Tax and Expenditure Limits: The Challenge of Turning Mitchell’s Golden Rule from Theory into Reality

By
Daniel J. Mitchell

The main goal of fiscal policy should be to shrink the burden of government spending as a share of economic output. Fortunately, it shouldn’t be too difficult to achieve this modest goal. All that’s required is to make sure the private sector grows faster than the government.

But it’s very easy for me to bluster about “all that’s required” to satisfy this Golden Rule. It’s much harder to convince politicians to be frugal. Yes, it happened during the Reagan and Clinton years, and there also have been multi-year periods of spending discipline in nations such as Estonia, New Zealand and Canada.

But these examples of good fiscal policy are infrequent. And even when they do happen, the progress often is reversed when a new crop of politicians take power. Federal spending has jumped to about 23 percent of GDP under Bush and Obama, for instance, after falling to 18.2 percent of economic output at the end of the Clinton years.

This is why many advocates of limited government argue that some sort of external force is needed to somehow limit the tendency of politicians to over-tax and over-spend.

I’ve argued on many occasions that tax competition is an important mechanism for restraining the greed of the political class. But even in my most optimistic moments, I realize that it’s a necessary but not sufficient condition.

Another option is budget process reform. If you can somehow convince politicians to tie their own hands (in the same way that alcoholics can sometimes be convinced to throw out all their booze), then perhaps rules can be imposed that improve fiscal policy.

But what sort of rules? Europe has “Maastricht” requirements that theoretically limit deficits and debt, and 49 states have some sort of balanced budget requirement, but these policies have been very unsuccessful - perhaps because they mistakenly focus on the symptom of red ink rather than the underlying disease of government spending.

Are there any budget process reforms that do work? Well, I’ve written about Switzerland’s “debt brake,” which has generated some good results over the past 10 years because it actually imposes an annual spending cap.

Some American states also impose expenditure limits. Have they been successful?

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Topics: 
Government and Politics, Tax and Budget Policy

What Washington State Can Expect From Higher K-12 Spending

By
Andrew J. Coulson

Just over a year ago, the Washington State Supreme Court ruled that the legislature was insufficiently funding K-12 education, and ordered it to boost that funding. A bi-partisan consensus now seems to have emerged that spending an extra $1 billion over the next two years is the proper first step in abiding with the Court’s ruling. Additional increases are likely to follow in later years. In a special budget session to begin today, the legislature will decide what balance of tax increases and economies in other areas will be used to raise the extra funds. 

So Washington state taxpayers are looking at the prospect of ever higher taxes to pay for ever higher education spending far into the future. Unless business blossoms unexpectedly in the next few years, that’s liable to be economically painful. Will it be worth it? As a guide, we might look at how effective previous increases in spending have been. 

Despite an increase in annual spending of $1.5 billion even after taking enrollment growth into account, academic performance has barely budged. The most hopeful signs are from the 4th (and uncharted 8th) grade NAEP scores, but there is good reason to doubt that even these very modest upticks lead to real reimprovements by the end of high school. One obvious indication of the problem is that SAT scores are essentially unchanged over the period. Another reason is that evidence from the NAEP Long Term Trends study reveals a pattern in which modest gains in the early grades evaporate by the end of high school (as can be seen on this nationwide chart of the performance of 17-year-olds). Based on the SAT scores, the same pattern likely holds in Washington state, but neither the Long Term Trends NAEP data series nor test results for older students are available at the state level.

Moreover, Washington state residents seem to drastically underestimate how much is spent per pupil in their public schools. In a 2012 survey, about half of respondents thought it was less than $8,000 / pupil. In fact, as shown in the chart above, total spending from all funds was $12,467 / pupil in that year. The survey also finds that when the public is informed about actual spending levels, support for increased K-12 spending falls dramatically (and that is true despite the fact that the survey in question misleadingly represented a lower partial spending figure as if it were total spending).

So Washington state has already tried even larger increases in spending than the one currently contemplated in Olympia with little or no academic effect. What’s the alternative? How about a proven policy for improving the achievement of students in both public and private schools that simultaneously saves millions of dollars?

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

IRS Lied to Congress about Targeting Tea Party

By
Michael F. Cannon

On Friday, the IRS admitted that when “social welfare” groups with the terms “tea party” or “patriot” in their names applied for 501(c)(4)/tax-exempt status, IRS agents targeted them for extra (and extra-legal) scrutiny to ensure they were not engaged in politicking. The Washington Post reports, “about 75 groups were selected for extra inquiry — including, in some cases, improper requests for the names of donors.” IRS agents did not apply similar scrutiny to groups with “progressive” in their names.

Over the weekend, more details emerged. It now appears the IRS lied to Congress about this practice for more than a year. It also appears the IRS is still targeting tea-party groups today, in part because IRS bureaucrats believe groups that “educat[e] on the Constitution and Bill of Rights” deserve greater scrutiny.

Here’s a rundown. 

Senior IRS officials have known about these abuses for nearly two years. The Associated Press reports: “Senior Internal Revenue Service officials knew agents were targeting tea party groups as early as 2011…on June 29, 2011, Lois G. Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt organizations, learned at a meeting that groups were being targeted, according to the watchdog’s report. At the meeting, she was told that groups with ‘Tea Party,’ ‘Patriot’ or ‘9/12 Project’ in their names were being flagged for additional and often burdensome scrutiny…Lerner instructed agents to change the criteria for flagging groups ‘immediately’…”. IRS agents also gave extra scrutiny to groups that “criticize how the country is being run.”

The IRS tried to get away with it again. The Washington Post reports:

the agency revised its criteria a week later.

But six months later, the IRS applied a new political test to groups that applied for tax-exempt status as “social welfare” groups, the document says. On Jan. 15, 2012 the agency decided to target “political action type organizations involved in limiting/expanding Government, educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, social economic reform movement”…

The agency did not appear to adopt a more neutral test for social welfare groups…until May 17, 2012…

Of course, these revised criteria are not politically neutral either. Tea-party groups are still far more likely to receive extra scrutiny than progressive groups. Lots of right-leaning political groups describe their mission as working to limit government or educate people about the Constitution. Far fewer left-leaning groups emphasize educating people about the Constitution or openly declare their mission is to expand government. And note: the U.S. government treated groups as suspect if they educate the public about the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Let that one sink in.

The IRS lied to Congress for more than a year. The Associated Press reports: “At a congressional hearing March 22, 2012, [then-IRS commissioner Douglas] Shulman was adamant in his denials. ‘There’s absolutely no targeting.’” Senior IRS staff knew that claim was false nine months before Shulman made it. Yet they let Shulman’s false statement to Congress go uncorrected, amid a congressional investigation into whether the IRS was targeting tea-party groups, for another 14 months. According to the Washington Post, “The IRS made no mention of targeting conservative groups in five separate responses to congressional inquiries between Nov. 18, 2011, and June 15, 2012, according to the [inspector general’s] timeline.” Even if we view the facts in the light most favorable to the IRS and assume Shulman did not know he was uttering a falsehood – which, by the way, would mean he is a very poor manager – the IRS’s failure to correct that falsehood pretty much makes it a lie. I don’t mean that in the phony way PolitiFact uses the term. I mean a real lie.

The IRS did not come forward of its own accord. The Associated Press: “The Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration is expected to release the results of a nearly yearlong investigation in the coming week.” House Oversight Committee chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) put it, “Before the IG’s report comes to the public or to Congress as required by law, it’s leaked by the IRS to try to spin the output. This mea culpa’s not an honest one.”

IRS officials maintain the targeting of tea-party groups was the work of low-level employees and not politically motivated. Yet the agency has shown a willingness to deceive Congress and the public about its own misconduct. Congress should conduct a thorough investigation.

Even if it is true that low-level IRS bureaucrats were acting on their own, Congress’ investigation should examine the role Obama administration officials played in encouraging those bureaucrats to single out the tea party. As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat explains:

Where might an enterprising, public-spirited I.R.S. agent get the idea that a Tea Party group deserved more scrutiny from the government than the typical band of activists seeking tax-exempt status? Oh, I don’t know: why, maybe from all the prominent voices who spent the first two years of the Obama era worrying that the Tea Party wasn’t just a typically messy expression of citizen activism, but something much darker — an expression of crypto-fascist, crypto-racist rage, part Timothy McVeigh and part Bull Connor, potentially carrying a wave of terrorist violence in its wings.

It would be very bad if senior Obama administration officials ordered the IRS to intimidate the president’s political opponents. It would scarcely be better if administration officials denounced their opponents until IRS bureaucrats took the hint.

People should lose their jobs over this.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Law and Civil Liberties, Tax and Budget Policy

Doing Business: If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It

By
Dalibor Rohac and Marian L. Tupy

A few weeks ago, we published a piece that defended World Bank’s Doing Business project against its critics. At the time, we didn’t know much about the politics behind the attack on the project – namely that the initiative to review Doing Business had come from China, which ranks relatively low in the ranking.

Perhaps unwittingly, the Chinese government has been assisted in its effort to shut the project down by a spectrum of organizations skeptical of markets, including CAFOD, Christian Aid, Oxfam, or Save the Children. Most recently, Christina Chang, a lead economic analyst at CAFOD appears to react to our article on FP’s Democracy Lab:

By lamenting the “uniquely democratic” debate around Doing Business, its self-appointed supporters are doing it a disservice. An independent review and a public debate are exactly what is needed.

That is not exactly a charitable way of identifying our position. We say explicitly that the project can be improved and are perfectly willing to entertain some of the specific suggestions Ms. Chang makes in her article, including the idea that the costs of corruption to businesses should be explicitly captured by the project, that the measure of access to credit could be improved, and that infrastructure-related constraints to doing business (such as access to electricity) could improve the project’s accuracy.

What bothers us, however, is that the critics of the project are also trying to undermine the key elements of the survey – namely the measures of taxation and labor market regulation. A large body of evidence shows that corporate taxation and labor market regulation have real costs to businesses – a fact Ms. Chang downplays by saying that these do not come up frequently in enterprise surveys in the developing world. While surveys may serve as a useful complement to the analysis of objective data on institutions, it is not sensible to use them as a basis for discarding specific elements of the Doing Business report – especially if independent evidence indicates that these elements matter.

Also, the goal of measuring taxation and labor market regulation as a cost to business has little to do with advancing an agenda of radical tax cuts or deregulation - although we would argue that such agenda would yield significant welfare gains in many countries around the world - instead, it has to do with an understanding of the relevant policy trade-offs.

The most serious flaw of Ms. Chang’s article lies in a confusion between the problems afflicting crony capitalism in the West and the development of private markets in emerging economies around the world:

The 2008 financial crisis highlighted long-standing reasons why the world needs to take a fresh look at how it does business. Unemployment has reached painful levels in many countries around the world. Multinational corporations use offshore jurisdictions to avoid billions in tax. Rampant inequality has become a hot-button issue.

For all these reasons, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim is right to conclude that the bank’s flagship Doing Business report needs a fresh look.

Let’s ignore the claim that inequality is on the rise, which is not true globally, and focus on the fact that Ms. Chang argued that the economic problems of the developed West somehow justify rethinking a project that has mostly informed policymaking in low- and mid-income countries. That would make sense if the policy recommendations that can be supported by the Doing Business project were also connected with the factors that have been driving economic problems of the West, such as unemployment, or the financial crisis of 2008. Yet Ms. Chang offers us no evidence for such claim.

If anything, one can argue that the unemployment in Western countries is associated with heavy labor market regulation, that the existence of offshore jurisdictions helps curb confiscatory tax regimes in the West, and that the crisis 2008 was driven by government involvement in financial and housing markets, or perhaps by a failure of monetary policy. In other words, Ms. Chang is guilty exactly of what we identified as the main problem of the current discussions about the Doing Business project – namely that she picks up on a failure of a particular type of crony capitalism in the West and uses it – disingenuously, one is tempted to say – to attack free markets around the world.

Topics: 
International Economics and Development

Sebelius Shakes Down Companies She Regulates for Cash to Implement ObamaCare

By
Michael F. Cannon

Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius’ latest abuse of power has strengthened the case for her removal from office. Before discussing her latest misconduct, let’s review some of Sebelius’ past abuses of power.

  • In 2010, Sebelius described anonymous political speech as “dangerous.” Ironically, Sebelius’ lashing out at her political opponents’ free-speech rights is dangerous because it is the sort of rhetoric that might encourage agencies like the IRS to target groups that “criticize how the country is being run.” That’s exactly what the IRS has admitted doing – which in turn is a good argument for protecting anonymous political speech.
  • So too is Sebelius’ 2010 threat to put health insurance companies out of business. Shortly after ObamaCare became law, insurers began telling their customers how much it was going to increase their premiums. In a September 2010 letter to insurers, Sebelius shot back that premiums would rise no more than 2 percent, even as her department predicted increases as high as 7 percent. Insurers that didn’t toe the party line “may be excluded from health insurance Exchanges in 2014.” That was no idle threat, I wrote at the time. Since “Medicare’s chief actuary predicts that in the future, ‘essentially all‘ Americans will get their health insurance through those exchanges,” Sebelius was essentially threatening to put insurers out of business if they disagreed with her.
  • In 2011, Sebelius approved her department issuing hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to private health insurance companies under the rubric of ObamaCare that the statute expressly forbids HHS to issue.
  • In 2012, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel concluded that Sebelius violated the Hatch Act by campaigning for President Obama and other political candidates while traveling on official business, an offense for which other federal workers are fired.
  • In a July 2012 letter to the nation’s governors, Sebelius arbitrarily rewrote and narrowed the Supreme Court’s ruling in NFIB v. Sebelius to allow HHS to continue coercing states into implementing parts of ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion.
  • When it became apparent that two-thirds of states would not implement one of ObamaCare’s health insurance “exchanges,” Sebelius dismissed the idea that a lack of congressionally authorized funding for federal Exchanges would stop her department from implementing them. “We are going to get it done,” she said. Now we learn she substituted her own judgment for Congress’ by raiding ObamaCare’s Prevention and Public Health Fund to the tune of $454 million to fund federal Exchanges. But even that wasn’t enough.

Now we learn, from the Washington Post’s Sarah Kliff, “Sebelius has, over the past three months, made multiple phone calls to health industry executives, community organizations and church groups and directly asked that they contribute to non-profits that are working to enroll uninsured Americans and increase awareness of the law.”

This too appears to be unlawful:

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Topics: 
Government and Politics, Health Care

Why FIRE Is Hot under the Collar

By
Andrew J. Coulson

According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), “the Departments of Justice and Education have mandated a breathtakingly broad definition of sexual harassment that makes virtually every student in the United States a harasser while ignoring the First Amendment.”

Here’s what FIRE is, well, fired up about:

The letter states that “sexual harassment should be more broadly defined as ‘any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature’ ” including “verbal conduct” (that is, speech). It then explicitly states that allegedly harassing expression need not even be offensive to an “objectively reasonable person of the same gender in the same situation”—if the listener takes offense to sexually related speech for any reason, no matter how irrationally or unreasonably, the speaker may be punished. 

So now, in addition to being a sadly moribund institution of dubious value to most students, college will be even more Orwellian in its policing of language than it had already become. Thank heavens technology is making it increasingly dispensable. College is dead. Long live higher education.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy, Law and Civil Liberties

Great Moments in Government: The IRS Apologizes for Bias while Simultaneously Denying Bias

By
Daniel J. Mitchell

I’m happy to bash the IRS, but I usually try to explain that our anger should be focused on the politicians who created the corrupt, 74,000-page tax code.

But sometimes the IRS deserves some negative attention. The tax collection bureaucracy has thieving employees, incompetent employees, thuggish employees, seemlingly brainless employees, and victimizing employees.

The senior folks at the IRS also deserve scorn for bone-headed decisions such as squandering millions of dollars on a P.R. campaign and a scheme to regulate and control private tax preparers.

Now it seems we have another reason to condemn the tax-collection bureaucracy. As Michael Cannon has noted, the IRS is engaging in Nixon-type political harassment.

Here’s some of what the Associated Press just reported.

The Internal Revenue Service inappropriately flagged conservative political groups for additional reviews during the 2012 election to see if they were violating their tax-exempt status, a top IRS official said Friday. Organizations were singled out because they included the words “tea party” or “patriot” in their applications for tax-exempt status, said Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups.

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Topics: 
Government and Politics, Tax and Budget Policy

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