New Paper -- the fiscal roots of inflation

I recently finished drafts of a few academic papers that blog readers might find interesting. Today, "The Fiscal Roots of Inflation."

The government debt valuation equation says that the real value of nominal debt equals the present value of surpluses. So, when there is inflation, the real value of nominal debt declines. Does that decline come about by lower future surpluses, or by a higher discount rate? You can guess the answer -- a higher discount rate.

Though to me this is interesting for how to construct fiscal theory models in which changes in the present value of government debt cause inflation, the valuation equation is every bit as much a part of  standard new-Keynesian models. So the paper does not take a stand on causality.

Here is an example of the sort of puzzle the paper addresses. Think about 2008. There was a big recession. Deficits zoomed, through bailout, stabilizers, and deliberate stimulus. Yet inflation.. declined. So how does the government debt valuation equation work? Well, maybe today's deficits are bad, but they came with news of better future surpluses. That's hard to stomach. And it isn't true in the data. Well, real interest rates declined and sharply. The discount rate for government debt declined, which raises the value of government debt, even if expected future surpluses are unchanged or declined. With a lower discount rate, government debt is more valuable. If the price level does not change, people want to buy less stuff and more government debt. That's lower aggregate demand, which pushes the price level down. Does this story bear out, quantitatively, in the data? Yes.

If you don't like discount rates and forward looking behavior, you can put the same observation in ex-post terms. When there is a big deficit, the value of debt rises. How, on average, does the debt-GDP ratio come back down on average? Well, the government could run big surpluses -- raise taxes, cut spending to pay off the debt. That turns out not to be the case. There could be a surge of economic growth. Maybe the stimuluses and infrastructure spending all pay off. That turns out not to be the case. Or, the real rate of return on government bonds could go down, so that debt grows at a lower rate. That turns out to be, on average and therefore predictably, the answer.

Identities

OK, to work. The paper starts by developing a Cambpell-Shiller type identity for government debt. This works also for arbitrary maturity structures of the debt. Corresponding to the Campbell-Shiller return linearization, $$ \rho v_{t+1}=v_{t}+r_{t+1}^{n}-\pi_{t+1}-g_{t+1}-s_{t+1}. $$ The log debt to GDP ratio at the end of period \(t+1\), \(v_{t+1}\), is equal to its value at the end of period \(t\), \(v_{t}\), increased by the log nominal return on the portfolio of government bonds \(r_{t+1}^{n}\) less inflation \(\pi_{t+1}\), less log GDP growth \(g_{t+1}\), and less the real primary surplus to GDP ratio \(s_{t+1}\). Surpluses, unlike dividends, can be negative, so I don't take the log here. This surplus is scaled to have units of surplus to value, so a 1% change in "surplus" changes the log value of debt by 1%. I use this equation to measure the surplus.

Iterating forward, and imposing the transversality condition, we have a Campbell-Shiller style present value identity, $$ v_{t}=\sum_{j=1}^{\infty}\rho^{j-1}s_{t+j}+\sum_{j=1}^{\infty}\rho^{j-1}g_{t+j} -\sum_{j=1}^{\infty}\rho^{j-1}\left( r_{t+j}^{n}-\pi _{t+j}\right). $$ Take innovations \( \Delta E_{t+1} \equiv E_{t+1}-E_t \) and we have $$ \Delta E_{t+1}\pi_{t+1}-\Delta E_{t+1} r_{t+1}^{n}= -\sum_{j=0}^{\infty} \rho^{j} \Delta E_{t+1}s_{t+1+j} -\sum_{j=0}^{\infty} \rho^{j} \Delta E_{t+1} g_{t+1+j}+\sum_{j=1}^{\infty} \rho^{j} \Delta E_{t+1}\left( r_{t+1+j}^{n}-\pi_{t+1+j}\right) $$ Unexpected inflation devalues bonds. So it must come with a decline in surpluses, a rise in the discount rate, or a decline in bond prices. Notice the value of debt disappeared, which is handy.

The bond return comes from future expected returns or inflation, so it's nice to get rid of that too. With a geometric maturity structure in which the face value of bonds of \(j\) maturity is \(\omega^j\), a high bond return today must come from lower bond returns in the future. $$ \Delta E_{t+1}r_{t+1}^{n} = -\sum_{j=1}^{\infty}\omega^{j}\Delta E_{t+1} r_{t+1+j}^{n} =-\sum_{j=1}^{\infty}\omega^{j}\Delta E_{t+1}\left[ (r_{t+1+j}^{n}-\pi_{t+1+j})+\pi_{t+1+j}\right] $$ Substitute and we have the last and best identity $$ \sum_{j=0}^{\infty}\omega^{j} \Delta E_{t+1}\pi_{t+1+j} = -\sum_{j=0}^{\infty} \rho^{j} \Delta E_{t+1}s_{t+1+j} -\sum_{j=0}^{\infty} \rho^{j} \Delta E_{t+1}g_{t+1+j} +\sum_{j=1}^{\infty} (\rho^{j} -\omega^{j})\Delta E_{t+1}\left( r_{t+1+j}^{n}-\pi_{t+1+j}\right) . $$ With long-term debt a weighted sum of current and future inflation corresponds to changes in expected surpluses and discount rates. A fiscal shock can result in future inflation, thereby falling on today's long term bonds. Equivalently, a surprise deficit today \(s_{t+1}\) must be met by future surpluses, by lower returns, or by devaluing outstanding bonds, so that the debt/GDP ratio is reestablished.

Results

I ran a VAR and computed the responses to various shocks.

Here is the response to an inflation shock - -an unexpected movement \(\Delta E_1 \pi_1\). All other variables may move at the same time as the inflation shock.

Inflation is persistent, so a 1% inflation shock is about a 1.5% cumulative inflation shock, weighted
by the maturity of outstanding debt.

So, where is the 1.5% decline in present value of surpluses? Which terms of the identity matter?
Inflation does come with persistent deficits here. The sample is 1947-2018, so a lot of the inflation shocks come in the 1970s. You might raise three cheers for the fiscal theory, but not so fast. The deficits turn around and become surpluses. The sum of all surpluses term in the identity is a trivial -0.06, effectively zero. These deficits are essentially all paid back by subsequent surpluses.

Growth declines by half a percentage point cumulatively, accounting for 2/3 of the inflation. And the discount rate rises persistently. Two thirds of the devaluation of debt that inflation represents comes from higher real expected returns on government bonds, which in turn means higher interest rates that don't match inflation. (More graphs in the paper.)

Growth here is negatively correlated with inflation, which is true of the overall sample, but not of the story I started out with. What happens in a normal recession, that features lower inflation and lower output? Let's call it an aggregate demand shock. To measure such an event, I simply defined a shock that moves both output and inflation down by 1%. Here are the responses to this "recession shock."

 Inflation and output go down now, by 1%, and by construction. That's how I defined the shock. This is a recession with low growth, low inflation, and deficits. Not shown, interest rates all decline too.

So where does the low inflation come from in the above decomposition. Do today's deficits signal future surpluses? Yes, a bit. But not enough -- the cumulative sum of surpluses is -1.15% On its own, deficits should cause 1% inflation, the fiscal theory puzzle that started me out in this whole business. Growth quickly recovers, but is not positive for a sustained period. Like 2008, we see a basically downward shift in the level of GDP. That contributes another 1% inflationary force. The discount rate falls however,  so strongly as to raise the real value debt by almost 5 percentage points! That overcomes the inflationary forces and accounts for the deflation.

Here is a plot of the interest rates in response to the same shock. i is the three month rate, y is the 10 year rate, and rn is the return on the government bond portfolio. Yes, interest rates at all maturities jump down in this recession. Sharply lower rates mean a one-period windfall for the owners of long term bonds, then expected bond returns fall too.

The point 

Discount rates matter. If you want to understand the fiscal foundations of inflation, you have to understand the government debt valuation equation. Inflation and deflation over the cycle is not driven by changing expected surpluses. If you want to view it "passively," inflation and deflation over the cycle does not result in passive policy accommodation through taxes, as most footnotes presume. The fiscal roots (or consequences) of inflation over the cycle are the strong variation in discount rates -- expected returns.

The fiscal process

Notice that the response of primary surpluses in all these graphs is s-shaped. Primary surpluses do not follow an AR(1) type process. In response to today's deficits, there is eventually a shift to a long string of surpluses that partially repay much though not all of that debt. This seems completely normal, except that so many models specify AR(1) style processes for fiscal surpluses. Surely that is a huge mistake. Stay tuned. The next paper shows how to put an s-shaped surplus process in a model and why it is so important to do so.

Comments on the paper are most welcome.

Boot Camp

The Hoover Institution will host another "Policy Boot Camp" August 16-22. See here for details and how to apply. It's a one-week survey of serious policy analysis.

The program includes  economists such as John Taylor, Ed Lazear, Amit Seru, Caroline Hoxby, Erik Hurst, and yours truly. Learn about international affairs from H.R. McMaster, Jim Mattis and  Condoleezza Rice. Niall Ferguson on Nationalism vs. Globalism and Bjorn Lomborg on climate should be worth it all on their own. And many more.

It's designed for "college students and recent graduates," but I think that is a bit elastic. Food and lodging free.

Update: in response to a commenter. Yes, PhD students and even those a year or two out are welcome. 

The best of times, or the worst of times?

So how is the economy doing? A good friend passed along for comment a recent project syndicate essay by Nobel Prize winning economist Joe Stiglitz. For an alternative view, I found interesting commentary on the CEA website,  "The Impact of the Trump Labor market on historically disadvantaged Americans" and "The blue-collar boom reduces inequality"

A fact that cannot be missed is that overall GDP is growing. In terms of the overall economy, 2019 was the best year in all of human history. The 3.5% unemployment rate has not been this low since December 1969. So, if we wish to complain, it must be that this prosperity is not evenly shared. (I would also complain that things could be much better, but neither of our essays today is really about that point. Free-market paradise will have to wait.)

Stiglitz:

As the world’s business elites trek to Davos for their annual gathering, people should be asking a simple question: Have they overcome their infatuation with US President Donald Trump?

Two years ago, a few rare corporate leaders were concerned about climate change, or upset at Trump’s misogyny and bigotry. Most, however, were celebrating the president’s tax cuts for billionaires and corporations and looking forward to his efforts to deregulate the economy. That would allow businesses to pollute the air more, get more Americans hooked on opioids, entice more children to eat their diabetes-inducing foods, and engage in the sort of financial shenanigans that brought on the 2008 crisis.

Great Society Review

I just finished Amity Shlaes' Great Society. It's a great book. I warmly recommend it.

The US is debating a fourth great wave of US government expansion. Theodore Roosevelt to Wilson the original progressive era and WWI; Frankin Roosevelt's new deal; and the Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon "great society" of this book came before us.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, is in many ways the theme of the book. The Great Society offers lots of parallels to our time, and a cautionary tale that it will all end badly once again. But not all is the same, and the many ways our time is different from the 1960s is also good to ponder -- for better and for worse.

Amity is a gifted writer and storyteller. Pay attention to her books also for how they are written. How do you tell the story of an era in a way that is comprehensible and memorable? Amity picks a few central (and now often overlooked) people, a few programs, and a few benchmarks (the Dow, the price of gold), and tells the story of the era through their eyes. It's the Game of Thrones approach to the Great Society.  Do not expect even a comprehensive list of all great society programs, diff in diff regression discontinuity estimates of their causal effects, or even charts and graphs (all curiously packed in an appendix and never referred to in the text) or the customary eyeball-glazing recitations of statistics. This was her approach to the Great Depression in Forgotten Man, equally effective. It complements, but does not substitute for that more structural work.

Introduction

In case you don't get the point, Amity starts right off in the introduction with Michael Harrington who wrote "a then-famous bestseller called The Other America" and who worked for Sargent Shriver, which is one of the main characters of the book (Daenerys Targaryen?)

Why not socialism? The president had been in office three months, and he wanted new ideas to distinguish himself from his predecessor. Could the author bring up socialism at the lunch? The very word “socialism” had been toxic until recently. ... The taboo was weakening, though.

..“socialism” might sound too controversial for the White House. The writer could, however, pitch ideas that took the country toward socialism. ... Laws that backed up organized labor so it might represent a greater portion of the American workforce... Higher minimum wages... Minimum wages that covered more workers, even those who did not work in an office or full-time. A dramatic change in the training of bigoted policemen in the big cities. ... The money was simply in the wrong hands. ... a tax system that captured the elusive wealth of the superrich. The moment had come to level incomes in a systematic fashion. 

..The story sounds like something that could happen today."

The 1960s and early 1970s included a huge expansion of programs. And the results were in the end mostly abject failure.

Today

progressive proposals that bear a strong resemblance to Michael Harrington’s, from redistribution via taxation to student debt relief to a universal guaranteed income, are becoming popular again. Once again, many Americans rate socialism as the generous philosophy. But the results of our socialism were not generous. May this book serve as a cautionary tale of lovable people who, despite themselves, hurt those they loved. Nothing is new. It is just forgotten.

It is also a refreshing reminder of just how old most of the "new" ideas we are being bombarded from on the left are -- and a warning of how long they will pester us, at least as long as we are unwilling to learn.

From an SDS (students for democratic society) manifesto:

"The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans own more than 80 percent of all personal shares of stock"

The capsule stories of the 1960s focus on the civil rights triumph, the remaining politically successul programs such as medicare and medicaid, the vietnam war, and a vague hippy nostalgia. Shales' story, and the central roles of the forgotten (largely)  men she tracks are a novel tonic.

Stories

Walter Reuther, head of United Auto Workers, is a central figure, and the fight between the old-left unions and the new-left students epitomized by Tom Hayden, for the soul of the Democratic party.

Sargent Shriver, and the Office of Economic Opportunity are the stand-in for many ill fated programs. It starts with the predictable story of chaos that results from a flood of federal money.   The flood of federal money  did not stop the cities from burning.  The OEO is the beginning of Federal support for "community action" programs, including political activity.

"Community action programs, the authors [of the Community Action Program Workbook—262 pages on how to apply for and run a federally funded program] wrote, should provide the “stimulation of change.” One marker of a successful community action group was that it “increased competence in protest activities.” The OEO ... welcomed experiments, including those where community action organizers paid by Washington were “facilitating the opportunities for the poor to participate in protest actions.”

That kind of language was enough to send mayors like Dick Daley through the roof.

In the end, the cities went up in flames. The OEO morphed in many ways. One interesting almost afterthought of the original program, legal aid to the poor -- who can obect to that, helping poor people who can't afford lawyers? -- ballooned the way all such programs do,

"the governor [Reagan] was after the lawyers again, assailing California Rural Legal Assistance. The nonprofit should have stuck to individual legal aid cases for rural indigents, Reagan said, but instead had “converted itself into a vehicle for class action lawsuits against various government agencies.” Reagan told the crowd that his staff had reckoned that if the CRLA won all its suits in California, the cost of welfare there would increase by $1 billion—the same amount Johnson and Shriver had first set as the budget for the entire War on Poverty."

Here was where the government started paying lawyers to sue the government for more government.

Amity tracks disastrous housing policies through the life of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis, begun in earnest but remote social-planner hope, though destroying the community where it sat, and ending in controlled demolition.

"In some cases, only welfare families were entitled to the lowest rents at Pruitt-Igoe. And to receive welfare under Missouri’s rules, a family could have only one parent—the mother. So families considering life in the towers had to make a terrible choice: stay together or take the apartment. ..Families who moved into Pruitt-Igoe often lost a father. ...The social workers even policed apartments at night, checking to see if fathers had secretly returned, grounds for eviction. "

The consequences of which are predictable.

"Pruitt-Igoe elevators, which stopped only every few floors, were muggers’ traps. Poor maintenance meant the elevators often jammed, leaving gangs’ victims in with them for long extra minutes. The gangs lurked in the halls and made tenants “run the gantlet” to get to their doors. Young men threw bricks and rocks at windows and streetlamps; the activity was a regular sport..... Because there were no toilets on the ground floor, children had accidents there and in the elevators, and the elevators gradually became public toilets. The community area was a sorry joke... No one seemed able to stop the decay. "

I love this:

"Social scientists were descending on the complex to conduct multiyear investigations, and that irritated the tenants further."

we've been at it a long time, missing the ends of our noses.

"At Pruitt-Igoe, rents were scaled to income. Every time the Straughters’ wages went up, their rent went up, a tax on striving"

Income-capped rent subsidies are with us today.

"After tens of millions and decades of urban renewal spending, Detroit did not look renewed. Detroit looked, Mayor Cavanagh said, like a city that now did need a Marshall Plan, like “Berlin in 1945.” Almost three thousand businesses had been sacked, with damage many times greater than in Watts just two years before. "

In the end

"There was hypocrisy [and I would say a great deal of paternalistic disdain] in the  different treatment of the middle class and poor. For the middle class, the government had aimed to re-create and sustain the world of Alexis de Tocqueville, subsidizing home purchasers for suburban settlers. For the poor, however, the government had operated in the world of Karl Marx: government-sponsored housing blocks with tenants, not owners. Black citizens—Pruitt-Igoe was now all black—had been ripped from their roots when they moved North, uprooted again when they were moved for urban renewal, and then placed in high-rise rentals where putting down new roots was impossible."

"How might neighborhoods like this one have turned out if local companies, local authorities, and local individuals had led in the 1950s and 1960s, building their own Great Society? How might St. Louis have looked if the jobs had stayed? No one knew.  But here in the shadow of

Pruitt-Igoe, Father Shocklee and Pruitt-Igoe tenants had discovered one possibility. With his small housing program, Father Shocklee had shown that “the poor” were more like the middle class than people supposed. They gained from something only when they had a chance to own it."

Daniel Patrick Moynihan is a second central character in Amity's story (Tyrion Lannister?) Moynihan was a Democrat, but wrote the important and controversial "The Negro Family: The Case For National Action," pointing out, among many other things, the perverse incentives of welfare.

"From his work at Harvard and in Washington, Moynihan thought he had learned what was wrong with American welfare. The first trouble was that poverty funding tended to flow to bureaucrats—social workers, not poor people. “Feeding the horses to feed the sparrows,” Moynihan called it.  In many states, those social workers spent their time in perverse endeavors: inspecting apartments at Pruitt-Igoe to make sure no fathers were present, for example. Taxes hit people when they entered the workforce, reducing the appeal of working just as Eartha Kitt said. ...In some states, for example, a welfare mother working at the same job as a family father not on welfare took in 50 percent more than the man, because she was entitled to keep a portion of her welfare. Why not bypass the bureaucrats and send the money to families, regardless of whether fathers were present?"

And then he took a job with Nixon, and became one of Nixon's main advisers. He nearly got passed a negative income tax, the equivalent of today's universal basic income. In his grudging New York Times review, Binyamin Applebaum finds this story "curious," because it did not pass in the end. But it nearly did, which makes it important. Amity covers well the failed attempt to over rule right to work laws, which also nearly passed. Near failures good and bad are equally instructive to our current situation, no matter the flap of butterfly wings that determines their fate.  (The quick review of the UK's longer experience starting p. 335 is well worth it too.)

I found this amusing

"The crowd at Harvard had held even Hubert Humphrey, and at times Robert Kennedy, in contempt. Any interest in Nixon Harvard rated worse than reprehensible

The schoolmates of Moynihan’s children stopped talking to them. Alan Rabinowitz, a fellow academic, wrote a satirical poem chiding Moynihan for his betrayal, “The Knight Before Nixon.”

Plus ça change in academia, and much Trump-deranged society.

Fairchild semiconductor plays a small but significant role. It's good to remember how different the US economy of the 1950s was. There really were a few very large companies in most industries, and most technology came out of defense. The emergence of an innovative private tech sector is one of those many ways we are not replaying exactly the same song. The slow emergence of Toyota and VW, selling better cars and forcing change in Detroit is another.

Money and gold

A minor story for the book caught my eye, and I pass it on first as many blog readers are interested in monetary issues. One of the themes of the book --  the snow level on the great white wall -- is the price of gold, and the US continuing problems of gold outflow, the emergence of inflation, and the eventual collapse of the Bretton Woods system. This is an event much too little studied by macroeconomists, though my international and economic history friends tell me that shows just how parochial we are and we should start reading their papers.

In macroeconomics perhaps we are too influenced by Milton Friedman's great called home run, the 1968 presidential address, where he forecast inflation would emerge along with unemployment. But Friedman's story was told entirely in terms of the money supply and to a lesser extent interest rate targets, the one too large and the other too low. And that is how the stylized history has come down to us: Fiscal deficits from the Great Society and Vietnam war, combined with too loose monetary policy, set off inflation.

That story leads to the puzzle of our age: If the (by current standards) comparatively minor Johnson-Nixon deficits set off a grand inflation why do our huge deficits have no such effect now, despite many officials stated desire for more inflation?

The story of the book reminds us that the mechanics were quite different then, and leads me to the speculative thought that the gold standard mechanism brought on inflation much more quickly than our current arrangements. In part, it may have been designed to do so -- to force governments to make fiscal adjustments quickly rather than let the problem get so big the fiscal adjustment will be immense, much as Doug Diamond and Raghu Rajan model short term debt and its runs as a disciplining device to managers.

The world was different then. We had fixed exchange rates, and it was difficult to move capital from country to country -- to buy foreign stocks, for example. Bretton Woods was not really set up to handle today's large trade deficits financed by large capital account surpluses. When the US started running trade deficits, other countries piled up dollars, and the main thing they could do with those dollars was to turn them in to their central banks, who in turn used them to drain gold from the Fed. So, it strikes me that open capital markets that allow us to finance large trade deficits are an important reason our system has held up so long.

Amity tells the sad tale of stopgap measures -- bans on using dollars for foreign travel, half-hearted interest rate increases, looney schemes for the Federal Government to mine gold, and of course the tragedy of price controls.

In any case, the remaining gold standard between central banks, not very open capital markets, not very open currency markets and fixed exchange rates were a crucial part of the inflation dynamics in this period, not just bad money supply or interest rate rules.

The episode also raises the counterfactual question why the US did not use the many devices used to defend the gold standard through the centuries. Borrow gold. Temporarily suspend convertibility.

Coda

At the end of a review that had to be negative, though he had to admit the quality of the book, New York Times review, Binyamin Applebaum writes

"Half a century later, in the midst of a revival of interest in ideas like Moynihan’s basic income proposal, readers may find themselves wondering whether the nation’s problem is really too much government — or, perhaps, not enough."

One wonders just what it would take to ever change his mind on that one. Were the 60s riots, the 70s economy, and the evident pathologies of the welfare system not bad enough, or do we have to go full Venezuela first? After all these years, and with the same policies on agenda, with the same predictable disincentives and unintended consequences, could not his call be at least for smarter government, not just more? For a larger government that learns from rather than repeats this sad history?

Wealth and taxes -- Overview

I thought that "wealth and taxes" would be a short blog post. It turned in to a 5 part series. Here's an overview, or table of contents in case the whole thing looks a bit indimidating. The most important one, really I think is Part V, "it's all political." The others build bit by bit, well, this can't be the answer and that can't be the answer, so what is the answer, and Part V finds it.

In Part I we met the fact that "wealth" is measured as "capitalized income," Y/r. But only some kinds of income Y and with discount rate choices r that blew up measured wealth inequality. I review the  Smith, Zidar and Zwick paper that finds huge overstatements of inequality because wealthy people have a higher r than you and me.

In Part II we learned that a big reason wealth inequality widened is that interest rates fell and asset prices rose.  If r falls, Y/r rises, but it's the same Y.

In Part III  we noted the distinction between consumption, income and wealth inequality. Wealth is beyond badly measured as a measure of lifestyle. The computations ignore taxes and transfers, wildly blowing up measured inequality and rendering it a "problem" that ipso facto cannot be solved. Why concern ourselves with pre-tax wealth inequality, especially given that most wealth is reinvested in businesses that produce things and employ people?

In Part IV, we met the wealth tax. If the question is, how do we raise revenue for the government, either to spend or to transfer it, the wealth tax is a terrible idea, as it distorts the economy and leads to an evasion industry. A consumption tax is a much better idea.

In  Part V I read Saez and Zucman's opeds, which finally tell us what the question is to which the wealth tax is the answer. Saez and Zucman want to confiscate billionaires' wealth, because they think billionaires have too much political power, billionaires all got their money unjustly, and somehow though big government cronyism is the problem, bigger government is the answer.  The wealth tax is not designed to raise revenue -- it succeeds if it raises no revenue (after perhaps a one-time wealth grab) because the wealth it taxes has vanished. Well, at least it is a consistent view, decide if you buy the premises.

Update  

CATO put out a much-improved version of this series. Html here and pdf here. 

Wealth and Taxes, Part V

Wealth and Taxes Part V -- it's all about politics

(This is Part V of a series. See the overview for a summary of the other four)

So if wealth is not the answer to "how big is inequality," by any sensible measure, and if the wealth tax is not the answer to "what's the best way to raise money, or to redistribute income,"  if in fact wealth and wealth taxes are terrible answers to these questions, what is the question to which the wealth tax is the answer, and alarmist measures of wealth inequality to buttress it the pathway?

It's right there clear as day in Saez and Zucman's  Jan 22 2019 New York Times Oped

Their [high marginal tax rates] root justification is not about collecting revenue...high tax rates for sky-high incomes do not aim at funding Medicare for All. They aim at preventing an oligarchic drift that, if left unaddressed, will continue undermining the social compact and risk killing democracy.

An extreme concentration of wealth means an extreme concentration of economic and political power… Democracy or plutocracy: That is, fundamentally, what top tax rates are about. 

Well, now we have at least an honest question to which confiscatory taxation is the answer.

• The point of the wealth tax is to destroy the supposed political power of billionaires by destroying their wealth. 

We could have saved a lot of time and effort if we had just started there and not wasted time on phony economic arguments!

Economic distortions are a feature not a bug. In optimal taxation theory we try to find taxes that raise revenue and don't kill the golden goose that lays eggs. The whole point here is to kill the golden goose.

• The wealth tax is successful when it raises no revenue, when it destroys the wealth subject to tax.  

Even more clearly:

That few people [in the 1960s] faced the 90 percent top tax rates was not a bug; it was the feature that caused sky-high incomes to largely disappear. 

Is your jaw dropping yet?

(The quote is also a... misleading statement. 90 percent tax rates made reported incomes disappear and tax shelters explode.)

In optimal tax theory, the point is to get resources without disincentives -- to tax the rich without discouraging people from becoming rich, so they can get rich and pay the taxes. Here the point is exactly the opposite. They want to tax billionaires to the point that there are no billionaires.

• The point of the wealth tax is to destroy the incentive to become rich. 

Why? If you view all wealth as ill-gotten, basically criminal, as perversions of democracy then you want to destroy the incentive to engage in those nefarious activities.

Well, no wonder we've been arguing and getting nowhere! As usual we're starting from different premises.

Saez and Zucman are not particularly consistent, arguing in many other places that the wealth tax will raise lots of revenue rather than just destroy wealth. They advise Senator Warren who has made big revenues a central part of her policy agenda. She wants the wealth tax precisely to fund Medicare for all, which Saez and Zucman just said is not the point. I find that sort of inconsistency very annoying, and telling of a political agenda which they're not willing to state honestly in many circles.

• Will the real wealth tax please stand up? Is it supposed to raise a lot of revenue, or is it supposed to get rid of billionaires, after which it will raise no revenue? Make up your minds, please.  

An amusing aside

"The view that excessive income concentration corrodes the social contract has deep roots in America — a country founded, in part, in reaction against the highly unequal, aristocratic Europe of the 18th century." 

I guess I can forgive two Frenchmen for being a little foggy on American history. Our revolution had a lot to do with paying British taxes, not guillotining the aristocracy. In modern language, Americans wanted opportunity, not redistribution. The Boston Tea Party was not a demand that Britain tax its aristocrats, either to send money instead of tea, or just to tax them out of existence because "inequality" was galling the Americans.  The American Revolution was run by the wealthiest in this country, and was if anything about keeping property, including slaves.

Do billionaires really run the country?

We have left economics long ago, but does this idea make any sense? This is a mantra of the extreme left. John Cassidy, writing in the New Yorker to cheer these ideas

Meanwhile, the Citizens United ruling, the rise of super pacs, and the lurch to the right of the Republican Party and, of course, the Trump Presidency have demonstrated the growing political power of the billionaire class. 

I'm scratching my head here. Just what billionaires are they worried about? Tom Steyer? Michael Bloomberg? George Soros? Bill Gates, devoting his billions to global charities? The Business Roundtable CEOs who endorsed "stakeholder capitalism" as fast as you can say "Warren just passed Biden in the polls?" The readers of the New Yorker? (Look at their ads and the NYT Style section. They don't run ads like that on Fox News!) Pete Buttigieg's wine-cave buddies? It strikes me that the billionaires in this country are by and large achingly progressive coastal elites. (see Ryan Bourne at Cato "Has Wealth Inequality Eroded U.S. Democracy" for numbers showing political preferences of the very rich.)

That billionaires bought Trump the election is simply untrue. Chris Edwards and Ryan Bourne:

not one CEO in the Fortune 100 had donated to Trump’s election campaign by September 2016. His victory did not stem from influence by the wealthy but more from grassroots opposition to wealthy coastal elites. 

The money was on Hilary Clinton, who spent nearly double what Trump did. I perceived Clinton, famous for Goldman-Sachs speeches, as just the kind of candidate one who dislike cronyism should worry about.

Well, dark conspiracy theories are hard to disprove. But at least now you know what worldview leads, logically (at last) from its premises to a wealth tax. You can decide if you buy these premises. It has, by admission, nothing to do with revenue, and little to do with economics.

The argument goes on that billionaires have too much "economic power." Progressives are great with language, and you usually see wealth "controlled" by the 1% not just "owned," or heaven forbid "earned" by the 1%. I will leave to your imaginations just what that means.  If you have a billion dollars in treasury bills and the Vanguard index fund, just what "power" does that give you?

A wealth tax would also be a dandy way to bring billionaires in, with their tax lawyers, accountants, lobbyists, and favorite congresspeople for a once-a-year trip to the confessional, to discuss how the IRS will value various complex entities, along with their twitter accounts, charitable and campaign contributions, and just how their businesses are doing on advancing the green new deal and diversity and equity programs. As long as we are scratching our heads trying to find the question to which the wealth tax is the answer, this is a pretty good one.

Off with their heads!

The world-view is expressed even more clearly by Bernie Sanders:

or perhaps George Bernard Shaw

“The more I see of the moneyed classes, the more I understand the guillotine.”

The point really is decapitation. "Inequality"  is (Saez and Zucman) such a "crisis" that we are better off just getting rid of billionaires, even if that means throwing all their wealth and the businesses that provide their income in the ocean. While it is often pointed out that any concern with inequality means are better off if a rich person loses $100 and a poor person loses $1, this is a pretty extreme version of that view.

Ill-gotten wealth 

A second argument lies behind the wealth tax: it's all ill-gotten money, or luck. Zucman and Saez again

progressive income taxation... restrains all exorbitant incomes equally, whether they derive from exploiting monopoly power, new financial products, sheer luck or anything else…

Can you think of a few anything elses' that are missing here?

Robert Reich opines that there are only five ways to make a billion dollars

" exploit a monopoly;...get insider information unavailable to other investors,... buy off politicians,...extort big investors,...get the money from rich parents or relatives."

Just who made their iPhones, I'd like to know?

Edwards and Bourne document much more extensively a view more consistent with my reading of the facts,

Most of today’s wealthy are business people who built their fortunes by adding to economic growth, and some have created major innovations that benefit all of us. The share of the wealthy who inherited their fortunes has sharply declined in recent decades

In particular, the Piketty story of centuries old inherited wealth growing at r>g is a fable. The rich are not getting richer. All of today's rich are nouveau. At best, this generation's self-made internet gazilloinaires and hedge fund managers made more money than the last generation's Waltons and bond traders.

There is an element of truth, as in all fables. Edwards and Bourne go on,

...cronyism, which refers to insiders and businesses securing narrow tax, spending, and regulatory advantages. Cronyism is one cause of wealth inequality, and it has likely increased over time as the government has grown.

The really big billionaires -- google, Facebook, apple, etc. -- unquestionably built tremendous products, and pocketed a tiny fraction of the resulting benefit. But there is a lot of cronyism and exploiting government-granted monopolies in the US economy for sure. The epi-pen story is not isolated. Banking, courtesy of Dodd-Frank barriers to entry. Health care. We can grant that Vladimir Putin did not get wealthy from an innovative tech startup.

But to the extent that wealth is amassed by exploiting regulations, regulatory barriers to entry, special favors from the government, tax deals, is more government really the answer? How is it that the politically connected super wealthy can get massive breaks from corporate taxes (how Reich thinks the Koch brothers made their money), but they won't get, well, massive breaks from the wealth tax? If too much government is the problem, inviting cronies to lobby for government to use its power on their behalf, just how is more government the answer? Bloody Marys don't work for a hangover.

Well, at least now we know what we're talking about. If you live on the Saez, Zucman, Reich planet, and you think destroying billionaires' wealth won't ruin your business too or deny you the benefits of economic growth, and you think that their politicians can operate a confiscatory tax regime without opening the same crony Pandora's box that they claim cause the problem in the first place, you like the wealth tax.

At least they should stop the pretense this has anything to do with revenue, economics,  optimal taxation, expanding economic opportunity for the lower end of America, and so forth. As Warren advisers, they might want to inform her before the next debate, ah, this is not about raising revenue. And we should stop falling for this trap as well, and wasting our time on part I-IV arguments.

Bottom line

I want to end on  two positive notes. I started all this with a discussion of  Smith, Owen, and Zwick. As we saw in part I it cleans up some of the egregious thumbs on scale in Saez and Zucman, and taught me just how fraught the whole "capitalization" idea to measure wealth is. It's a good example of an industry of papers that quickly tore apart the Saez Zucman numbers.

But I fault Smith, Owen and Zwick, and most of their fellows, for meekly taking the questions at face value. Their paper  "builds on the pioneering work of Saez and Zucman (2016)." They "follow Saez and Zucman (2016) in defining wealth." They calculate static revenues from a wealth tax. But we just found out that this was all a red herring as the point is to destroy wealth not tax it. They offer nothing to question the idea that if this definition of "wealth" has become more unequal, "policy" should do something about it.   One can at least point to a literature, such as Edwards and Ryan, that do question the question, or Saez and Zucman's own opeds that suggest a very different set of questions.

Thus, I fault this paper, and its companions, for taking the questions at face value. You see the  agenda.  You’re being suckered into a rope-a-dope. The right response is that this is the wrong question, an utterly silly question, and one can at least say that.

This series is really about conciliation. Unlike other economists, I don't want to presume we're all asking the same question and Saez and Zucman are dummies. I want to respect that they are smart, so if they are coming to a different answer, it must be because they have a different question. In today's post, we now have a set of world views that does at last have some logic, which one can debate. In that spirit, I close with a Saez quote which which I agree completely:

"My sense is really that the public will favor more progressive taxation only if it is convinced that top income gains are detrimental to economic growth of the 99%, and that taxation can ameliorate this. In America, people do not have a strong view against inequality per se, as long as inequality is fair. And what does fair mean? As an economist, you would say fair means that individual income and wealth reflect the value of what people produce or otherwise contribute to the economic system. This is why distinguishing between the standard supply side scenario versus the rent-seeking scenario is so important." 

Amen, brother Saez. And, if rent-seeking is the problem, explain to us how an enormous wealth tax will not attract the same rent-seekers who game the obscene income, corporate, and estate taxes today.

In the end, this is all about power. Sure, let's call it "economic power" as well as political power. Saez and Zucman want to transfer power from private hands to the government, and eliminate a potential source of power, a source of competition to the incumbent government.

Whether that is a good idea depends essentially on your view of just how bad private vs. government power is. I'm a (many adjectives) libertarian, and I see even in the worst excesses of private power some discipline of competition or potential competition restraining it. I see most private power as given to the powerful by government in exchange for political support, which is really an expression of government power to suppress that competition.  The defining character of government power is lack of competition and a monopoly of force. The essence of Saez and Zucman is to reduce the competition for power faced by whoever runs the government.  Historically, I see the damage of extreme government power -- Soviet and Chinese Communism, German Nazism -- as orders of magnitude worse than even the worst caricatures of private power, especially of private power that does not derive ultimately from or require support from state power -- perhaps the Victorian dark satanic mills?

I presume Saez and Zucman agree they don't want to hand massive power to this administration, or a Republican Congress, or maybe even to the branch of the Democratic Party that handed out the cronyist goodies to billionaires they decry. So the argument must be that the "good politicians" will take over, will stay in power, will arrange never to hand the reins to a future Trump, and this time they will not misuse a monopoly of power, made ever stronger by lack of private economic or political power to challenge it.  Just put us bien-pesants in charge and all will be well.

I'm dubious of anyone making that claim, made so often in the past. I don't favor a libertarian dictatorship either.

They claim to worry about "inequality." Many government-run states -- Cuba, say, or Soviet Russia -- had much less measured income inequality. But if this is really all about "power," we should not fail to note that those states had much more inequality of power. Stalin may not have reported a lot on his income taxes, but he essentially owned a whole country.

More

Chris Edwards and Ryan Bourne at Cato have a nice series on inequality issues here (study, also pdf)  here (blog post). Ryan also takes on the final question that this series builds to, Has wealth inequality eroded democracy?

The Saez Summers Mankiw debate is informative.  See also Summers and Natasha Sarin on the wealth tax. If you're following politics, this really is about the soul of the Democratic Party and its economic views, Summers vs. Saez-Zucman as it is about Biden vs. Warren, Sanders, AOC.

My Hoover colleague David Henderson wrote a nice blog post on the topic, including coverage of the  debate.

"Emmanuel Saez... made his case for a tax on wealth and claimed that the wealthy have disproportionate influence on economic policy. In a segment that is beautiful to see (from about the 1:07:00 point to the 1:09:30  in this forum), Larry Summers challenged Saez to give an example where reducing wealthy people’s wealth by 20 percent would produce better political, social, or cultural decisions. Summers to Saez: “You’ve been making this argument for years. Do you have one example?” Saez didn’t. Summers went on to make the point that very wealthy people can have large influence by spending a trivial percentage of their wealth. Even heavy taxes on wealth would leave them quite wealthy."

"In his earlier presentation on the panel, Summers made another important point. He considered three activities that wealthy people engage in.  Activity A is continuing to invest it productively. Activity B is consuming it—for  example, by hiring a big jet and taking their friends to a nice resort. Activity C is donating it to causes and, if the causes are political, having even larger influence on political causes than they have now. Both B and C are ways to avoid a tax on wealth; A is not."

Interestingly, in the above oped, Saez did have examples, like the interesting claim that Russia became oligarchic and Japan did not (?) because Russia wasn't taxing enough. I would have been interested to hear Larry's response to that one.

From Nihai Krishan in the Washington Examiner

Larry Summers... has called Saez and Zucman’s estimates for the revenues generated by the wealth tax “naively high.” One possibility is that, instead of paying the tax, the über-wealthy would strategically give their money away to charities, reducing the tax base. "It seems important to account for the fact that the wealthy (and their tax planners) will inevitably be motivated to limit tax liability," Summers and another professor argued in an opinion piece in the Washington Post

Larry and the rest of us need to read the NYT oped and understand that low revenue is the point. Of course, Saez and Zucman could be more consistent about that.

The prevalence of non-profits as a tax-avoidance device, and their increasingly political nature, is a topic worth exploring. There is a reason every billionaire and sports star has a charity, that among other things employs his or her relatives and associates.

Gerald Auten and David Spilinter's analysis is an important recent piece in the data discussion.

"Top income share estimates based only on individual tax returns, such as Piketty and Saez (2003), are biased by tax-base changes, major social changes, and missing income sources.... Our results suggest that top income shares are lower than other tax-based estimates, and since the early 1960s, increasing government transfers and tax progressivity resulted in little change in after-tax top income shares."

Chris Edwards passed along a number of good links. Like me, Chris is worried about cronyism, and has good opeds  here and here  acknowledging that "the democrats are partially right." He points to the logical fallacy though -- just because some people earned money this way does not mean that all rich people did. And, we can agree on the disease but disagree on the treatment. If a government running a complex tax system open to cronyism is the problem, it does not follow that more government running an even more complex tax system is the answer. Chris also has a nice analysis of the wealth and capital income taxes and Alan Reynolds on tax elasticities

Update: Thanks to commenters and correspondents who fixed some little errors.

A good friend passes on a lovely quip:  "If ever there was an example of policy-based evidence-making, the case for the wealth tax is it."

Wealth and Taxes, Part IV

(This is Part IV of a series. Part III, and Part V. which has the punchline.  See the overview for a summary.)

The Wealth Tax.

So, if arguing about the ill-defined and ill-measured distribution of wealth lies in service of the wealth tax, what is the question to which the wealth tax is an answer?

Revenue and Redistribution -- good and bad taxes

Preamble: Economists have no real professional expertise to object to redistribution, or argue for it. Swallow hard, you may not like it for political, moral or other reasons -- or you may be all for it for those reasons -- but admit economists economists have no special insights to the right amount of redistribution. Economics has one analysis to offer the world: incentives. (OK, and equilibrium.) If it were possible to take money from A and give it to B without creating any adverse incentives, we have no special standing to cheer or to object. Economics can tell us something about tax rates, but not much about taxes. 

Thus the theory of optimal taxation is straightforward: how can the government raise a given tax revenue while generating the least perverse disincentives? The theory of optimal redistribution offers an additional wrinkle: how can the government give money away while generating the least perverse disincentives to recipients as well as payers?

Conference announcement

If you're working on fiscal issues, especially fiscal theory of the price level, here is a good conference you should submit to or attend. Don't wait, the deadline is today. Yes, this is self-interested -- I'm going and giving a talk so it's entirely in my interest that the other papers are interesting! The conference website is here

Wealth and Taxes, Part III

(This is Part III of a series.  Part II and Part IV   See the overview for a summary. The punchline comes in Part V. )

So, why do we care about the distribution of wealth? -- Especially,  as we learned in part I that wealth is poorly defined and poorly measured, and we learned in part II that much of the distribution of "wealth" reflects higher market prices for the same assets, which do not increase their owner's ability to consume over a lifetime? Why so much anger, even from commenters on this blog?

• Why wealth inequality not income inequality or consumption inequality?

There already has been much ballyhoo about income inequality. Why worry, separately, about wealth inequality? Why worry, especially, given that "wealth" is measured as income / discount rate, so it is income inequality? Well, not really -- it is only certain kinds of income inequality, and different kinds of income get multiplied by different large numbers (1/r). But why do we casre about this particular kind of weighted income inequality rather than broad income inequality?

Why do we worry about wealth inequality or income inequality rather than consumption inequality in the first place?  If you're worried about inequality of lifestyle, inequality of who is using the planet's resources, and so forth, you want to think about consumption inequality.

Wealth and Taxes, part II

(This is a continuation of Wealth and Taxes, part I. Part III follows.  See the overview for a summary. The punchline comes in Part V.)

A second asset pricing perspective helps us to digest "wealth," its distribution, and whether we should care.   

Here is another Smith, Zidar and  Zwick  graph showing the top 0.1% share of wealth (as they define and measure wealth). (Reminder. The game here is to start with selected income streams, then divide them by a rate of return to produce large wealth numbers. $100 income / 0.01 interest rate = $10,000 of wealth.) The "baseline" case capitalizes realized capital gains, which I argued last time was a pretty crazy thing to do. The bottom line treats only dividends. If dividends are properly measured, the value of the firm is the value of dividends only and repurchases are irrelevant.

The graph makes the obvious point that "capitalizing" capital gain "income" is an important assumption to driving up the appearance of wealth inequality.

But it makes a deeper point, my focus today. The top graph is pretty much the graph of the S&P index. This illustrates visually a deeper point:  

• A lot of the rise in "wealth," and "wealth inequality," even properly defined and measured as the market value of net assets, consists of higher market prices for the same underlying physical assets. In turn, higher asset prices stem almost entirely from lower real interest rates and lower risk premiums, not from higher expectations of economic growth. 

This raises a deep "why do we care" question. Suppose Bob owns a company, giving him $100,000 a year income. Bob also spends $100,000 a year. The discount rate is 10%, so his company is worth $1,000,000. The interest rate goes down to 1%, and the stock market booms. Bob's company is now worth $10,000,000. Hooray for Bob!

But wait a minute. Bob still gets $100,000 a year income, and he still spends $100,000 a year. Absolutely nothing has changed for Bob! The value of his company is "paper wealth."

We compare Bob to Sally, who earns $100,000 per year wages and has no assets. The distribution of income and of consumption is entirely flat. But the distribution of wealth was already concentrated: Bob had  $1,000,000 of wealth, because we ignored Sally's human wealth, the present value of her salary. Now wealth inequality is 10 times worse, because we also ignore the higher capitalized value of Sally's human wealth.

But why should we care? Bob and Sally are both marching along unchanged.

Well, you say, I just assumed Bob didn't change consumption. He should sell some stock and go out on a round-the-world private jet tour. Or, what gazillionaires really do, he should start a foundation and give it away. But Bob won't do that for a simple reason. Originally, he wanted to spend $100,000 per year. Originally, if he sold his company for $1,000,000 and invested it at 10%, he could spend $100,000 per year. Now if he sells his company for $10,000,000, he can only invest that at 1% per year so the most he can spend is still $100,000!

People don't want to consume in one big spurt. They want to spread consumption out over their and their heirs lifetimes. When the interest rate goes down, it takes more wealth to finance the same consumption stream.

• Consumption should not respond (much) to increases in wealth generated by lower discount rates for the same cashflows.  

The present value of liabilities -- consumption -- rises just as much as the present value of assets. This is a rather deep point that gets lost all too often in the static Keynesian consumption function thinking about "wealth effects of consumption" that still pervades macroeconomics.

If the rise in asset value is because people expect the income stream to grow a lot in the future, at unchanged discount rates, then indeed Bob is truly more "wealthy" than before. But that is emphatically not the situation of today's market value of wealth in the US, at least on average. If you think internet companies have enormous stock values because their profits will continue to grow at astronomical rates, I have some 1999 dot com stock to sell you.

(A refinement: lower real interest rates do generate a "substitution effect." You should rearrange consumption to be earlier in time rather than later in time. But the central point is that the lower interest rate does not have a "wealth effect." Though the asset is worth more, you cannot consume more in every year than you could before. The original flat consumption path is still just affordable.)

Now there are good questions to be asked about the distribution of consumption, and in particular lifetime consumption. If Bob averages $100,000 consumption over his life, and Sally only $10,000 that's an interesting observation about our society and we might want to think about the economics, politics, justice if you wish and so forth of the situation. But why should we worry about an increase in mark-to-market "wealth" that has no implications for the overall command over resources that "wealthy" people have?

Is this a big effect? Yes. Here is a simple plot of real interest rates, computed as the 10 year bond rate less the university of Michigan inflation survey. It declines from nearly 10% to negative numbers. (If you want to make "wealth distribution" look bad, start capitalizing incomes dividing by zero and then negative numbers!)

In sum, much of the increase in "wealth inequality," to the extent it is there at all, reflects higher market values of the same income flows, and indicates nothing about increases in consumption inequality, or if you prefer "command over resources."

Just why should we carte about wealth inequality?  Obviously, many smart people are very animated by it, including apparently about half the job market candidates on this year's PhD market. What is the question to which wealth inequality is the answer? Stay tuned for part III..

(Note: As a commenter on the last post pointed out, Larry Summers made this point in the excellent
Saez Summers Mankiw debate about wealth and taxes.)

On to Part III

Wealth and taxes, part I

(This is Part I of a series. See the overview for a summary. The punchline comes in Part V.)

Last November I had the pleasure of discussing "Top Wealth in the United States: New Estimates and Implications for Taxing the Rich" a very nice paper by Matthew Smith, Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick at the NBER asset pricing meetings, presented by Eric. The paper prompts a series of blog posts on wealth distribution and wealth taxes. I'll try to stick to points that haven't been made a hundred times already.

The paper mostly examines  Saez and Zucman's 2016 QJE paper on wealth inequality.  As many others have found, the Saez Zucman numbers are, ... let's say somewhat overstated.

Their bottom line is to cut Saez and Zucman in half. As I read the paper I think this is conservative -- and when we ask the obvious questions that the whole enterprise begs to be asked (which Smith et al don't do, but I will) a chasm of emptiness opens up, and the questions end up emptier than their answers.

The first thing you have to understand is the nature of wealth. Here is most people's impression of what wealth is:

That's not it at all. As Zwick et al say,

“Less than half of top wealth takes the form of liquid securities with clear market values”

So, the question is how do we measure the "wealth" that is not liquid securities with clear market values, like the profits of privately owned businesses? And, given that there is not US data on wealth (yet, thank goodness), even the part that is a security is hard to measure. 

Enter "capitalization." The main idea in Saez and Zucman, reexamined by Smith et al., is that we measure "wealth" by measuring income, and then translating that income to wealth by assuming it will last forever and discounting it at some rate. In equations 

Wealth = Income / discount rate

We have data from the IRS on income. So, let's follow along on Zwick et al.'s best story, how we find wealth invested in bonds from IRS individual interest income data and total bonds outstanding data: 

“In 2014, the aggregate flow of [taxable] interest income was $98B, and the stock of fixed income wealth was $11T. The ratio gives the average yield, r = $98B/$11T   = 0.89%. Using this yield to capitalize income amounts to multiplying every dollar of interest income by 1/0.89% = 113 to estimate fixed income wealth. … Implementing equation (4) for fixed income gives an estimate of top fixed income wealth of $42B × 113 = $4.7T of fixed income wealth held by the top 0.1%. The bottom 99.9% estimate is $56B × 113 = $6.4T .

My emphasis.

You may have wondered, if we're just going to mulitply income by a number and call it wealth, why are we bothering to measure the wealth distribution at all? Let's just use the income distribution! You get one answer here -- if you call it wealth you get to multiply by 113! Since only some kinds of income get this treatment, kinds that are more likely to be held by wealthy people, that makes the numbers look much more unequal.

Smith et al's point though is not this basic one. Rather they look carefully at the calculation. This calculation assumes that all "fixed income" assets pay the same, low, rate of interest. Another well established fact is that rich people get better rates of return on their assets.

 Here is Smith et al's plot of the actual rate of return that people earn on their fixed income investments. The uber wealthy earn 6% on their fixed income investments. This is not a small effect. In our capitalization factors, wealth = income / discount rate,

1/0.01 = 100

1/0.06 = 16.7

Changing from a 0.01 discount rate to a 0.06 discount rate pulls the wealth estimate per dollar of income down from 100 to 16.7. That's a lot. Smith et al:

“the adjustment reduces the top capitalization factor—and thus estimated top fixed income wealth—by a factor of 4.7, or 80%”

This is huge, to say the least.

(Note the irony. People who worry about wealth inequality are usually bemoan the fact that rich people earn higher returns on average than not so rich people, as it apparently will make inequality worse over time.  But the same higher average return must mean a lower multiples for converting income to wealth. You just can't have it both ways.

Higher returns are not some evil plot. The largely come from the fact that rich people buy riskier assets, like stocks and  junk bonds, and less rich people buy safer but lower yielding assets like bank accounts.  OK, It is to some extent a plot. Lots of regulations prohibit lower income people from buying the kinds of assets that make rich people richer in the name of consumer protection. The SEC is loosening some of these regulations.)

Beyond fixed income, the capitalization game gets even muddier, in both papers. What income flow are you going to capitalize?

“In the case of C-corporation equities, the income flow is dividends plus [realized] capital gains."

I think that's an accounting mistake, common in this literature. You cannot take the realized capital gains as an "income" flow for capitalization purposes. Suppose you buy a stock for $1, and it grows to $100. You sell $10 of the stock, but now you only have $90 left. You can't keep doing this forever, as the capitalization assumes.  That's fundamentally different than the company is worth $100, makes a $10 profit and gives you a $10 dividend. I'll be curious to hear from better accountants than I whether you can sensibly capitalize realized capital gains. Onwards...

For S-corporation equities, the income flow is S-corporation  income. For proprietor and partnership wealth, the income flow is the sum of proprietor income and partnership income  [ “capital” income?].  In the  case of real estate, property tax is capitalized to estimate housing assets ….”

Ok, that's income, what is the discount rate?

“Private business returns are harder to estimate than fixed income returns because private business wealth is harder to observe than fixed income wealth…We focus on multiple-based valuation models”

So we go from multiples to estimate a multiple... This all seems rather circular.

The bottom line? The game, as announced by Saez and Zucman is this: We start with the  pretax value of “capital” income, including asset income, proprietor income and partnership income, but not labor income (wages, bonuses, etc) or social security income. We multiply by various huge 1/r numbers to call them "wealth".  By doing that and using low r numbers, the "wealth" distribution looks much more extreme than the income distribution. As you can see the 1/r assumption allows great latitude in how this calculation is going to come out.

****

I spent a lot of time in asset pricing, and this paper was presented at an asset pricing meeting, so let me offer a little bit of what asset pricing has to say about these kinds of procedures.

The real capitalization formula is

P/D = 1/(r-g)

the price - dividend ratio is equal to one over the difference of the discount rate and the growth rate of dividends. Shhh! If the wealth inequality crowd realizes they can subtract g their multipliers will explode! (Joke. Of course we always use the right numbers) 

The function 1/(r-g) is very sensitive to r and g, especially for low discount rates like the 1% we were using for bonds. Going down from 2% to 1% doubles the value. So, if you want to fiddle with values, fiddle with discount rates.

The right discount rate is much higher for risky assets than risk free assets. Lots of people discount things with stock market risk using interest rates, and get absurdly too high values.

If you put the 20 best financial economists in the world together in a room, gave them all of a company's cash flow information, they could not come within a factor of 3 of the actual stock market value.  "Valuation" mostly consists of fiddling with discount rates to get the "right" answer. Maybe "multiples" isn't so bad after all.

In short, capitalizing income to get any sense of "wealth" is an inherently... absurdly imprecise game.

***

I don't mean to sound critical of Smith et al. They're doing the best they can given the Zucman and Saez rules of the game. But a little peek into this sausage factory should leave you wondering, just why are these the rules of the game? Why do we care (should we care) so much about the distribution of something that is essentially impossible to measure or define? If you are making money was a partner in an LLC you help to run, why should anyone care about a fictitious accounting "value" of that partnership? You can't sell it!

Why start with pretax income? If you pay half your income in taxes, does that not halve the value of the asset?  Why does "wealth" include the value of proprietor and partnership income but not labor income or social security income?

These are good questions for the next few blog posts. Stay tuned.

On to Part II

Economics and cognitive dissonance

What is the value of economics? "Have you economists ever proved anything that isn't obvious?" is a common complaint.

Tyler Cowen has an insightful post on Marginal Revolution, that provides a lovely insight into the power of economic thinking.

Often, multiple policy questions come down to a single issue. We may not know the answers to any of the questions, but we can at least say that the single issue drives the answer to all of them. So once you decide one issue goes one way, you can't (rationally) believe another issue goes another way, no matter how politically convenient that might be.

The issue here is the "elasticity of labor demand." If wages go down 10%, how many more workers will employers hire? If wages go up 10%, how many fewer will they hire? Already, note, that's one number, and it makes little sense to believe a higher number in one direction than another except for some likely quite transitory adjustment costs.

Tyler

There is a longer history of minimum wage assumptions not really being consistent with other economic views. 

Have you ever heard someone argue for wage subsidies and minimum wage hikes?  No go!  The demand for labor is either elastic or it is not. 

Have you ever heard someone argue for minimum wage hikes and inelastic labor demand, yet claim that immigrants do not lower wages?  Well, the latter claim about immigration implies elastic labor demand. 

Have you ever heard someone argue that “sticky wages” reduce employment in hard times but government-imposed sticky minimum wages do not?  Uh-oh. [The link is good too - JC]  

It would seem we can now add to that list.  Maybe we will see a new view come along:
“Labor demand is elastic when licensing restrictions are imposed, but labor demand is inelastic when minimum wages are imposed.”

This is a bit of economic-ese, so let me translate just a bit. The argument for a minimum wage is that labor demand is inelastic -- employers will hire the same number of workers. They will just absorb the higher wages or pass along the costs to customers. Workers get all the benefit. If labor demand is elastic, employers cut back on the number of employees. Most people lose their jobs and only a lucky (or productive, or willing to tolerate harsher working conditions) few get the higher wage.

The argument for wage subsidies requires the opposite assumption. If we subsidize wages, do employers respond by just paying people less? (Or, of we pay the subsidy to the worker, are the same number now willing to work for lower wages from employers? An often forgotten core result of economics is, it doesn't matter who pays the tax or gets the subsidy.) That is the case if labor demand is inelastic. Or do employers respond by paying the same amount, and expanding the workforce? That is the result if labor demand is elastic. You need elastic labor demand for wage subsidies to work as intended.

Thus, you can't simultaneously be for higher minimum wages and for wage subsidies. That is cognitive dissonance. Or, inconsistency. Or wishful thinking. And very common.

Likewise, just about 99% of macroeconomics is centered on the proposition that wages are "sticky." (1%, consisting of basically me, still has doubts.) If deflation breaks out, wages do not fall. Wages are too high. Employers cut back on workers, and people are unemployed. For this argument to work, (among other things) labor demand must be elastic. And then inducing exactly the same situation by minimum wages must have exactly the same result -- fewer jobs.

The point on immigration is good. The labor demand curve unites a price and a quantity. Thus, if pushing on a price has little effect on quantity, we know that pushing on a quantity has a large effect on price. Or, you have a hard time believing one thing about pushing on a price, and another thing about pushing on a quantity.

If you don't like minimum wage hikes, you can't believe that immigrants are pushing down wages. If you like higher minimum wages, you must believe that immigrants are terrible for labor markets. This proposition should be equally uncomfortable on the left and the right.

(Supply demand graphs are great here. I leave them as an exercise for the reader. If you know how to read them, this was all obvious already.)

Yes, one can complicate the analysis in each case to get a desired result -- add adjustment costs, asymmetries, or whatever. But it is striking that most discussions don't do that -- they don't reconcile that what is good for the goose ought to be good for the gander, and defend why not in a specific case.

Tyler:

Third addendum: Of course there are numerous other ways this analysis could run.  What is striking to me is that people don’t seem to undertake it at all.

It is interesting in policy debates how people debating each issue seem not to connect with other issues. Clear thinking is hard. "Wait, this comes down to the elasticity of labor demand, and we made the opposite assumption last Tuesday discussing immigration" is not the sort of thought that occurs naturally.  It is also a sign that policy-oriented economics is all too often searching for justification of pre-determined answers.

Update: Casey Mulligan complains that Tyler and I both left out the many margins of adjustment that happen in response to minimum wages, such as making hours less convenient, reducing benefits, making work less pleasant, and so forth. Casey's right, but Casey needs to relax! This isn't an extensive minimum wage post. I've blogged about those effects many times before. They're real and important. And the other side may want to complicate things as well. Before we come up for excuses why (say) minimum wages and immigration are different, let us at least acknowledge the simple model in which they are the same, and that to the extent labor demand elasticity bears in the analysis of each, one should use a consistent assumption on that ingredient.

Who pays more taxes

A retired guy and a carpenter walk in to a bar, and they each order a beer. When they pay, the fashionable progressive economist asks them, "how much tax did you pay today on the money you got to buy that beer?" The carpenter answers, "Well, I just got my paycheck today. So, that's 30% federal income tax, 5% state income tax, 15% social security and other payroll taxes." The retiree says, "I took the money out of my bank account at the ATM on the way over. There isn't a tax on taking money out of banks so I didn't pay any taxes today."

"The shame, the horror, the inequality!,"  proclaims the progressive economist, sending the preprint of his study in the New York Times. "Retirees, who have a lot more in their bank accounts than working folks, aren't paying any taxes! All the taxes are being shouldered by poor workers! We need to tax money people take out of banks!"

"Wait a darn-tootin' minute," says the retiree, having spilled half his beer. (Old people talk like that.) "I worked my whole life.  I paid Federal income taxes, state income taxes, city income taxes, and payroll taxes on that money. My company paid sales taxes, corporate income taxes, property taxes, mitigation fees and so on out of every dollar I billed made for them. I paid vastly overinflated health insurance to cross subsidize medicaid, medicare, and indigent care. I saved for my retirement, rather than blowing it all when I was young. Then every year I paid taxes on interest and dividends, and capital gains when I rebalanced my portfolio. It's a miracle I still have this lousy $5 left to buy a beer. No, thank goodness there is not a take-it-out-of-the-bank tax.  But I paid a heck of a lot of taxes on this money!"

I think this little story captures the essence of one of the  many little -- well, Phillip Magness in in the AEIER, reflecting a little traditional conservative politeness,  calls them "fibs" --  in the latest Saez-Zucman effort to prove that rich people pay less taxes than you and I, an equally ardent effort to prove that despite everyone else's numbers the rich really did pay a lot more taxes in the golden 1950s, reinforcing the trope cited even in the Democratic debates* with lightning speed.

Others have torn the numbers apart, including Magness,  David Splinter at the Joint Committee on Taxation, Larry Kotlikoff in the Wall Street Journal, Robert Verbuggen in the National Review, Michael R. Strain at Bloomberg and many others. To usually sleep-inducing results. Hand it to Saez and Zucman to know how to tell the big fib and get your name in the headlights. So let me focus on two very simple problems that my little story highlights.

Why stop at 100? The case for perpetuities

Issue 100-year Treasurys, advocates the Wall Street Journal.  It mentions a short note deep on the Treasury website that

Treasury’s Office of Debt Management is conducting broad outreach to refresh its understanding of market appetite for a potential Treasury ultra-long bond (50- or 100-year bonds). 

My 2 cents: Why stop at 100? Issue perpetuities! 

(I wrote a whole paper on this a while ago, if you want lots of detail and answers to practical questions. Unfortunately the Treasury website does not say how to send in suggestions, and nobody outreached to me, so this blog post is it.)

Perpetuities are bonds with no principal payment. Each perpetuity pays $1 forever.  If interest rates are 3%, to borrow $100, the government would sell three perpetuities, and then pay investors $3 each year. When the government wants to pay back the debt, it simply buys back the perpetuities on the open market.

A 100 year bond is almost a perpetuity. If the government issues a $100 100 year bond at 3%, only 100/(1.03)^100 = $5.20 of that value comes from the $100 principal payment. 95% of the value of a 100 year bond is already in the stream of coupons. For the investor, they are practically the same security. In particular they have nearly the same sensitivity to interest rate changes.

But perpetuities are better. Most of all: Perpetuities would be much more liquid -- easy to buy, sell, and use as collateral.  The reason is simple. Once 100 year bonds get going, there would be 100 separate and distinct issues outstanding. The 2123 2.6% 100 year bond is a different bond from the 2124 2.7% 100 year bond. If a dealer has an order for the first and an offer for the second, he or she cannot make the trade. If you borrow and sell short the first, you cannot deliver the second in return. This segmentation would make the markets for each bond thinner, and the bid ask spread larger. It would keep a lot of dealers and traders and market makers needlessly in business, which may  be one good reason the financial industry seems largely against the idea.

Perpetuities, by contrast, are a single security. When the government borrows more next year, it is borrowing more of the same security.  There is one, thick, transparent, low-spread market.

A more liquid market would pay lower rates.  Much of the point is for the government to borrow at low rates. Much of the reason government debt has such low interest rates is that it is very liquid -- easy to buy and sell, the "safe haven" in bad  times and so forth. Government debt is somewhat like money, and like money pays less interest in return for its liquidity. Well, then, the more liquid the better!

A 100 year bond would make sense if there were a group of investors sitting around who really wanted to have $3 coupons for 100 years, and then $100 exactly in 100 years, not 101 years, and they were not planning to buy or sell in the meantime. That is not remotely the case. Long term bonds are actively traded. Perpetuities match the varied investment horizons of ultimate investors, and by being more liquid are more flexible.

There is plenty of historical precedent. Perpetuities actually came before long-term bonds. They were the cornerstone of UK finance for the entire 19th century.

One can raise a bunch of practical objections, and if you have them go check out the paper.

Lower costs? The WSJ only advocates 100 year debt on the notion it would give the Treasury a lower borrowing cost when yield curves are inverted. This is a good argument, but more difficult and subtle than the WSJ lets on. The current yield is not the lifetime cost.  The 100 year cost of borrowing with short term bonds depends on what short term interest rates do in the future. If rates go up, it costs eventually more to borrow short. If rates go down it costs less, even if the current yield curve is inverted. In the benchmark "expectations model" yields have already adjusted so the expected cost is the same. The issue is the same to a household deciding between an ARM and a fixed rate mortgage. Even if the current ARM rate is higher than the fixed, if ARM rates go down in the future, the ARM could end up being better.

My paper was part of a conference at Treasury, published by Brookings.  I had a good debate with Robin Greenwood, Sam Hanson, Joshua Rudolph, and Larry Summers who wrote The Optimal Maturity of Government Debt (available here). They argued for borrowing short, not long. A the time the yield curve was steeply upward sloping, and in their simulations they opined that the chance of short rates rising and long rates declining to the point that the cost advantage would invert was small. The current reality has changed that conclusion as now it is the short rates that are higher.

Still, I think this is the wrong way to look at it. The Treasury is not in a great position to play bond trader and figure out where small variations in the yield curve reflect profitable opportunities.

Risk management. Like all investors, though, the Treasury's first question should be risk management, not profit. And there is a great risk facing the US Treasury. We are clearly going to run up a lot more debt before sanity sets in. Go look at the just released CBO Long Term Debt Outlook.

Net interest is already large. What happens if interest rates go up? Yes, they are unbelievably low now. But nobody really knows why. Between "secular stagnation" and "r* has declined" and "savings glut" you can see economists making things up right and left. So, you should not have huge confidence that we will not  return to historically normal interest rates of the last few centuries, or moreover that we will never suffer the kinds of interest rate spikes that happen to highly indebted countries trying to roll over 100% of  GDP  or so debt in a recession,  financial crisis, or war. If interest rates rise sharply, the US Treasury, having borrowed  short, is screwed.  We bought the ARM at a teaser rate.

This,  to me, is the real argument that  the  government should issue lots more long-term debt; 100 years if needed (but please, only every 10 years or so!) or, much better, perpetuities. Buy the fixed rate mortgage, and you keep the house no matter what happens to rates. Let's keep the house. In this discussion with Greenwood et al, they argued that the chance of such an interest rate spike is low. Perhaps, but the insurance is cheap -- and with a flat or inverted yield  curve it's even cheaper.

Borrow long to buy insurance, not just for a good deal.

Update:

In response to a few comments. In the paper I proposed that the Treasury issue 1)  fixed-rate perpetuities -- a security that pays one  dollar forever -- 2) floating-rate perpetuities -- just like Fed reserves, the interest rate adjusts  daily  and the price is always exactly $1.00 3) indexed perpetuities  -- it pays one dollar adjusted for  the CPI (or one of its improved versions) forever. The first eventually replaces all long  term debt, the second eventually replaces all short term debt, and the third replaces TIPS.

The second is really more  important, and I'll do a separate post eventually. If the treasury offered a fixed-value floating-rate instantly transferrable security just like reserves, it would do wonders for the  financial system.