February 15, 2015
The NYT seems to be backsliding again in its commitment to put numbers in context. A NYT article on the prospects of tax reform threw around many big numbers which would almost certainly be meaningless to nearly all of its readers.
I will pick on one here, because it doesn’t seem to make any sense. According to the article, President Obama’s proposal to end the tax deductions for money placed in 529 accounts in future years would have saved the government $1 billion over the next decade. (These accounts allow people to deposit after-tax dollars and have the money accumulate tax free, if used for educational purposes.) I have seen this figure cited elsewhere, but it is surprisingly small.
According to a recent GAO report, there were 11 million accounts in 2011 with a total balance of $167 billion. The report estimates that the lost revenue due to the accounts was $1.6 billion in 2011. If we adjust upward for 2015 based on the nominal growth over the economy, the implied lost revenue for the current year would be just under $2.0 billion. This would almost certainly be an understatement, since the sharp rise in the stock market would mean that the holdings in 529 accounts would have grown far more rapidly than the economy over the last four years. Furthermore, since the top tax rate has been raised, the implicit tax savings from these accounts would be higher for the same amount of holdings in 2015 than in 2011.
If the one-year cost of the program is $2 billion, then how can ending future deductions only save $1 billion over ten years? President Obama proposal did protect the tax sheltered status of current deposits, but unlike retirement accounts, there is a limited period of time over which people can accumulate money in 529 accounts, basically from when a child is born until they complete their college education. This means that by the end of the ten-year budget horizon, most of the 529 money with grandfathered tax exempt status would already have been spent.
If the counter-factual assumes that 529 withdrawals grow in step with projected economic growth over the next decade, then they would be costing the Treasury over $3 billion in lost taxes in 2025. If 70 percent of this represents money contributed in 2016 and later, then the implicit savings in 2025 alone from President Obama’s proposal would be more than $2.1 billion. If this calculation is anywhere close to accurate, how can the 10-year savings be just $1 billion?
Another way to think about this is the cost per account. If the number of accounts does not rise from the 11 million in 2011, then the implicit tax cost per account holder over 10 years is $91 or $9.10 per year. Is this plausible? Did hundreds of thousands of middle class families really get outraged over a proposal that would have cost them 18 cents a week in higher taxes?
Something in this picture is not adding up. The $1 billion figure over 10 years (0.002 percent of projected spending) doesn’t make sense. If the paper had been tried to put this number in a context that made it meaningful to readers it might have gotten the number right.
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