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Article Artículo

Subverting the Inversions: More Thoughts on Ending the Corporate Income Tax

I see that my friend Jared Bernstein has some more thoughtful (if mistaken) arguments on ending the corporate income tax. I recognize his concerns about giving more money to the people who have the most (hey, it’s the American Way), but I still think this is a policy that could be a big winner in the battle against the enemies of the people.

I will quickly address two issues Jared raised, the extent to which any of the savings will be passed on in wages and the ability to replace the revenue. However my main focus is the nature of the corporate tax avoidance industry. This is a pernicious drain of economic resources. It is also a major source of upward redistribution. I consider its elimination an enormous benefit – even if on net we give up some government revenue to do it.

First, I followed the Tax Policy Center in assuming that 20 percent of the benefits would go to workers in higher wages. Jared rightly pointed out that this will depend on workers bargaining power. However, it is worth noting that even in the worst of times workers have gotten some fraction of productivity gains. And if we look at the last year, the data show that average real hourly compensation increased almost as much as productivity growth (1.0 percent rise in real compensation versus a 1.2 percent increase in productivity). So the Tax Policy Center’s 20 percent pass back to wages hardly seems out of line.

The second question is how we would make up the lost revenue. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects we will get $351 billion or 2.0 percent of GDP from the corporate income tax in 2014 (Table 4-1). This is the average for the next decade as well. Much of this can be gotten back from eliminating the special treatment of dividend and capital gains income. The major rationale for their special treatment was the argument that it amounted to double taxation since profits were already taxed at the corporate level. Since the corporate income tax will have been eliminated, there is no rationale for special treatment.

In 2012, the most recent year for which data is available, the Internal Revenue Service reported $260.4 billion in taxable dividend income and $2.217 trillion in capital gains distributions. If we assume an average increase of 10 percentage points in the tax rate on dividends and 5 percentage points in the effective tax rate on realized capital gains, this gets us $137 billion in tax revenue (26.0 billion from dividends and $111 billion from taxing capital gains). If we adjust this figure up by 10 percent to account for nominal growth from 2012 to 2014 we are up to $151 billion.

In addition, eliminating the corporate income tax will cause both sources of income to increase, which would imply a further increase in revenue. If half of profits are paid out in dividends (a bit less than the historic average) then we would see dividends increase by $175 billion (using the 2014 numbers), which at a 30 percent average tax rate gets us $53 billion in tax revenue.

The ending of the corporate income tax would increase after tax profits by around 25 percent, which presumably would lead to a corresponding increase in stock prices. That would lead to a one-time windfall for both stockholders and also the government in the form of capital gains tax revenue. However going forward stock prices should rise on average at the same pace but at base that is roughly 25 percent higher. In 2011 (sorry, most recent year I could find) the CBO projected capital gains income for 2014 of $103 billion. If we up that by 25 percent, it gets $26 billion.

This brings the total from additional capital income to $79 billion. Adding that to $151 billion from raising the tax rate, get us to $230 billion. Suppose we raise the top marginal rate by three percentage points. CBO projected that the ending of the Bush tax cut for high end individuals would raise $109 billion in 2014 (Table 3), so a three percentage point hike should get around half that, or $55 billion. That gets us to $285 billion, still a bit short of the $351 billion in lost corporate tax revenue, but it is within spitting distance.

Dean Baker / August 27, 2014

Article Artículo

Workers

Part 1: Returns to Whose College Degree?

As college students head back to school and costs rise faster than inflation even using a conservative measure, it’s worth revisiting the dispute about the value of a degree. In May, David Leonhardt declared the debate closed, citing a paper by David Autor and explaining that the total cost of college is about negative $500,000 over the course of someone’s lifetime. (As Leonhardt notes, the original source for this estimate is a 2012 journal article by Avery and Turner.) To calculate the return to college, researchers basically subtract the costs of tuition and forgone wages from the average additional lifetime earnings associated with a college degree.

CEPR and Ben Wolcott / August 25, 2014