As part of my collection of honest leftists, I have a bunch of columns highlighting how some advocates of big government (including, to their credit, Bernie Sanders and Andrew Yang) don’t hide from reality.
I’m unalterably opposed to their policies, but at least they openly admit that huge tax increases on ordinary people are needed in order to finance a European-style welfare state.
Now we have two more honest statists to add to our list.
In a column for the Washington Post, and openly embrace huge tax increases on Americans with modest incomes.
They start by complaining that the tax burden is lower in the United States compared to other western nations.
A no-new-middle-class-taxes pledge…is seriously misguided. Middle-class taxes are a necessary and desirable part of a comprehensive, progressive policy framework… Democratic presidential candidates should make the case for middle-class taxes, not run from them.
Here is a basic fact: The United States is a low-tax country. In 2018, the most recent year for which data is available, the United States ranked fourth-lowest in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (a consortium of 36 economically developed countries) in terms of tax revenue collected as a percentage of the economy — behind nations like Germany, Israel, Latvia and Canada. The gap between U.S. and average OECD revenue has widened over time, from 1.3 percentage points of gross domestic product in 1965 to 10 percentage points more recently. That’s nearly $2 trillion per year in forgone revenue from lower tax rates.
Interestingly (though not surprisingly), they don’t acknowledge that Americans are far richer than people in other advanced nations.
So maybe, just maybe, there’s a relationship between tax policy and economic outcomes.
The authors then complain that Reagan triggered an era of lower taxes for the non-rich. Oh, the horror!
In 1979, the year before Ronald Reagan was elected president, the average household in the middle quintile of the income distribution paid 19.1 percent of its income in federal taxes, according to data from the Congressional Budget Office. By 2016, that rate had dropped 5.2 percentage points, more than a quarter, to 13.9 percent. The story is similar for the second and fourth quintiles, which saw their rates decline by 5.6 and 3.8 percentage points respectively over the same period.
Here’s a graphic that accompanied the column.
As you can see, readers are supposed to conclude that the United States is “below average” compared to other developed nations.
What would it mean if politicians reversed all the tax cuts that started under Reagan?
The most revealing factoid from the column is their calculation that middle-income families should be paying $3800 more to the IRS every year.
In 2016, middle-quintile families paid $3,800 less in taxes than they would have at 1979 rates… Low middle-class taxes in the United States stand in stark contrast to the approach in other developed countries, which raise more revenue from the middle class through some combination of taxes on goods and services, payroll taxes, and income taxes.
And don’t forget that the authors don’t just want to go back to 1979 tax rates.
They want America to become another France.
Somehow, I suspect America’s middle-class does not want to be pillaged like their European counterparts.
Amazingly, it gets even worse. The authors want more debt-financed spending and they even endorse the perpetual motion machine of “modern monetary theory.”
Of course, middle-class tax increases are not the only means of providing these public goods. Trillions of dollars can be raised through various taxes on the rich… And funding public investments with government debt, which modern monetary theory’s adherents recommend, is a far better approach than requiring every program to have a designated “payfor.” The government is uniquely positioned to borrow money, and we shouldn’t let unsubstantiated, theoretical concerns about debt levels prevent us from addressing the concrete and urgent needs of today.
I could end the column at this point and simply observe that it’s good to find honest folks on the left, even if they’re wildly wrong.
But the authors of the column unintentionally have given me an excuse to make a key point about taxes, growth, the economy, and the Laffer Curve.
Their graphic inserted above reveals that the overall tax burden in France consumes 46.1 percent of GDP in France, nearly twice as high as the United States.
But high tax rates don’t necessarily produce high tax revenues.
Indeed, I crunched data from the International Monetary Fund and found that per-capita revenues in France are only about 10 percent higher than they are in the United States.
I’m sure Art Laffer won’t be surprised by these results. Neither would Ibn Khaldun.
The bottom line is that most people in Europe are subject to much higher tax rates, which leads to lower living standards and weaker economies, which means there’s not even a lot of tax revenue to spend.
Would your family be willing to give up $10,000, $15,000, or $20,000 of income just so politicians could spend an extra $2,000 per household?
