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Friday, August 24, 2012

Lid Blowing Off Romney Tax Secrecy

Gawker (via Eman at Daily Kos) dropped a bombshell yesterday when it released over 950 pages of confidential documents from 21 Bain Capital-related investment vehicles, all of which Mitt or Ann Romney invested in. It made all 48 documents into a single searchable one here so that others could take a look and see what nuggets it might contain.

Romney previously claimed that his Cayman Island funds had to be located there in order to attract foreign investors, who invested via the Caymans so they would not be subject to U.S. taxes on their earnings, and that he did not reduce his tax bill as a result of his Cayman holdings. The newly released documents confirm that among these 21 funds, two set up a total of five so-called "blocker corporations" which allow U.S. non-profit entities to legally pretend to be foreign (i.e., Cayman) corporations in order to avoid the 35% "unrelated business income tax, which was created to prevent nonprofit groups from undertaking profit-making ventures that compete with taxpaying companies," as the New York Times reports. The still-unanswered question is whether Romney's huge 401-k, valued between $20 million and $102 million on financial disclosure forms, is one of the entities that invested in a blocker corporation, which would then refute Romney's assertion that his Cayman investments had not reduced his tax.

The two Bain funds with blocker corporations are Bain Capital Asia Fund LP (mentioned in the Times article; 3blockers) and Bain Capital IX Coinvestment Fund (2 blockers).

A second issue that has been raised is that various Bain entities converted management fees to carried interest (via Ryan Grim). While people know that the carried interest loophole (which makes management compensation into capital gains) exists and is legal, the issue raised by Professor Victor Fleischer of University of Colorado Law School is that private equity firms have come up with a way to make fees that are unarguably management fees subject to ordinary income (35% tax) into capital gains (15% tax) by "waiving" the fees in exchange for virtually certain future profit, so that the extremely slight economic risk is disproportionately small compared to the tax gain. Fleischer argues that this is flat out illegal and concludes: "Mitt Romney has not paid all the taxes required under law." Not all experts agree. We can look forward to more argument on this issue in coming days. Even if it is legal, it is morally even less defensible than the carried interest loophole.

In the end, we are still left with the fact that the tax system for the 1% is different from that for the rest of us.  Whether Romney releases more tax returns or not, that issue is not going away. And the drip, drip, drip of new information makes me think he will eventually cave in.

Cross-posted with Angry Bear.

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Is the Growth of Manufacturing Production a Mirage?

A lot of people lament the decline in manufacturing employment, which has fallen by about 1/3 since 2000. As Upjohn Institute economist Susan Houseman points out in the linked article, we're talking about 5.5 million lost manufacturing jobs in that time frame. Here's what it looks like in long perspective


Instead of recovering as it did in previous recessions, after the 2001 recession manufacturing employment continued to fall, as Houseman points out.

But a number of commentators, including Matthew Yglesias and some more conservative ones cited by Houseman, have argued that what we really ought to be looking at is manufacturing output, which has risen steadily except for small blips during recessions.


What's wrong with needing fewer people in manufacturing due to greatly increased productivity?

Houseman argues that the increased productivity is a mirage, due to a single industry, computers. She writes:
Real value added in the computer industry grew at a staggering rate of 22 percent per year from 1997 to 2007 and 16 percent per year from 2000 to 2010. In contrast, average growth of real value added in the rest of manufacturing was just 1.2 percent per year from 1997 to 2007; real value added in the rest of manufacturing was actually about 6 percent lower in 2010 than at the start of the decade.
With that kind of growth, many multiples of GDP growth, we must be an export powerhouse in computers and electronics, right? (Insert joke here.)*

Of course we aren't, so where does that gigantic growth rate come from? If you remember the debates over inflation that gave us the Boskin Commission, you will recall that one of its criticisms of Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index (CPI) data was it did not adequately account for improvements in quality over time. Houseman argues that the huge increases in computer power and semiconductor processing speed are what are beneath the apparently massive growth in productivity in the industry. In other words, the price deflators used to calculate real growth are the real reason productivity is apparently growing so rapidly in computers.

If Houseman is right, it means that falling manufacturing employment really is a problem; we have not become so productive that we simply need fewer manufacturing workers. And the fact that productivity is growing by leaps and bounds, yet our trade deficit in electronics keeps getting worse, seems to me to be strong evidence that she is on to something.


* From the Austin Lounge Lizards song, "The Drugs I Need."

Cross-posted with Angry Bear.