Chicago, Athens, and Jerusalem

Economists are quick to speak of ‘market failure’, and rightly so, but a greater threat comes from ‘government failure’. Because it is a monopoly, government brings inefficiency and stagnation to most things it runs; government agencies pursue the inflation of their budgets rather than the service of their customers; pressure groups form an unholy alliance with agencies to extract more money form taxpayers for their members. Yet despite all this, most clever people still call for government to run more things and assume that if it did so, it would somehow be more perfect, more selfless, next time.

That is from The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley (page 182 of the US paperback edition), which I recently finished reading, and which economist David Henderson likes for other reasons. World-renowned economist Gary Becker expounds upon these same ideas on his blog.

Ridley’s astute observation could and should be a rallying cry for today’s free-market economists, moderate libertarians, economic conservatives, and centrist pro-market incrementalists. It’s certainly a much better starting point for lovers of liberty than the scorched-earth, radical sham-libertarianism of Ron Paul and his followers. Unfortunately, Ron Paul’s version of libertarianism is currently receiving much national attention, and as Will Wilkinson discusses in this article for The New Republic, the Paulite creed is both embarrassing and counterproductive to the cause of liberty (incrementalist or otherwise). Do read the whole thing, but Wilkinson is right on the money when he says,

If you were an evil genius determined to promote the idea that libertarianism is a morally dubious ideology of privilege poorly disguised as a doctrine of liberation, you’d be hard pressed to improve on Ron Paul.

I’m sure to get some flack for condemning Ron Paul (or I would, if anyone actually read this), but between Wilkinson’s TKO of the Paulite ideology and Ridley’s positive alternative, I am content to do so.

If, on the other hand, you enjoyed this criticism of Ron Paul, stay tuned for my upcoming post on what I think of the Republican Party’s 2012 presidential candidates, which will be posted in time for the start of the primary election season.

President Obama has been touring the country to promote his “American Jobs Act“, along with a package of tax increases designed to pay for that jobs bill. Pundits have been debating Obama’s proposals for the last few months, but the best commentary on the president’s tax plan comes from the September 24 issue of the British newsweekly The Economist.

On taxes, Mr Obama has stapled together a clutch of previous proposals: returning tax rates on the wealthy to where they were before Mr Bush cut them in 2001, and curbing deductions such as those for municipal-bond interest, mortgages and charitable giving. He proposes a new “Buffett” tax, named after the billionaire investor who has protested against the injustice of paying a lower tax rate than his secretary. It would require anyone earning more than $1m to pay a tax rate equal to that of the middle class, though how that could be done is completely obscure.

Republicans accused Mr Obama of class warfare; he responded that “this is not class warfare. It’s math. The money is going to have to come from someplace.” But that is disingenuous. Maths demands that substantial money should be raised, not that it should all come from the wealthiest 2% of citizens, nor that Mr Obama should stick to his promise that 98% of households must never pay higher rates.

[emphasis added]

As I will (probably) say several times in future posts over the next few years, America is in deep fiscal trouble and to get out of it we will all have to bear some of the burden of higher taxes and reduced spending. Those on the left shout that we can’t “balance the budget on the backs of the poor”, but it is equally true that we can’t balance the budget on the backs of the rich. (As this article explains, it is not only true that we shouldn’t balance the budget on the backs of the rich, for reasons of economic efficiency and growth, but it is also true that we literally can’t balance the budget by hiking taxes on the rich, as the amount that would be raised by Obama’s potential tax increases is only a small fraction of what is needed to close the US budget deficit.) While wealthier Americans will pay proportionally more under any revenue-increasing tax reform (just as they pay proportionally more under our current system), Obama’s idea is to force high earners, small-business owners, and large corporations to bear virtually all of the burden of paying for our nation’s out-of-control spending. As The Economist continues,

Billionaires and secretaries will both surely have to pay more taxes; record deficits have long since replaced the surpluses of 2001, thanks in large part to Mr Bush’s across-the-board tax cuts. Yet Mr Obama is going about it in a clumsy way. Consider those millionaires he is insisting should pay more: there are 433,000 of them, or 0.3% of all taxpayers, according to the Tax Policy Centre, a non-partisan research outfit. On average they pay 20% of their income in federal income and payroll taxes, while the median taxpayer pays 11%. Just under a quarter of the millionaires pay as little, or less, than that median, a phenomenon almost entirely due to the lower rate levied on capital gains and dividends.

A far more efficient way to collect more taxes would be a genuine tax reform that maintained or lowered marginal rates while curbing the exemptions, credits and deductions that cost $1 trillion a year, including the lower rate for capital gains and dividends. This would boost productivity by making the tax code more efficient, while shifting more of the tax burden to the rich who now benefit disproportionately from such exemptions and account for Mr Buffett’s sub-secretarial tax rate. A lower corporate rate would offset the harm of higher capital gains and dividend taxes.

Or, as they will teach you in any public economics class, the solution is to “broaden the base and lower the rate”. While I don’t agree completely with The Economist‘s prescription (Milton Friedman persuasively argued that corporate income should not be taxed at all), it is far more reasonable than Obama’s proposals. The president can say a million times that his ideas represent “common sense” or the “balanced approach”, but that doesn’t make it true.

Last month, I highlighted the comments of economist Arnold Kling regarding the Social Security (and Medicare) trust fund. I recently finished reading Kling’s book Unchecked and Unbalanced: How the Discrepancy Between Knowledge and Power Caused the Financial Crisis and Threatens Democracy. Chapter 1 of that book contains the best discussion of the causes of the financial crisis that I have read, and I highly recommend it, even though I do not endorse all of Kling’s diagnosis of or prescription for what is wrong with American democracy. Today, I am more interested in his comments on Social Security, which appear on pages 99-100 of the hardcover edition of Unchecked and Unbalanced.

Social Security does not incur investment risk. That is because Social Security taxes are not invested at all. They are paid to beneficiaries. Until this point, taxes have exceeded benefits, and excess revenues have been spent on other government programs. This excess spending is tracked in an account called the Social Security Trust Fund, which can  be thought of as a collection of IOUs from the rest of the Federal government to Social Security recipients.

Within a few years, Social Security benefits will start to exceed tax revenues, and the government will have to make good on its IOUs. Later this century, depending on how demographic and productivity trends play out, the Trust Fund will be exhausted, and the government will have to raise additional taxes to pay for Social Security benefits.

I would go so far as to say that thinking about Social Security with the image of money (or bonds) in a trust fund somewhere is downright pernicious. There isn’t any money stored away to pay for Social Security–just a promise by the government to repay the money it “borrowed” from Social Security excess revenues and in fact spent on other things. As I wrote in my previous post on this subject, Thomas Sowell once said that no one can borrow and save the same money simultaneously. To the extent that the Social Security Trust fund exists, it is a promise by the government (specifically Congress) to take money out of general revenues and spend it on Social Security benefits when the time comes that–as Kling described–benefits start to exceed revenues. I will conclude by stating what many others have written, namely that if you’re in your twenties or younger, don’t expect the government to keep its Social Security promise to you. One or both of the following will be the experience of my generation: 1) substantially higher taxes during our peak earning years as we (via the government) pay for the retirement and health care of our Baby Boomer parents, and 2) drastically reduced benefits from government programs like Social Security and Medicare when we’re old enough to receive those benefits.

ADDENDUM: Gregg Easterbrook lays out the facts on Social Security here. Also, in the October 2010 issue of The Atlantic, Michael Kinsley argues that the Baby Boomers should redeem themselves by turning down the Social Security largess about the be lavished on them and by helping to pay the way out of our nation’s fiscal hole.

Paul Ryan is a Republican United States Congressman representing Wisconsin’s 1st congressional district. Over the past two years, he has become a leading voice among the Republicans on the subject of fiscal policy (government taxation and spending). Yesterday, superblogger Andrew Sullivan echoed economist Paul Krugman by accusing Ryan of being a fraud, writing:

I have to say that Paul Krugman made a very strong case that the young GOPer is still drinking supply-side Kool-Aid.

…I remain pretty much persuaded by Krugman’s broad critique, however. Cutting taxes at this point in American history, in the face of this much debt, strikes me as loony.

From my vantage point, it is Sullivan who is drinking Krugman’s hyper-partisan left-wing Kool-Aid. I understand that Sullivan is angry about Republicans who propose tax cuts without recognizing the need for substantial spending cuts and tax increases to put America’s fiscal house in order (and on that account I agree with him). But that’s not what Ryan is doing. Ryan developed his plan for across-the-board reductions in government spending as a way to ease the US debt burden without having to employ extremely high tax rates. Ryan further contends that we can climb out from under the debt through economic growth if we stimulate the economy with carefully-targeted tax cuts. There is a legitimate debate to be had about whether we could bolster economic growth and help claw our way out of the current recession with tax cuts, just as there is a continuing debate about the need for additional stimulus in the form of increased government expenditures (some in the form of aid to the states, which Congress is considering this week). While I am probably closer to Sullivan than to Ryan on the subject of whether or not we need tax cuts right now, it inefficient, ignorant, and just plain rude to label anyone who favors tax cuts as “loony”–we are, after all, still reeling from the effects of one of the largest recessions in history. It may be silly to think that we can tax-cut our way out of a recession, but from the standpoint of economic theory it’s no sillier than thinking we can government-spend our way out of a recession, which has been the policy of the Obama Administration and the Democrat-controlled Congress for the past two years.

Furthermore, Paul Krugman’s attacks on Ryan are at least somewhat spurious. Krugman alleges that Ryan was being disingenuous by having the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) only score the part of Ryan’s “Roadmap” involving spending cuts, while ignoring Ryan’s proposed tax cuts, which would understandably eat away at much of the savings that Ryan’s spending reductions would create. The only problem with this line of attack is that the CBO doesn’t, as part of its operations, score tax cuts. As Megan McArdle, the business and economics editor for the Atlantic, points out in an excellent blog post entitled “Krugman is Wrong on Ryan and the CBO”, scoring tax cuts is the responsibility of the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT). And Ryan did ask the JCT to score his tax cut proposals, although the JCT turned him down–possibly due to its heavy workload scoring the tax provisions of healthcare reform.

As an aside, I should say that I agree with a few of Krugman’s criticisms of Ryan’s plan, notably that Ryan fails to specify precisely what programs he would cut to achieve some of his spending reductions, and that other spending reductions rely on cuts in politically-sensitive Medicare, which are unlikely to ever be enacted.

However, Krugman writes:

The Ryan plan is a fraud that makes no useful contribution to the debate over America’s fiscal future.

This, of course, is just partisan vitriol. Ryan’s plan makes several useful contributions to the debate, even if it is not the most realistic or workable plan that has ever been proposed. Paul Ryan may not be the fiscal prophet that some on the right wish him to be, but he certainly doesn’t fit Paul Krugman’s caricature of a scammer, charlatan, or “flimflam man”.