” and hence play an especially important role under this point of view.  But changes in the top rates also mark the times when there were normally more general tax cuts for the rest of the population as well, as cuts (or increases) in the top marginal rates were generally accompanied by cuts (or increases) in the other rates also.  It can thus be taken as a good indicator of when tax rates changed and in what direction.  Note also that the chart combines on one scale the annual GDP percentage growth rates and the marginal tax rate as a percentage of an extra dollar of income, which are two different percentage concepts.  But the point is to compare the two.

As the chart shows, the top marginal income tax rate exceeded 90% in the 1950s and early 1960s.  The top rate then came down sharply, to generally 70% until the Reagan tax cuts of the early 1980s, when they fell to 50% and ultimately to just 28%.  They then rose under Clinton to almost 40%, fell under the Bush II tax cuts to 35%, and then returned under Obama to the rate of almost 40%.

Were GDP growth rates faster in the periods when the marginal tax rates were lower, and slower when the tax rates were higher?  One cannot see any indication of it in the chart. Indeed, even though the highest marginal tax rates are now far below what they were in the 1950s and early 1960s, GDP growth over the last decade and a half has been less than it what was when tax rates were not just a little bit, but much much higher.  If cuts in the marginal tax rates are supposed to spur growth, one would have expected to see a significant increase in growth between when the top rate exceeded 90% and where it is now at about 40%.

Indeed, while I would not argue that higher tax rates necessarily lead to faster growth, the data do in fact show higher tax rates being positively correlated with faster growth.  That is, the economy grew faster in years when the tax rates were higher, not lower.  A simple statistical regression of the GDP growth rate on the top marginal income tax rate of the year found that if the top marginal tax rate were 10% points higher, GDP growth was 0.57% points higher.  Furthermore, the t-statistic (of 2.48) indicates that the correlation was statistically significant.

Again, I would not argue that higher tax rates lead to faster GDP growth.  Rather, much more was going on with the economy over this period which likely explains the correlation. But the data do indicate that very high top marginal income tax rates, even over 90%, were not a hindrance to growth.  And there is clearly no support in the evidence that lower tax rates lead to faster growth.

The chart above focuses on the long-term impacts, and does not find any indication that tax cuts have led to faster growth.  An earlier post on this blog looked at the more immediate impacts of such tax rates cuts or increases, focussing on the impacts over the next several years following major tax rate changes.  It compared what happened to output and employment (as well as what happened to tax revenues and to the fiscal deficit) in the immediate years following the Reagan and Bush II tax cuts, and following the Clinton and Obama tax increases.  What it found was that growth in output and employment, and in fiscal revenues, were faster following the Clinton and Obama tax increases than following the Reagan and Bush II tax cuts.  And not surprisingly given this, the fiscal deficit got worse under Reagan and Bush II following their tax cuts, and improved following the Clinton and Obama tax increases.

C.  The Economics of the Impact of Tax Rates on Work Effort

The “supply siders” who argue that cuts in income taxes will lead to faster growth base their case on what might seem (at least to them) simple common sense.  They say that if you tax something, you will produce less of it.  Tax it less, and you will produce more of it. And they say this applies to work effort.  Income taxes are a tax on work.  Lower income tax rates will then lead to greater work effort, they argue, and hence to more production and hence to more growth.  GDP growth rates will rise.

But this is wrong, at several levels.  One can start with some simple math.  The argument confuses what would be (by their argument) a one-time step-up in production, with an increase in growth rates.  Suppose that tax rates are cut and that as a result, everyone decides that at the new tax rates they will choose to work 42 hours a week rather than 40 hours a week before.  Assuming productivity is unchanged (actually it would likely fall a bit), this would lead to a 5% increase in production.  But this would be a one time increase. GDP would jump 5% in the first year, but would then grow at the same rate as it had before.  There would be no permanent increase in the rate of growth, as the supply siders assert.  This is just simple high school math.  A one time increase is not the same as a permanent increase in the rate of growth.

But even leaving this aside, the supply sider argument ignores some basic economics taught in introductory microeconomics classes.  Focussing just on the economics, what would be expected to happen if marginal income tax rates are cut?  It is true that there will be what economists call “substitution effects”, where workers may well wish to work longer hours if their after-tax income from work rises due to a cut in marginal tax rates. But the changes will also be accompanied by what economists call “income effects”.  Worker after-tax incomes will change both because of the tax rate changes and because of any differences in the hours they work.  And these income effects will lead workers to want to work fewer hours.  The income and substitution effects will work in opposite directions, and the net impact of the two is not clear.  They could cancel each other out.

What are the income effects, and why would they lead to less of an incentive to work greater hours if the tax rate falls?:

a)  First, one must keep in mind that the aim of working is to earn an income, and that hours spent working has a cost:  One will have fewer hours at home each day to enjoy with your wife and kids, or for whatever other purposes you spend your non-working time. Economists lump this all under what they call “leisure”.  Leisure is something desirable, and with all else equal, one would prefer more of it.  Economists call this a “normal good”.  With a higher income, you would want to buy more of it. And the way you buy more of it is by working fewer hours each day (at the cost of giving up the wages you would earn in those hours).

Hence, if taxes on income go down, so that your after-tax income at the original number of hours you work each day goes up, you will want to use at least some portion of this extra income to buy more time to spend at home.  This is an income effect, and will go in the opposite direction of the substitution effect of higher after-tax wages leading to an incentive to work longer hours.  We cannot say, a priori, whether the income effect or the substitution effect will dominate.  It will vary by individual, based on their individual preferences, what their incomes are, and how many hours they were already working.  It could go either way, and can only be addressed by looking at the data.

b)  One should also recognize that one works to earn income for a reason, and one reason among many is to earn and save enough so that one can enjoy a comfortable retirement. But in standard economic theory, there is no reason to work obsessively before retirement so that one will then have such a large retirement “nest egg” as to enjoy a luxurious life style when one retires.  Rather, the aim is to smooth out your consumption profile over both periods in your life.

Hence if income tax rates are cut, so that your after-tax incomes are higher, one will be able to save whatever one is aiming for for retirement, sooner.  Hence it would be rational to reduce by some amount the hours one seeks to work each day, and enjoy them with your wife and kids at home, as your savings goals for retirement can still be met with those fewer hours of work.  This is an income effect, and acts in the direction of reducing, rather than increasing, the number of hours one will choose to work if there is a general tax cut.

c)  More generally, one should recognize that incomes are earned to achieve various aims. Some of these might be to cover fixed obligations, such as to pay on a mortgage or for student debt, and some might be quasi-fixed, such as to provide for a “comfortable” living standard for one’s family.  If those aims are being met, then time spent at leisure (time spent at home with the family) may be especially attractive.  In such circumstances, the income effect from tax cuts might be especially large, and sufficient to more than offset the substitution effects resulting from the change in the after-tax wage.

Income effects are real, and it is mistake to ignore them.  They act in the opposite direction of the substitution effect, and will act to offset them.  The offset might be partial, full, or even more than full.  We cannot say simply by looking at the theory.  Rather, one needs to look at the data.  And as noted above, the data provdes no support to the suppostion that lower tax rates will lead to higher growth.  Once one recognizes that there will be income effects as well as substitution effects, one can see that this should not be a surprise.  It is fully consistent with the theory.

One can also show how the income and substitution effects work via some standard diagrams, involving indifference curves and budget constraints.  These are used in most standard economics textbooks.  However, I suspect that most readers will find such diagrams to be more confusing than enlightening.  A verbal description, such as that above, will likely be more easy to follow.  But for those who prefer such diagrams, the standard ones can be found at this web posting.  Note, however, that there is a mistake (a typo I assume) in the key Figures 2A and 2B.  The horizontal arrows (along the “leisure” axis) are pointed in the opposite direction of what they should (left instead of right in 2A and right instead of left in 2B).  These errors indeed serve to emphasize how even the experts with such diagrams can get confused and miss simple typos.

D.  But There is More to the Hours of Work Decision than Textbook Economics

The analysis above shows that the supply-siders, who stress microeconomic incentives as key, have forgotten half of the basic analysis taught in their introductory microeconomics classes.  There are substitution effects resulting from a change in income tax rates, as the supply-siders argue, but there are also income effects which act in the opposite direction. The net effect is then not clear.

However, there is more to the working hours decision than the simple economics of income and substitution effects.  There are social as well as institutional factors.  It the real world, these other factors matter.  And I suspect they matter a good deal more than the standard economics in explaining the observation that we do not see growth rates jumping upwards after the several rounds of major tax cuts of the last half century.

Such factors include the following:

a)  For most jobs, a 40 hour work week is, at least formally, standard.  For those earning hourly wages, any overtime above 40 hours is, by law, supposed to be compensated at 50% above their normal hourly wage.  For workers in such jobs, one cannot generally go to your boss and tell him, in the event of an income tax increase say, that you now want to work only 39 1/2 hours each week.  The hours are pretty much set for such workers.

b)  There are of course other workers compensated by the hour who might work a variable number of hours each week at a job.  These normally total well less than 40 hours a week.  These would include many low wage occupations such as at fast food places, coffee shops, retail outlets, and similarly.  But for many such workers, the number of hours they work each week is constrained not by the number of hours they want to work, but by the number of hours their employer will call them in for.  A lower income tax rate might lead them to want to work even more hours, but when they are constrained already by the number of hours their employer will call them in for, there will be no change.

c)  For salaried workers and professionals such as doctors, the number of hours they work each week is defined primarily by custom for their particular profession.  They work the hours that others in that profession work, with this evolving over time for the profession as a whole.  The hours worked are in general not determined by some individual negotiation between the professional and his or her supervisor, with this changing when income tax rates are changed.  And many professionals indeed already work long hours (including medical doctors, where I worry whether they suffer from sleep deprivation given their often incredibly long hours).

d)  The reason why one sees many professionals, including managers and others in office jobs, working such long hours probably has little to do with marginal income tax rates.  Rather, they try to work longer than their co-workers, or at least not less, in order to get promoted.  Promotion is a competition, where the individual seen as the best is the one who gets promoted.  And the one seen as the best is often the one who works the longest each day.  With the workers competing against each other, possibly only implicitly and not overtly recognized as such, there will be an upward spiral in the hours worked as each tries to out-do the other.  This is ultimately constrained by social norms.  Higher or lower income tax rates are not central here.

e)  Finally, and not least, most of us do take pride in our work.  We want to do it well, and this requires a certain amount of work effort.  Taxes are not the central determinant in this.

E.  Summary and Conclusion

I fully expect there to be a push to cut income tax rates early in the Trump presidency.  The tax plan Trump set out during his campaign was similar to that proposed by House Speaker Paul Ryan, and both would cut rates sharply, especially for those who are already well off. They will argue that the cuts in tax rates will spur growth in GDP, and that as a consequence, the fiscal deficit will not increase much if at all.

There is, however, no evidence in the historical data that this will be the case.  Income tax rates have been cut sharply since the Eisenhower years, when the top marginal income tax rate topped 90%, but growth rates did not jump higher following the successive rounds of cuts.

Tax cuts, if they are focused on those of lower to middle income, might serve as a macro stimulus if unemployment is significant.  Such households would be likely to spend their extra income on consumption items rather than save it, and this extra household consumption demand can serve to spur production.  But tax cuts that go primarily to the rich (as the tax cuts that have been proposed by Trump and Ryan would do), that are also accompanied by significant government expenditure cuts, will likely have a depressive rather than stimulative effect.

The supply-siders base their argument, however, for why tax cuts should lead to an increase in the growth rate of GDP, not on the macro effects but rather on what they believe will be the impact on microeconomic incentives.  They argue that income taxes are a tax on work, and a reduction in the tax on work will lead to greater work effort.

They are, however, confused.  What they describe is what economists call the substitution effect.  That may well exist.  But there are also income effects resulting from the changes in the tax rates, and these income effects will work in the opposite direction.  The net impact is not clear, even if one keeps just to standard microeconomics.  The net impact could be a wash.  Indeed, the net impact could even be negative, leading to fewer hours worked when there is a cut in income taxes.  One does not know a priori, and you need to look at the data.  And there is no indication in the data that the sharp cuts in marginal tax rates over the last half century have led to higher rates of growth.

There is also more to the working hours decision than just textbook microeconomics. There are important social and institutional factors, which I suspect will dominate.  And they do not depend on the marginal rates of income taxes.

But if you are making an economic argument, you should at least get the economics right.