A serious approach to tax reform
‘The Republican tax bill hurtling through Congress is increasingly tilting the United States tax code to benefit wealthy Americans.” That’s the beginning of a stage-setting front-page story in The New York Times on the tax bill in the Senate.
“Hurtling” suggests irrational, uncontrolled, threatening movement; “tilting” suggests abandoning upstanding fairness; spelling out “the United States tax code” suggests an ominous attack on a respected national institution. And all this “to benefit wealthy Americans.”
This is less reportage than it is advocacy journalism, written to advance the argument that Republican tax bills are harmful because they make federal taxation less progressive. But it’s also an argument against any tax cut at any time. After all, if you start off with a progressive system that imposes higher rates on high earners and doesn’t tax low earners at all,then every tax cut takes that shape.
Missing from the arguments of Republicans’ critics is acknowledgment that we already have what is, by most measures, the most progressive national tax system in the world. Other advanced countries tend to rely more heavily on regressive sales (valueadded) taxes, and many have less steeply graduated income taxes.
Currently, the top 1 percent of earners account for about 40 percent of federal income tax revenue; the next 9 percent provide about 30 percent more. You could make the system more progressive with more progressive income tax rates or by raising the amount of income subject to the payroll tax, but at the risk of redirecting high earners’ attention from productivity to tax avoidance. Such changes tend to reduce economic growth, just as tax cuts tend to increase it.
In fact, this year, Republican tax writers have devoted much less attention to cutting income tax rates for high earners than their predecessors did in 1981 and 2003 or their presidential nominees in 2008 and 2012. Instead, they want to increase the child tax credit and double the standard deduction. That would reduce taxes for many modest earners and get the government out of the business of encouraging some behaviors and therefore discouraging others. This could reduce the scope of lobbyists larding up the tax code with special exemptions and favors.
Sophisticated critics of the Republicans’ plan avoid arguing against any tax cut ever but say that with low unemployment and increasing growth, this is the wrong time — that economic policy should depend on the economic, not the political, calendar.
The problem with this argument is that the biggest cuts in the Republican plan would be to the corporate income tax rate— from 35 percent to 20 percent. Today’s corporate rate is the highest of any advanced nation. It encourages multinational firms to park billions of dollars abroad rather than invest them here or to be merged into foreign-based rivals.
Moreover, economists of just about every stripe agree that the economic burden of the corporate tax falls on not just stock owners but also employees and consumers. The only disagreement is on who bears how much.
Some critics focus on provisions fashioned to take advantage of budget procedures and Congressional Budget Office scoring rules mostly set in the 1970s. Both parties are guilty of gaming this increasingly dysfunctional system, especially the CBO’s wildly oscillating cost estimates of the Obamacare mandate.
As this is written, it’s not clear whether Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell can round up the needed 50 votes or, if he does, whether a conference committee will hammer out a version that can pass in the House, too. In any case, the Republican tax plan is something more serious and responsible than “hurtling” missiles “tilting” the tax code toward the “wealthy.”