It takes investment to get sustainable economic growth. We can’t spend our way to growth. We have to save some of the stuff we make today and use it to create new, higher value, tomorrow. If we produce and consume it all, then our economy lives “hand-to-mouth” and we do not grow.
Investing is risky. There is no guarantee that the investment will pay off. Investors weigh many possible scenarios when determining whether or not to make an investment. If the expected return on an investment does not meet an investor’s next best opportunity for his cash, he will forgo that investment.
The expected rate of return compared is the after-tax rate of return. The higher the tax on returns, the more investments will be foregone. So why is Congress trying to discourage investment at a time when the economy desperately needs investment to start growing again?
Because in order to get a deficit neutral score from CBO the legislators needed to find more ways to squeeze revenue from taxpayers. Unfortunately increasing taxes from things that produce economic growth will cause the deficit to increase in a dynamic economy. Slower economic growth will result in fewer jobs and less tax revenue.
As revenues fall, the government must either cut spending or borrow more money. As the government borrows more, there is upward pressure on interest rates. Higher interest rates can crowd out private sector investments, which further slows growth..
The downward trajectory, the Senate and Reconciliation bill puts the economy on in the early years to pay for benefits in later years, are too steep to get out of. In just ten years, the Senate bill (without the large tax increases on investment), slow the economy enough to lose 690,000 jobs per year and add $755 billion to the debt. The Reconciliation bill then slaps the economy by increasing taxes on high-income individuals’ wages and on their growth producing investment income. A 2.9% tax on investment is estimated to cause interest payments on the debt to be $12.4 billion higher over just ten years and slows the economy further eroding household disposable income by an estimated $17.3 billion dollars per year. The Reconciliation bill is worse; it places an even higher 3.8% tax on investment income thereby increasing the after-tax rate of return threshold on those considering investing. When combined with the expiration of President Bush’s tax cuts, the tax rate on capital will be increased by over 50% for some taxpayers.
With slowing growth and rising deficits, it is no wonder that Standard and Poor’s is warning the U.S. about down-grading its debt. People who say “all you need is your health” perhaps do not realize how difficult it is to get quality health care in an unhealthy economy.
On March 9 the Tax Policy Center (TPC) released a preliminary analysis of the tax reform proposal contained in Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) Roadmap for America’s Future fiscal plan. The TPC analysis helps Ryan advance the tax reform ball considerably, but it also raises issues some of which need to be addressed by Congressman Ryan (R-WI), the author of the plan, and some by the TPC.
Perhaps most important of all is that the TPC analysis, along with a slew of commentary both favorable and unfavorable from other sources, confirms that the Ryan plan is a very serious, substantive foray into tax reform. The Ryan plan provides an intellectually sound, coherent and fundamental path to tax reform, and is part of a broader plan to resolve our long-term fiscal crisis. If it were otherwise, the tax reform component would be ignored.
The Ryan tax reform plan, which reforms both individual and business taxes to move toward lower tax rate systems, is intended to be revenue neutral over ten years when compared to a current policy revenue baseline; the TPC analysis suggests the plan is close to its target. It may even be closer than the TPC analysis suggests because of a pair of foibles in the TPC approach as well as simple differences in estimating methodologies.
What About the Economy?
The TPC analysis is a good first step, but critically leaves out some important information on economic effects. By way of analogy, imagine the Congressional Budget Office providing an analysis of health care reform and ignoring any references to the consequences for health care costs or whether the ranks of the uninsured would rise or fall. Policymakers want to know if the legislation would “bend the curve” and that it substantially reduces the ranks of the uninsured. Analysis lacking this information would obviously be woefully incomplete.
The TPC has done much the same by ignoring the stronger economy that would follow from enactment of the Ryan plan. As with health care reform and the uninsured, a fundamental motivation for tax reform is to improve economic performance, yet the TPC acknowledges its analysis is essentially static. Revenue forecasts aside, this is a substantial shortcoming of the TPC analysis that will hopefully be remedied in their follow-on work.
Foibles to Resolve
One foible in the TPC analysis is that it combines a rigorous methodology for assessing the revenue effects from the tax on individuals with a back of the envelope approach to estimating tax revenues from the new Business Consumption Tax (BCT) tax contained in the Ryan plan. If TPC does not have the tools for a rigorous assessment of the BCT, then so be it, but TPC should clearly indicate the difference in approaches and admit that its revenue forecast of the BCT carries an unusually high degree of uncertainty.
Another foible in the TPC analysis deals with the treatment of pass-through entities such as sole proprietorships. This is a difficult area and the TPC analysis usefully highlights an issue in the plan its designers may want to revisit. However, TPC arbitrarily assumes small business owners will take all their income in tax-exempt dividends rather than taxable wages. To be sure, this is a troubled area in the existing tax code, but the TPC assumption is most unreasonable, and creates an obvious downward bias in the total revenue estimate.
Finally, the TPC is known for its distributional analysis and it refers to distributional effects in its analysis. But where are the tables?