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?

Dudley on reserves

Bill Dudley, ex President of the New York Fed, has an excellent Bloomberg editorial on reserves.

Reserves are accounts that banks hold at the Fed. The Fed used to pay no interest on these accounts. Accordingly, banks held very small quantities, as little as $10 billion in all, and they managed that quantity very carefully against legal reserve requirements, and having just enough around to make payments. To control interest rates, the Fed used to change the supply of reserves, and then watch the Federal Funds rate, the rate banks charge each other to borrow reserves.

"Each day, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York would assess whether to add or drain bank reserves from the financial system to balance the supply and demand to achieve the desired short-term interest rate. While straightforward in theory, the process was extremely complex to carry out. "

Since 2008, the Fed has started paying interest on reserves. The interest the Fed pays on reserves largely determines interest rates elsewhere, and the Fed doesn't have to go through a hoopla every morning to figure out just how many reserves to offer. The banking system is awash in trillions of dollars of reserves. And there has been no hyperinflation, nor indication that the Fed cannot control interest rates if it wishes to.

There has been a lot of controversy within the Fed about keeping the new system vs. the old.

State support for nuclear power

Tyler Cowen responded with an interesting  post to my query,

"I don’t see just why nuclear power needs “state support,” rather than a clear workable set of safety regulations that are not excuses for anyone to stop any project."

 (Tyler, originally wrote,

"State Capacity Libertarians are more likely to have positive views of infrastructure, science subsidies, nuclear power (requires state support!), ...," 

I interpreted "state support" as  massive subisdies to be added to the massively regulated system we have now, adding nuclear to (say) windmills, rooftop solar, and housing. Tyler had something quite different and interesting in mind:

"in general American society has become far more litigious, and it is much harder to build things, and risk-aversion and infrastructure-aversion have risen dramatically....So the odds are that without a Price-Anderson Act [which starkly limits nuclear company's liability exposure] America’s nuclear industry would have shut down some time ago, with no real chance of a return. "

A society that allows its lawyers to nearly bankrupt Toyota and Audi over non-existent auto defects, and now is shutting down Bayer over completely unscientific claims that Roundup causes cancer, is obviously going to quickly destroy any nuclear company over harms real and imagined.  If we're going to have nuclear, we need some limitation on this kind of adventurism, along with the legal and regulatory knots that make it almost impossible to build any infrastructure in the US today.

I file this in the "lack of state capacity" department. A good (adjective) Libertarian wants clear property rights, and a sensible tort system that pays some vague attention to scientific evidence.  That is part of state infrastructure. When we say "infrastructure" people envision roads, but good courts, laws, regulations, property rights, and so forth are perhaps the most essential state-provided infrastructure.

Tyler went on a bit, to comments that made a bit less sense to me:

I am not sure which level or kind of liability should be associated with “the free market,” especially when the risks in question are small, arguably ambiguous, but in the negative scenarios involve very very high costs.  Which is then “the market formula”? 

The free market does involve property rights and payment for actual damages. Airlines, drug companies, car companies, all can function in a free-market property-rights libertarian view (another good adjective!) Of all the problems of nuclear, especially the promising small scale new technolgy nuclear, properly bonding and paying for actual (as opposed to imagined) harm does not seem impossible.

But now we're falling in to another libertarian trap, that of discussion which cloud of libertarian nirvana is better. We're pretty far away from designing tort law for free-market property-rights society.

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

(Adjective) Libertarianism

Libertarianism consists of many different ideas, and is clearly in need of some adjectives. Tyler Cowen, in an interesting new-Year's reflection, offers "State-Capacity Libertarianism."  The guts of it is, I think, that the State must exist, and do competently and effectively its crucial tasks.

The best bit, I think:

5. Many of the failures of today’s America are failures of excess regulation, but many others are failures of state capacity.  Our governments cannot address climate change, much improve K-12 education, fix traffic congestion, or improve the quality of their discretionary spending.  Much of our physical infrastructure is stagnant or declining in quality.  I favor much more immigration, nonetheless I think our government needs clear standards for who cannot get in, who will be forced to leave, and a workable court system to back all that up and today we do not have that either.

A nice observation on the left:

9. State Capacity Libertarians are more likely to have positive views of infrastructure, science subsidies, nuclear power (requires state support!), and space programs than are mainstream libertarians or modern Democrats.  Modern Democrats often claim to favor those items, and sincerely in my view, but de facto they are very willing to sacrifice them for redistribution, egalitarian and fairness concerns, mood affiliation, and serving traditional Democratic interest groups.  For instance, modern Democrats have run New York for some time now, and they’ve done a terrible job building and fixing things.  Nor are Democrats doing much to boost nuclear power as a partial solution to climate change, if anything the contrary.

I don't see just why nuclear power needs "state support," rather than a clear workable set of safety regulations that are not excuses for anyone to stop any project.  Democrats have also run California for some time now, and are apparently trying to see just how quickly the golden goose can be convinced to pack up and move to Nevada. In a show of bipartisanship Tyler might have added just how quickly small-government, free-market, individual-liberty local-government philosophies evaporate among many Republicans when inconvenient.

Another good but flawed, I think, observation

2. Earlier in history, a strong state was necessary to back the formation of capitalism and also to protect individual rights (do read Koyama and Johnson on state capacity).  Strong states remain necessary to maintain and extend capitalism and markets.  This includes keeping China at bay abroad and keeping elections free from foreign interference, as well as developing effective laws and regulations for intangible capital, intellectual property, and the new world of the internet.  (If you’ve read my other works, you will know this is not a call for massive regulation of Big Tech.)

I agree with the principles, but "keeping China at bay" seems like a poor goal for our foreign policy, "foreign interference" seems to me vastly overblown compared to domestic interference. The decay of rule of law and property rights seems vastly more important.

While I like the basic idea, I think "State Capacity" is a poor adjective because it isn't that self-explanatory. Libertarians have awful marketing skills, as evidenced by the fact that such demonstrably correct ideas have so little traction.

Adjectives I like in front of "libertarian" include constitutional, rule-of-law, practical, empirical, globalist. Too often though adjectives like these just define a set of ideas as antitheses of their opposites.

Update: Like a commenter, I like the adjective "conservative" appended to Libertarian as well, in the sense that we live on ages of legal and social development that should be respected for encoding a lot of wisdom, and "conserved."

Childbirth and crime

Family formation and crime is the title  of  a very nice new paper by Maxim Massenkoff and Evan K. Rose. (HT Alex Tabarrok at Marginal  Revolution, which also has great commentary.)

The graphs speak for themselves. Go to the paper to look at them all. A few select ones:

Arrests fall by half, starting when mothers know they are pregnant:

(The paper presents  more  accurate but less interpretable event study coefficients.  If you know what that means, go look at  the paper.)

Father's crime drops too:

This decline isn't as steep. But first of all note it's all fathers, married or no, and second third and more kids. Then  look at the huge difference in vertical scale.  Women  go from 3 to 2 economic offenses per 10,000. Men go from 20 to12 economic offenses per 10,000. This is a huge reduction in crime rates.

Capital market freedom

I gave a presentation on "capital markets" at the Hoover Centennial series on Tuesday.  Caroline Hoxby gave a clear  presentation on human capital, and George Shultz told  some great  stories  from his time in government. Judging from the questions, Caroline was the star and  I put them to sleep. Finance always does that. The  video:

Here is the text of my  presentation

Hoover  stands for freedom: ideas defining a free society is our motto.  And economic is a central freedom: You can’t guarantee political freedom, social and lifestyle freedom, freedom of speech and expression, without economic freedom.

Economic freedom applies to capital; to financial  freedom, as much as to goods, services, and labor.  Freedom to buy and sell, without a government  watching every transaction. Freedom to save, and invest your capital with the most promising venture, at home or abroad, or to receive investment from and sell assets to anyone you choose — whether the investments conforms to a government’s plans or not.

But freedom is not anarchy. Economic and financial freedom depend on a public economic infrastructure. They need functioning markets, property rights, an efficient court system, rule of law; They need a stable and efficient money, and a government with sound fiscal affairs  that will not inflate, expropriate, or repress finance to its benefit, and freedom from confiscatory taxation.

Here lies our conundrum. The government that can set up and maintain this public architecture can restrict trade and finance. Businesses, workers and other groups can demand protection. The government can control finance for political ends and to steer resources its way. And that ever-present temptation is stronger for finance. Willie Sutton, asked why  he  robbed banks,  responded   “that’s where the money is.” Governments have noticed as well.

Ideas matter. People care about prosperity, too. Citizens and voters must understand that their own freedom, and that of their neighbors, is the best guarantor of their and the common prosperity. 250 years after  Adam Smith, most of US still really does not trust that fervent competition is their best protection, not extensive regulation. See our rent control and labor laws. That necessary understanding remains even more tenuous in financial affairs

Can a more free financial, payments, monetary, and capital market system work? How? It is our job — ours, the ideas-defining-a free-society people  —  to put logic and experience together on this question. And the answer is not obvious. Finance paid for our astonishing prosperity. But the history of finance is also full of crashes, panics, and imbroglios. Government finance won wars, but also impoverished nations.  Economic freedom does  not mean freedom to  dump garbage in neighbor’s back yard. Just where this parable applies to financial markets is an important question.

The last 100 years have been a great  ebb and flow of freedom in financial and monetary affairs. The immediate future is cloudy, suggesting more ebb, but offering some hope for flow

Hoover scholars have been and are in the midst of it. Milton Friedman spent a quarter century here, advancing free exchange rates, free trade, open capital markets, sound money, and sound fiscal policy. John Taylor took up that baton. Allan Meltzer, author of the magisterial history of the Federal Reserve, was a  frequent visiting fellow here.  George Shultz spearheaded the transition to floating exchange rates and free capital movement, fought valiantly against price controls, and anchored the Reagan Administration’s effort to eliminate inflation and fix  the tax code. Many others contributed, and Hoover is just  as alive  today.

We  could  spend  an afternoon on the financial history of the last 100 years. I’ll just focus  on three pivotal stories.

Bank and financial panics have been central to the ebb and flow of financial freedom for all of the last hundred years. The banking  panic of 1933 was surely the single event that made the great depression great. It was centrally a failure of regulators and regulation. The Federal Reserve was set up in 1914, to prevent another panic of 1907.  And it promptly failed its first big test.  Micro-regulation failed too. Interstate banking and branch banking were illegal. So, when the first bank of Lincoln, Nebraska failed, it could not sell assets to JP Morgan, who could have  reopened the bank the next day. The bank could not recapitalize by selling shares.  So the people who knew how to make loans were out selling apples.

As usual, the response to a great failure of regulation was... more regulation. Deposit insurance protected depositors. But offering insured deposits to bankers is like sending your brother-in-law to Las Vegas with your credit card. So the government started extensively regulating how banks invested, and forbade banks to compete for deposits. But people in Las Vegas with  your credit card, for 20 years, get creative. From Continental Illinois to the savings and loan Crisis, to the Latin American and Southeast Asian crises, to LTCM, and Bear Stearns, and finally the great crisis of 2008, we repeated the same story: bailout larger classes of creditors, add regulations to try to stop more creative risk taking, add power to regulators who really really will see the next one ahead of time, promise it won’t happen again. Dodd Frank, and today’s “macroprudential” policy are not new, they are just the last logical patch on the same leaky ship.

An alternative idea has been around since the  1930s. Financial crises are runs, period. Runs are caused by a certain class of contract, like deposits, which promise a fixed value,  first-come first-served payment, and the bank fails if it cannot pay immediately. Then, if I hear of trouble at the bank, I run  down to get my money before you do, and the bank  fails. The solution is simple —  let  banks get their money largely by issuing equity and long term debt.  Such banks need no asset regulation, and no protection  from competition, as  they simply  cannot fail. Run prone short term debt financing is the garbage in the neighbor’s back yard, and eliminating it is the key to financial freedom — and innovation.

Many of us at  Hoover have been advancing this idea, adapted to modern technology, along with reform of the bankruptcy code so that large banks can fail painlessly, a lesson we should have learned from the 1930s. It is slowly gaining traction in the  world  of ideas, though not  yet in the world of policy. A lot of vested interests will lose money in this free world, not the least of which the vast regulatory bureaucracy and economists who serve them more welcome ideas.

Second, let’s talk about international trade and capital flows.  Financial freedom includes the right to buy and sell abroad as you see fit, and to invest your money or receive investment from wherever you wish, even if that crosses political boundaries. As always that freedom leads to prosperity.

The world learned a good lesson from the disastrous Smoot-Hawley tariffs of the 1930s. So, the  postwar order built an international system aiming for free trade and free capital markets.  Now  free trade and capital should be easy. They take one-sentence bills, ideally that start “Congress shall make no law…” But each government faces strong pressure and temptations to protect its weak industries, and their employees, and to redirect its citizens’ savings to pet projects, favored sectors, and to government coffers, mixed with frankly xeonophobic fears of “foreign ownership.” So the postwar order was a long hard slog, with international institutions, long international agreements that are more managed mercantilism than free trade, and consistent US leadership.  Capital  freedom took even  longer than trade freedom. As recently as the 1960s, US citizens were not allowed to take money abroad. Many people around the world still fact such restrictions.

This time, a crisis helped. The Bretton Woods system of 1945 envisioned free trade but little net trade, so it wanted fixed exchange rates and allowed capital controls to continue. The US deficits and inflation of the early 1970s blew that apart, leading to floating exchange rates and open capital markets.

By the 1990s, the world entered an era of vastly expanded trade and international investment, strong economic  growth. The last 30 years  have seen the greatest decline  in poverty around the globe in all human history. Now much-maligned “globalization” and “neo-liberalism” was a big  part of it.  I think we shall remember it nostalgically alongside the free-trade and free-capital pax Britannica of the late 19th century.

But crises often lead to bad policy in international finance as  well. The Latin American and Southeast Asian crises of the 1990s, even before the great financial crisis of 2008 unsettled many nerves. To me the stories look  familiar: Latin American governments borrowed too much money, again, and US banks found a way to leverage their  too-big-to-fail guarantees around the supposedly wise oversight of  risk regulators, again. East Asian governments were on the hook for their banks' short term borrowing and big American banks were lending again.

But the policy community, and countries wanting cover for bailouts and expropriations, convinced themselves that dark forces were at work, “hot money” “sudden stops,” and that all foreign capital — not just short-term foreign-currency debt — is dangerous and must be controlled. Now even the IMF, formerly the bastion of free exchange rates, free capital flows, and fiscal probity, advances capital controls, exchange-rate intervention, and government spending on solar cells and consumer subsides, in the name of climate and inequality, even in times of crisis.

Moreover, I think the world of ideas failed really to understand what it had created. For a generation economists scratched their heads that countries seemed to invest mostly out of their own savings rather than borrow from abroad, and called this a puzzle. When the world started to look like our models, and huge trade and capital surpluses and deficits emerged, economists pronounced “savings gluts” and “excessive volatility” needing “policy-makers” to “manage flows,” and lots of  clever economists  to  advise them.  Time-tested verities do not get you famous in economics.

Let me close by speculating a bit about the future. It will be an… well an exiting time for those of us who value ideas in defense of a free society and who think about money, finance, and capital.

Sooner or later, if  our path does not change, the western world will confront a sovereign debt crisis. Our governments have  made  promises they cannot keep, buttressed  by economists bearing the singularly bad idea  that  debts do not have to be repaid.  Since government debt is the core of the financial system, most of which counts on a bailout of borrowed money, the subsequent financial crisis will be unimaginably awful.

Payments,  technology and financial  innovation will force some fundamental  choices.

We are headed to a world of  electronic rather than cash transactions.  But cash has one great freedom-enhancing virtue: anonymity. If the government  can watch everything you buy and sell, or exclude people from the ability to transact, all sorts of freedoms vanish.  Now Governments have good reasons to monitor transactions  to better collect  taxes, and to make life difficult for criminals, drug smugglers, and terrorists. But governments have many bad reasons: to impose capital controls and trade barriers, to prop up onerous domestic regulations, and to punish political enemies, foreign and domestic.

So a great battle of financial freedom will play out. Will the emerging electronic payments  system work on the Chinese social credit model? Or  will innovation undermine leviathan — and  undermine even basic law enforcement efforts? Can we reestablish a balance between anonymity, freedom, and optimally imperfect enforcement of often ill-conceived financial laws and regulations?

In a larger sense, Silicon Valley is trying  to do to finance what Uber did to taxis. Will the Fed and Congress  allow narrow banks, electronic  banks, payments networks like Libra, and internet lenders to compete and serve us better? Or  will they continue to defend by regulation the oligopoly of banks and credit card companies?

Larger questions hang over us. On one political side seems to lie business as usual — unreformed, highly regulated banks, the usual subsidies  such as Fannie and Freddy, student loans, and so on, with increasing restrictions on international trade and investment. On the other side lies a large increase in bank regulation, direction of credit to green new deal projects and favored constituencies, and extreme levels of capital taxation. From the Fed, central banks, IMF, OECD, BIS, CFPB, and so on, I hear  only projects for ever larger expansion  of their role in directing finance.

I do not hear many voices for patient liberalization. Ideas defining a free society will be sorely needed.

********


The Q&A was interesting. John Raisian wisely preempted  the usual "what about inequality?"  question. My main regret was not answering cogently enough the questioner who asked (paraphrase) "Now that unions are gone, who will speak for the little guy (or gal)?" What I should have said, in addition to what I did say:

The little guy or gal voluntarily dropped out of unions, and voted against pro-union politicians, because they felt unions did not speak for them. If you're a Republican, a Libertarian, a fan of school  choice, concerned about pension debt, unions do not speak for you. A lot of formerly union people voted for Trump. Unions became government-supported advocates  for  one wing of one political party, and their members left in droves. Political  parties "speak for" you if you  wish someone to do that.  Not unions.

Free market health care

and transparent pricing are  possible. 

Russ Roberts has a great econtalk podcast, interviewing  Keith Smith of the Surgery Center of Oklahoma Click on that link, roll over the areas of your body that hurt, and find out exactly how much it will cost to fix them.

No insurance. Pay a preset transparent surprisingly low price. Get surgery. A great piece of news is that this is actually possible -- you won't go to jail (yet) for just running a hospital like any other business.

Russ and Keith had one particularly good interchange on why regular hospital pricing is so screwed up. I have made the point several times that our government wants to cross-subsidize indigent care, medicare and medicaid, and the insanity of hospital and insurance billing is mostly a reaction to that. I went on to speculate that the government is also restricting competition to uphold these cross subsidies. The existence of the surgery center of Oklahoma says to some extent I am wrong about hospitals, though it raises the question why the model is so scarce.

Russ: A friend of mine recently had back surgery at an academic institution, a nonprofit regular hospital, a very good one with a good reputation. The surgery... was $101,673.77. Seriously. Now, my listeners know that macroeconomists have a sense of humor. We know they do because they use decimal points. But it turns out hospital finance offices do too. ...That is not--repeat--not--what the hospital collected from the insurance company. But that list price, that weird, enormous list price of $100,000--a little over 100,000--was on the form. 

The surgery facility... got $13,000 from the insurer. You charge for that same surgery, I looked it up, a little under [$10,000]. So, they're 30% more than you for what they collect and they're 10 times what you charge on the list price. 

My first question is why did they write down that goofy number of $100,000 on the bill, even though the insurance company only pays [$13,000]? ... 

Keith Smith: Well, I'll back up in time. I was at a meeting where there was some hospital people and they were very angry with me because we put our prices online.... and this angry hospital administrator lost his cool....he asked me what percentage of my revenue at the Surgery Center of Oklahoma was uncompensated care.... that question haunted me, because that is a very bright, very articulate person. And he does not misspeak. I thought very carefully about what he actually said. What percentage of my revenue is uncompensated care?  

[JC, in case you're skimming read the literal words. Normally, uncompensated care might be a big fraction of your costs, but sort of by definition zero percent of your revenue]
...So, I did some checking and indeed hospitals are paid to the extent that they claim that they were not paid. And this is a kickback... Hospitals are paid to the extent that they claim that they were not paid. 

Russ Roberts: So, explain. 

Keith Smith: So, a $100,000 bill, the hospital collects $13,000. They claim that they lost $87,000. 

This $87,000 loss maintains the fiction of their not-for-profit status, but it also provides the basis for a kickback the federal government sends to this hospital in the form of what's called Disproportionate Share Hospital payments. 

So, when you hear uncompensated care, that is the $87,000 that your friend saw written off on the difference between hospital insurance and what insurance paid.
So, the fact is, the hospital made money on that case. But they claimed that they lost $87,000. 

And then that fictional loss provides the basis for a kickback from the federal government, called--it's uncompensated care or DSH, Disproportionate Share Hospital payments. So, as I thought about this, I began to realize that there's a lot of people in on this scam. Including the insurance companies. I mean, why would an insurance company agree to play along with this hospital? Well, the insurance company actually wants an inflated charge because then, for employers they work with, they can show that the savings that dealing with that particular insurance company generates is very, very large.... 

Now, what the insurers actually do is ask the hospital administrators, 'Can you do a brother a favor and actually charge $200,000 for that, so that our percentage savings actually looks larger?'

It goes on like this. A definite must-listen.

In related news, "the Trump Administration Releases Transparency Rule in Hospital Pricing" reported by Stephanie Armour in the Wall Street Journal. The subhead is "legal challenges are likely!"

The final rule will compel hospitals in 2021 to publicize the rates they negotiate with individual insurers for all services, including drugs, supplies, facility fees and care by doctors who work for the facility. 

The administration proposed extending the disclosure requirement to the $670 billion health-insurance industry. Insurance companies and group health plans that cover employees would have to disclose negotiated rates, as well as previously paid rates for out-of-network treatment, in file formats that are computer-searchable, officials said.
...
The requirements are more far-reaching than many industry leaders had expected and could upend commercial health-care markets, which are rife with complex systems of hidden charges and secret discounts. The price-disclosure initiative has become a cornerstone of the president’s 2020 re-election health strategy, despite threats of legal action from the industry. 

Hospitals and insurers typically treat specific prices for medical services as closely held secrets, with contracts between the insurers and hospital systems generally bound by confidentiality agreements. 

All well and good, and a testament to lots of the good  regulatory reform work going on under the radar screen in Washington. In some sense the headline chaos is quite useful. And my personal kudos to the market oriented health economists working on this effort.

But... You have to ask, just why do we need another layer of price-transparency regulations? Why are hospitals choosing such devious schemes, while grocery stores don't? Or, a better analogy, tax lawyers, contractors, car repair, pet repair, lasik surgeons, or anyone else performing complex personal services does not do this sort of thing? Are hospital administrators uniquely devious? Of course not. They are good hard-working men and women trying to do the best they can in a screwed-up regulatory and legal system.

So as long as hospitals and insurers want to play these games, as long as the strong incentives are there to play these games, so long as many arms of the government want to play these games to support medicare, medicaid and indigent care that governments don't want to pay for, I'm less than sanguine about their inability to get around a set of transparency rules. It seems about like bank risk regulation, a game of cat and mouse. It would seem more effective to reduce the government-provided incentive to screw things up in the first place. I guess that if transparency is politically hard and headed to legal challenges, reforming a system that so many people have so much vested interest in -- intellectual as well as financial -- might be even harder.

But, as long as the Surgery Center of Oklahoma is not driven out of business -- which its many competitors would surely like -- maybe there is hope. Free market, cash and carry, competitively priced health care might just upend the ossified current system.

Imagine if there were two Surgery Centers of Oklahoma, competing on price and quality...

Climate clarity

The  carbon elephant in the room: (Data from EIA)

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.

Bans on fracking and nuclear power

If you want evidence that climate policy has become unhinged from science and quantification, becoming more like a religious cult, look no further than the recent Democratic presidential candidates' proposals to ban fracking immediately and nuclear power soon.

From Michael Cembalest at JP Morgan

I'm not a denier. Yes, carbon is a problem, warming is a problem, and a uniform carbon tax, vast expansion of nuclear energy, more renewables, lots of R&D on them, GMO foods, and geoenginnering are solutions. (If indeed warmer weather is an existential crisis, and if indeed $2 billion of soot in the upper atmosphere solves it, that should at least be on the table.) Actual, quantitative, scientific solutions. They don't atone for our carbon sins.

A ban on fracking and nuclear are not solutions, and will raise carbon emissions.  The US is doing better on carbon reduction than other countries, because of fracking and natural gas.  Unlike Germany, who has followed these policies, we cannot rely on Eastern European coal and Russian gas.

I am delighted to see that despite my fears of how extensive discretionary regulation will silence dissent, Mr Cembalest can still write such a note, with the JP Morgan imprimatur. We'll see how long such heresy  survives more intense financial regulation and "stakeholder" control of corporate boards.   "Eco-authoriarianism" and a "coercive green new  deal"  are already openly advocated, here for example.

More on low long-term interest rates

In an environment with stable inflation, the yield curve should typically be inverted.

Long term investors care about money when they retire, not next month. Most investors are long-term.

If inflation is steady, long-term bonds are a safer way to save money for the long run. If you roll over short-term bonds, then you do better when interest rates rise, and do worse when interest rates fall, adding risk to your eventual wealth. The long-term bond has more mark-to-market gains and losses, but you don't care about that. You care about the long term payout, which is less risky. (Throw out the statements and stop worrying.) So, in an environment with varying real rates and steady inflation, we expect long rates to be less than short rates, because short rates have to compensate investors for extra risk.

If, by contrast, inflation is volatile and real rates are steady, then long-term bonds are riskier. When inflation goes up, the short term rate will go up too, and preserve the real value of the investment, and vice versa. The long-term bond just suffers the cumulative inflation uncertainty. In that environment we expect a rising yield curve, to compensate long bond holders for the risk of inflation.

So, another possible reason for the emergence of a downward sloping yield curve is that the 1970s and early 1980s were a period of large inflation volatility. Now we are in a period of much less inflation volatility, so most interest rate variation is variation in real rates. Markets are figuring that out.

Most of the late 19th century had an inverted yield curve. UK perpetuities were the "safe asset," and short term lending was risky. It also lived under the gold standard which gave very long-run price stability.

(Yes, this argument is about portfolio variance, not beta, and assumes that the bond portfolio is a substantial part of the investor's wealth, or that inflation happens in bad times, at least over the investor's long horizon.)

***

This is a follow-up to low bond yields. That post has several good comments with links to the literature.

On that point, Uri Carl and Anthony Dierks send along this lovely graph from their note which makes the same point as my earlier blog post. The plot is different measures of the time-varying "covariance between Real Activity and Nominal Measures." The covariance changes sign, as I suspected.

Intellectual property and the trade deficit

"The IP Commission estimates that between $200 billion and $500 billion a year of intellectual property is stolen from the U.S." I found this interesting tidbit in The Atlantic interview of Kevin Hassett, ex CEA chair. (HT Marginal Revolution)

Well, suppose China were to pay up, and pay the $200 to $500 billion a year in royalty payments. Where would it get the money from? Hmm. It would have to sell us an additional $200 to $500 billion worth of exports, that's how.  The trade deficit would have to increase.

China could sell us $200 to $500 billion a year of assets instead. Maybe we would like to hold lots of Chinese stocks, bonds, or government bonds rather than buy more boatloads of goods? But if we bought worthwhile Chinese assets, those are only claims on future Chinese profits. And the only use we have for lots and lots of Chinese currency profits is to... buy things in China and send them here. If we bought worthless assets, bonds that default, or stocks whose legal rights evaporate,  then, well, we're back where we started.

Or maybe we don't want to license IP, we just think US owned firms operating in China could make an additional $200 to $500 billion per year profits operating in China without Chinese competition. And what do US owners want to do with $200 to $500 billion of Chinese profits per year? Go on a shopping trip, and put it on boats, sooner or later.

One way or another, the only way that China can properly pay for intellectual property, is to put more stuff on boats and send it to us. Paying for intellectual property must increase the trade deficit.

Being a free trader, I think this is great. The point of trade is to get the imports. The point of intellectual property is to force China to send us boatloads of stuff.

Somehow I don't think the Administration sees it that way. But you can't escape addition.  

Low bond yields

Why are interest rates so low?

Here is the 10 year bond yield, by itself and subtracting the previous year's inflation (CPI less food and energy). The 10 year yield has basically been on a downward trend since 1987.  One should subtract expected 10 year future inflation, not past inflation, and you can see the extra volatility that past inflation induces. But you can also see that real yields have fallen with the same pattern.

There is lots of discussion. A falling marginal product of capital, due to falling innovation, less need for new capital, a "savings glut," and so forth are common ideas. The use of government bonds in finance, the money-like nature of government debt among other institutional investors and liquidity stories are strong too. And most of the press is consumed with QE and central bank purchases holding down long term rates. I hope the steadiness of the trend cures that promptly.

Along the way in another project, though, I made the following graph:

The blue line is 10 times the growth rate of nondurable + services per capita (quarterly data, growth from a year ago). The red line is the negative of an approximate measure of the real return on 10 year government bonds. I took 10 x (yield - yield a year ago), and subtracted off the CPI.

Look at the last recession. Consumption fell like a rock, while the real return on long-term bonds was great. That real return came from a double whammy: long term bonds had great nominal returns as interest rates fell, and there was a big decline in inflation.  No shock, there is a "flight to quality" in recessions, along with a sharp decline in nominal rates. From a foreign perspective, the rise in the dollar added to the return of long-term bonds. The graph suggests this is a regular pattern going back to the almost-recession of 1987. In every recession, consumption falls, interest rates fall, inflation falls, so the real ex post return on government bonds rises.

Government bonds are negative beta securities. At least measured by consumption or recession betas.  Negative beta securities should have low expected returns. They should be less even than real risk free rates. I haven't seen that simple thought anywhere in the discussion of low long-term interest rates.  

Making the graph, I noticed it was not always thus. 1975, 1980, and 1982 have precisely the opposite sign. These were stagflations, times when bad economic times coincided with higher inflation and higher interest rates. Likewise, countries such as Argentina which go through periodic currency crises, devaluations, and inflations, flights to the dollar, all associated with bad economic times, should have the opposite sign. There is a hint that 1970 was of the current variety.

One could easily make a story for the sign flip, involving recessions caused by monetary policy and attempts to control inflation, vs. recessions involving financial problems in which people run to, rather than from, money in the recession.

In any case, the period of high yields was associated with government bonds that do worse in recessions, and the period of low yields is associated with government bonds that do better in recessions and have a negative beta. I haven't really seen that point made, though I am not fully up on the literature on time-varying betas in bond markets.

In any case, if we want to understand risk premiums in bond markets, this sort of simple macro story might be a good starting point before layering on institutional complexities.