The President’s Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform issued its report Tuesday. It contains many sensible proposals that most economists would support. In other words, it probably doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of ever becoming law. Nevertheless, the panel report may engender a more fundamental debate about tax policy in this country than we have had in 20 years.
Tax reform is a huge issue, too large to cover in one column. So let’s start with some basics.
Leaving aside arguments about which specific programs are necessary or effective, governments need money to provide the services that citizens want. In our democracy, elected officials determine which programs and appropriate spending for each. The money to pay for them has to come from somewhere. That brings us to taxes.
Taxes involve several important questions. How much money must we raise? What do we tax — income, consumption, wealth, real estate, personal property, sales, wages or cigarettes, to name a few possibilities — and how do we administer these taxes? Do we want taxes to promote other outcomes — charitable giving, home ownership, access to post-secondary education, high levels of saving and investment, affordable child care — and how can we best do that?
Recognize that all taxes, however well-intentioned and well-crafted, motivate people to minimize the tax they owe. These actions often waste resources. Taxes also affect how much money households can spend on their own needs. Some possible outcomesare more fair, according to our values, and some are much less fair.
We know that the cost of taxes to society goes beyond the amount paid. Resources that businesses or individuals use in complying with tax laws cannot be used for other purposes. This is a cost to society. So are the resources the government devotes to administering tax programs.
An ideal tax, then, should be fair. It should raise the money needed. It should be cheap to administer, both for taxpayers and government. It should distort incentives as little as possible to reduce the inefficient use of resources that leaves society as a whole poorer.
Our current federal tax system fails these tests. It is complicated. Both taxpayers and government spend a lot in compliance and administration. It is unfair — although opinions vary widely on how or why it is unfair. It creates many perverse incentives that waste resources. And it does not bring in enough to cover our spending, so our national debt increases apace. In 2004, the amount we spent at the federal level exceeded what we took in by 16 percent. This year the figure will be close to 20 percent.
Now consider the personal income tax. It is complicated. Households must keep many records, some for decades. Tax forms and rules are difficult to understand. Most households pay some tax preparer to do their return, but even then spend hours assembling the needed information.
The tax involves perverse incentives. If you buy a very large SUV you get a special break that you don’t get on a compact car. Deductibility of mortgage interest effectively subsidizes not only one home, but also cabins. Thus, households direct most of their savings to housing. We invest a higher proportion of national income in housing than does any other industrialized nation. One result is that our savings in anything besides housing is very low.
The tax code is unfair. Two people with the same gross income can pay sharply different amounts of tax, depending on the source of the income. Despite a nominally progressive structure — tax rates go up as income rises — some high-income people actually pay a smaller proportion of their income in taxes than many poorer people after various sorts of special treatment are factored in.
Some people are troubled that recent tax changes largely benefited the rich. Others respond that the rich — a relatively small proportion of the population — pay a high proportion of total income taxes. Meanwhile, millions of households pay no income tax at all. The first group responds by observing that, even after paying all these taxes, the after-tax incomes of the richest 10 or 20 percent of the population have grown sharply in the last quarter century, more sharply than incomes of any other group. So has the rich’s share of total national income.
That’s plenty of problems. How will the panel’s proposals change things? Why are fundamental changes in taxes so hard to achieve? And how would major changes in taxes at the federal level affect states like Minnesota that piggyback their tax systems on the federal one? These questions must be left to future columns.
© 2005 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.