Addressing uncontrolled federal debt growth

Per Andrew Sullivan, there's a recent AEI piece by John Steele Gordon addressing the uncontrolled growth of federal debt. Sullivan notes that it's (of course) too easy on the G.W. Bush Administration, to which I'd add that it also misconceives the core problem and offers dubious solutions. but at least it's a generally good faith effort, albeit from a perspective that conservative readers (actual ones, not Teabaggers who mind debt only during Democratic administrations) will find more compatible than liberal ones.

While I welcome Gordon's input here, I view it as having basic conceptual problems that have nothing to do with liberal vs. conservative.

First, he offers as his Proposal # 1 resurrection of a constitutionally permissible form of the line item veto. This is naive, and further analysis would be needed to ascertain whether it would raise or lower spending growth (as I explain here). People tend to think about the line item veto statically: Congress spends $X, then the president can only reduce spending by knocking some stuff out. But legislation is a dynamic process. The line item veto shifts power towards the president, and will be used to further his interests or policy agenda relative to that of the Congress. So the question is: How will this likely affect total spending? In general, Congress tends to like penny ante stuff more than the president does (goodies for particular districts or interest groups). But presidents like really big initiatives more. Thus, e.g., if the line item veto existed today it would offer Obama additional leverage to lobby members of Congress to support his health care legislation ("give me your vote or I'll knock out the appropriations for your district").

Gordon's second idea is to have an independent accounting board scoring new programs (a la the Fed, except that here it's just scoring, not substantive policy actions). Fine with me, but don't expect much, I would say. No reason for Congress or the president to care much what these folks say. Plus, to what degree would the nominal independence actually work out in practice? The incentive the parties have to preserve Fed independence (fear that, if they exercise direct control, they'll screw up AND take the blame for everything) really doesn't apply here. What sorts of people do you think George W. Bush would have appointed to this commission, not to single him out as the only sinner, if he thought it would matter substantively to policymaking in the slightest?

Gordon's third idea is to limit total spending by Congress so it could only grow with the population. Even assuming the underlying normative predicate, which is of course controversial in right versus left terms about the optimal and politically likely scale of government, it's a fatally naive implementation of the idea that government growth should be slowed. As I explain in my recent book on fiscal language and approaching fiscal default (link, once again, is here), the term "spending" is formalistic and not meaningful, e.g., consider tax expenditures or regulatory mandates. Dollars formally counted has "spent" has very little relationship to the true size of government, i.e., its effect on allocation and distribution relative to some agreed-upon (if problematic) "minimal government" baseline.

Bruce Bartlett on the risk of a U.S. government debt default

In his column today, he says - and I completely agree:

"[M]arkets have always assumed that the federal government would raise taxes as much as necessary to prevent a debt default. That's the primary reason why U.S. Treasury securities are assumed to have zero default risk.

"This was a reasonable assumption in the past, but I'm not sure if it is going forward because the Republican Party is now totally dominated by anti-tax fanatics utterly opposed to raising taxes for any reason. Although most Democrats would probably raise taxes if they could, they are terrified of being attacked by Republicans if they do. Barack Obama is so fearful of such attacks, he insists that taxes will never rise on any group except the rich, even if this means extending most of the Bush tax cuts.

"I don't think financial markets have yet priced into interest rates the possibility that Republicans would rather default on the debt than raise taxes. Although they may not control Congress or the White House any time soon, it is clear from the health care debate that they and their allies at Fox News and talk radio effectively dominate the policy agenda even on issues like health that are generally favorable to the Democrats.

"If Republicans gain seats next year, which is very likely at this point, they will have veto power over any tax increase. Should Democrats attempt to raise taxes, we will see a replay in Washington of the budget debacle that recently transpired in California, where the state was reduced to paying people with IOUs.

"In short, the fiscal situation going forward is even more precarious than it appears at first glance--and that's extremely bad. If I am right about Republican opposition to tax increases, default on the debt has to be considered as a real possibility."

Time to get a massive short position in U.S. government bonds. Or, since that's prohibitively costly, do what? Buy inflation-indexed bonds on the view that they'll eventually be paid? (Don't bet on it.) Buy gold?

A sucker, or just another hapless (if tail-end) boomer?

OK, I've ordered the Beatles box set (stereo - I'm not enough of an audiophile fanatic for the mono). I did so even though the albums are so far past over-familiar to me by now that I generally will only listen to bootlegs and outtakes. Worse still, I'm annoyed that they can't be like Pavement, say, and have greatly expanded reissues exploiting the vast wealth of unissued material out there. (E.g., the White Album could easily be doubled via Esher and other demos and outtakes; Get Back/Let It Be should be a 3 to 4-CD boxed set.)

But if the sound really is way better, as Pitchfork and others say ...

Tax reform recommendations (mine and others)

Tax Analysts has just posted "Towards Tax Reform: Recommendations for President Obama's Task Force," consisting of short essays by 32 invited kibitzers of all stripes (law profs, practitioners, economists, journalists, etc.). You can access the entire 130-page document here or my contribution here. My comments focus on corporate and international tax policy.

Game-changer?

Today we were on the verge of adopting this very placid and sweet-tempered 4-year old male cat named Seymour, when I noticed a mysterious lump on his belly. Could be nothing, but no adoption until the shelter has a vet check him out.

UPDATE: Looks like he's coming home with us in a few days after minor (?) surgery to fix an umbilical hernia.

FURTHER UPDATE: We've got him, after umbilical hernia surgery. Very calm yet affectionate.

Some interesting health reform ideas

With the Obama health reform plan evidently struggling, a host of different (political and substantive) approaches are being suggested. Two in today's NY Times alone.

Glenn Hubbard suggests reducing the exclusion for employer-provided healthcare and using the revenue to expand health insurance availability, e.g., via tax credits to the low-income uninsured for purchasing it.

Zero chance this is politically acceptable to either side, but a decent idea substantively, especially if the limit to the employer-provided exclusion targets coverage of routine care outlays.

BTW, Glenn also says Bush blew it in 2005 in his Social Security initiative by emphasizing private accounts rather than addressing financing (in particular at the expense of the upper-income) in exchange for expanding low-income saving. Once again, good policy thinking by my lights but no way this would have worked politically. The left would have said no, and for Karl Rove types in the Bush Administration, drunk as they were at the time on their hubris, the chief goal was to dismantle the belief that Social Security was a government program, as a tool for broader political point-scoring (i.e., they might have been happy with a substantively identical program to the current one in which the checks seniors got changed in only one respect: they purported to be from private companies rather than the government). Of course, it turns out this didn't matter because angry seniors at the healthcare forums appear to believe that neither Social Security nor Medicare are government programs. But that's another matter.

Meanwhile, Bill Bradley recalls that 1986 tax reform was a grand bargain founded on base-broadening for the Democrats in exchange for lower rates for the Republicans. Could we do it again in healthcare? He proposes universal coverage in exchange for tort reform.

Small aside, the empirical literature I'm aware of suggests that, while tort reform would help the problem of rising healthcare costs, it wouldn't do nearly enough. An opinionated senior doctor I was talking with the other day emphatically disagreed (based of course only on his anecdotal sense), arguing that defensive medicine is so prevalent that it would make a big difference.

Obama, in leaving tort reform out of the health reform package, either (a) wisely avoided picking one fight too many as the savings weren't big enough, or (b) cynically catered to the Democrats' trial lawyer lobby, on his own behalf or for Democratic support on the Hill. Take your pick, or say both if you like. I myself am sympathetic to a degree to tort reform, even though it's grossly wrong as a theoretical matter to have doctors not bear the costs of negligence so they will have the right incentives, because I have the sense that the liability process is so wildly askew that we aren't really advancing proper care sufficiently by having it. Being found liable may be more like losing the lottery than anything else, if the outcomes are random enough. But I am not expert in this area, and I'd certainly like people who leave in sponges, sever the wrong blood vessel, etc. to face liability.

Is Bradley right that this bargain could work? I'd like to think so but am skeptical both politically (would either side accept it?) and substantively (does tort reform, especially if tailored responsibly, come close to paying for the other piece?).

Maybe put all these things in the hopper together? But again, presumably it isn't happening.

One last thought, purely on the politics. Shouldn't Obama have called the public option "buying into Medicare," so long as its financing were explicitly separate? People couldn't possibly have gotten hysterical about that given Medicare's popularity. Dumb mistake not to have done it, which is not to say it would have been a good approach in substance.

Krugman comes around?

In reading Paul Krugman, it's important to resist Broderism, or centrism for its own sake. For example, his saying harsh things about the Republicans, or arguing that the stimulus package needs to be much bigger than the political consensus has it, sound "extreme" in the standard Washington framework, but ought to be evaluated straight on the merits, where they often prove more convincing than the "reasonable" competition.

But I certainly have had an enduring disagreement with him about the long-term fiscal sustainability problem, concerning which he, to my mind, has been overly dismissive. Only - might he finally be moving my way on this?

My recent book on the subject bears the tell-all title, "Taxes, Spending, and the U.S. Government's March Toward Bankruptcy." I discuss the parade of horribles towards which the U.S. is headed under current policy (a plausible playout could involve hyper-inflation, a bigger wave of bank failures than in 2008, etc.). I note healthcare's central role in the problem, but am a bit less willing than Krugman and others in his camp on this issue to say it's JUST healthcare (as there are other contributing elements as well).

Most importantly, I note that the fundamental problem is political, not economic. Under any reasonable economic and demographic path (leaving aside those that would imply disaster wholly apart from whether there's a fiscal collapse), it's in principle quite easy to fix things. If you put a couple of leading economic experts - say, one liberal and one conservative but both sane and reasonable - in a room for the weekend, they could come out on Monday morning with a plan that would work fine, albeit dishing out a bit of pain and disappointment, if implemented.

The problem is that the political system probably can't get there. Given the pain involved from raising taxes and slowing the growth of healthcare-related and other outlays, a fix would require bipartisanship, of the real kind we had every now and then in the 1980s, not the phony Broder style of compromising halfway between sanity and wherever the Republican leadership lines up (a moving target, since if you give them X they will demand 2X). So a minimum requirement for our having any chance whatsoever of avoiding the collapse is that the Republicans return to sanity. Even that might not be enough (the Democrats are hardly saints on this stuff either), but without it the chance of a soft landing is not much greater than zero.

Fast-forward to Krugman's column today. He says the deficit needs to be bigger for the next couple of years. OK, agreed unless there's a tradeoff down the road if, for reasons of political economy, this produces higher deficits in the future when stabilization policy wouldn't indicate having them.

Then he turns to the long-term problem. "So is there anything to worry about? Yes, but the dangers are political, not economic." OK, we certainly agree on that.

Then comes the bit that shocked and stunned me when I skimmed the paper quickly this morning before going to work. Only, I turn out to have read it out of context. After noting that eventually "the U.S. government will have big problems unless it .... rein[s] in the growth of Medicare and Medicaid spending," he says:

"That shouldn’t be hard in the context of overall health care reform. After all, America spends far more on health care than other advanced countries, without better results, so we should be able to make our system more cost-efficient."

Here, thinking this was his bottom-line conclusion, my contact lenses almost fell out. But then comes the payoff:

"But that won’t happen, of course, if even the most modest attempts to improve the system are successfully demagogued — by conservatives! — as efforts to 'pull the plug on grandma.'

"So don’t fret about this year’s deficit; we actually need to run up federal debt right now and need to keep doing it until the economy is on a solid path to recovery. And the extra debt should be manageable. If we face a potential problem, it’s not because the economy can’t handle the extra debt. Instead, it’s the politics, stupid."

My sentiments exactly.

It looks like the informed deficit debate has gone an important extra step, unfortunately into a dead end so far as what to do about it is concerned. To people like me concerned about the overall fiscal situation, Krugman kept saying: "It isn't a fiscal problem, it's a healthcare problem." To which my initial response was: Why call it only one, when it's both? (Albeit that without the healthcare problem it would be manageable, even if requiring non-trivial policy adjustments.)

But in Taxes, Spending, and the U.S. Government's March Toward Bankruptcy, I say: It isn't actually a healthcare problem; it's a political problem. (At least in terms of what makes it insoluble.)

While I'm confident that Krugman hasn't read my book, it looks like he's come around.

The next step, which I don't think he's taken yet, is to ask how all of one's policy proposals, even for the short term, might change if one rules out rational adjustments by the political system and asks instead how it likely will adjust (e.g., if deficits, once high, are hard to lower).

Paul Krugman on zombie Reaganism

Today Paul Krugman has an op-ed in the NYT asking why Reaganism, which he defines as "an ideology that says government intervention is always bad, and leaving the private sector to its own devices is always good," continues to dominate Washington policy debate even though events of the last few years have done so much to discredit it.

He has a point, but also is missing a point.

How, why, and when markets work or don't work is theoretically well understood, and we've learned in the last few years that market failure is more pervasive than the academic consensus held a decade ago. And he is right to label the financial crisis as Exhibit A, whether one primarily blames corporate governance failures within a rational behavior framework for individuals or thinks the framework's direct limitations were more crucial.

But he leaves out the other side of the horse race between market and government solutions that is crucial to evaluations of the proper size and scope of public sector decisionmaking. That is, while pervasive market failures call for government intervention, pervasive defects in political decisionmaking call into question how much benefit to expect in practice from government intervention.

Trained as a policy-oriented economist rather than a political scientist, Krugman has a view as to what sorts of government interventions could address market failures and lead to better outcomes. His approach to politics is to hope that making good arguments and supporting (while also exhorting) the relatively good guys against the really bad guys will lead to a close enough approximation of the policies he advocates for good to result overall. If you are arguing "We should do X" and your analysis is right (X if done correctly would have good effects), that may seem to be the end of it. But in the long run one also needs a political theory of how discretion will be exercised in practice.

Consider the hands-off non-regulation of new financial products that Krugman decries. Suppose we agree that the regulatory approach he advocates, if adopted and vigorously enforced 10 years ago, would have staved off the financial collapse. But now let's suppose that the approach was already in place but we had Greenspan, the Bush Administration, and for that matter the Eastern Democrats in Congress who were tight with the financial firms calling all the shots. There's a well-known theory of regulatory capture suggesting that the regulators end up serving their "constituents" rather than the diffuse public interest. Krugman's answer, a perfectly understandable one for someone playing his role, is simply: let's demand that they do the right thing, hold their feet to the fire, put in good people, etc. Keep on fighting and don't give up the ship.

But from a broader perspective one does have to think about market failure versus government failure. And one important intellectual force keeping the "zombie" of Reaganism alive is all too well-founded skepticism about the political process, enhanced pretty much every day one reads the papers. It's hard to come up with good theoretical grounds for expecting good things to happen, even if one can identify (and fight for) policies that would have good effects.

Case in point is the public option on health insurance. Krugman today notes the view expressed by Democrats such as Senators Conrad and Nelson that, if the option were available and people chose it over private insurance, this would be "a self-evidently bad thing, rather than ... what should happen if the government plan was, in fact, better than what private insurers offer."

Well, we know (as does Krugman) where Conrad and Nelson are coming from on this. But in fact the popularity of publicly provided health insurance would be normatively ambiguous until we understood more about how it was being run and why it was proving popular. One possibility is that the genuine cost savings proponents claim such a program could provide would be operating. A second possibility is that it would be heavily enough subsidized to offer a better price. Maybe that's fine too, but it raises a different set of issues. A third possibility, by the way, is that the insurance companies would make sure it was run in order to fail.

The problem with those on-line weather forecasts

Say I want to know if it will rain this afternoon between 2 and 5 pm, and the link says 30% for each of the three one-hour segments. Without knowing anything about the correlation, how am I supposed to plan?

There seems to be no way of telling where the chance of rain, for the entire period between 2 and 5 pm, falls between the polar answers of 30% and 65.7%.

Perhaps I'm over-thinking this (or failing to look at the forecast for the day as a whole).

Healthcare reform

The current debate's lack of coherent content has been quite startling, and indeed dismaying insofar as one naively hoped for better.

I generally support what the Obama Administration is trying to do (though sometimes what that is, isn't entirely clear). In 1993, I was unsympathetic to the Clinton plan, but since then my view of how well the U.S. healthcare market functions has darkened. More on that in a moment. Unfortunately, I don't think the Administration has conveyed any clear sense of what it is trying to do, or why.

Concerning the other side in the debate, perhaps the less said, the better. I really can't say anything temperate at this point.

What is the set of problems to which the Administration's healthcare reform proposals might, with luck, be an at least partial solution? Brad DeLong once put the point quite crisply (in his moderate rather than shrill persona). To liberal economists, the big problem is adverse selection. To conservative economists, the big problem is moral hazard. And I myself would say they're both right, plus there also are externalities.

On adverse selection: Anyone who is facing uncertain healthcare expenses ought to want insurance, smoothing out the actual cost towards the expected cost. Our healthcare market does not work well to solve this problem, and that's a big reason for the millions of uninsured. The tax subsidy for employer-provided insurance contributes to this, by making risk pooling much harder for the people left over after these generally healthier groups have been cherry-picked out of the pool (so to speak).

Adverse selection, making fairly priced insurance unavailable, is inherently a big problem in healthcare if the government doesn't somehow mandate pooling, given that people often will know more about their expected future health than insurance company doctors will be able to learn. But the system created by tax benefits certainly has made things worse.

Myopic or irrational failure to insure (until it is too late) when one should have also is a problem. Likewise, the prospect of free care in the ER if one has a crisis may create an individually rational reason for under-insurance, but involving a fiscal externality. When you count as well the adverse effect on risk-pooling of people's staying out of the insurance market (contributing to adverse selection), there's a good case for mandating health insurance coverage, just as Social Security effectively mandates retirement savings.

There is an argument on the other side - why give me (or make me buy) something that costs $X if I value it at less than $X - but while that's often a good argument I personally would reject it on balance here. Note, however, that this argument applies equally to making me buy something for $X and giving it to me for free (since in that case we could simply have given me the $X instead). And the question of whether I pay the $X or get it for free is simply an input to the overall issue of post-tax and transfer wealth distribution in the society (which is not to diminish its importance, but just to put it in the proper larger context).

And finally, mixed in with adverse selection (though conceptually distinct) is that we may favor redistribution from those facing low expected healthcare costs to those facing high expected costs, in particular to the extent that brute luck rather than choice underlies the difference. Thus, mandatory insurance for which everyone was charged the same amount might be defended as combining a solution to adverse selection with a deliberative redistributive policy. By the way, lest this sound a bit lefty, it is distributionally equivalent to what the George H.W. Bush Administration would have proposed it if Bush I had won the 1992 election, via risk-adjusted subsidies for the purchase of private health insurance.

OK, on to moral hazard. One key reason the U.S. healthcare system is so wildly expensive relative to the benefits provided (where the comparison is other economically advanced countries, where people get comparably good healthcare for much less) is that we have half of a free market system, in effect - which can be worse than no market system at all. Consumer demand drives the market, but it is largely the demand of subsidized consumers who are not actually paying at the margin for what they get. Suppose that in the market for groceries or cars we had consumer demand in the driver's seat (as we do), except that people didn't actually have to pay for what they purchased (or maybe they just had a small co-pay). Whole Foods and GM might like this, but it wouldn't be good socially. Yet in healthcare, that's effectively what we have, much of the time, for people on Medicare, Medicaid, or employer-provided health insurance that overpays at the margin (relative to the optimal insurance level) due to the distorting effect of the tax subsidy.

Perhaps the food or cars analogy overstates the problem in a couple of respects. Good food and cars are fun in themselves, getting healthcare isn't and hence I'd generally only do it out of the belief that my health will benefit. Plus, doctors to a large extent tell healthcare consumers what to do. But the latter is actually a big part of the problem - they don't bear the marginal costs either, and have some reasons of both ideology and self-interest (earn more fees or practice overly defensive medicine) for recommending treatments that aren't actually worth their cost to the patient.

So we have a terrible healthcare system that surely could be vastly improved. I take the Administration to be addressing the adverse selection problem by extending health insurance to the uninsured population. Also, it may want to address under-treatment of this population (which exists alongside over-treatment of others), which I think of as a distributional issue, because being sick and treatable, but unable to afford the treatment, should raise one's estimate of the marginal utility that a transfer via free provision of the needed service would provide.

The Administration would also perhaps like to address the moral hazard problem, which is a key input to the horrendous problems of long-term fiscal unsustainability that the U.S. currently faces. Many observers are skeptical, I would guess rightly, of the progress that the current proposal would make on this front. Unfortunately, addressing it really requires bipartisanship, since cutting benefits is politically unpopular. And the Republicans couldn't make any clearer their unwillingness to cooperate in any sort of good faith effort to address waste and put healthcare outlays on a sustainable path.

One of the many offensive and odious aspects of the Republicans' hateful lying about death panels and the like is that they are actually the ones who want to provide less treatment. For those among them who are sane and believe in civil society, this mainly reflects concern about moral hazard and/or a libertarian distributional view. The rest, apparently a large majority of their number, do not bear discussing.

Rare football commentary

The Brett Favre embarrassment tour continues.

Woodstock, 40 years later

Was I there at the time? Yes, if you're willing to count being a pre-teen in the back seat of my parents' car, caught in the very outskirts of the miles-and-miles-wide traffic jam as we drove to or fro a vacation site.

Woodstock's little secret (not that my knowledge of this comes from back then) is that most of the music wasn't very good. It was a year or two too late - too grandiose and self-infatuated by that point in the evolution of rock music. And though there still were some very good things to come in the immediate offing, the already badly needed rescue by punk rock / new wave remained seven years in the future.

Another day, another review

Alan Viard, in the latest National Tax Journal (Vol LXII, No. 2, June 2009), says the following about Institutional Foundations of Public Finance, the recently published conference volume (in honor of David Bradford) that I co-edited with Alan Auerbach:

"The book is exceptionally well suited to serve as a tribute to David Bradford. The authors and discussants address the questions Bradford studied, and they do so at the same broad and conceptual, but policy-relevant, level at which he addressed them .... This book should be of interest to economists studying any of the topics that it covers, particularly those interested in fundamental tax reform. It is a fitting tribute to David Bradford and should serve as an inspiration to those seeking to carry on his work."

I would add that it's not just suitable for economists, but also people with tax policy interests generally, including those with law or other generalist backgrounds. The participants were close to a 50-50 lawyers and economists mix. But admittedly it's much more of a specialists' book than, say, this one.

Topics covered include fiscal federalism, dividend taxation, fiscal language, income and consumption taxes, and questions of transition to a consumption tax.

"Keep the guvmint off my Medicare"

The widespread view among healthcare reform foes that Medicare is not a government program inclines me to ask: If Obama gets away with this, what is the government going to take over next? Social Security?!?!?

Go ahead, make my day

Perhaps I can be forgiven for quoting highlights from the brief review of my book, Decoding the Corporate Tax (available here or here), in the August 2009 issue of Choice Magazine.

"Shaviro (New York Univ. Law School), a distinguished tax scholar, does a masterful job of bringing the critiques together and explaining their logic in a concise, lucid manner. The arguments involve some arcane economics, corporate finance, and law, but he manages to bring a degree of order from the complexity .... This is the first place to go for anyone seeking to understand the corporate income tax maze."

The book gets a 4-star rating and is deemed "essential."

Most amusing quote in the review: "Shaviro tries hard, at the end, to convince himself that the U.S. political system can yield reforms." Ah, that would be the self-described "Hollywood ending," complete with the old saying that "if wishes were horses, beggars would ride," that I added upon being told by readers that the ending was a bit too bleak.

Quote of the day

From Captain Beefheart, in an excellent 1978 live album called "I'm Gonna Do What I Wanna Do" (that being his verbal response to audience requests for favorite songs):

"It's very hard to do poetry in this world of Denny's staying open all night."

But no harder, I suppose, than trying to revise the introduction to my new book while riding the NYC subway and listening to said live album.

Excitement on the home front last night. Ursula (our small brown tabby) was making loud crunching noises in our room while we were trying to get to sleep. It turned out she had a small mouse in her mouth. As it no longer had a head, it had stopped struggling, but she has always been conscientious about chewing her food.

I suppose Freddy from the Friday the 13th movies is a good analogy for cats as seen through the eyes of their prey. Demonically playful, bloodthirsty, and equipped with multiple retracting blades. Luckily I get to see a different side of Ursula, more characterized by her rolling on her back, eyes half-closed, kneading with her paws in the air, and purring.

Another day, another article

I've initiated posting on SSRN my new short (7,000 words) article, "The 2008-09 Financial Crisis: Implications for Income Tax Reform," and will post the link when it's up.

The paper is based on PowerPoint slides for a talk I gave in Milan (or actually from NYC via skype) earlier this year, as per the preceding blog entry. It may appear next year in a conference volume relating to that session.

UPDATE: The link is here. Abstract is as follows:

Tax rules encouraging excessive debt, complex financial transactions, poorly designed incentive compensation for corporate managers, and highly leveraged home ownership all may have contributed to the financial crisis, but do not appear to have been among the primary causes. Even without a strong causal link, however, the preexisting case for tax reform at all these margins arguably is strengthened by the 2008 financial crisis, which suggests that tax rules not only fell short of classic neutrality benchmarks but generally leaned in precisely the wrong direction.

Oops, more delays

If there's one thing I really want to accomplish over the rest of the summer - other than taking advantage of the NYC farmers markets' fresh fruit bonanza while it lasts - it's to make serious progress on my international tax book, which has taken very definite form inside my head but needs to be extracted and actualized.

But first I had to get straight the reading list and plan of action for the seminar on corporate and international tax policy that I am teaching this fall (starting a week before Labor Day). It's all very well to assign the students reading from this handy item, but I realized that wouldn't do the job all by itself. Luckily, my syllabus is now set, leaving me much more enthusiastic about the seminar than I was a mere 24 hours ago, when I still had various unsolved obstacles. Now the main concern I have left is whether I will draw genuinely interested students, rather than people who simply seek to fulfill a course requirement or keep their classes early in the week. (My holy grail is a filter to select positively for students who are genuinely interested, although admittedly, from the standpoint of the overall NYU faculty, this amounts to attempted cream-skimming.)

Now with that done, I've reluctantly persuaded myself that it makes a great deal of sense to write a short piece on taxes and the financial crisis, for a forthcoming volume associated with the conference, at Bocconi University in Milan, that I attended at the end of April (if only virtually, by skype, due to back spasms), and reported on here. The slides on which I will base the paper are still available here.

In other news, I should soon have 3 fresh publications out there on the at least virtual street. One is my paper for the George Washington Law Review on the long-term U.S. fiscal gap, a second is a piece for the British Tax Review on the Obama Administration's international tax reform proposals, and the third is a very short one for Tax Notes that's part of a series they should be publishing shortly on where the Volcker tax reform panel that ostensibly is hard at work should look for ideas. More on these when they come out.

And while I'm at it, I don't believe I've ever posted a link for my recently published article, Internationalization of Income Measures and the U.S. Book-Tax Relationship, which appears to be available here.

Oxford talks on U.S. international taxation

Powerpoint slides for the two talks that I gave a couple of weeks back in Oxford are now available on-line here.

The one from July 7, "Planning and Policy Issues Raised by the Structure of the U.S. International Tax Rules," is based on chapter 2 of my book-in-progress. (At least I like to think of it as my book-in-progress - I'm getting so backed up right now with other things I need to finish first that I'm starting to envy the Red Queen and Alice, for being able to stay in place by running fast.)

The one from July 10, "The Obama Administration's Tax Reform Proposals Concerning Controlled Foreign Corporations," echoes a forthcoming British Tax Review piece in which I expand on the views I first set forth here.

U.K. vs. U.S. international tax policy

My trip to Oxford earlier this month for a pair of conferences, one academic and the other mainly business and government, gave me a close-up look at how tax policymaking differs both substantively and procedurally in the two countries.

Substantively, the differences are pretty clear. The U.K. is in the process of greatly scaling back worldwide taxation of its resident corporations, whereas in the U.S. the Obama Administration has proposed heading in the opposite direction. This partly reflects differences in the countries' situations. The U.K. is obviously more deeply embedded in the "small open economy scenario" than we are, having a smaller internal market right next to the rest of Europe. Plus, corporate threats of expatriation in response to worldwide taxation play out very differently for a technical reason. In the U.S., where corporate residence depends on one's place of incorporation, companies that attempted "inversion transactions" a few years back (placing, say, a Caymans corporation at the top of the multinational chain and taking the U.S. firm out of the line of ownership of other foreign corporations) led to a huge 9/11-influenced political stink about "Benedict Arnold corporations" and the like.

In the U.K., by contrast, domestic residence follows from having U.K. headquarters. Thus, when companies threaten to leave, this apparently contributes to a very different reaction. Whereas the formalism of corporate inversion transactions helps feed the U.S. political anger about them, people in the U.K. evidently take to some extent the view that, if the headquarters truly leave, the expatriation transaction "should" work - the normative basis that people think of as underlying corporate residence has genuinely changed.

So by having a somewhat more economically substantive economic residence rule, the U.K. ends up inducing a greater sense in popular thinking that companies really can expatriate if they want to, leading to the threat of departure's having a different and stronger political valence. This in turn provides a big impetus for the drive to weaken worldwide residence-based corporate taxation in the U.K.

But all that concerns the substance of the policy, not the procedure. The latter is quite different as well. To begin with, as it's a parliamentary system, once the U.K. government announced what it wanted to do, everyone pretty much agreed that it was definitely going to happen, with only the details remaining open. Given the long-term political fragility of the Labor government, this presumably reflects some combination of the view that they can definitely serve out their time (without a no-confidence vote) and get this done before calling elections, and/or the view that the Conservatives would also be sure to adopt this policy given its pro-business direction.

Compare the fate of U.S. Administrations' tax policy proposals, which typically vary along a range from "maybe you'll get something loosely like this if you fight like hell and get lucky" to "dead on arrival."

Perhaps more surprising is the procedural differences in developing the details of the policy. In the U.S., the Administration will typically announce a full-blown (even if sketchy) proposal on which they have publicly consulted no-one. Obviously, there may be political dealings going on behind closed doors, and in the most extreme cases (such as the energy policy Cheney developed in 2001) they are pretty much explicitly written by current and past/future lobbyists on what's close to a pay-to-play basis. But given how contrary this is to the U.S. ideal of the government simply announcing its policy, in those cases the interest group input is as hidden as possible.

Then in Congress there's a lot of interest group input (obviously), and in recent years lobbyists have even been permitted to do the actual drafting (unthinkable in the 1980s and before). But even so the ideal is that the government policymakers decide, since public input is assumed (all too rightfully) to be sleazy giveaways to organized interests at the expense of the general public.

The biggest U.S. departure I can think of from this pertains to drafting regulations. The Treasury Department realizes it needs detailed input in order for regulations to be workable and to address the problems it aims at. So it solicits and receives notice & comment (as required by the Administrative Procedure Act), and makes serious use of input from affected taxpayers (and expert practitioners), even if it ultimately makes the calls itself subject to whatever White House control is being exercised (much greater in the GW Bush era than previously).

In the U.K., the Treasury announced the general details of its intended international tax policy change, but announced as well that it wanted extensive input from the business community in making workable rules that would avoid imposing excessive burdens. They more or less said they wanted to come up with something that the business community felt it could live with, although they didn't offer carte blanche to give people whatever they wanted. One big example of the input's impact: the UK government initially intended to retain their version of subpart F insofar as it taxes resident companies' foreign source passive income (such as portfolio dividends and interest), but has now pretty much agreed to give up on this point, subject only to doing what they feel is necessary to protect (a) overall revenues and (b) taxation of what is truly U.K.-source active business income.

It's easy to view this through a U.S. interest group lens, as merely a more overt and less secretive or shamefaced version of Cheney oil industry sleaze or lobbyists writing "rifleshot" tax giveaways for themselves. But, even leaving aside the distinct point that I tend to agree with this shift substantively, I get the sense that, while clearly the interest group story is a part of it (and the credible threat to expatriate is a further part of it), there also is some sense of consultation and consensus that really doesn't have an exact parallel in the U.S. setting.

The U.K.'s parliamentary system clearly plays a role in the U.S. versus U.K. procedural differences - but it doesn't necessarily explain this. After all, in the parliamentary model, it's vastly easier to shove an unpopular change down everyone's throat. I think the difference in scale may be crucial here. The U.S. is so big that wide-ranging consultation and consensus simply can't work the same way as in a smaller country like the U.K.

In Federalist # 10, Madison famously said that when you extend the sphere you create a better democratic process because there are too many interests for any one of them to be able to shove its agenda down everyone else's throat. The story here is very different and has an opposite normative spin (if I am right in viewing the U.K. example relatively benignly). Indeed, it's more of an anti-Federalist type story in which a "community" can run things with greater cooperation and consensus than a vast republic. Obviously, reflecting modern technology, the community-compatible size has greatly increased, and the underlying values being expressed are radically different.

Once again I find myself worrying that the U.S. has become unusually ungovernable by advanced-country standards.

Back in the U.S.A.

After a whirlwind week of sightseeing in London, we're back home and only slightly jet-lagged.

Although I'm a summerphile with a taste for heat (at least up to the mid-80s), London's weather was reasonably pleasant. There's seemingly a rule there that it has to spritz at least briefly every day, no matter how sunny it may look in the morning, but for the most part we had decent weather. The Underground is superior to the NYC subway in many ways - easier to use and with much more frequent trains (the tradeoff, clearly worth it for my money, is that it shuts down in the dead of night). The extremely long summer daylight hours (17+ hours at this time of year) are also exhilarating, although of course one pays dearly for this in the winter (I'm told the Sun pretty much disappears, between short hours and fog, from November through March).

There's lots of art in London that's either great or interesting - an example of the latter being my old favorite, the National Portrait Gallery, with its psychologically illuminating portraits of famous Britishers ranging from kings to poets. Though often averse to tack, I couldn't resist bringing home a Richard III towel, showing the famous painting in which he looks conscientious and careworn (the inspiration for Josephine Tey's delightful "The Daughter of Time"). But I passed up a Tate Gallery T-shirt I liked (saying "Your pizza is ready now") because the price was too high.

My most enjoyable read of the vacation was Tom Holland's "Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic," which turns the exploits of Marius, Sulla, Caesar, Crassus, et al into something at least on a par for excitement with "The Godfather." I gather it's historically sound if one forgives the rampant speculation about Romans' individual and collective beliefs and motives. Truly a compelling page-turner.

"Waiting for Godot" was predictably a bit too much to ask of our adolescents in tow (I declined to offer an advance preview of the plot, though it would have been easy to do in a sentence), but they greatly enjoyed "The 39 Steps" (enjoyable farce, though to my taste a bit too ready to rely on laughs that were easy but not enormously interesting).

A week in Oxford

I've just completed a week in Oxford (with family), attending a Summer Symposium and a Summer Conference held by the Centre for Business Taxation at the Said Business School at Oxford University. More shortly on the substance, including my own two talks (one on the main problems with the U.S. international tax rules, the other on the Obama Administration's international tax proposals). But anyway, most of the world is heading towards an exemption system for outbound investment by resident multinationals (a term of art, of course, as corporate residence isn't a meaningful concept). Today I compared the U.S., which is potentially headed in the other direction, to the boy in the high school parade of whom his proud mother says: "Will you look at that! Everyone is out of step except for my son, Johny!"

One amusing moment today came in a discussion of U.K. law. One issue is UK companies threatening to "expatriate" if the home company rules don't become more favorable. A second issue is ongoing litigation by HM Treasury on economic substance-type grounds.

On the latter, someone from the audience said something about how pretty soon some companies will be singing "the Clash song, 'I Fought the Law and the Law Won.'"

One of the speakers very promptly responded: "Or rather, 'Should I Stay or Should I Go?'"

OK, maybe you had to be there, but it was quite quick and funny in context.

I've also taken enough time off from the conference to go to Blenheim Palace and the slightly Disneyized but nonetheless interesting Warwick Castle. And the conference festivities included a humbling experience punting along the river (how Charles Dodgson could extemporize Alice in Wonderland while punting I'll never understand), and an amusing performance of Twelfth Night. Tomorrow, Stonehenge, and then a week in London.

On the road again

Last week (June 22-26) I was at an international tax conference in Berkeley. As it was devoted to looking at existing literature, I didn't hear much that was new to me while there.

Tomorrow I'm off again to another international tax conference, this one in Oxford at the Said Business School (July 6-10) and involving a number of new papers or talks. I'll be presenting twice, and hope to get the PowerPoint slides up on the NYU website, in which case I'll link them here. One concerns a chapter of my new international tax book in progress, while the other discusses U.S. trends in international tax policy with particular reference to the Obama Administration's international tax proposals.

After that, a week's vacation in London and then back to NYC as the summer bleeds away all too fast. Summer is by far my favorite time here, from a weather as well as a free time standpoint. I spend the winter cursing the cold and lack of fresh produce, and wishing the summer would get here already. Then I spend the summer half-enjoying it (at least when the rain lets up) and half-brooding about how fleeting it is.

Tax expenditure analysis at the Joint Committee on Taxation

While Ed Kleinbard was Chief of Staff at the Joint Committee on Taxation, he sought to modify and revive tax expenditure analysis, along grounds which I thought added to its usefulness and intellectual coherence. What is going to happen to JCT's tax expenditure analysis now that Ed has moved on to USC Law School?

From an interview with new JCT chief of staff Tom Barthold in the June 29 edition of Tax Notes:

TA: Your predecessor also focused a lot on the tax expenditure issue and, for example, looking at how to define expenditures. Will you continue that work, or are there areas that kind of fall into rethinking how the JCT looks at things?

Barthold: I don't currently have a special new thing that I want to do. The staff, as part of its Budget Act responsibilities, identifies and estimates tax expenditures annually. Of course we'll continue to do that. Ed Kleinbard wanted to emphasize it a little bit differently. The taxwriting committees frequently hold hearings where they say, "We want to look at the tax benefits that we've provided to topic X." When the committees look at that, that's a tax expenditure analysis. When our staff prepares background materials for committee hearings, it's often a discussion of how much does this cost, what are the distributional consequences, are there alternatives, what are the economic effects? That's really what a tax expenditure analysis is about.

I suspect that a redacted though still accurate version of this colloquy might read as follows:

TA: Your predecessor sought to revive and change tax expenditure analysis. Will you continue that work?

Barthold: No.

California's budget crisis and the upcoming federal budget crisis

California is teetering on the budgetary cliff these days, issuing IOUs in lieu of meeting its obligations because it can't adopt a plan to close the budget gap even though it is wealthy enough to do so without serious difficulty.

The IOUs remind me of the line in Duck Soup, where Groucho asks Ambassador Trentino for a personal loan until payday and offers a 30-day note. "If it isn't paid in 30 days, you can keep the note."

Living across the country from California, and thus not myself directly facing the main consequences as this plays out, the question that occurs to me is whether this is a harbinger of future U.S. budgetary problems. I am inclined to think that it is.

Obviously, the federal and California situations are easy to distinguish. The U.S. government presides over an even bigger economy, from which exit by tax base factors is costlier. The U.S. borrows in its own currency, and thus has a one-time option to default implicitly through inflation, although this is a bit of a nuclear option given the likely macroeconomic consequences. And the federal government doesn't have Proposition 13 or the other various fiscal hamstrings adopted in California via the statewide ballot process.

But the key point in common is that California's crisis is an entirely self-inflicted wound, reflecting the political system's inability to respond adequately, even when everyone knows (in broad outline) what it has to do, since it's consumed with ideological posturing and chicken games. That is already a problem on the federal level as well, and there is no particular reason to believe that it will ease.

Shadow, 1991(?)-2009

Today, with a bit of heart-wrenching assistance on the home front, Shadow met his end. At age 18, his body was breaking down on several fronts, with multiple severe conditions that required a very high level of active daily care - seemingly inadequate, however, so far as we could tell, to give him a decent quality of life. At the end he had diabetes, a thyroid problem, bladder problems, kidney disease, was unsteady, and may have had bad arthritis. He would still eat, but slept and rested the remainder of the time, meowing plaintively in an uncharacteristic way and sometimes seemingly trying to keep himself awake, which I've never seen from a cat before.

He was one of the nicest and kindest creatures of any species that I have ever known. I'm not sure our species entirely deserves his extremely positive view of us - although I suppose his experiences with us were pretty uniformly good.

I first met him in a men's clothing store that was having a closing sale. We made friends right away, which I must say wasn't hard to do, and he actually was following me around the store on a short acquaintance. He made us all very happy for eight years, and I just wish we could have known him longer.

Extremely mellow and easygoing at all times, except that he sometimes felt strongly about our food. Here you can see him in happier times, ingeniously using his front paw to extract milk that had been left for a minute in a glass on the table.

Finally, a reason to live in Washington!

... So as NOT to subscribe to the Washington Post, now that it has fired its only good print or on-line political columnist, Dan Froomkin, for political incorrectness as defined from a neoconservative perspective.

I already don't and wouldn't subscribe to the Post, but living in Washington would make it more pointed.

All things considered, probably not a good enough reason to live in Washington.

Recent diversions

Mark Maxwell's novel Nixoncarver; Lily Allen (both albums but especially It's Not Me, It's You). The first is mainly for hardcore Nixon (and to a lesser extent Carver) fans; the latter should be (and is) for lots of people.

Not sure I like my new green background on the top, but it's for Iranian solidarity.

Battle of the revenue estimates

As noted in several news articles with links at the TaxProf blog, the Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that President Obama's international tax proposals will bring in about $50 billion less than the Administration had estimated, over the period from 2011 (when the proposals would take effect) through 2019.

I thought it might be helpful to show the line by line comparisons of the estimates for the main proposals applying to U.S. multinationals:

1) Defer deductions for (other than research & experimentation) that current law apportions or allocates to foreign source income that is deferred: $60.1 billion according to the Administration, versus $51.5 billion according to the JCT. I guess we could say this one is not entirely un-close.

2) Deny foreign tax credit where the associated income isn't recognized and require pooling approach for determining which foreign tax credits are made available by repatriation: $43 billion according to the Administration, versus $55.7 billion (the sum of two amounts estimated separately) according to the JCT. The JCT is higher here, and higher for changes 1 & 2 combined. I wonder if a difference in "stacking" convention is operating here (e.g., when either of two proposals, standing alone, would raise a given dollar, to which of them do you credit it?).

3) Prevent use of "disregarded entities" in overseas tax planning: $86.5 billion according to the Administration, versus $31 billion according to the JCT.

This last one seems to be the source of the big difference. Everything else, including proposals for individuals, adds up roughly the same as between the two sets of estimates over all. So evidently the big disagreement concerns item # 3 above, which would eliminate a device that multinationals use to shift income abroad from high-tax to low-tax jurisdictions without thereby (as would happen if they did it more straightforwardly) incurring a deemed dividend to the U.S. parent under subpart F in the U.S. international rules.

I must say, even without analyzing any data, I thought the Administration's estimate of the disregarded entities change seemed a bit high. I would assume that, as between the two estimates, the one by the JCT (a) treats taxpayers as much more able to find alternative routes to the same tax planning ends, and/or (b) assumes that taxpayers give up on their overseas tax planning maneuvers, since subpart F would now eliminate the benefit, and therefore they end up paying higher taxes to the source jurisdictions, rather than to the U.S. Treasury.

The Obama international tax proposals were probably DOA (in the short run at least) anyway, given the combination of (a) bipartisan opposition, (b) the existence of higher-priority legislative issues, and (c) the lack of top staff on hand in Treasury (especially given the sad recent news that Beth Garrett has withdrawn her candidacy for the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Tax Policy position).

A couple of quick points about the disregarded entities proposal:

(a) It merely corrects a mistake that the Treasury made in 1997 when it changed the rules for classifying ambiguous legal entities as C corporations or not for purposes of the U.S. federal income tax. The Treasury surely has the power to act unilaterally on this by fixing the regulations, only (a) under federal budget rules, the Administration then wouldn't get credit for the extra revenue (though obviously the budget deficit would reflect whatever revenue came in, and (b) Congressional leaders, hearing angry complaints from U.S. multinationals, might regard it as a breach of comity. But this doesn't mean the Administration's proposal is good - the past mistake is water under the bridge, and the question of interest today is whether the proposed legislative change would on balance be good or bad policy.

(b)The proposal clearly makes sense IF one favors the use of subpart F to prevent companies from shifting business income abroad from the true source jurisdictions to tax havens. Note that the source jurisdictions could do this themselves (and get the revenue) if they wanted, such as through tougher rules for transfer pricing and the use of debt to strip away local earnings. Perhaps they don't want to because they see it as a targeted tax break for mobile capital investment. I myself am on the taxpayers' rather than the Obama Administration's side in this debate, on the view that the proposal would result in revenue-raising for other countries not the U.S., or else simply lead to reallocation of who does foreign business investment from U.S.-incorporated to non-U.S. incorporated companies.

Clearly it's in the U.S. national interest, all else equal, for companies owned by U.S. individuals to pay lower taxes abroad (since the money goes to someone else, not to us). To take an opposite and pro-Administration view of this issue, one might have to either (a) believe that we still come out ahead from reciprocal anti-tax avoidance efforts, which strikes me as unlikely, or (b) view the lower tax rates abroad as likely to reduce investment and revenues in the U.S., which the empirical evidence (with good logical underpinnings) tends to rebut.

Remiss?

Not many blog entries lately, because in summer my engagements reduce sufficiently that I'm not distracted and running from one thing to another. Instead, I can focus at work on my writing, and my energy goes into that. I'm nearly done with chapter 2 (not counting a short intro chapter) of a book on U.S. international taxation that I'm fairly enthused about, in that I feel it will contain new insights and advance the debate. Not that anyone will accept them or anything, but still. A few will possibly see the merits.

My most recent book, Decoding the U.S. Corporate Tax, didn't center on bringing new insight to the practical issues in the field because they haven't engaged me as deeply. Instead, its prime strength is in explaining how and why the rich but under-appreciated economic literature in the area is important, and why none of it really fits (which is the lawyers' fault, not the economists). I do feel this makes the book valuable, as well as often fun to read. But in international tax the practical policy questions engage me more and I feel the theoretical literature has to a greater extent fallen short.

Anyhow, some other random notes. Tonight I attended (most of) an Elvis Costello concert on his country & bluegrass tour. Enjoyable, professional, nice band and sound, seems at this stage an amiable raconteur. I'd never seen him before, but I'll swear by his first 4 albums (plus Spike to a lesser extent). These days, a bit literalist and lacking in poetry as a writer. And almost the only songs I recognized were Blame It On Cain and the Velvet Underground's Femme Fatale. Still, nice to have seen him.

On a completely different subject, I'd meant to post a link to Greg Mankiw's recent co-authored paper that offers a nice little summary of the optimal income tax literature. So here it is. Next time I'm teaching a basic tax policy class I may well assign it, and people who want an intro to the field may find it useful. I had been waiting to have the chance to post a corrected link to an old paper of mine that discusses some related ideas, and that more or less started a micro-genre in the legal tax policy literature on endowment taxation. So here that is. I found to my surprise that this link has a problem - the paper as posted is lacking two charts that may help in understanding the discussion, as well as the bibliography. I'm trying to post a corrected version but it's not up yet. Better the posted one than nothing, I suppose.

Fool me once, shame on you ...

... but needless to say, fool me twice and it's shame on me. By these lights, our cat Buddy (a.k.a. the Wascally Wabbit) succeeded in shaming us the other day.

Perhaps 3 years ago, we had a period when we would occasionally let him go out into our small, fence-surrounded backyard. For a while, he just patrolled, sniffed things, and so forth, but one day, while someone's back was turned, he hopped over the fence and we didn't see him for five whole days. Since he didn't have a collar, this was a pretty big problem. We papered the neighborhood with photos and so forth. Finally one day I spotted him on someone else's second-floor terrace. He meowed at me though it was several houses down, and we were able to retrieve him.

He looked pretty good - well-fed and well-groomed, rather than in the least bit bedraggled. We were curious how he had lived those 5 days - and, for that matter, how he had gotten onto a terrace that was seemingly inaccessible, even to a cat, from the ground (nor had the neighbors seen him in their house). But he wasn't talking. I am confident that he will take those secrets to the grave (though not for many years yet - he is only about 4 and we also have a 19-year old cat).

This led to a policy of not letting him out, ever. But the years pass and one's policies loosen up. He's been so desperately eager to get outside that, over the last few days, we let him out a few times, albeit while very closely watched. Since cats are usually deliberate in their movements in territories they don't know well, we figured we would be able to grab him if he got ideas, as no doubt he eventually would. We also blocked the easiest escape routes.

Then two days ago, he was calmly sitting in the middle of the yard looking around, when suddenly he saw another cat on one of the fences between the different yards. In a quarter of a second if not less (it seemed), he (a) shot across the yard, (b) jumped to the top of a fence that's about 6 feet high (scrabbling along the side on the way up, as cats do when the jump is too high to do all at once), and (c) raced along the top of the connected fences (a functional catwalk) at least thirty feet down, and well out of our yard, in pursuit of the other cat.

You had to see it to believe it, though it was so fast that I barely did. Truly the peewee version of the Hound of the Baskervilles racing down the moor in pursuit of fresh game.

By five seconds later, we couldn't tell where he was - there were perhaps 20 possible backyards, many of them in small apartment buildings. And we didn't entirely (or perhaps at all) trust him to return. Our relations are very cordial but less intense than with our other two cats (he is very sweet but, if he were a person, we'd say he's in his own head). The saying "You can never really own a cat," is true of him, though not of all cats. Also, we don't feed him enough, by his lights, because if we did (as we used to) he'd be extremely overweight.

But the story has a happy ending. A neighbor on the other side, not previously known to us, heard us calling his name and asked if everything was okay. A fellow cat-owner, she volunteered to call her cat-owning neighbors to see if Buddy had shown up in any of their yards. He had, and I went to fetch him. When I got to the yard in question, Buddy had left, apparently startled by the stranger who had gone out to check on him.

But good old bribery did the trick. I had shown up with "greenies," a small cat treat that, in our house, he likes to chase and bat around before gobbling down. I called out to him and he looked at me, but that alone didn't seem to count for much. But when I started rattling the greenie container and actually took one out, he calmly walked over and let me grab him.

Fool me three times and ... well, we don't plan ever to let him out again, but we're also ordering a collar with contact information.

Latest publication

A short article of mine, "Internationalization of Income Measures and the U.S. Book–Tax Relationship," just came out in the National Tax Journal. Not available on-line (other than the abstract), and I don't seem to have posted it on SSRN, but the cite is 62 N.T.J. 155-67 (March 2009).

The abstract is as follows:

Taxable income and financial accounting income are measures that use the same name but serve different purposes, leading to some differences in how they might ideally be defined. However, concern about managerial incentive problems may support integrating them, either to increase the accuracy of amounts reported or to reduce the resources that managers expend on reducing taxable income and increasing reported earnings. Political incentive problems, on the other hand, arguably support separating the measures, so that legislative eagerness to control the tax base need not promote politicization of accounting standards. The case for a largely one–book system may grow stronger, however, if pressures for international convergence in defining income on both the tax and accounting fronts lead to reduced politicization of both.

Doug Holtz-Eakin talks up new conservative think tank

I admit to having been hard occasionally on Doug Holtz-Eakin during the 2008 presidential campaign. I had three reasons for this: (1) at times he deserved it, (2) I expected better from him, and (3) he risked harming his entire profession's public reputation through egregious flacking that should have been left to others in the McCain campaign. The strangest thing about his flacking was its inconsistency - one day he'd spout a silly talking point that was beneath his station (so to speak), and the next day he'd make a responsible comment about the long-term fiscal situation (which of course neither candidate wanted to highlight).

Anyway, Doug has now resurfaced via his statement that he's developing a proposal for a new think tank that he calls a “Center for American Progress for the right.”

This in turn prompts Paul Krugman and Matt Yglesias to note the already large supply of conservative think-tanks (such as AEI and Heritage) with exceptionally deep funding. They posit that, since the Republican Party and the conservative movement have gone stark raving mad, institutions that align with them, in Yglesias' words, must "not [be] prepared to accept anything other than 'tax cuts' as a solution to anything. Consequently, they’re not really even prepared to accept the premise that other problems exist. Tax cuts can’t solve climate change, so there must be no such thing! Tax cuts can’t curb inequality, so there must not be a problem with growing inequality."

This is a bit unfair. AEI, for example, is a mixed bag. On the one hand, it was the venue the other day for the Cheney speech, about which the less said the better. But it also still features intelligent and responsible commentary, such as (just to give one example without prejudice to others) this.

The problem is that, when an institution gets too deep in bed with really bad apples (or demanding funders), the good people doing good work there suffer a labeling or guilt by association problem. Or they may need to watch what they say and avoid pursuing some ideas too far. Thus, Holtz-Eakin could accomplish something by creating an institution that stuck to the high road. But the tricky part is getting the funding and prominence needed to pick off the good people from compromised institutions. Making this all the harder, those institutions have good reason to treat a few high-minded people very well. The labeling confusion goes both ways - the institutions gain luster from good and honest work done there, just as the people doing that work risk losing a bit of their own luster.

In discussing his initiative, Holtz-Eakin talks a bit too much for my taste in terms of reviving the Republican Party. It's certainly extremely important for our national welfare - as numerous people on the left have noted - that the Republicans return to planet Earth and to our country's traditions (not to mention those of the Enlightenment). It's also true that hypothetical Republicans who had returned to sanity and decency would be the natural constituency for a policy shop lying on the side of the spectrum that is more pro-market and less focused on inequality. But I would say that the smarter and safer way of getting to that end state would be to utterly ignore the Republicans for now, and wait for them to come calling in 2014 or so. As I would have hoped Holtz-Eakin had already learned, engaging with them now is a recipe for debasing oneself without improving them.

Possible early hire, if Doug is serious: Bruce Bartlett.

Summer's here and ...

So far I've written a 1,000 word piece on tax reform ideas for a U.S. publication, another of 5,000 words on the Administration's international tax proposals for a U.K. publication (the U.K. is preparing international tax changes in the opposite direction), and better nailed down my plans for an as yet untitled but perhaps 15% written book on U.S. international tax policy.

Cheney

I've been following the man's antics with amazement. He's obviously a very disturbed individual. I've heard privately from people who worked in national security in the Bush Administration that he had a fascination with torture and would keep after it even when begged by his associates to give it a rest. Obviously it serves deep psychological needs for him. His daughter is right - torture truly is his cause, in the same sense that global warming is Al Gore's.

Of course, I don't wish to discount Cheney's rational motive, from his perspective, to fabricate evidence in support of invading Iraq.

Charming show

Yesterday, to celebrate Mother's Day plus certain household members' birthdays, a close fambly group of us went to see Coraline at the Lucille Lortel Theater - this being the stage musical version, with songs by Magnetic Fields / 69 Love Songs genius (if I may say so) Stephin Merritt, rather than the movie that I have thus far avoided (based on my perhaps unjustly suspecting it of being Disneyesquely cloying). The show was delightful and the music extremely inventive, one person being enough orchestra here to outdo the typical Broadway theater pit.

UPDATE: A few days later, as part of an end-of-year school event, we saw the Broadway adaptation of Schiller's Mary Stuart. Very different genre. The acting was good, but MY GOD what a flurry of over-long bombast.

Radio appearance off the usual circuit for me

Today I discussed the Obama Administration's international tax plan on a Jamaican radio show, Evening Edition Newstalk 93 FM. I assume the interest over there lies in concern that Jamaica is one of the tax-friendly locations being targeted by the plan. My fellow commentator was someone from the Tax Foundation, who I assume was more anti-plan than I was (though you can guess my largely skeptical content from my prior post), but through my phone connection I could not hear more than one word out of every 10 that he spoke. Luckily he didn't try to cross-talk me (or if he did, I never realized) as it's hard to respond when you don't know what they're saying.

Silliest moment came when the host asked me if the Administration's tax plan was socialistic. After half-snorting, half-laughing (you had to be there), I noted that JFK's international tax plan went a lot further than Obama's (repealing deferral altogether) and also involved a higher rate than 35%, but no one seemed to think that was socialistic.

I suggested that the part of the plan aimed at U.S. companies, if not quite DOA, is likely at a minimum to be cut back substantially by Congress, but that the part aimed at tax-evading individuals seems feasible both politically and administratively.

The Obama Administration's new international tax proposals

I'm still trying to get a preliminary handle on the Obama Administration's international tax proposals. The fullest description I've yet been able to find, from a White House fact sheet, is available here.

The fact sheet opens by stating that the White House's key concern is about jobs fleeing the U.S. However, recent empirical literature about U.S. international taxation on balance supports skepticism that jobs really "flee" the U.S., on a net basis, when U.S. companies invest abroad due in part to the lower tax rates available there. The two main reasons for doubt are (a) at the firm level, complementarity rather than substitution as between home and overseas investments; (b) what I call the "musical chairs" point. If there are good slots for business investment in the US (e.g., available workers, nearby resources & consumer markets, etc.), then one prospective user's deciding against using a particular slot may induce someone else to go there.

I thus think of it as more of an efficiency and revenue issue. Raising taxes on outbound investment to be closer to those on domestic investment has the potential - subject to the problems discussed below - to be more attractive on efficiency grounds than alternative means of raising the same revenue.

The efficiency gains from equalizing domestic and foreign tax rates faced by U.S. taxpayers might verge on being a slam dunk argument for the Administration's general position if not for one further problem. When we impose business taxes on legal entities such as corporations, rather than directly on individuals, we can only impose the U.S. tax rate, for investment abroad, on companies that are classified as U.S. residents. Unfortunately, corporate residence is an extremely weak reed for the imposition of U.S.-level rather than tax haven-level taxes. For new investments (as distinct from those already out there, which are hard to shift without paying a tax price), it is quite easy for investors to use non-U.S. entities.

Anyway, onto the Administration's proposals after one last bit of background. The Administration is proposing to use legislation even for changes that it could accomplish purely by revising Treasury regulations. This, in turn, may be an artifact of budget rules that only permit it to claim credit for extra revenues when achieved through legislative changes. That's really too bad insofar as changes that one deems desirable end up being blocked by the vociferous opposition that clearly will emerge in the legislative process.

And fight the opponents will. Herewith a quote from a newly posted article by Ryan Donmoyer at Bloomberg:

“'This is bad stuff,'” Kenneth Kies, a tax lobbyist at the Washington firm Federal Policy Group, said of Obama’s plans. “'This is going to be the biggest fight for the corporate community in the next two years.'” Kies represents General Electric Co., Anheuser-Busch Cos. and Microsoft Corp., among others."

But don't worry about Ken, who I'm sure will find the fight lucrative as well as stimulating. Think of all the other corporate lobbyists in different areas who wish they could say with a straight face that THEIR issues are the biggest ones.

Anyway, back to the White House press release, which opens with the following fun facts:

--In 2004, U.S. multinationals paid $16 billion of tax on $700 billion of foreign active earnings, an effective U.S. tax rate of 2.3%. Comment: Given foreign tax credits, this would be true even without the benefits of deferral and their enhancement by tax planning, if foreign rates were close enough to U.S. ones. It would be interesting to see the pre-credit "gross" tax liability, although that requires a grain or two of salt as well given foreign tax credit planning games. Note, however, that if we can't do much better than this (and I'll suggest below that perhaps we can't even with aggressive anti-tax planning rules), one wonders if the game is worth the candle. Lots of tax planning, compliance, and administrative costs relative to the revenue that's being raised.

--83 of the 100 largest U.S. corporations have subsidiaries in tax havens. Comment: What could possibly be holding back the other 17? Are their operations purely domestic?

--One address in the Cayman Islands hosts 18,857 corporations. Comment: I've always wanted to visit that building, especially if there are nice beaches nearby.

--Nearly one-third of all foreign profits reported by U.S. corporations in 2003 came from Bermuda, the Netherlands, and Ireland. Comment: One dismaying fact one learns from this is that, of the two pillars of international taxation, residence and source, BOTH lack fundamental economic meaning and thus invite extensive game-playing. This helps explain why there are no really good answers in U.S. international taxation. Disposing of the corporate residence concept and taxing income based purely on source (e.g., via an exemption system) would be far more clearly correct if source were a less slippery and manipulable concept.

Anyway, on to the Administration's proposals with very brief comments based on what I understand so far:

1) DENY DEDUCTIONS ASSOCIATED WITH UNTAXED OVERSEAS INVESTMENT UNTIL THE INCOME IS REPATRIATED TO THE U.S. - This amounts to a partial repeal of deferral, just as denying home mortgage interest deductions would amount to a partial repeal of the imputed rent exclusion. Note also that allowing the deductions (as under present law) arguably goes beyond putting U.S. and foreign companies on a level playing field. Suppose a U.S. company deducts domestic expenses at 35 percent so it can earn abroad at 10 percent. This is a better outcome than a company that was purely in the source jurisdiction would get from both deducting and earning at 10 percent.

Deferral creates massive distortions in tax planning by U.S. companies. A burden-neutral repeal of deferral (as proposed by Rosanne Altshuler and Harry Grubert) therefore strikes me as all to the good. They propose to get there by lowering the rate to offset the effective base-broadening. But non-burden-neutral, revenue-raising repeals of deferral run into the problem that companies may simply respond by reallocating their investments so that companies classified as U.S. residents aren't the ones doing these things. Over the long run, certainly, it's not going to be very sustainable to impose a worldwide tax on U.S. companies that exceeds the taxes owed if the same owners invest through non-U.S. companies.

Since it's really a transition issue, involving revenues from taxing existing profits that we might be able to get while companies are in the process of shifting around to beat the rules, my preferred proposal, which I realize is politically unrealistic, is to impose a one-time transition tax on the unrepatriated earnings of U.S. multinationals, accompanied by a change in regime to show that we don't plan to do it again. If credible, this would avoid affecting incentives regarding whether new investments starting tomorrow should be made through U.S. companies or foreign ones.

2) CLOSING FOREIGN TAX CREDIT LOOPHOLES - According to the White House fact sheet, "current rules and tax planning strategies make it possible to claim foreign tax credits for taxes paid on foreign income that is not subject to current U.S. tax." Agreed that this is not supposed to happen under the current rules, though I'm not surprised to hear that it does. Offhand, I'm not up on exactly what sort of tax planning strategies they have in mind. The Administration proposes to respond by changing the rules so as to determine allowable FTCs based on the ratio of total foreign tax to total foreign earnings. If I understand this correctly, it's a pretty big shift from basing FTCs purely on the income brought home this year and the foreign taxes associated therewith. This one is pretty interesting, and, like proposal (1), sounds like it's potentially a big structural improvement, only, subject to the same concern that, in the long run, the optimal U.S. tax burden on outbound investment by our multinationals is greatly lowered by the ease of investing through non-U.S. entities. Hence, same comment about preferring a transition tax to increasing the tax burden on outbound investments that might be made tomorrow.

FTCs are a really lousy instrument design, and I'd support extending Altshuler-Grubert to include burden-neutral repeal of FTCs as well as deferral. This idea couldn't be done the Altshuler-Grubert way, however, since they propose lowering the domestic corporate tax rate to match their burden-neutral reduced foreign rate. Doing this for FTCs would lower the burden-neutral rate too much for it to apply domestically as well as on outbound.

3) USE THE REVENUES RAISED ABOVE TO MAKE THE RESEARCH & EXPERIMENTATION CREDIT PERMANENT - Companies are going to laugh at this one, since they expect to have the credit extended anyway. (It's always ticketed for phase-out in a couple of years but is always extended again.) That said, extending the credit arguably gets some support from R&E's positive externalities - though I suspect that, in practice, the credit also covers a lot of junk. Making it permanent has additional virtues in that it adds certainty and reduces the need for ongoing lobbying expenses by the companies that want it, and financing the extension is a step in the right direction given the U.S. fiscal gap.

4) PREVENT U.S. COMPANIES FROM USING THE "CHECK-THE-BOX" REGULATIONS TO SHIFT INCOME TO TAX HAVENS WITHOUT BEING SUBJECT TO U.S. TAXATION UNDER SUBPART F - This recoups a blunder that the Treasury made during the Clinton Administration when it adopted "check the box" without thinking through the international ramifications. I'd think they could do this through regulations alone, apart from the budgetary scoring problem I noted above (though companies might complain and try to get Congress involved). Main problem is simply that the subpart F rules that companies evade by using check-the-box are subject to the same concern that I keep repeating here, i.e., limited ability to keep on imposing higher taxes based on U.S. corporate residence.

The remaining Administration proposals in the press release mainly pertain to individuals and compliance problems using tax havens. In general, I'm strongly in favor - these often involve fraud, and taxing resident individuals on outbound investment lacks the fundamental conceptual problem of doing so for legal entities such as corporations, since it's actually economically meaningful (and hence less tax-elastic) to live in the U.S. and/or be a citizen.

The New York Mets

I'm a Mets fan, not by choice, but because I have no choice. The affliction first struck me before my 7th birthday, and there's really nothing I can do about it now.

Queue here the Macbeth quote:

MACBETH: Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas'd;
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow;
Raze out the written troubles of the brain;
And with some sweet oblivious antidote,
Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?

DOCTOR: Therein the patient
Must minister to himself.

Unfortunately, accomplishing that is a bit above my pay grade. But at least a Mets site that I saw today (while struggling with the start-up to a new section of my U.S. international tax book-in-progress) offered two appropriate photos, one capturing my sense of the Mets front office and the other of the team itself.

Virtually participating

As I noted in my last post, today I was supposed to be in Milan, Italy, participating in a panel at a conference entitled "Tax Policy and the Financial Crisis," held by Econpubblica, the Center for Research on the Economics of the Public Sector at Milan's Universita Bocconi. Lots of excellent people, mainly European economists, officials, and businesspeople, were also there, and I was looking forward to meeting many of them for the first time, as much as to seeing The Last Supper and sampling the local cuisine. Severe though transient back pain forced me to cancel, but this morning I was able to participate from my desk, courtesy of the remote video conferencing wizardry of Skype, along with the help of kind people on both ends.

My talk was entitled "The 2008-09 Financial Crisis: Implications for Tax Reform." It's briefly described here. You can also, if interested, access a pdf version of my PowerPoint slides for the talk, either at the previous link or here.

Ouch

The semester is now over, and I was supposed to be (at this very hour) headed to JFK Airport to fly to Milan, where I'm scheduled to appear on Thursday, April 30 at an Econpubblica, Universita Bocconi conference entitled "Tax Policy and the Financial Crisis." Good food, a viewing of Leonardo's The Last Supper, and getting to meet a number of leading European tax policy economists and lawyers, were also part of my plans for my expected 48+ hours in Milan.

Severe though (I hope) transient back pain forced me to cancel, and I'll instead be attempting remote video participation via Skype. Have PowerPoint slides, will travel, even if only virtually.

Final NYU Tax Policy Colloquium of 2009

Yesterday we had our final session, featuring Tom Brennan's Certainty and Uncertainty in the Taxation of Risky Returns.

Tom's article, still in early draft form, is a contribution to the extensive Domar-Musgrave literature on the treatment of risk in an income or consumption tax. It's well-established in that literature that, with a uniform tax rate (including loss refundability) and complete financial markets, neither an income tax nor a consumption tax affects the after-tax return available to taxpayers on their investment portfolios, except that the income tax hits the entire portfolio at the tax rate times the risk-free rate. That rendering may sound esoteric, but the key point is that taxpayers can undo the tax system's mandatory insurance by suitably adjusting their pre-tax portfolios, again assuming that financial markets are complete.

While the Domar-Musgrave reasoning notoriously requires all sorts of strong assumptions, these help to focus (as I put it at the session) on the "income-ness" of the tax base. In other words, there's no claim that the actual tax system has no effect on risk; rather, its being an income tax has no effect that wouldn't generally be the same (e.g., due to incomplete markets) if it were instead a consumption tax.

One feature of the actual tax system actually having a huge effect on risk-bearing is the lack of full proportionate rates. Rates on positive income are graduated (though for large corporations this is relatively insignificant), and net losses are non-refundable except insofar as one has net income in other years permitting the use of net operating losses (NOLs).

Tom Brennan, who has a math PhD, aims in his paper to give us a new way of looking at the tax rate effect on risk. Taking the simple case of an investment that will either gain $X (taxable at the statutory rate) or lose $Y (assumed to be non-recoverable despite the possibility of other taxable income in the same or a different year), he models nonrefundability as equivalent to a government call option on the value of the asset, based on the statutory rate.

His analysis used investments changing value over time, but I thought it could be made simpler through an example involving an instantaneous coin toss bet. E.g., suppose if it's heads you win $100, tails you lose $100, and the tax rate is 50%.

The standard Domar-Musgrave point (leaving out time and thus income taxation) could be illustrated by noting that, if there's a 50% tax with full loss offsets, all you have to do is double the bet to $200 pre-tax to end up in exactly the same place as if there were no tax.

Tom proposes to look at the case where the gain is still taxable at 50% but the loss is disallowed. Now, to restore after-tax the $200 dispersion in outcomes that you had in the non-tax world (since you'd either gain or lose $100), the amount bet has to be jumped up to $133.33. This will leave you, after-tax, either plus $66.67 or minus $133.33. Only, this is not very satisfying despite restoration of the prior level of dispersion, since the expected after-tax return is now minus 25%. So in fact you'd refuse to bet if you demand at least the 0 expected return that you could have gotten by doing nothing.

Tom notes that one could look at the government's tax claim as akin to its having gotten a free call option permitting it to claim half of the betting outcome. Win and the government takes half of your risky outcome for the strike price of zero; lose and the government lets the option expire as it's out of the money (a negative return being worth less than zero). Under these facts, the government's option was worth ex ante 25% of the amount bet.

Final step in restoring Domar-Musgrave style equivalence, if you happen to have an aesthetic taste for going there, is that, if the government compensated the TP for the value of the option, we'd end up (as in the standard Domar-Musgrave scenario). Specifically, the TP would bet $133.33, the government would hand him $33.33 in cash to make up for the option that it's taken, and the taxpayer would end up after resolution of this bet with either $66.67 or minus $133.33, in either case plus the cash that the government handed him.

The point not being that this is either a policy recommendation or a prediction of any kind; it just closes the circle so we can square our accounts (so to speak). Or, a bit more pertinently, if the government doesn't compensate the TP for the value of the option (and why would it, if it evidently wants to impose the asymmetric tax), the value of the option that's been taken tells us something about the burden being imposed through the asymmetric rates.

All this may sound a bit esoteric, but it was a good last PM session, as we were able to help clarify what the paper says (it's math-heavy and tough reading for lawyers). Question to be answered down the road is how much the model helps us in advancing our understanding of the real world impact of asymmetric rates. While this particular way of parsing them is new, experts have certainly long understood that loss nonrefundability is potentially important to risk-taking, as are graduated marginal rates.

More on this from me in a few days and in a different setting. I will be in Milan, Italy for a couple of days next week, to speak on April 30 at a conference entitled "Tax Policy and the Financial Crisis," to be held at Econpubblica, Universita Bocconi. I'll be on a panel addressing the financial crisis's long-term implications for tax reform, and one of the topics I plan to address is the interplay between loss nonrefundability and excessive risk-taking, AIG-style.