Remember Iceland? During the high-flying early 2000s, its three main banks went berserk, paying high interest rates to international investors that accumulated deposits equal to more than 100% of the country's gross domestic product (GDP) and making loans equal to 980% of GDP. When the collapse came, Iceland took a route not taken by Ireland, Spain, and other EU countries: Rather than bail out the banks, the government simply let them go bankrupt. The value of the krona fell by about half, the country was embroiled in disputes with the Netherlands and the United Kingdom over paying off Dutch and British depositors, and it had to take an International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan just to stay afloat.
When we last checked in, there were indictments and criminal investigations of the officers of all three banks, and Icelandic banks were forced to forgive all mortgage debt in excess of 110% of a home's value. Iceland's 2012 unemployment rate was 6.0% compared to Ireland's 14.7%. But that was two years ago; what's happening now?
In December 2013, four top officials of the country's formerly largest bank, Kaupthing, were sentenced to jail terms ranging from five and a half years for its chief executive to three years for one of the majority owners. While their cases are currently under appeal, they were indicted this July for further fraud charges. Various bank and government officials have had final convictions as determined by the Supreme Court of Iceland; Wikipedia has a handy rundown on where numerous cases stand, all based on Icelandic-language sources so I cannot read them myself.
Homeowners are still in difficulty in Iceland, however. This is because mortgages in Iceland are usually indexed to the inflation rate; that is, the amount of principal is increased by the rate of inflation. Iceland's inflation rate was 5.2% in 2012 and 3.9% in 2013, while Ireland's inflation was 1.7% in 2012 and a near-deflation 0.5% in 2013. That is a pretty hefty load for Icelandic homeowners. The current conservative government has instituted a new round of mortgage relief, but there are a lot of devils in the details. Almost half of the "relief" comes in the form of people being allowed to use their retirement savings (which are tax-advantaged like U.S. individual retirement accounts) to pay down their debt. Yeah, it's great to pay your mortgage with pre-tax dollars, but it's still your own money you're paying, which will no longer be available for retirement. The IMF has raised doubts about the plan's overall effect on government finances, too.
As I mentioned in my last post, unemployment in Iceland stood at 4.4% in July, versus 11.5% in Ireland (navigate to Labour Force Statistics, then Short-term Statistics, Short-term Labour Market Statistics, then Harmonised Unemployment Rates). And, as I also mentioned in the post, Ireland's unemployment rate has been artificially lowered due to net emigration from the country.
While Iceland suffered a great deal from the crisis and is by no means out of the woods, it looks like the country made the right call by not bailing out the banks. The economy is growing and unemployment is down to less than half of its peak crisis level. As Paul Krugman has emphasized, having your own currency to devalue helps as well, although it substantially raised inflation and mortgage balances. Iceland was dealt a bad hand by its bankers, but it's making at least some of them pay for that, which is more than we can say in the United States.
Cross-posted at Angry Bear.
Thursday, September 25, 2014
Saturday, September 20, 2014
Irish Austerity Exodus Lingers On
August brings us the annual Irish immigration data, so it's time to look at what has happened in their statistical reporting "year" that ended in April 2014. While better than last year, it's still not pretty.
According to the Central Statistics Office, net emigration continued in 2013-14, with net emigration of 21,400. a decline of just over 1/3 compared to net emigration of 33,100 in 2012-13. Of the new total, once again, the Irish themselves accounted for over 100% of the net departures, with 29,200 more Irish nationals leaving the country than returning.
This continued out-migration continues to diminish any published improvements in Irish employment numbers and unemployment rate. In the year to the second quarter of 2014 (the closest quarter to April 2014 immigration figures), employment increased to 1,901,600, a rise of 31,600 over a year previous. Unemployment fell by even more, 46,200, in the year to Q2 2014. So, while there is definite improvement even accounting for emigration, Ireland is nowhere near back to its peak 2007 employment figure of about 2.15 million. So employment is still 11.6% below its peak.
In Iceland (create a custom table here), by contrast, despite (but also in part because of of) the almost 50% decline in the value of the kronor, the sharp dip in unemployment has been almost completely erased, with July 2014's value of 179,000 employed being a mere 1.7% below May 2008's maximum of 182,100. Indeed, Iceland's unemployment rate has fallen to a mere 4.4% in July 2014, compared with 6.2% in the United States -- and 11.5% in Ireland.
So the lesson, if I have haven't pounded it into your head enough already, is that Ireland's austerity measures are not paying off, as it has failed to regain its pre-crisis employment level and has seen its unemployment rate fall only by reverting to its historical solution of exporting people, as in the 1980s.
Cross-posted at Angry Bear.
According to the Central Statistics Office, net emigration continued in 2013-14, with net emigration of 21,400. a decline of just over 1/3 compared to net emigration of 33,100 in 2012-13. Of the new total, once again, the Irish themselves accounted for over 100% of the net departures, with 29,200 more Irish nationals leaving the country than returning.
This continued out-migration continues to diminish any published improvements in Irish employment numbers and unemployment rate. In the year to the second quarter of 2014 (the closest quarter to April 2014 immigration figures), employment increased to 1,901,600, a rise of 31,600 over a year previous. Unemployment fell by even more, 46,200, in the year to Q2 2014. So, while there is definite improvement even accounting for emigration, Ireland is nowhere near back to its peak 2007 employment figure of about 2.15 million. So employment is still 11.6% below its peak.
In Iceland (create a custom table here), by contrast, despite (but also in part because of of) the almost 50% decline in the value of the kronor, the sharp dip in unemployment has been almost completely erased, with July 2014's value of 179,000 employed being a mere 1.7% below May 2008's maximum of 182,100. Indeed, Iceland's unemployment rate has fallen to a mere 4.4% in July 2014, compared with 6.2% in the United States -- and 11.5% in Ireland.
So the lesson, if I have haven't pounded it into your head enough already, is that Ireland's austerity measures are not paying off, as it has failed to regain its pre-crisis employment level and has seen its unemployment rate fall only by reverting to its historical solution of exporting people, as in the 1980s.
Cross-posted at Angry Bear.
Tuesday, September 16, 2014
Tesla Deal Even Worse Than First Thought
Via an email from Greg LeRoy of Good Jobs First, we learn that the Tesla deal, as enacted by the Nevada Legislature, is even worse than announced. Aside from the widely touted 6500 jobs only being 6000 jobs for which the state is paying for, it turns out that Tesla doesn't even have to create the jobs itself!
You read that right. Tesla gets to receive tax credits for investment and job creation not only for itself, but for any of its suppliers ("participants," in the law's language) that locate on the project's huge location. Theoretically, Telsa does not even have to create half the jobs for which it will receive subsidies.
Why does this matter? Isn't Tesla still responsible for bringing all those jobs (assuming they all come, which Richard Florida doubts) to Nevada? Yes, but it tells us that all the figures bandied about for indirect and induced jobs are just malarkey. The state claims that there will be a total of 22,000 jobs ultimately due to the project, but that depends on Tesla itself creating 6500 jobs. If the state is instead paying for some of the indirect jobs it claims would be due to the project, it is admitting that the Tesla base of direct jobs is smaller than 6000; therefore, 22,000 jobs would no longer be supported (assuming you buy into that methodology in the first place, which you shouldn't). These multipliers are easily manipulated, and we have just gotten an object lesson in how to do that.
Amazingly, the media is not paying much attention. As far as I can tell from searching the Web and the premium Nexis news service, the only place that has picked up LeRoy's statement is the Las Vegas Sun's blog. Really, this is no time for the media to be letting us down!
I encourage you to check the link to the legislation above. It is a sight to behold, and proof once again that bad economic deals are a dime a dozen, leaving the average taxpayer to pick up the slack.
Cross-posted at Angry Bear.
You read that right. Tesla gets to receive tax credits for investment and job creation not only for itself, but for any of its suppliers ("participants," in the law's language) that locate on the project's huge location. Theoretically, Telsa does not even have to create half the jobs for which it will receive subsidies.
Why does this matter? Isn't Tesla still responsible for bringing all those jobs (assuming they all come, which Richard Florida doubts) to Nevada? Yes, but it tells us that all the figures bandied about for indirect and induced jobs are just malarkey. The state claims that there will be a total of 22,000 jobs ultimately due to the project, but that depends on Tesla itself creating 6500 jobs. If the state is instead paying for some of the indirect jobs it claims would be due to the project, it is admitting that the Tesla base of direct jobs is smaller than 6000; therefore, 22,000 jobs would no longer be supported (assuming you buy into that methodology in the first place, which you shouldn't). These multipliers are easily manipulated, and we have just gotten an object lesson in how to do that.
Amazingly, the media is not paying much attention. As far as I can tell from searching the Web and the premium Nexis news service, the only place that has picked up LeRoy's statement is the Las Vegas Sun's blog. Really, this is no time for the media to be letting us down!
I encourage you to check the link to the legislation above. It is a sight to behold, and proof once again that bad economic deals are a dime a dozen, leaving the average taxpayer to pick up the slack.
Cross-posted at Angry Bear.
Wednesday, September 10, 2014
Understanding Piketty, part 5 (conclusion)
Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century is the first book to make a data-driven examination of economic inequality. Based on hundreds of years worth of data, it attempts to determine the long-term trends in inequality and the social and political consequences that follow from them.
In this final post, I want to highlight the most important points of the book, including a few I have not yet discussed. Beyond that, I want to consider parts of the book that are perhaps a bit less persuasive.
First of all, the data has been almost unchallenged. The one person who claimed substantial flaws in it, Chris Giles of the Financial Times, is road kill.
Second, three major results emerge from the data bringing dearly-held economists' views into question. A) There is no Kuznets Curve: Developed countries do not keep getting more equal; rather, the data show that they have become less equal since about 1980. B) There is no fixed share for capital and labor income, as assumed by the Cobb-Douglas production function: Capital's share of national income has risen since 1975. C) Franco Modigliani's view that most savings was for retirement, not inheritance, is wrong. Depending on the country, no more than 20% of private wealth is in the form of annuitized wealth that ends at death.
Third, the big theoretical payoff is that some economists' happy stories about how everyone earns their marginal productivity are simply incorrect. These bedtime stories may make the rich feel like their high incomes and wealth are deserved. The fact of the matter, though, is that high incomes are not the result of merit but of bargaining power. The increase of capital mobility since the 1970s is one element in disciplining labor, while the reduction in the top income tax rate gave top corporate executives more incentive to push for large wage increases and exploit the large uncertainty regarding their individual contribution to corporate success.
Fourth and most obviously, r>g* is no historical necessity, but it has held true virtually everywhere for all of human history. As long as it is true, there is a tendency for inequality to worsen.
Moving on to aspects of the book I have not previously covered, one discussion that stood out was Piketty's discussion of the weakness of measures of gross domestic product (p. 92). In particular, he notes that there are no good quality measures for adjusting GDP:
As I discussed before, Piketty advocates a global annual tax on wealth as the solution to the problem of inequality. However, he relegates an alternative global tax, on financial transactions, to a single paragraph plus a single footnote. He claims that an FTT would "dry up" "high frequency transactions," and for that reason would not raise much revenue. Of course, this would depend on which transactions are taxed (James Tobin had originally proposed taxing foreign exchange transactions) and what the tax rate is. A balance can be struck between "throwing sand in the wheels," as Tobin described it, and raising revenue. Contra Piketty, I don't think it is something that can be rejected out of hand, and I plan to discuss an FTT more fully in the future.
So what's wrong with the book? Honestly, not much. I mentioned before that I wasn't fully persuaded by Piketty's evidence that bigger fortunes necessarily earn higher rates of return. However, this is not a big issue, especially as the claim does seem fairly plausible.
At times, however, Piketty's political arguments seem almost ad hoc. He attributes (p. 509) the rise of Reaganism and Thatcherism in part to a feeling people had that other countries were catching up to them. He presents no evidence for this claim, which does not strike me as particularly plausible. Similarly, he lectures the leaders of large EU countries (p. 523) for their failure to align taxation among the Member States, rejecting their leaders' point that EU institutions (unanimity is required for changes affecting direct taxation) and other Member States (read: Ireland) can block fiscal coordination indefinitely. But it's true! It's right there in the Treaty! So he's a little too glib about politics for my tastes; but then, I'm a political scientist, so perhaps I'm not the most neutral of sources.
Bottom line: You've already bought the book, so take it off the coffee table and read it! It may take you a few weeks, or a few months, but you'll be glad you did.
* r>g means that the rate of return on investment, r, is greater than an economy's growth rate, g.
Cross-posted at Angry Bear.
In this final post, I want to highlight the most important points of the book, including a few I have not yet discussed. Beyond that, I want to consider parts of the book that are perhaps a bit less persuasive.
First of all, the data has been almost unchallenged. The one person who claimed substantial flaws in it, Chris Giles of the Financial Times, is road kill.
Second, three major results emerge from the data bringing dearly-held economists' views into question. A) There is no Kuznets Curve: Developed countries do not keep getting more equal; rather, the data show that they have become less equal since about 1980. B) There is no fixed share for capital and labor income, as assumed by the Cobb-Douglas production function: Capital's share of national income has risen since 1975. C) Franco Modigliani's view that most savings was for retirement, not inheritance, is wrong. Depending on the country, no more than 20% of private wealth is in the form of annuitized wealth that ends at death.
Third, the big theoretical payoff is that some economists' happy stories about how everyone earns their marginal productivity are simply incorrect. These bedtime stories may make the rich feel like their high incomes and wealth are deserved. The fact of the matter, though, is that high incomes are not the result of merit but of bargaining power. The increase of capital mobility since the 1970s is one element in disciplining labor, while the reduction in the top income tax rate gave top corporate executives more incentive to push for large wage increases and exploit the large uncertainty regarding their individual contribution to corporate success.
Fourth and most obviously, r>g* is no historical necessity, but it has held true virtually everywhere for all of human history. As long as it is true, there is a tendency for inequality to worsen.
Moving on to aspects of the book I have not previously covered, one discussion that stood out was Piketty's discussion of the weakness of measures of gross domestic product (p. 92). In particular, he notes that there are no good quality measures for adjusting GDP:
For example, if a private health insurance system costs more than a public system but does not yield truly superior quality (as a comparison of the United States and Europe suggests), then GDP will be artificially overvalued in countries that rely mainly on private insurance.Parenthetically, it seems to me that any high-cost low-quality system would overstate GDP, whether it's private or public. But the point to remember is that we are talking big bucks here: if the United States were spending merely what the #2 country (Netherlands, in terms of percent of GDP) does, we would be spending almost $1 trillion less, so presumably this means U.S. GDP is overstated by $1 trillion. That's still a lot of money!
As I discussed before, Piketty advocates a global annual tax on wealth as the solution to the problem of inequality. However, he relegates an alternative global tax, on financial transactions, to a single paragraph plus a single footnote. He claims that an FTT would "dry up" "high frequency transactions," and for that reason would not raise much revenue. Of course, this would depend on which transactions are taxed (James Tobin had originally proposed taxing foreign exchange transactions) and what the tax rate is. A balance can be struck between "throwing sand in the wheels," as Tobin described it, and raising revenue. Contra Piketty, I don't think it is something that can be rejected out of hand, and I plan to discuss an FTT more fully in the future.
So what's wrong with the book? Honestly, not much. I mentioned before that I wasn't fully persuaded by Piketty's evidence that bigger fortunes necessarily earn higher rates of return. However, this is not a big issue, especially as the claim does seem fairly plausible.
At times, however, Piketty's political arguments seem almost ad hoc. He attributes (p. 509) the rise of Reaganism and Thatcherism in part to a feeling people had that other countries were catching up to them. He presents no evidence for this claim, which does not strike me as particularly plausible. Similarly, he lectures the leaders of large EU countries (p. 523) for their failure to align taxation among the Member States, rejecting their leaders' point that EU institutions (unanimity is required for changes affecting direct taxation) and other Member States (read: Ireland) can block fiscal coordination indefinitely. But it's true! It's right there in the Treaty! So he's a little too glib about politics for my tastes; but then, I'm a political scientist, so perhaps I'm not the most neutral of sources.
Bottom line: You've already bought the book, so take it off the coffee table and read it! It may take you a few weeks, or a few months, but you'll be glad you did.
* r>g means that the rate of return on investment, r, is greater than an economy's growth rate, g.
Cross-posted at Angry Bear.
Friday, September 5, 2014
Nevada is Biggest Loser of Tesla Auction UPDATED
On September 4, Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval announced that electric car-maker Tesla had chosen Nevada for the location of its much sought-after Gigafactory. Contrary to its claim that it wanted $500 million, Tesla in fact wanted speed plus the highest bidder. As I analyzed last month, a $500 million subsidy would have been relatively low as measured by the benchmarks of cost per job and aid intensity (subsidy divided by investment).
Instead, Nevada gave Tesla subsides worth $1.25 billion over 20 years. This is not a good deal, as I will detail below.
First, of course the cost was far higher than Tesla had hinted; it clearly was just trying to squeeze extra incentives out of the "winner" by conducting a five-state auction. Using a discount rate of 2.5% (the 10-year Treasury bond yield on Sept. 4 was 2.45%) the $1.25 billion in nominal value has a present value of about $1.1 billion, by my calculations. In fact, it is probably quite close to the full $1.25 billion because the sales tax breaks based on the actual investment in plant and equipment will be heavily front-loaded, not spread evenly over the 20-year period.
According to the Reno Gazette-Journal article linked above, the incentives break down as follows:
$725 million in sales tax abatements over 20 years
$332 million in property tax abatements over 10 years
$120 million in investment tax credits
$75 million in job creation tax credits for up to 6000 (note: not 6500) jobs
$27 million in a 10-year business tax abatement
$8 million in discounted electricity rates for 8 years
Note by the way that we should, in this instance, count the sales tax breaks as a subsidy. Because Nevada does not have either personal or corporate income tax, sales tax becomes more important to the state, though of course not as much as for a state lacking Nevada's taxes on gambling revenue. More specifically, though, this is for sales of plant and equipment to be used in the factory, so it is directly tied to the investment.
Second as pointed out to me by Richard Florida in a draft article for CityLab, while these jobs pay $25 per hour, the facility will be relatively self-contained, and will not create spinoff jobs on the scale that, for example, an automobile assembly facility does. Tesla's research and development will still be conducted at its headquarters in Palo Alto, California, not at the Gigafactory. One way we can tell: Tesla is giving a whopping $1 million to the University of Nevada-Las Vegas for research on batteries. (Professor Florida's excellent article is here.)
In terms of our usual metrics, a $1.1 billion subsidy for a $5 billion investment is 22% aid intensity, certainly not Boeing territory but higher than would be allowed in the European Union. It is lower than the typical U.S. auto assembly plant aid intensity of about 33%. However, the cost per job is $183,333, about 20% higher than an auto plant typically receives in the United States, for a project that is not as good as an auto plant. Thus, while it is hardly the worst deal we've seen, the incentive package is far too high for what the state is getting.
Moreover, this is quite a risky deal, too. As the Reno Gazette-Journal points out, this incentive package is 13 times larger than Nevada's previous biggest incentive, a mere $89 million for Apple. Talk about putting all your eggs in one basket!
Finally, we should note that if the Tesla project is successful, it will mean that we will see job losses at competing facilities (mainly engine plants) elsewhere in the country, so that national net job creation will be less than 6500. This will raise the true cost per job of the project.
Thus, we see yet another bad incentive deal, but at a much larger scale than usual. The package does need legislative approval, so it's not quite a done deal. But assuming it passes, Nevada taxpayers will take on a tremendous burden to lighten CEO Elon Musk's load.
Cross-posted at Angry Bear.
Instead, Nevada gave Tesla subsides worth $1.25 billion over 20 years. This is not a good deal, as I will detail below.
First, of course the cost was far higher than Tesla had hinted; it clearly was just trying to squeeze extra incentives out of the "winner" by conducting a five-state auction. Using a discount rate of 2.5% (the 10-year Treasury bond yield on Sept. 4 was 2.45%) the $1.25 billion in nominal value has a present value of about $1.1 billion, by my calculations. In fact, it is probably quite close to the full $1.25 billion because the sales tax breaks based on the actual investment in plant and equipment will be heavily front-loaded, not spread evenly over the 20-year period.
According to the Reno Gazette-Journal article linked above, the incentives break down as follows:
$725 million in sales tax abatements over 20 years
$332 million in property tax abatements over 10 years
$120 million in investment tax credits
$75 million in job creation tax credits for up to 6000 (note: not 6500) jobs
$27 million in a 10-year business tax abatement
$8 million in discounted electricity rates for 8 years
Note by the way that we should, in this instance, count the sales tax breaks as a subsidy. Because Nevada does not have either personal or corporate income tax, sales tax becomes more important to the state, though of course not as much as for a state lacking Nevada's taxes on gambling revenue. More specifically, though, this is for sales of plant and equipment to be used in the factory, so it is directly tied to the investment.
Second as pointed out to me by Richard Florida in a draft article for CityLab, while these jobs pay $25 per hour, the facility will be relatively self-contained, and will not create spinoff jobs on the scale that, for example, an automobile assembly facility does. Tesla's research and development will still be conducted at its headquarters in Palo Alto, California, not at the Gigafactory. One way we can tell: Tesla is giving a whopping $1 million to the University of Nevada-Las Vegas for research on batteries. (Professor Florida's excellent article is here.)
In terms of our usual metrics, a $1.1 billion subsidy for a $5 billion investment is 22% aid intensity, certainly not Boeing territory but higher than would be allowed in the European Union. It is lower than the typical U.S. auto assembly plant aid intensity of about 33%. However, the cost per job is $183,333, about 20% higher than an auto plant typically receives in the United States, for a project that is not as good as an auto plant. Thus, while it is hardly the worst deal we've seen, the incentive package is far too high for what the state is getting.
Moreover, this is quite a risky deal, too. As the Reno Gazette-Journal points out, this incentive package is 13 times larger than Nevada's previous biggest incentive, a mere $89 million for Apple. Talk about putting all your eggs in one basket!
Finally, we should note that if the Tesla project is successful, it will mean that we will see job losses at competing facilities (mainly engine plants) elsewhere in the country, so that national net job creation will be less than 6500. This will raise the true cost per job of the project.
Thus, we see yet another bad incentive deal, but at a much larger scale than usual. The package does need legislative approval, so it's not quite a done deal. But assuming it passes, Nevada taxpayers will take on a tremendous burden to lighten CEO Elon Musk's load.
Cross-posted at Angry Bear.
Thursday, August 28, 2014
Chess Break
I am playing in a strong chess tournament, so no posts until after Labor Day. Have a great holiday weekend!
Understanding Piketty, part 4
We now come to the exciting conclusion of Thomas Piketty's monumental work, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. This is not an exaggeration: the final part of the book contains findings that I consider to be simply bombshells in their significance.
In Part 4, "Regulating Capital in the Twenty-First Century," Piketty calls for a new "social state" for the new century, as well as a new way of taxing, a progressive tax on capital. Highlighting the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and Sweden as representative, he shows that all followed similar trends in taxation. Until World War I, all four collected less than 10% of gross national income in taxes. By 1980, the figures had increased to levels ranging from about 30% in the United States to 55% in Sweden. Since 1980, those levels are essentially unchanged.
As discussed by Alan Krueger, countries with high inequality tend to have lower inter-generational income mobility. This holds true in particular for the United States. In fact, Piketty says "the most firmly established result" of research on this question is that the U.S. has the highest correlation of income from one generation to the next (lowest mobility), and the Nordic countries the lowest correlation (highest mobility). The fable often told by conservatives that "we may have inequality, but that changes over generations" is not true today and, more surprisingly, was not true in the twentieth century when the U.S. had lower inequality than Europe.
One reason for this lack of mobility could be the high cost of college, especially among top schools. According to the Harvard financial aid website, tuition and fees come to $43,938 per year. Piketty estimates that the average (mean) income of Harvard students' parents is $450,000 per year, which is enough to put you in the top 2% of U.S. incomes. Harvard notes that ">70% of our students receive some form of aid," which isn't surprising when you run the cost calculator. A family of three with just the one child going to Harvard can receive financial aid even with an annual income of $240,000.
While I have written before about the coming retirement crisis, Piketty points out that it's not just the United States where Social Security is the only thing standing between seniors and poverty. He writes (p. 478), "in all the rich countries, public pensions are the main source of income for at least two-thirds of retirees (and generally three-quarters)." Ending senior poverty which, as he says, was "endemic as recently as the 1950s," is the third main outcome of the expansion of the social state (after education and health expenditures). As I've said before, we need to keep senior poverty from reappearing.
Piketty considers the future of pensions in a low-growth environment. He notes that in pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) systems, such as Social Security was before the creation of the Trust Fund in the 1980s, "the rate of return is by definition equal to the growth rate of the economy." Thus, he says, it would be wise to promote rising wages, for example through increased education funding and even policies to increase the birth rate (pp. 487-88). When r>g, however, it seems logical that money for future pensions should be invested to take advantage of the higher return on investment. That was one of the arguments for privatizing Social Security. However, transitioning to a PAYGO system runs into the huge problem that "an entire generation of retirees is left with nothing." Of course, this is exactly what has happened in the United States and why we are looking at a looming middle class retirement crisis. However, it has not taken place in the Social Security system, but in the area of private pensions. That is, while public pensions in continental Europe equal 12-13% of national income (p. 478), they are only 7-8% in the United States so, traditionally, private pensions picked up the slack. But we now face a situation where 49% of private-sector workers have no pension at all, 31% have been stuck with a defined-contribution plan (401-k, 403-b, etc.), and only 20% have a true pension. Since the 1980s, workers have been transitioned off of defined-benefit pensions and on to -- nothing! Well, almost nothing, as we can see from the $6.6 trillion shortfall between what people need to maintain their current standard of living and what they've actually saved for retirement.
Moreover, investment-based systems suffer from having much higher variance in their returns, a problem that is magnified when investment accounts are individual rather than collective, i.e. as with the Trust Fund. Indeed, as Piketty says, "the rate of wage growth may be less than the rate of return on capital, but the former is 5-10 times less volatile than the latter." This is especially a problem, I would argue, when the level of retirement benefits is low relative to pre-retirement income, as it is in the United Kingdom and the United States. Piketty's preferred solution is to keep PAYGO pensions, but supplement them with guaranteed rates of return for small savers that are closer to r than to g. However, this may have problems of its own. First, where will lower-income people get the money to save in the first place, with falling real wages and all? Second, how will government finance the guarantee in a way that is cheaper than just expanding Social Security? Expanding Social Security has the advantage of shielding individuals from the volatility of the market (and the fact that small investors earn lower rates of return than large investors) while offering a risk-free return (the Trust Fund is invested in Treasury bonds).
Piketty next turns to the progressive income tax, which he calls "the major twentieth-century innovation in taxation" (p. 493). However, in the twenty-first century, it faces two related challenges. First, it is being undermined by international tax competition, including from tax havens. Second, at the very top of the income hierarchy, the income tax is turning regressive, i.e., having lower rates than for those further down the income scale. This is the point Warren Buffett refers to when decrying the fact that he pays taxes at a lower rate than his secretary.
Piketty argues that one reason the progressive income tax is coming under intellectual attack today is that it was adopted chaotically, without time for all its implications to be debated. The tax, he says, "was as much a product of the two world wars as it was of democracy" (p. 498). That is, while many countries had adopted income taxes before World War I, it is only in the aftermath of the war that the top tax rate in major countries exploded. For example, the U.S. top marginal rate went from 7% in 1915 to 77% in 1918. In the United Kingdom, it went from 8% to 60%; in Germany from 4% to 40%, and in France, from 2% to 50%, all in the space of a few years.
Indeed, in both income and estate taxation, the United States was a leader with high rates. Piketty points out that the top marginal rate in the U.S. averaged 81% for the 48-year period from 1932 to 1980. While Britain had similar rates over a long period of time, no other European country did.
Okay, now for the bombshells. As you probably know, top marginal tax rates fell after 1980 everywhere among developed OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) member countries. This seems to have increased the incentive for high earners to increase their compensation. In fact, in all 18 countries in the World Top Incomes Database, "the two phenomena are perfectly correlated: the countries with the largest decreases in their top tax rates are also the countries where the top earners' share of national income has increased the most (especially when it comes to the remuneration of executives of large firms)" (p. 509).
Having the incentive to try for bigger pay raises, managers took advantage of the fact that "it is objectively difficult to measure individual contributions to a firm's output" and persuaded their employers to give them big raises, often helped by the fact that their compensation committees were composed of people like themselves. So, Piketty says, it is really a question of bargaining power at the top (and don't forget that he already told us that there is no correlation between executive compensation and firm performance).
Not only did the countries with the biggest cuts in their top marginal tax rate see the greatest increases in top income shares, but at the same time they did not show any greater increase in productivity growth. So top managers were not creating some generalized increase in productivity that they had some kind of moral claim to. In fact, as Piketty points out, productivity growth was 2.3% annually from 1950-1970 but only 1.4% per year in 1990-2010. Yet it is the latter period in which executive pay mushroomed, not the former.
You can probably see where this is going. The entire idea that people's pay level is based on their marginal productivity, such that they "merit" the incomes they earn, is bunk. It is innately hard to measure marginal productivity, and some people have more bargaining power than others (not to mention greater incentives to bargain hard) for reasons that have nothing to do with productivity. In fact, Piketty, Saez, and Stantcheva found that executive could achieve big raises without great performance most easily in countries with the lowest top marginal tax rate. Thus, the theoretical edifice for the claim that inequality is "fair" collapses.
What can counter the massive increase in incomes at the very top of the distribution? If we stick with income tax, Piketty says that the optimal top marginal rate in the United States is 82% (p. 512). This would apply to the top 0.5% or top 1% of incomes only. This would not affect productivity because it would largely wipe out some economically useless activities. Because those activities would disappear, a tax that high would not raise much revenue. If the United States wanted to raise revenue, Piketty suggests a marginal tax rate of 50-60% on incomes in the top 5%. It's important to note that while the United States could do this because it is the world's largest national economy, it is not possible for European countries unless they achieve fiscal coordination. This is extremely difficult due to EU rules requiring unanimity on votes affecting direct taxation (personal and corporate income tax).
The ideal solution, he argues, would be a global tax on capital plus "a very high level of international financial transparency" (p. 515). Piketty recognizes that this is infeasible right now, although he says it might be possible "incrementally," at the European level, for example (which would still run up against EU voting rules). He argues, though, that the alternative could well be worse: If people view inequality to have reached unacceptable levels, the response might be a breakdown of the global economy via widespread protectionism. (I offer a similar argument at the end of Competing for Capital.) A tax on capital allows high levels of trade to continue while directly addressing the problem of inequality.
One important element of achieving international financial transparency is shutting down bank secrecy. For Piketty, without solid information on inequality (and hence on individuals' ownership of capital), it is impossible to have a democratic debate about the type of taxation and government services that individuals want. Tax havens and their defenders will whine about this being an intrusion on people's privacy, but Piketty's response is compelling (p. 522):
Piketty argues that we should not rely solely on an income tax. The fact of the matter is that capital ownership generates much economic income (such as capital gains) that doesn't have to be declared year-to-year. As a result, income tax filings grossly understate rich people's true income. This means that the problem of tax regressivity at the top is even worse than he discussed under the income tax. He goes back to the example of L'Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt. Her wealth exceeds €30 billion, and her rate of return is somewhere between 6% and 7% a year (€1.8-€2.1 billion in economic income). Yet she herself has said that she has never declared more than €5 million per year in income. Even if she's paying 50% of this figure in income taxes (France's top bracket is currently 53%), that €2.5 million is barely 0.1% of her economic income. It is hard to get taxation more regressive than that.
Not only would a tax on capital create financial transparency while raising a modest amount of revenue (Piketty envisions 2% of European GDP), but Piketty argues that an extraordinary tax on capital on the order of 15% could wipe out Europe's current debt problems. As he says (p. 540), "From the standpoint of the general interest, it is normally preferable to tax the wealthy rather than borrow from them." The alternatives are inflation, which governments have frequently used, and austerity, which Europe is currently using with predictably bad results. Moreover, he says, it is possible to get more precise targeting of the distributional consequences you want with a wealth tax than with debt repudiation or inflation.
I mentioned before that Piketty believes that the United States is large enough by itself to levy an 82% top income tax rate, whereas Europe isn't. The same is true, in his view, on a capital tax (he also thinks China might be able to effectively tax capital). Europe's problem is that tax competition is particularly intense, a problem he lays at the feet of the smaller economies, particularly Ireland (no surprise there). Piketty sees the creation of fiscal union (with EU-wide corporate income taxes apportioned to each country by formula) as no more utopian than the idea of creating the euro. Indeed, he seems to think that political union is ultimately necessary to end destructive tax competition, though he is pleasantly surprised at the traction gained for instituting a European financial transaction tax. He proposes a "budgetary parliament" for the Eurozone that could make democratic decisions on fiscal matters, and argues that it should not be bound by any fixed rules limiting deficits or debt -- which will be nearly impossible to get Germany to agree to.
He concludes by reminding us that we cannot escape the possibly infinite concentration of capital that follows from r>g unless governments take proactive policies, most importantly an annual progressive tax on capital. The inequality r>g does not follow from market imperfections, so it cannot be solved simply by making markets more competitive. While he acknowledges that there is a real risk that increased European integration could lead to the shriveling of the social states constructed in each nation, the problem is that this is inevitable in the absence of creating a political entity large enough to regulate capitalism. "If we are to regain control over capitalism, we must bet everything on democracy -- and in Europe, democracy on a European scale."
For those of us in the United States, we already have a political entity big enough to battle the pressures for greater inequality. But of course we have numerous obstacles in our way as great wealth buys high levels of political influence, especially in the Citizens United era.
My next post will provide a summary and critique of the book.
Cross-posted at Angry Bear.
In Part 4, "Regulating Capital in the Twenty-First Century," Piketty calls for a new "social state" for the new century, as well as a new way of taxing, a progressive tax on capital. Highlighting the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and Sweden as representative, he shows that all followed similar trends in taxation. Until World War I, all four collected less than 10% of gross national income in taxes. By 1980, the figures had increased to levels ranging from about 30% in the United States to 55% in Sweden. Since 1980, those levels are essentially unchanged.
As discussed by Alan Krueger, countries with high inequality tend to have lower inter-generational income mobility. This holds true in particular for the United States. In fact, Piketty says "the most firmly established result" of research on this question is that the U.S. has the highest correlation of income from one generation to the next (lowest mobility), and the Nordic countries the lowest correlation (highest mobility). The fable often told by conservatives that "we may have inequality, but that changes over generations" is not true today and, more surprisingly, was not true in the twentieth century when the U.S. had lower inequality than Europe.
One reason for this lack of mobility could be the high cost of college, especially among top schools. According to the Harvard financial aid website, tuition and fees come to $43,938 per year. Piketty estimates that the average (mean) income of Harvard students' parents is $450,000 per year, which is enough to put you in the top 2% of U.S. incomes. Harvard notes that ">70% of our students receive some form of aid," which isn't surprising when you run the cost calculator. A family of three with just the one child going to Harvard can receive financial aid even with an annual income of $240,000.
While I have written before about the coming retirement crisis, Piketty points out that it's not just the United States where Social Security is the only thing standing between seniors and poverty. He writes (p. 478), "in all the rich countries, public pensions are the main source of income for at least two-thirds of retirees (and generally three-quarters)." Ending senior poverty which, as he says, was "endemic as recently as the 1950s," is the third main outcome of the expansion of the social state (after education and health expenditures). As I've said before, we need to keep senior poverty from reappearing.
Piketty considers the future of pensions in a low-growth environment. He notes that in pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) systems, such as Social Security was before the creation of the Trust Fund in the 1980s, "the rate of return is by definition equal to the growth rate of the economy." Thus, he says, it would be wise to promote rising wages, for example through increased education funding and even policies to increase the birth rate (pp. 487-88). When r>g, however, it seems logical that money for future pensions should be invested to take advantage of the higher return on investment. That was one of the arguments for privatizing Social Security. However, transitioning to a PAYGO system runs into the huge problem that "an entire generation of retirees is left with nothing." Of course, this is exactly what has happened in the United States and why we are looking at a looming middle class retirement crisis. However, it has not taken place in the Social Security system, but in the area of private pensions. That is, while public pensions in continental Europe equal 12-13% of national income (p. 478), they are only 7-8% in the United States so, traditionally, private pensions picked up the slack. But we now face a situation where 49% of private-sector workers have no pension at all, 31% have been stuck with a defined-contribution plan (401-k, 403-b, etc.), and only 20% have a true pension. Since the 1980s, workers have been transitioned off of defined-benefit pensions and on to -- nothing! Well, almost nothing, as we can see from the $6.6 trillion shortfall between what people need to maintain their current standard of living and what they've actually saved for retirement.
Moreover, investment-based systems suffer from having much higher variance in their returns, a problem that is magnified when investment accounts are individual rather than collective, i.e. as with the Trust Fund. Indeed, as Piketty says, "the rate of wage growth may be less than the rate of return on capital, but the former is 5-10 times less volatile than the latter." This is especially a problem, I would argue, when the level of retirement benefits is low relative to pre-retirement income, as it is in the United Kingdom and the United States. Piketty's preferred solution is to keep PAYGO pensions, but supplement them with guaranteed rates of return for small savers that are closer to r than to g. However, this may have problems of its own. First, where will lower-income people get the money to save in the first place, with falling real wages and all? Second, how will government finance the guarantee in a way that is cheaper than just expanding Social Security? Expanding Social Security has the advantage of shielding individuals from the volatility of the market (and the fact that small investors earn lower rates of return than large investors) while offering a risk-free return (the Trust Fund is invested in Treasury bonds).
Piketty next turns to the progressive income tax, which he calls "the major twentieth-century innovation in taxation" (p. 493). However, in the twenty-first century, it faces two related challenges. First, it is being undermined by international tax competition, including from tax havens. Second, at the very top of the income hierarchy, the income tax is turning regressive, i.e., having lower rates than for those further down the income scale. This is the point Warren Buffett refers to when decrying the fact that he pays taxes at a lower rate than his secretary.
Piketty argues that one reason the progressive income tax is coming under intellectual attack today is that it was adopted chaotically, without time for all its implications to be debated. The tax, he says, "was as much a product of the two world wars as it was of democracy" (p. 498). That is, while many countries had adopted income taxes before World War I, it is only in the aftermath of the war that the top tax rate in major countries exploded. For example, the U.S. top marginal rate went from 7% in 1915 to 77% in 1918. In the United Kingdom, it went from 8% to 60%; in Germany from 4% to 40%, and in France, from 2% to 50%, all in the space of a few years.
Indeed, in both income and estate taxation, the United States was a leader with high rates. Piketty points out that the top marginal rate in the U.S. averaged 81% for the 48-year period from 1932 to 1980. While Britain had similar rates over a long period of time, no other European country did.
Okay, now for the bombshells. As you probably know, top marginal tax rates fell after 1980 everywhere among developed OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) member countries. This seems to have increased the incentive for high earners to increase their compensation. In fact, in all 18 countries in the World Top Incomes Database, "the two phenomena are perfectly correlated: the countries with the largest decreases in their top tax rates are also the countries where the top earners' share of national income has increased the most (especially when it comes to the remuneration of executives of large firms)" (p. 509).
Having the incentive to try for bigger pay raises, managers took advantage of the fact that "it is objectively difficult to measure individual contributions to a firm's output" and persuaded their employers to give them big raises, often helped by the fact that their compensation committees were composed of people like themselves. So, Piketty says, it is really a question of bargaining power at the top (and don't forget that he already told us that there is no correlation between executive compensation and firm performance).
Not only did the countries with the biggest cuts in their top marginal tax rate see the greatest increases in top income shares, but at the same time they did not show any greater increase in productivity growth. So top managers were not creating some generalized increase in productivity that they had some kind of moral claim to. In fact, as Piketty points out, productivity growth was 2.3% annually from 1950-1970 but only 1.4% per year in 1990-2010. Yet it is the latter period in which executive pay mushroomed, not the former.
You can probably see where this is going. The entire idea that people's pay level is based on their marginal productivity, such that they "merit" the incomes they earn, is bunk. It is innately hard to measure marginal productivity, and some people have more bargaining power than others (not to mention greater incentives to bargain hard) for reasons that have nothing to do with productivity. In fact, Piketty, Saez, and Stantcheva found that executive could achieve big raises without great performance most easily in countries with the lowest top marginal tax rate. Thus, the theoretical edifice for the claim that inequality is "fair" collapses.
What can counter the massive increase in incomes at the very top of the distribution? If we stick with income tax, Piketty says that the optimal top marginal rate in the United States is 82% (p. 512). This would apply to the top 0.5% or top 1% of incomes only. This would not affect productivity because it would largely wipe out some economically useless activities. Because those activities would disappear, a tax that high would not raise much revenue. If the United States wanted to raise revenue, Piketty suggests a marginal tax rate of 50-60% on incomes in the top 5%. It's important to note that while the United States could do this because it is the world's largest national economy, it is not possible for European countries unless they achieve fiscal coordination. This is extremely difficult due to EU rules requiring unanimity on votes affecting direct taxation (personal and corporate income tax).
The ideal solution, he argues, would be a global tax on capital plus "a very high level of international financial transparency" (p. 515). Piketty recognizes that this is infeasible right now, although he says it might be possible "incrementally," at the European level, for example (which would still run up against EU voting rules). He argues, though, that the alternative could well be worse: If people view inequality to have reached unacceptable levels, the response might be a breakdown of the global economy via widespread protectionism. (I offer a similar argument at the end of Competing for Capital.) A tax on capital allows high levels of trade to continue while directly addressing the problem of inequality.
One important element of achieving international financial transparency is shutting down bank secrecy. For Piketty, without solid information on inequality (and hence on individuals' ownership of capital), it is impossible to have a democratic debate about the type of taxation and government services that individuals want. Tax havens and their defenders will whine about this being an intrusion on people's privacy, but Piketty's response is compelling (p. 522):
No one has the right to set his own tax rates. It is not right for individuals to grow wealthy from free trade and economic integration only to rake off the profits at the expense of their neighbors. That is outright theft.For this reason, he advocates the automatic exchange of bank information to ensure transparency.
Piketty argues that we should not rely solely on an income tax. The fact of the matter is that capital ownership generates much economic income (such as capital gains) that doesn't have to be declared year-to-year. As a result, income tax filings grossly understate rich people's true income. This means that the problem of tax regressivity at the top is even worse than he discussed under the income tax. He goes back to the example of L'Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt. Her wealth exceeds €30 billion, and her rate of return is somewhere between 6% and 7% a year (€1.8-€2.1 billion in economic income). Yet she herself has said that she has never declared more than €5 million per year in income. Even if she's paying 50% of this figure in income taxes (France's top bracket is currently 53%), that €2.5 million is barely 0.1% of her economic income. It is hard to get taxation more regressive than that.
Not only would a tax on capital create financial transparency while raising a modest amount of revenue (Piketty envisions 2% of European GDP), but Piketty argues that an extraordinary tax on capital on the order of 15% could wipe out Europe's current debt problems. As he says (p. 540), "From the standpoint of the general interest, it is normally preferable to tax the wealthy rather than borrow from them." The alternatives are inflation, which governments have frequently used, and austerity, which Europe is currently using with predictably bad results. Moreover, he says, it is possible to get more precise targeting of the distributional consequences you want with a wealth tax than with debt repudiation or inflation.
I mentioned before that Piketty believes that the United States is large enough by itself to levy an 82% top income tax rate, whereas Europe isn't. The same is true, in his view, on a capital tax (he also thinks China might be able to effectively tax capital). Europe's problem is that tax competition is particularly intense, a problem he lays at the feet of the smaller economies, particularly Ireland (no surprise there). Piketty sees the creation of fiscal union (with EU-wide corporate income taxes apportioned to each country by formula) as no more utopian than the idea of creating the euro. Indeed, he seems to think that political union is ultimately necessary to end destructive tax competition, though he is pleasantly surprised at the traction gained for instituting a European financial transaction tax. He proposes a "budgetary parliament" for the Eurozone that could make democratic decisions on fiscal matters, and argues that it should not be bound by any fixed rules limiting deficits or debt -- which will be nearly impossible to get Germany to agree to.
He concludes by reminding us that we cannot escape the possibly infinite concentration of capital that follows from r>g unless governments take proactive policies, most importantly an annual progressive tax on capital. The inequality r>g does not follow from market imperfections, so it cannot be solved simply by making markets more competitive. While he acknowledges that there is a real risk that increased European integration could lead to the shriveling of the social states constructed in each nation, the problem is that this is inevitable in the absence of creating a political entity large enough to regulate capitalism. "If we are to regain control over capitalism, we must bet everything on democracy -- and in Europe, democracy on a European scale."
For those of us in the United States, we already have a political entity big enough to battle the pressures for greater inequality. But of course we have numerous obstacles in our way as great wealth buys high levels of political influence, especially in the Citizens United era.
My next post will provide a summary and critique of the book.
Cross-posted at Angry Bear.
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