Is Hillary Clinton Ignorant about Geography, Fiscal Policy, or Both?

Hillary Clinton recently opined that Brazil was a great role model for the idea of soaking the rich with higher tax rates. She didn't really offer evidence for that specific assertion, but Politico reports that she did say that "Brazil has the highest tax-to-GDP rate in the Western Hemisphere and guess what — they're growing like crazy."

I'm not sure if "growing like crazy" is an accurate description, particularly since poor nations normally have decent growth rates because they start from such a low baseline.

But let's excuse that bit of rhetorical excess and focus on the really flawed portion of her remarks.

Contrary to her direct quote, Brazil does not have the "highest tax-to-GDP rate in the Western Hemisphere." It may have the highest tax burden in South America. And it may even have the highest tax burden in all of Latin America, but its overall tax burden of about 24 percent of GDP is slightly below the aggregate tax burden in the United States.

I suppose I should issue a caveat and say there's a very slight chance that the recession has temporarily pushed U.S. tax receipts as a share of GDP below the Brazilian level, but that isn't apparent from the IMF data. Moreover, there's no doubt that the tax burden in Canada is significantly higher than the Brazilian burden.

So Secretary Clinton either was unaware that the United States and Canada are in the Western Hemisphere, or has no clue how to read fiscal statistics.

But let's suspend reality and assume that Brazil has a higher tax-to-GDP ratio. Would that somehow be proof that Brazil is a role model for class-warfare taxation? There is no precise definition of that term, to be sure, but high tax rates on the rich presumably are a necessary component of any class-warfare system. Yet Brazil's top tax rate is 27.5 percent. That's not exactly a low-rate system such as Hong Kong, and it's 27.5 percentage points higher than the zero-percent rate in the Cayman Islands, but it also happens to be significantly lower than the 35 percent (soon to be 39.6 percent) rate in the United States. If that's class warfare, sign me up for the Brazilian approach.

I suppose it's possible that Brazil's top tax rate recently has been boosted, but that didn't show up in a Google search. And even if the rate was just increased, that would hardly be proof of Secretary Clinton's strange hypothesis that high tax rates and/or high tax-to-GDP rates are a magical formula for growth. That would require looking at future economic performance with the higher top tax rate, not the recent growth rates with the 27.5 percent top tax rate.

But pointing out Secretary Clinton's mistakes seems a bit rude and I do like to be a gentleman, so let's at least give her points for consistency. Earlier this year, she urged higher tax rates on the so-called rich in Pakistan, so at least she doesn't discriminate in her desire to punish success.