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Taxes on Corporate Profits Have Continued to Collapse

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The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) released earlier today its second estimate of GDP growth in the fourth quarter ot 2018.  (Confusingly, it was officially called the “third” estimate, but was only the second as what would have been the first, due in January, was never done due to Trump shutting down most agencies of the federal government in December and January due to his border wall dispute.)  Most public attention was rightly focussed on the downward revision in the estimate of real GDP growth in the fourth quarter, from a 2.6% annual rate estimated last month, to 2.2% now.  And current estimates are that growth in the first quarter of 2019 will be substantially less than that.

But there is much more in the BEA figures than just GDP growth.  The second report of the BEA also includes initial estimates of corporate profits and the taxes they pay (as well as much else).  The purpose of this note is to update an earlier post on this blog that examined what happened to corporate profit tax revenues following the Trump / GOP tax cuts of late 2017.  That earlier post was based on figures for just the first half of 2018.

We now have figures for the full year, and they confirm what had earlier been found – corporate profit tax revenues have indeed plummeted.  As seen in the chart at the top of this post, corporate profit taxes were in the range of only $150 to $160 billion (at annual rates) in the four quarters of 2018.  This was less than half the $300 to $350 billion range in the years before 2018.  And there is no sign that this collapse in revenues was due to special circumstances of one quarter or another.  We see it in all four quarters.

The collapse shows through even more clearly when one examines what they were as a share of corporate profits:

 

The rate fell from a range of generally 15 to 16%, and sometimes 17%, in the earlier years, to just 7.0% in 2018.  And it was an unusually steady rate of 7.0% throughout the year.  Note that under the Trump / GOP tax bill, the standard rate for corporate profit tax was cut from 35% previously to a new headline rate of 21%.  But the actual rate paid turned out (on average over all firms) to come to just 7.0%, or only one-third as much.  The tax bill proponents claimed that while the headline rate was being cut, they would close loopholes so the amount collected would not go down.  But instead loopholes were not only kept, but expanded, and revenues collected fell by more than half.

If the average corporate profit tax rate paid in 2018 had been not 7.0%, but rather at the rate it was on average over the three prior fiscal years (FY2015 to 2017) of 15.5%, an extra $192.2 billion in revenues would have been collected.

There was also a reduction in personal income taxes collected.  While the proportional fall was less, a much higher share of federal income taxes are now borne by individuals than by corporations.  (They were more evenly balanced decades ago, when the corporate profit tax rates were much higher – they reached over 50% in terms of the amount actually collected in the early 1950s.)  Federal personal income tax as a share of personal income was 9.2% in 2018, and again quite steady at that rate over each of the four quarters.  Over the three prior fiscal years of FY2015 to 2017, this rate averaged 9.6%.  Had it remained at that 9.6%, an extra $77.3 billion would have been collected in 2018.

The total reduction in tax revenues from these two sources in 2018 was therefore $270 billion.  While it is admittedly simplistic to extrapolate this out over ten years, if one nevertheless does (assuming, conservatively, real growth of 1% a year and price growth of 2%, for a total growth of about 3% a year), the total revenue loss would sum to $3.1 trillion.  And if one adds to this, as one should, the extra interest expense on what would now be a higher public debt (and assuming an average interest rate for government borrowing of 2.6%), the total loss grows to $3.5 trillion.

This is huge.  To give a sense of the magnitude, an earlier post on this blog found that revenues equal to the original forecast loss under the Trump / GOP tax plan (summing to $1.5 trillion over the next decade, and then continuing) would suffice to ensure the Social Security Trust Fund would be fully funded forever.  As things are now, if nothing is done the Trust Fund will run out in about 2034.  And Republicans insist that the gap is so large that nothing can be done, and that the system will have to crash unless retired seniors accept a sharp reduction in what are already low benefits.

But with losses under the Trump / GOP tax bill of $3.1 trillion over ten years, less than half of those losses would suffice to ensure Social Security could survive at contracted benefit levels.  One cannot argue that we can afford such a huge tax cut, but cannot afford what is needed to ensure Social Security remains solvent.

In the nearer term, the tax cuts have led to a large growth in the fiscal deficit.  Even the US Treasury itself is currently forecasting that the federal budget deficit will reach $1.1 trillion in FY2019 (5.2% of GDP), up from $779 billion in FY2018.  It is unprecedented to have such high fiscal deficits at a time of full employment, other than during World War II.  Proper fiscal management would call for something closer to a balanced budget, or even a surplus, in those periods when the economy is at full employment, while deficits should be expected (and indeed called for) during times of economic downturns, when unemployment is high.  But instead we are doing the opposite.  This will put the economy in a precarious position when the next economic downturn comes.  And eventually it will, as it always has.

Taxes on Corporate Profits Have Collapsed

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A.  Introduction:  The Plunge in Corporate Profit Tax Revenues

Corporate profit tax revenues have collapsed following the passage by Congress last December of the Trump-endorsed Republican tax plan.  And this is not because corporate profits have decreased:  They have kept going up.  The initial figures, for the first half of 2018, show federal corporate profit taxes (also referred to as corporate income taxes) collected have fallen to an annual rate of roughly just $150 billion.  This is only half, or less, of the $300 to $350 billion collected (at annual rates) over the past several years.  See the chart above.

The estimates on corporate profit taxes actually being paid through the first half of 2018 come from the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA, and commonly also referred to as the GDP accounts) produced by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.  The figures are collected as part of the process of producing the GDP accounts, but for various reasons the figures on corporate profit taxes are not released with the initial GDP estimates (which come out at the end of the month that follows the end of each quarter), but rather one month later (i.e. on August 29 this time, for the estimates for the April to June quarter).  The quarterly estimates are seasonally adjusted (which is important, as tax payments have a strong seasonality to them), and are then shown at annual rates.  While we already saw such a collapse in corporate tax revenues in the figures for the first quarter of 2018 (first published in May), it is always best with the estimates of GDP and its components to wait until a second quarter’s figures are available to see whether any change is confirmed.  And it was.

This initial data on what is actually now being collected in taxes following the passage of the Republican tax plan last December suggests that the revenue losses will be substantially higher than the $1.5 trillion over ten years that the staff at the Joint Committee on Taxation (the official arbiters for Congress on such matters) forecast.  Indeed, the plunge in corporate profit tax collections alone looks likely to well exceed this.  On top of this, there were also sharp cuts in non-corporate business taxes and in income taxes for those in higher income groups.

This blog post will look at what the initial figures are revealing on the tax revenues being collected, as estimated in the GDP accounts.  The focus will be on corporate income taxes, although in looking at the total tax revenue losses we will also look briefly at what the initial data is indicating on reductions in individual income taxes being paid.

The chart above shows what the reduction has been in corporate profit taxes in dollar terms.  In the next section below we will look at this in terms of the taxes as a share of corporate profits.  That implicit average actual tax rate is more meaningful for comparisons over time, and it has also plunged.  And the implicit actual rate now being paid, of only about 7% for the taxes at the federal government level, shows how misleading it is to focus on the headline rate of tax on corporate profits of 21% (down from 35% before the new law).  The actual rate being paid is only one-third of this, as a consequence of the numerous loopholes built into the law.  The Republican proponents of the bill had argued that while they were cutting the headline rate from 35% to 21%, they were also (they asserted) ending many of the loopholes which allowed corporations to pay less.  But in fact numerous loopholes were added or expanded.

The next section of the post will then look at this in the longer term context, with figures on the implicit corporate profit tax rate going back to 1950.  The implicit rate has fallen steadily over time, from a rate that reached over 50% in the early 1950s, to just 7% now.  While Trump and his Republican colleagues argued the cut in corporate taxes was necessary in order for the economy to grow, the economy in fact grew at a faster pace in the 1950s and 1960s, when the rate paid varied between 30 and 50%, than it has in recent decades despite the now far lower rates corporations face.

But this is for the federal tax on corporate profits alone.  There are also taxes on corporate profits imposed at the state and local level, as well as by foreign governments (although such foreign taxes are then generally deductible from the taxes due domestically).  This overall tax burden is more meaningful for understanding whether the overall burden is too high.  But, as we shall see below, that rate has also fallen steadily over time.  There is again no evidence that lower rates lead to higher growth.

The final substantive section of the post will then look more closely at the magnitude of the revenue losses from the December bill.  They are massive, and based on the initial evidence could very well total over $2 trillion over ten years for the losses on the corporate profit tax alone.  The losses from the other tax cuts in the new law, primarily for the wealthy and for non-corporate business, will add to this.  A very rough estimate is that the losses in individual income tax revenues may total an additional $1 trillion, bringing the total to over $3 trillion.  This is double the $1.5 trillion loss in revenues originally forecast.

But first, an analysis of what we see from the initial evidence on what is being paid.

B.  Profit Taxes as a Share of Corporate Profits

The chart at the top of this post shows what has been collected, by quarter (but shown at an annual rate), by the federal tax on corporate profits over the last several years.  Those figures are in dollars, and show a fall in the first half of 2018 of a half or more compared to what was collected in recent years.  But for comparisons over time, it is more meaningful to look at the implicit corporate tax rate, as corporate profits change over time (and generally grow over time).  And this can be done as the National Income and Product Accounts include an estimate of what corporate profits have been, as part of its assessment of how national income is distributed among the major functional groups.

That share since 2013 has been:

Between 2013 and 2016, the implicit rate (quarter by quarter) varied between about 15 and 17%.  It came down to about 14% for most of 2017 for some reason (possibly tied to the change in administration in Washington, with its new interpretation of regulatory and tax rules), but one cannot know from the aggregate figures alone.  But the rate then fell sharply, by half, to just 7% after the new tax law entered into effect.

A point to note is that the corporate profit figures provided here are corporate profits as estimated in the National Income and Product Accounts.  They are a measure of what corporate profits actually are, in an economic sense, and will in general differ from what corporate profits are as defined for tax purposes.  Thus, for example, accelerated depreciation allowed for tax purposes will reduce taxable corporate profits.  But the BEA estimates for the NIPA accounts will reflect not the accelerated depreciation allowed for tax purposes, but rather an estimate of what depreciation actually was.  Thus the figures as shown in the chart above will be a measure of what the true average corporate tax rate actually was, before the adjustments made (as permitted under tax law) to arrive at taxable corporate profits.

That average rate is now just 7%.  That is only one-third of the headline rate under the new law of 21%.  Provisions in the tax code allow corporations to pay far less in tax than what the headline rate would suggest.  This is not new (the headline rate previously was 35%, but the actual average rate paid was just 15 to 17% between 2013 and 2016, and 14% in most of 2017).  But Trump administration officials had asserted that many of the loopholes allowing for lower taxes would be ended under the new tax law, so that the actual rate paid would be closer to the headline rate.  But this clearly did not happen.  As many independent analysts pointed out before the bill was passed, the new tax law had numerous provisions which would allow the system to be gamed.  And we now see the result of that in the figures.

C.  Corporate Taxes in a Longer Term Context

The cuts in corporate profit taxes are not new.  Taxes on corporate profits in the US used to be far higher:

In the early 1950s, the federal tax on corporate profits (actually paid, not the headline rate) reached over 50%.  While it then fell, it kept to a rate of between about 30% and 50% through the 1950s and 60s.  And this was a period of good economic growth in the US – substantially faster than it has been since.  A high tax rate on corporate profits did not block growth.  Indeed, if one looked just at the simple correlation, one might conclude that a higher tax on corporate profits acts as a spur to growth.  But this would be too simplistic, and I would not argue that.  But what one can safely conclude is that a high rate of tax on corporate profits does not act as a block to more rapid growth.

There have also been important distributional consequences, however.  Corporate wealth is primarily owned by the wealthy (duh), and the sharp decline in taxes paid on corporate profits means that a larger share of the overall tax burden has been shifted to taxes on individual incomes, which are primarily borne by the middle classes.  Based on figures in the NIPA accounts, in 1950 taxes on individual incomes (including Social Security taxes) accounted for 47% of total federal taxes, while taxes on corporate profits accounted for 35% (with the rest primarily various excise taxes such as on fuels, liquor, tobacco, etc., plus import duties).  By 2017, however, the share of taxes on individual incomes had grown to 87.4%, while the share on corporate profits had declined to just 8.6%.  There was a gigantic shift away from taxes on wealth to taxes on individual incomes – taxes that are borne primarily by the middle class.  And that share will now fall further in 2018, by about half.

The chart above is for federal corporate profit taxes alone.  It could be argued that what matters to growth is not just the corporate profit taxes paid at the federal level, but all such taxes, including those paid at the state and local level, as well as to foreign governments (although the taxes paid abroad are generally deductible on their domestic taxes, so that will be a wash).

That chart looks like:

This follows the same path as the chart for federal corporate profit taxes alone, with a similar decline.  With the federal share of such taxes averaging 84% over the period (up to 2017), this is not surprising.  The federal share will now fall sharply in 2018, due to the new tax law.  But over the 1950 to 2017 period, the chart covering all taxes on corporate profits is basically a close to proportionate increase over what the tax has been at the federal level alone.

So the same pattern holds, and the total of the taxes on corporate profits varied between 33% to over 50% in the 1950s and 60s, to between 15 and 20% in recent years before the plunge in the first half of 2018 to just 10%.  But the relatively high taxes in the 1950s and 60s did not lead to slow growth in those years, nor did the low taxes in recent decades lead to more rapid growth.  Rather, one had the reverse.

D.  An Estimate of the Revenue Losses Due to the Tax Bill

These initial figures on the taxes actually being paid following the passage of the Republican tax bill allow us to make an estimate of what the revenue losses will turn out to be.  These will be very rough estimates, as we only have data for half a year, and one should be cautious in extrapolating this to what the losses will be over a decade.  But they can give us a sense of the magnitude.  And it is large.  As we will see below, based on the evidence so far the revenue losses (from the cuts in both corporate taxes and in personal income taxes) might be over $3 trillion over ten years, or about double the $1.5 trillion loss estimate originally forecast.

First, for the federal taxes on corporate profits, as the largest changes are there:  As was discussed before (and seen in the charts above), corporate profit taxes paid as a share of corporate profits were relatively flat between 2013 and 2016, varying between 15 and 17% each quarter, before falling to 14% for most of 2017.  For the full 2013 to 2017 period, the simple average was 15.3%.  The implicit rate then fell to just 7.0% in the first half of 2018.  Had the rate instead remained at 15.3%, corporate profit taxes collected in 2018 would have been $184 billion higher (on an annual basis).

This is not small, and is twice as high as the estimate of the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation of revenue losses of $91 billion in FY2019 (the first full year under the new tax regime) from all the tax measures affecting businesses (including non-corporate businesses, and covering both domestic business and overseas business).  It is three times as high as the estimated loss of $60 billion in FY18, but the new tax law did not affect the first quarter of FY2018 (October to December).

One should be cautious with any extrapolation of this loss estimate going forward, as not only is the time period of actual experience under the new tax regime short (only a half year), but the law is also a complicated one, with certain provisions changing over time.  But a simple extrapolation over ten years, based on the assumption that corporate profits grow at just a modest 3% a year in nominal terms (meaning 1% a year in real terms if inflation is 2% a year), and that the tax rate on corporate profits will be 7.0% a year (as seen so far in 2018) rather than the 15.3% of recent years, implies that the reduction in corporate profit tax revenues will sum to about $2.1 trillion.

Note that the losses would be greater (everything else equal) if the assumed growth rate of corporate profits is higher.  But the results are not very sensitive to this.  The total losses over ten years would be $2.2 trillion, for example, at an assumed nominal growth rate of 4% (i.e. with inflation still at 2%, then with corporate profits growing at 2% a year in real terms, or double the 1% rate of the base scenario).  Note this also counters the argument of some that such tax cuts will lead to such a large spurt in growth that total tax collections will rise despite the cut in the rates.  As will be discussed below, there is no evidence that this has ever been the case in the US.  But even assuming there were, the argument is undermined by the basic arithmetic.  In the example here, a doubling of the assumed growth rate of profits (from 1% in real terms to 2%) would imply taxes on corporate profits would still fall by $2.0 trillion over the next ten years.  This is not far from the $2.1 trillion loss if there is no rise at all in the growth of corporate profits.  And a doubling of the real growth rate is far above what anyone would reasonably assume could follow from such a cut in the tax rate.

Second, there were also substantial cuts in individual income taxes, although primarily for the wealthy.  While far less in proportional terms, the substantially higher taxes that are now paid by individuals than by corporations means that this is also significant for the totals.

Specifically, individual (federal) income taxes as a share of GDP in the NIPA accounts were quite steady in the quarterly GDP accounts for the period from 2015Q1 to 2017Q4, varying only between 8.22% and 8.44%.  The average was 8.31%.  But then this fell to an average of 7.89% in the first half of 2018 (7.90% in the first quarter, and 7.87% in the second quarter).  Had the rate remained at 8.31%, then $86 billion more in revenues (at an annual rate) would have been collected.

Extrapolating this out for ten years, assuming again just a modest rate of growth for GDP of 3% a year in nominal terms (i.e. just 1% a year in real terms if inflation is 2% a year), the total loss would be $1.0 trillion.  With a higher rate of growth, and everything else the same, the losses would again be larger.  This extrapolation is, however, particularly fraught, as the Republicans wrote into their bill that the cuts in individual taxes would be reversed in 2026.  They did this to keep the forecast cost of the tax bill to the $1.5 trillion envelope they had set, and an effort is already underway to make this permanent (Speaker Paul Ryan has said he will schedule a vote on this in September).  But even if we left out the tax revenue losses in the final two years of the period, the losses in individual taxes would still reach about $0.8 trillion.

Adding the lower revenues from the taxes on corporate profits and the taxes on individual incomes, the total revenue losses would come, over the ten years, to about $3 trillion.  This is double the $1.5 trillion loss that had been forecast.  It is not a small difference.

To give a sense of the magnitude, the loss in 2018 alone (a total of $270 billion) would allow a doubling of the entire budgets (based on FY2017 actual outlays) of the Departments of Education, Housing and Urban Development, and Labor; the Environmental Protection Agency; all international assistance programs (foreign aid); NASA; the National Science Foundation; the Army Corps of Engineers (civil works); and the Small Business Administration.  Note I am not arguing that all of their budgets should necessarily be doubled (although many should, indeed, be significantly increased).  Rather, the point is simply to give readers a sense of the size of the revenues lost as a consequence of the tax cut bill.

As another comparison to give a sense of the magnitude, just half of the lost revenue (now and into the future) would suffice to fund fully the Social Security Trust Fund for the foreseeable future.  If nothing is done, the Social Security Trust Fund will run out at some point around 2034.  Republicans have asserted that nothing can be done for Social Security except to scale back (already low) Social Security pensions.  This is not true.  Just half of the revenues that will be lost under the tax cut bill would suffice to ensure the pensions can be paid in full for at least 75 years (the forecast period used by the Social Security trustees).

But as noted above, proponents of the tax cuts argue that the lower taxes will spur growth.  This has been discussed in earlier posts on this blog, where we have seen that there is no evidence that this will follow.  There are not only basic conceptual problems with this argument (a misreading of basic economics), but also no indication in what we have in fact observed for the economy that this has ever been the case (whether in the years immediately following the major tax cuts of Reagan or Bush, nor if one focuses on the longer term).

Administration officials have not surprisingly argued that the relatively rapid pace of growth in the second quarter of 2018 (of 4.2% at an annual rate in the end-August BEA estimates) is evidence of the tax cut working as intended.  But it is not.  Not only should one not place much weight on one quarter’s figures (the quarterly figures bounce around), but this followed first-quarter figures which were modest at best (with GDP growth of an estimated 2.2% at an annual rate).

But more fundamentally, one should dig into the GDP figures to see what is going on.  The argument that tax cuts (especially cuts in corporate profit taxes) will spur growth is based on the presumption that such cuts will spur business investment.  More such investment, especially in equipment, could lead to higher productivity and hence higher growth.  But growth in business investment in equipment has slowed in the first half of 2018.  Such investment grew at the rates of 9.1%, 9.7%, 9.8%, and 9.9% through the four quarters of 2017 (all at annual rates).  It then decelerated to a pace of 8.5% in the first quarter of 2018 and to a pace of 4.4% in the second quarter.  While still early (these figures too bounce around a good deal), the evidence so far is the exact opposite of what proponents have argued the tax cut bill would do.

So what might be going on?  As noted before, there is first of all a good deal of volatility in the quarterly figures for GDP growth.  But to the extent growth has accelerated this year, a more likely explanation is simple Keynesian stimulus.  Taxes were cut, and while most of the cuts went to the rich, some did go to the lower and middle classes.  In addition, government spending is now rising, while it been kept flat or falling for most of the Obama years (since 2010).  It is not surprising that such stimulus would spur growth in the short run.

The problem is that with the economy now running at or close to full capacity, such stimulus will not last for long.  And when it was needed, in the years from 2010 until 2016, as the economy recovered from the 2008/09 downturn (but slowly), such stimulus measures were repeatedly blocked by a Republican-controlled Congress.  This sequence for fiscal policy is the exact opposite of the path that should have been followed.  Contractionary policies were followed after 2010 when unemployment was still high, while expansionary fiscal policies are being followed now, when unemployment is low.  The result is that the fiscal deficit is rising soon to exceed $1 trillion in a year (5% of GDP), which is unprecedented for a period with the economy at full employment.

E.  Conclusion

We now have initial figures on what is being collected in taxes following the tax cut bill of last December.  While still early, the figures for the first two quarters of 2018 are nonetheless clear for corporate profit taxes:  They have fallen by half.  Corporate profit taxes paid would be an estimated $184 billion higher in 2018 had the tax rate remained at the level it had been over the last several years.

While this post has not focused on personal income taxes, they too were cut.  The reduction here was more modest – only by about 5% overall (although certain groups got far more, while others less).  But with their greater importance in overall federal tax collections, this 5% reduction is leading to an estimated $86 billion reduction in revenues (in 2018) from this source.

Based on what has been observed in the first two quarters of 2018, the two taxes together (corporate and individual) will see a combined reduction in taxes paid of about $270 billion in 2018.  Extrapolating over ten years, the combined losses may be on the order of $3 trillion.

These losses are huge.  And they are double what had been earlier forecast for the tax bill.  Just half of what is being lost would suffice to ensure Social Security would be fully funded for the foreseeable future.  And the rest could fund programs to rebuild and strengthen the physical infrastructure and human capital on which growth ultimately depends.  Or some could be used to reduce the deficit and pay down the public debt.  But instead, massive tax cuts are going to the rich.

The Mismanagement of Fiscal Policy Under Trump: Deficits When There Should be Surpluses

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A.  Introduction

Since World War II, the US has never run such high fiscal deficits in times of full employment as it will now.  With the tax cuts pushed through by the Republican Congress and signed into law by Trump in December, and to a lesser extent the budget passed in March, it is expected that the US will soon be running a fiscal deficit of over $1.0 trillion a year, exceeding 5% of GDP.  This is unprecedented.

We now have good estimates of how high the deficits will grow under current policy and in a scenario which assumes (optimistically) that the economy will remain at full employment, with no downturn.  The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) published on April 9 its regular report on “The Budget and Economic Outlook”, this year covering fiscal years 2018 to 2028.  In this report to Congress and to the public, the CBO assesses the implications of federal budget and tax policy, as set out under current law.  The report normally comes out in January or February of each year but was delayed this year in order to reflect the tax bill approved in December and also the FY18 budget, which was only approved in March (even though the fiscal year began last October).

The forecast is that the deficits will now balloon.  This should not be a surprise given the magnitude of the tax cuts pushed through Congress in December and then signed into law by Trump, but recall that the Republicans pushing through the tax bill asserted deficits would not increase as a result.  The budget approved in March also provides for significant increases in legislated spending – especially for the military but also for certain domestic programs.  But as will be discussed below, government spending (other than on interest) over the next decade is in fact now forecast by the CBO to be less than what it had forecast last June.

The CBO assessment is the first set of official estimates of what the overall impact will be.  And they are big.  The CBO forecasts that even though the economy is now at full employment (and assumed to remain there for the purposes of the scenario used), deficits are forecast to grow to just short of $1 trillion in FY2019, and then continue to increase, reaching over $1.5 trillion by FY2028.  In dollar terms, it has never been that high – not even in 2009 at the worst point in the recession following the 2008 collapse of the economy.

That is terrible fiscal policy.  While high fiscal deficits are to be expected during times of high unemployment (as tax revenues are down, while government spending is the only stabilizing element for the economy when both households and corporations are cutting back on spending due to the downturn), standard policy would be to limit deficits in times of full employment in order to bring down the public debt to GDP ratio.  But with the tax cuts and spending plans this is not going to happen under Trump, even should the economy remain at full employment.  And it will be far worse when the economy once again dips into a recession, as always happens eventually.

This blog post will first discuss the numbers in the new CBO forecasts, then the policy one should follow over the course of the business cycle in order to keep the public debt to GDP under control, and finally will look at the historical relationship between unemployment and the fiscal deficit, and how the choices made on the deficit by Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress are unprecedented and far from the historical norms.

B.  The CBO Forecast of the Fiscal Deficits

The forecasts made by the CBO of the fiscal accounts that would follow under current policies are always eagerly awaited by those concerned with what Congress is doing.  Ten-year budget forecasts are provided by the CBO at least annually, and typically twice or even three times a year, depending on the decisions being made by Congress.

The CBO itself is non-partisan, with a large professional staff and a director who is appointed to a four-year term (with no limits on its renewal) by the then leaders in Congress.  The current director, Keith Hall, took over on April 1, 2015, when both the House and the Senate were under Republican control.  He replaced Doug Elmensdorf, who was widely respected as both capable and impartial, but who had come to the end of a term.  Many advocated that he be reappointed, but Elmensdorf had first taken the position when Democrats controlled the House and the Senate.  Hall is a Republican, having served in senior positions in the George W. Bush administration, and there was concern that his appointment signaled an intent to politicize the position.

But as much as his party background, a key consideration appeared to have been Hall’s support for the view that tax cuts would, through their impact on incentives, lead to more rapid growth, with that more rapid growth then generating more tax revenue which would partially or even fully offset the losses from the lower tax rates.  I do not agree.  An earlier post on this blog discussed that that argument is incomplete, and does not take into account that there are income as well as substitution effects (as well as much more), which limit or offset what the impact might be from substitution effects alone.  And another post on this blog looked at the historical experience after the Reagan and Bush tax cuts, in comparison to the experience after the (more modest) increases in tax rates on higher income groups under Clinton and Obama.  It found no evidence in support of the argument that growth will be faster after tax cuts than when taxes are raised.  What the data suggest, rather, is that there was little to no impact on growth in one direction or the other.  Where there was a clear impact, however, was on the fiscal deficits, which rose with the tax cuts and fell with the tax increases.

Given Hall’s views on taxes, it was thus of interest to see whether the CBO would now forecast that an acceleration in GDP growth would follow from the new tax cuts sufficient to offset the lower tax revenues following from the lower tax rates.  The answer is no.  While the CBO did forecast that GDP would be modestly higher as a result of the tax cuts (peaking at 1.0% higher than would otherwise be the case in 2022 before then diminishing over time, and keep in mind that these are for the forecast levels of GDP, not of its growth), this modestly higher GDP would not suffice to offset the lower tax revenues following from the lower tax rates.

Taking account of all the legislative changes in tax law since its prior forecasts issued in June 2017, the CBO estimated that fiscal revenues collected over the ten years FY2018 to FY2027 would fall by $1.7 trillion from what it would have been under previous law.  However, after taking into account its forecast of the resulting macroeconomic effects (as well as certain technical changes it made in its forecasts), the net impact would be a $1.0 trillion loss in revenues.  This is almost exactly the same loss as had been estimated by the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation for the December tax bill, which also factored in an estimate of a (modest) impact on growth from the lower tax rates.

Fiscal spending projections were also provided, and the CBO estimated that legislative changes alone (since its previous estimates in June 2017) would raise spending (excluding interest) by $450 billion over the ten year period.  However, after taking into account certain macro feedbacks as well as technical changes in the forecasts, the CBO is now forecasting government spending will in fact be $100 billion less over the ten years than it had forecast last June.  The higher deficits over those earlier forecast are not coming from higher spending but rather totally from the tax cuts.

Finally, the higher deficits will have to be funded by higher government borrowing, and this will lead to higher interest costs.  Interest costs will also be higher as the expansionary fiscal policy at a time when the economy is already at full employment will lead to higher interest rates, and those higher interest rates will apply to the entire public debt, not just to the increment in debt resulting from the higher deficits.  The CBO forecasts that higher interest costs will add $650 billion to the deficits over the ten years.

The total effect of all this will thus be to increase the fiscal deficit by $1.6 trillion over the ten years, over what it would otherwise have been.  The resulting annual fiscal deficits, in billions of dollars, would be as shown in the chart at top of this post.  Under the assumed scenario that the economy will remain at full employment over the entire period, the fiscal deficit will still rise to reach almost $1 trillion in FY19, and then to over $1.5 trillion in FY28.  Such deficits are unprecedented for when the economy is at full employment.

The deficits forecast would then translate into these shares of GDP, given the GDP forecasts:

The CBO is forecasting that fiscal deficits will rise to a range of 4 1/2 to 5 1/2% of GDP from FY2019 onwards.  Again, this is unprecedented for the US economy in times of full employment.

C.  Fiscal Policy Over the Course of the Business Cycle

As noted above, fiscal policy has an important role to play during economic downturns to stabilize conditions and to launch a recovery.  When something causes an economic downturn (such as the decision during the Bush II administration not to regulate banks properly in the lead up to the 2008 collapse, believing “the markets” would do this best), both households and corporations will reduce their spending.  With unemployment increasing and wages often falling even for those fortunate enough to remain employed, as well as with the heightened general concerns on the economy, households will cut back on their spending.  Similarly, corporations will seek to conserve cash in the downturns, and will cut back on their spending both for the inputs they would use for current production (they cannot sell all of their product anyway) and for capital investments (their production facilities are not being fully used, so why add to capacity).

Only government can sustain the economy in such times, stopping the downward spiral through its spending.  Fiscal stimulus is needed, and the Obama stimulus program passed early in his first year succeeded in pulling the economy out of the freefall it was in at the time of his inauguration.  GDP fell at an astounding 8.2% annual rate in the fourth quarter of 2008 and was still crashing in early 2009 as Obama was being sworn in.  It then stabilized in the second quarter of 2009 and started to rise in the third quarter.  The stimulus program, as well as aggressive action by the Federal Reserve, accounts for this turnaround.

But fiscal deficits will be high during such economic downturns.  While any stimulus programs will add to this, most of the increase in the deficits in such periods occur automatically, primarily due to lower tax revenues in the downturn.  Incomes and employment are lower, so taxes due will be lower.  There is also, but to a much smaller extent, some automatic increase in government spending during the downturns, as funds are paid out in unemployment insurance or for food stamps for the increased number of the poor.  The deficits will then add to the public debt, and the public debt to GDP ratio will rise sharply (exacerbated in the short run by the lower GDP as well).

One confusion, sometimes seen in news reports, should be clarified.  While fiscal deficits will be high in a downturn, for the reasons noted above, and any stimulus program will add further to those deficits, one should not equate the size of the fiscal deficit with the size of the stimulus.  They are two different things.  For example, normally the greatest stimulus, for any dollar of expenditures, will come from employing directly blue-collar workers in some government funded program (such as to build or maintain roads and other such infrastructure).  A tax cut focused on the poor and middle classes, who will spend any extra dollar they receive, will also normally lead to significant stimulus (although probably less than via directly employing a worker).  But a tax cut focused on the rich will provide only limited stimulus as any extra dollar they receive will mostly simply be saved (or used to pay down debt, which is economically the same thing).  The rich are not constrained in how much they can spend on consumption by their income, as their income is high enough to allow them to consume as much as they wish.

Each of these three examples will add equally to the fiscal deficit, whether the dollar is used to employ workers directly, to provide a tax cut to the poor and middle classes, or to provide a tax cut to the rich.  But the degree of stimulus per dollar added to the deficit can be dramatically different.  One cannot equate the size of the deficit to the amount of stimulus.

Deficits are thus to be expected, and indeed warranted, in a downturn.  But while the resulting increase in public debt is to be expected in such conditions, there must also come a time for the fiscal deficits to be reduced to a level where at least the debt to GDP ratio, if not the absolute level of the debt itself, will be reduced.  Debt cannot be allowed to grow without limit.  And the time to do this is when the economy is at full employment.  It was thus the height of fiscal malpractice for the tax bills and budget passed by Congress and signed into law by Trump not to provide for this, but rather for the precise opposite.  The CBO estimates show that deficits will rise rather than fall, even under a scenario where the economy is assumed to remain at full employment.

It should also be noted that the deficit need not be reduced all the way to zero for the debt to GDP ratio to fall.  With a growing GDP and other factors (interest rates, the rate of inflation, and the debt to GDP ratio) similar to what they are now, a good rule of thumb is that the public debt to GDP ratio will fall as long as the fiscal deficit is around 3% of GDP or less.  But the budget and tax bills of Trump and the Congress will instead lead to deficits of around 5% of GDP.  Hence the debt to GDP ratio will rise.

[Technical note for those interested:  The arithmetic of the relationship between the fiscal deficit and the debt to GDP ratio is simple.  A reasonable forecast, given stated Fed targets, is for an interest rate on long-term public debt of 4% and an inflation rate of 2%.  This implies a real interest rate of 2%.  With real GDP also assumed to grow in the CBO forecast at 2% a year (from 2017 to 2028), the public debt to GDP ratio will be constant if what is called the “primary balance” is zero (as the numerator, public debt, will then grow at the same rate as the denominator, GDP, each at either 2% a year in real terms or 4% a year in nominal terms) .  The primary balance is the fiscal deficit excluding what is paid in interest on the debt.  The public debt to GDP ratio, as of the end of FY17, was 76.5%.  With a nominal interest rate of 4%, this would lead to interest payments on the debt of 3% of GDP.  A primary balance of zero would then imply an overall fiscal deficit of 3% of GDP.  Hence a fiscal deficit of 3% or less, with the public debt to GDP ratio roughly where it is now, will lead to a steady debt to GDP ratio.

More generally, the debt to GDP ratio will be constant whenever the rate of growth of real GDP matches the real interest rate, and the primary balance is zero.  In the case here, the growth in the numerator of debt (4% in nominal terms, or 2% in real terms when inflation is 2%) matches the growth in the denominator of GDP (2% in real terms, or 4% in nominal terms), and the ratio will thus be constant.]

Putting this in a longer-term context:

Federal government debt rose to over 100% of GDP during World War II.  The war spending was necessary.  But it did not then doom the US to perpetual economic stagnation or worse.  Rather, fiscal deficits were kept modest, the economy grew well, and over the next several decades the debt to GDP ratio fell.

For the fiscal balances over this period (with fiscal deficits as negative and fiscal surpluses as positive):

Fiscal balances were mostly but modestly in deficit (and occasionally in surplus) through the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.  The 3% fiscal deficit rule of thumb worked well, and one can see that as long as the fiscal deficit remained below 3% of GDP, the public debt to GDP ratio fell, to a low of 23% of GDP in FY1974.  It then stabilized at around this level for a few years, but reversed and started heading in FY1982 after Reagan took office.  And it kept going up even after the economy had recovered from the 1982 recession and the country was back to full employment, as deficits remained high following the Reagan tax cuts.

The new Clinton budgets, along with the tax increase passed in 1993, then stabilized the accounts, and the economy grew strongly.  The public debt to GDP ratio, which had close to doubled under Reagan and Bush I (from 25% of GDP to 48%), was reduced to 31% of GDP by the year Clinton left office.   But it then started to rise again following the tax cuts of Bush II (plus with the first of the two recessions under Bush II).  And it exploded in 2008/2009, at the end of Bush II and the start of Obama, as the economy plunged into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

The debt to GDP ratio did stabilize, however, in the second Obama term, and actually fell slightly in FY2015 (when the deficit was 2.4% of GDP).  But with the deficits now forecast to rise to the vicinity of 5% of GDP (and to this level even with the assumption that there will not be an economic downturn at some point), the public debt to GDP ratio will soon be approaching 100% of GDP.

This does not have to happen.  As noted above, one need not bring the fiscal deficits all the way down to zero.  A fiscal deficit kept at around 3% of GDP would suffice to stabilize the public debt to GDP ratio, while something less than 3% would bring it down.

D.  Historical Norms

What stands out in these forecasts is how much the deficits anticipated now differ from the historical norms.  The CBO report has data on the deficits going back to FY1968 (fifty years), and these can be used to examine the relationship with unemployment.  As discussed above, one should expect higher deficits during an economic downturn when unemployment is high.  But these deficits then need to be balanced with lower deficits when unemployment is lower (and sufficiently low when the economy is at or near full employment that the public debt to GDP ratio will fall).

A simple scatter-plot of the fiscal balance (where fiscal deficits are a negative balance) versus the unemployment rate, for the period from FY1968 to now and then the CBO forecasts to FY2028, shows:

While there is much going on in the economy that affects the fiscal balance, this scatter plot shows a surprisingly consistent relationship between the fiscal balance and the rate of unemployment.  The red line shows what the simple regression line would be for the historical years of FY1968 to FY2016.  The scatter around it is surprisingly tight.  [Technical Note:  The t-statistic is 10.0, where anything greater than 2.0 is traditionally considered significant, and the R-squared is 0.68, which is high for such a scatter plot.]

An interesting finding is that the high deficits in the early Obama years are actually very close to what one would expect given the historical norm, given the unemployment rates Obama faced on taking office and in his first few years in office.  That is, the Obama stimulus programs did not cause the fiscal deficits to grow beyond what would have been expected given what the US has had in the past.  The deficits were high because unemployment was high following the 2008 collapse.

At the other end of the line, one has the fiscal surpluses in the years FY1998 to 2000 at the end of the Clinton presidency.  As noted above, the public debt to GDP ratio stabilized soon after Clinton took office (in part due to the tax increases passed in 1993), with the fiscal deficits reduced to less than 3% of GDP.  Unemployment fell to below 5% by mid-1997 and to a low of 3.8% in mid-2000, as the economy grew well.  By FY1998 the fiscal accounts were in surplus.  And as seen in the scatter plot above, the relationship between unemployment and the fiscal balance was close in those years (FY1998 to 2000) to what one would expect given the historical norms for the US.

But the tax cuts and budget passed by Congress and signed by Trump will now lead the fiscal accounts to a path far from the historical norms.  Instead of a budget surplus (as in the later Clinton years, when the unemployment rate was similar to what the CBO assumes will hold for its scenario), or even a deficit kept to 3% of GDP or less (which would suffice to stabilize the debt to GDP ratio), deficits of 4 1/2 to 5 1/2 % of GDP are foreseen.  The scatter of points for the fiscal deficit vs. unemployment relationship for 2018 to 2028 is in a bunch by itself, down and well to the left of the regression line.  One has not had such deficits in times of full employment since World War II.

E.  Conclusion

Fiscal policy is being mismanaged.  The economy reached full employment by the end of the Obama administration, fiscal deficits had come down, and the public debt to GDP ratio had stabilized.  There was certainly more to be done to bring down the deficit further, and with the aging of the population (retiring baby boomers), government expenditures (for Social Security and especially for Medicare and other health programs) will need to increase in the coming years.  Tax revenues to meet such needs will need to rise.

But the Republican-controlled Congress and Trump pushed through measures that will do the opposite.  Taxes have been cut dramatically (especially for corporations and rich households), while the budget passed in March will raise government spending (especially for the military).  Even assuming the economy will remain at full employment with no downturn over the next decade (which would be unprecedented), fiscal deficits will rise to around 5% of GDP.  As a consequence, the public debt to GDP ratio will rise steadily.

This is unprecedented.  With the economy at full employment, deficits should be reduced, not increased.  They need not go all the way to zero, even though Clinton was able to achieve that.  A fiscal deficit of 3% of GDP (where it was in the latter years of the Obama administration) would stabilize the debt to GDP ratio.  But Congress and Trump pushed through measures to raise the deficit rather than reduce it.

This leaves the economy vulnerable.  There will eventually be another economic downturn.  There always is one, eventually.  The deficit will then soar, as it did in 2008/2009, and remain high until the economy fully recovers.  But there will then be pressure not to allow the debt to rise even further.  This is what happened following the 2010 elections, when the Republicans gained control of the House.  With control over the budget, they were able to cut government spending even though unemployment was still high.  Because of this, the pace of the recovery was slower than it need have been.  While the economy did eventually return to full employment by the end of Obama’s second term, unemployment remained higher than should have been the case for several years as a consequence of the cuts.

At the next downturn, the fiscal accounts will be in a poor position to respond as they need to in a crisis.  Public debt, already high, will soar to unprecedented levels, and there will be arguments from conservatives not to allow the debt to rise even further.  Recovery will then be even more difficult, and many will suffer as a result.