Since I first estimated Iran’s hyperinflation at 69.6% per month, many people have asked, how long will it last? To answer that question, I have posted my “Hanke Chart of the Day” and will let the data speak for themselves.

On second thought, perhaps I should offer some “tweet-able”  hyperinflation-duration takeaways:

• The average duration of hyperinflation is roughly 12 months.
• The longest duration of hyperinflation is 58 months (4 years and 10 months), which occurred in Nicaragua from June 1986 until March 1991.
• The shortest duration of hyperinflation is one month (see numbers 46-57).

When it comes to Iran and the probable duration of its hyperinflation, the specter of  “a horrible end” or “a horror without end” comes to mind.

For the latest news on Iran’s hyperinflation, follow my Twitter: @Steve_Hanke

This new Cato Institute Working Paper by Senior Fellow Alan Reynolds confirms recent studies which find little or no sustained increase in the inequality of disposable income for the U.S. population as a whole over the past 20 years, even though estimates of the top 1 percent’s share of pretax, pretransfer (market) income spiked upward in 1986-88, 1997-2000 and 2003-2007.

It has become commonplace  to use top 1 percent shares of market income as a shorthand measure of inequality, and as an argument for greater taxes on higher incomes and/or larger transfer payments to the bottom 90 percent.  This paper finds the data inappropriate for such purposes for several reasons:

• Excluding rapidly increased transfer payments and employer-financed benefits from total income results in exaggerating the rise in the top 1 percent’s share between 1979 and 2010 by 23 percent because a growing share of other income is missing.
• Using estimates of the top 1 percent’s share of pretax, pretransfer income (Piketty and Saez 2003) as an argument for higher tax rates on top incomes or larger transfer payments to others is illogical and contradictory because the data exclude taxes and transfers.
• Using highly cyclical top 1 percent shares as a measure of overall inequality leads, paradoxically, to describing most recessions as a welcome reduction in inequality, because poverty and unemployment rates typically rise when the top 1 percent’s share falls, and fall when the top 1 percent’s share rises.
• Top 1 percent incomes are shown to be extremely sensitive (“elastic”) to changes in the highest tax rates on ordinary income, capital gains and dividends.  Although estimates of the elasticity of ordinary income for the top 1 percent range from 0.62 (Saez 2004) to 1.99 (Moffitt and Wilhelm), those estimates fail to account for demonstrably dramatic responses to changes in the highest tax rate on capital gains and dividends.

Reynolds estimates that more than half of the increase in the top 1 percent’s share of pretax, pretransfer income since 1983, and all of the increase since 2000,  is attributable to behavioral reactions to lower marginal tax rates on salaries, unincorporated businesses, dividends and capital gains. After reviewing numerous data sources, he finds no compelling evidence of any large and sustained increase in the inequality of disposable income over the past two decades.

In “The $5 Trillion Question: How Big Is Romney’s Cut” Wall Street Journal reporters Damlan Paletta and John D. McKinnon echo, once again, the journalistic convention of contrasting “the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center” with “the conservative American Enterprise Institute.”  In the English language, the opposite of “conservative” is not “nonpartisan.”   On the contrary, the phrase “nonpartisan” applies equally to the American Enterprise Institute (or Cato Institute) as it does to Tax Policy Center (TPC) – a front for the Brookings Institution and Urban Institute.   To be “nonpartisan” does not mean non-ideological, unbiased or even competent.  It simply means following a few rules so the IRS will allow the organization to receive tax-deductible contributions.   Governor Romney wants to severely curb such deductions (including his own), which does not necessarily make the TPC a disinterested observer, even if there really were one or two closet Republicans (or even non-Keynesians) at the TPC.

The U.S. already cut marginal tax rates across-the-board by more than 20 percent in 1964 and 1984 (the 1981 law, like that of 2001, was foolishly phased-in).  In both cases, the Table shows that revenues from the individual income tax were higher than before, as a share of GDP.  The economy grew much faster too, raising payroll and corporate tax receipts.   Until the TPC can explain how and why that happened, they cannot even pretend to predict that Romney’s more modest tax reform will lose any revenue, much less $5 trillion.  Incidentally, deductions were not significantly curbed in the tax laws of 1964 or 1981, or in the Tax Reform of 1986 (which merely substituted reduced itemized deductions for a much larger standard deduction).  If Romney puts a cap on deductions, either as a percentage of AGI or as a dollar limit, the net effect of his plan would raise revenues, particularly from people like Warren Buffett and Mitt Romney (who deduct millions in charitable contributions).

The Tax Policy Center’s fundamental error is to assume no behavioral response at all to lower tax rates – an “elasticity of taxable income” (ETI) of zero.   The academic evidence is that ETI is at least 0.4 for all taxpayers, as Martin Feldstein observed, mostly because ETI is above 1.0 for the top 1 percent, as I recently explained in the Journal.  Cut top rates and the rich report more income; raise top rates and much of their income disappears – through reduced economic activity and increased avoidance.