Henry V will love this...There are charts he can evaluate.
No introduction needed. This does require some 'heavy-lifting', however...mebbe not comprehendable for some.
UB
Why You Can’t Trade Taxes For Spending
No Magic Beans This Time
By: Dan McLaughlin (Diary) |
Should Republicans trade tax hikes for spending cuts? Much of the debate over the current fiscal cliff standoff centers around discussions of “ratios”: Republicans will agree to X dollars of tax hikes, Democrats will agree to Y dollars of spending cuts, and so forth.
Much of this discussion is based on numbers that are misleading or worse, because Washington doesn’t calculate taxes and spending the same way. A tax hike will raise real, immediate costs on real taxpayers, whether or not it actually raises any more revenue. The targets of a tax hike are citizens, who do not have a choice whether to obey.
By contrast, a “spending cut” may simply involve altering future projections of the rate of increase of spending, and thus agreements to cut spending rarely actually result in less spending. And the targets of such spending cuts are future Congresses, who can disregard them at will; they’re not binding.
The only real equivalents to tax hikes are (1) complete elimination of federal spending programs or (2) changes in the eligibility criteria or benefits formulas for entitlement programs. There are fair arguments about the best GOP strategy in managing the tax debate, but if a negotiated agreement is to be reached that will require Republican votes to pass, Republicans should not even consider agreeing to trade tax hikes in exchange for anything less.
Taxes: The Case Of The Tax on Widgets
To consider how this works, let’s consider a hypothetical budget deal. On the tax side, we have a $1 tax on widgets that brought in $100 million in 2011 and $100 million in 2012. The Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) presently projects that the sale of widgets will grow steadily by 5 million widgets a year, year-to-year, adding $5 million in new revenue each year on top of what’s already collected, and that over tax years 2013-2022, the tax will bring in $1.275 billion.
The White House wants to double the widget tax to $2. JCT dutifully applies a “static” revenue growth assumption: that is, it assumes that doubling the widget tax will have no impact whatsoever on sales of widgets (Phil Gramm once had the JCT score a proposal to tax income at 100%; JCT had no choice but to compute the resulting tax revenue on the assumption that people would work just as hard for no after-tax pay. JCT claims to have modified this somewhat in the intervening years, but its projections are still more or less done the same way). As a result, JCT projects an additional $1.275 billion in revenue over ten years.
As an aside, tax and spending numbers are always presented in these “total over ten years” figures, with no adjustment for the time value of money; thus, you can play all kinds of budgetary games by back-loading some parts of a budget package and front-loading others. This was famously done by Obamacare, which started its taxes before the spending so that 10 years of taxes could be counted against 6 years of spending as if this would be a continuing feature of the annual cost of a permanent program.
Anyway, the tax gets passed, and it has real effects on real taxpayers: every widget must either cost an additional dollar or be produced at less profit. Some buyers cut back their purchases of widgets; some widget manufacturers go under; some industries that buy widgets in bulk build new offshore factories to buy widgets from overseas manufacturers that aren’t subject to the tax. And even aside from that, JCT – because it lacks a crystal ball – fails to foresee a recession starting in 2020. Instead of an additional $1.275 billion in revenue over ten years, the widget tax hike ends up bringing in just $77 million in new revenue (a pitiable $7.7 million a year), while a whole bunch of
American widget workers lose their jobs, adding to the government’s spending on unemployment insurance and other automatic expenditures. Ten years down the line, the tax is still 50% higher than it was in 2012, but brings in only 30% more revenue than 2011 or 2012, and the same amount as in 2013.
Here’s what that looks like in chart and graph form:
Tax (Current) Tax (New) Tax (Actual) 2011 100 100 100 2012 100 100 100 2013 105 210 130 2014 110 220 135 2015 115 230 137 2016 120 240 133 2017 125 250 128 2018 130 260 140 2019 135 270 144 2020 140 280 138 2021 145 290 137 2022 150 300 130 TOTAL 1275 2550 1352 CHANGE 1275 77
Spending: The Case of The Department of Departments Budget
What did Congress get in return for the widget tax? An offsetting $1.275 billion reduction in projected spending by the Department of Departments. The Department spent $60 million in 2011, and had its budget nearly doubled to $100 million in 2012. You might think a billion-plus-dollar cut in spending means spending less than $100 million in 2013, but you would be wrong. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) sets a ‘baseline’ that calculates what current spending levels are and then adds to those levels projected future spending growth based on a set of assumptions.
Any “cuts” will simply be reductions in the future growth projections. If the CBO ran a diet, you could declare that you’ve succeeded at weight loss by projecting a decrease in your expected weight gain over the next decade.
In our example, the current CBO baseline has the Department’s budget increasing another 30% in 2013 from 2012, 50% over 2013-14, and 900% by 2022 – all of that baselined against 2012, ignoring the huge jump in its budget from 2011, which is banked as a permanent part of the baseline it spends every year. Under the budget deal for the widget tax, these insane numbers are pared back to…something still insane: a 20% increase in 2013, a 65% increase by 2015, a 500% increase by 2022.
In theory, this is an offset of $1.275 billion; in practice, we went from a widget tax taking in $100 million vs the Department budget of $60 million in 2011 to the widget tax taking in $130 million in 2022 while the Department spends $500 million. And unlike the tax hike, 89.5% majority of the projected savings are more than 5 years in the future, and thus is much more subject to future uncertainties. Jonathan Chait describes what happens when Congress claims to cap future discretionary spending:In 2012, for example, the Senate voted to avoid the spending caps in the 2011 Budget Control Act, and Democrats howled at the idea that Republicans would actually hold them to the caps in proposing a “jobs bill” with a bunch of new spending. Past budget deals, like the “firewall” in the budget deal in which the first President Bush agreed to break his read-my-lips-no-new-taxes pledge, proved unenforceable.
What usually happens is that Congress plans for tight caps to this category, and then when it comes time to implement it, and Congress discovers it actually means things like firing FBI agents and slashing the weather service, it balks.
(cont'd)
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Originally Posted by Uncle Bill
