I have to start this post with a big caveat.

I’m not a fan of the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The international bureaucracy is infamous for using American tax dollars to promote a statist economic agenda. Most recently, it launched a new scheme to raise the tax burden on multinational companies, which is really just a backdoor way of saying that the OECD (and the high-tax nations that it represents) wants higher taxes on workers, consumers, and shareholders. But the OECD’s anti-market agenda goes much deeper.

• The OECD has allied itself with the so-called Occupy movement to push for bigger government and higher taxes.
• The OECD, in an effort to promote redistributionism, has concocted absurdly misleading statistics claiming that there is more poverty in the United States than in Greece, Hungary, Portugal, or Turkey.
• The OECD is pushing a “Multilateral Convention” that is designed to become something akin to a World Tax Organization, with the power to persecute nations with free-market tax policy.
• The OECD supports Obama’s class-warfare agenda, publishing documents endorsing “higher marginal tax rates” so that the so-called rich “contribute their fair share.”
• The OECD advocates the value-added tax based on the absurd notion that increasing the burden of government is good for growth and employment.

Now that there’s no ambiguity about my overall position, I can admit that the OECD isn’t always on the wrong side. Much of the bad policy comes from its committee system, which brings together bureaucrats from member nations.

The OECD also has an economics department, and they sometimes produce good work. Most recently, they produced a report on the Swiss tax system that contains some very sound analysis, including a rejection of Obama-style class warfare and a call to lower income tax burdens.

Shifting the taxation of income to the taxation of consumption may be beneficial for boosting economic activity (Johansson et al., 2008 provide evidence across OECD economies). These benefits may be bigger if personal income taxes are lowered rather than social security contributions, because personal income tax also discourages entrepreneurial activity and investment more broadly.

I somewhat disagree with the assertion that payroll taxes do more damage than VAT taxes. They both drive a wedge between pre-tax income and post-tax consumption. But the point about income taxes is right on the mark.

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Chris Edwards showed that the Internal Revenue Service’s budget has been soaring and the main culprit is refundable tax credits. The magnitude of refundable tax cuts is obfuscated in the IRS’s budget because only the refunded portion of the credit shows up as an outlay —the rest is recorded as a reduction in revenues. 

The Congressional Budget Office released a handy report on refundable tax credits in January. The following table from the report shows the entire magnitude of the tax credit, separating between the refunded portion (outlays) and the reduction in revenues:

As Chris noted, the figure has dropped in recent years with the expiration of temporary “stimulus” tax credits. However, the upward trajectory is projected to resume due to refundable tax credits in the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a, Obamacare).   

The revelations of IRS officials targeting conservative and libertarian groups suggest that now is a good time for lawmakers to review a broad range of the agency’s activities. Since the agency’s last overhaul in the IRS Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998, its budget has exploded from $33 billion to a proposed $106 billion in 2013. 

Using data from the OMB budget database, I split total IRS outlays into two broad activities: administration and handouts. Administration includes tax return processing, investigations, enforcement, and other bureaucratic functions. Handouts mainly includes spending on “refundable” tax credits such as the EITC. 

The chart shows that the IRS has become a huge social welfare agency in recent decades. Handouts have soared from $4.4 billion in 1990 to an estimated $91.1 billion in 2013 (red line). Handouts are down a bit in recent years because some of the refundable credits from “stimulus” legislation have expired. IRS administration costs have grown from $7.7 billion in 1990 to an estimated $15.3 billion in 2013 (blue line). 

How should we reform the IRS budget? First, we should terminate the handout programs. That would save taxpayers more than $90 billion annually and cut the IRS budget by 86 percent. 

The largest IRS handout is the refundable part of the EITC, which is expected to cost $55 billion in 2013. Many policymakers favor the EITC as a “conservative” handout program because it encourages people to work. But the EITC itself creates a discouragement to increased work over the income range that it is phased-out. It also adds to tax-code complexity and has an error and fraud rate of more than 20 percent.

The EITC is an example of how big government begets more big government. We certainly wouldn’t need the EITC incentive to work if we slashed all the taxes and welfare programs that currently encourage people not to work. 

It’s a similar situation with other IRS handout programs, such as the $1 billion “Therapeutic Discovery” grant program. These grants are supposed to “produce new and cost-saving therapies, support jobs and increase U.S. competitiveness.” But it would be better to accomplish those goals by repealing the excise tax on medical devices and slashing the high 40 percent U.S. corporate income tax. 

As for the $15 billion in spending on IRS administration, we could dramatically cut that cost with major tax reforms. In particular, a consumption-based flat tax would hugely simplify the code and greatly reduce paperwork costs of the IRS and taxpayers alike. 

Looking ahead, the IRS budget is expected to balloon in coming years as the agency plays a key role in implementing ObamaCare. Unless the health care legislation is repealed, IRS outlays are expected to soar from $106 billion this year to $263 billion by 2023.