Marginal Taxes on the Poor
I've always been skeptical of the importance of the purported bad incentive effects of high marginal tax rates on high income earners. (I won't go into the details now, but I don't think the incentive effects are very strong -- at least at tax rates close to current tax rates -- and I don't think they're all bad.) For some time, though, I have been concerned about the effects of effective marginal taxes on low income earners. The problem is not the taxes they pay to the IRS (which they mostly don't, anyhow) but the effective taxes they pay to various subsidizers, price discriminators, and assistance providers in both the public and private sectors.
It has worried me that there might even be some point on the lower part of the income spectrum where the effective tax rate is greater than 100%. That is, you get more income; you no longer qualify for various assistance and subsidies; you slide up the "sliding scale" of various vendors and service providers who (officially or unofficially) give discounts for the financially challenged; you pay more in FICA and state and local taxes (even if you still don't pay Federal income taxes, which you might); and you end up worse off (even leaving aside any reduction in leisure) than when you had less income.
It turns out this was more than a theoretical possibility. Jeff Frankel (hat tip: Greg Mankiw) quotes Jeff Liebman with a story about a woman who "moved from a $25,000 a year job to a $35,000 a year job, and suddenly she couldn’t make ends meet any more." In her case it wasn't until after the (apparently irrevocable) decision that she discovered what a bad deal it was to make more money, so maybe the incentive effect per se wasn't a problem, but even someone like me, dubious as I am about "justice" as a moral concept, has a sense that this woman has been cheated and that what happened is "wrong." And eventually we have to assume that the incentive effects will matter: presumably Abraham Lincoln was right that you can't fool all of the people all of the time. Moreover, the incentive effects will matter even when the effective tax rate is "only" 80% or 90%. And it can only get worse when we begin to attempt universal health care on a national level.
In theory the solution is to consolidate all forms of public (and ideally, private) assistance into a single, fairly large grant, which can then be taxed away via the income tax at a reasonably slow rate for people who don't need it. That obviously isn't going to happen, and I don't have any other solutions to offer, but Jeff Frankel notes in passing that Jeff Liebman is an economic advisor to Barrack Obama. Given that Senator Obama is now the (not quite odds-on, as of this morning) favorite for the next presidency, I'm heartened that at least one of his economic advisors is thinking about the problem.
[UPDATE: My next post deals specifically with the issue raised in the first two sentences about high income earners. I guess it's hopeless, though, for me to get people to break that thread here and post comments on that more relevant entry.]
It has worried me that there might even be some point on the lower part of the income spectrum where the effective tax rate is greater than 100%. That is, you get more income; you no longer qualify for various assistance and subsidies; you slide up the "sliding scale" of various vendors and service providers who (officially or unofficially) give discounts for the financially challenged; you pay more in FICA and state and local taxes (even if you still don't pay Federal income taxes, which you might); and you end up worse off (even leaving aside any reduction in leisure) than when you had less income.
It turns out this was more than a theoretical possibility. Jeff Frankel (hat tip: Greg Mankiw) quotes Jeff Liebman with a story about a woman who "moved from a $25,000 a year job to a $35,000 a year job, and suddenly she couldn’t make ends meet any more." In her case it wasn't until after the (apparently irrevocable) decision that she discovered what a bad deal it was to make more money, so maybe the incentive effect per se wasn't a problem, but even someone like me, dubious as I am about "justice" as a moral concept, has a sense that this woman has been cheated and that what happened is "wrong." And eventually we have to assume that the incentive effects will matter: presumably Abraham Lincoln was right that you can't fool all of the people all of the time. Moreover, the incentive effects will matter even when the effective tax rate is "only" 80% or 90%. And it can only get worse when we begin to attempt universal health care on a national level.
In theory the solution is to consolidate all forms of public (and ideally, private) assistance into a single, fairly large grant, which can then be taxed away via the income tax at a reasonably slow rate for people who don't need it. That obviously isn't going to happen, and I don't have any other solutions to offer, but Jeff Frankel notes in passing that Jeff Liebman is an economic advisor to Barrack Obama. Given that Senator Obama is now the (not quite odds-on, as of this morning) favorite for the next presidency, I'm heartened that at least one of his economic advisors is thinking about the problem.
[UPDATE: My next post deals specifically with the issue raised in the first two sentences about high income earners. I guess it's hopeless, though, for me to get people to break that thread here and post comments on that more relevant entry.]
Labels: economics, income distribution, labor, public finance, taxes
posted by knzn at 2/11/2008 04:49:00 PM
53 Comments:
One of the advantages of universal, non-means-tested public benefits (such as public schools and single-payer health care) is that they don't have this de facto "tax" effect.
Making the qualifications for assistance steep is a way of coping with underfunding of assistance programs.
The non-governmental, non-charity exploitation of the poor, really ought to be figured into public policy, though. Below a certain, vague line, it can get really, really expensive to be poor. John Edwards showed a commendable interest in this aspect of the problem.
It ought to be possible to leverage the reduction in private exploitation in a way that enhances marginal gains from increaing income.
Wow...what a depressing post.
It's kind of awesome that feel the need to put "justice" and "wrong" in quotation marks.
In theory the solution is to consolidate all forms of public (and ideally, private) assistance into a single, fairly large grant, which can then be taxed away via the income tax at a reasonably slow rate for people who don't need it.
Or, every single assistance can be more gradually mean-tested as a function of income so that the whole check for, say, childcare, doesn't go bye-bye at once as income increases beyond a certain threshold. A more gradual sliding scale, as it were.
However, that increases complexity.
So perhaps a partial answer would be different assistant programs topping out at different income levels so that each hit would not be so massive as to discourage the person from moving to the next income level beyond.
Um, yeah. If this effect is pervasive, it really makes the EITC/negative income tax look good.
Greg Mankiw links to your posts and asks:
"Have you ever turned down a money-making opportunity that you would have accepted if it paid twice as much?"
He doesn't provide space for comments anymore, so I'll address it here.
Greg asks the wrong question in an effort to get the answer he seeks.
The correct question should be, "would you turn down that opportunity if ALL your other money making opportunities also pay twice as much?"
It's not clear that I would do anything different if all my options improved by the same amount. There are only so many hours in day. In fact, perhaps I would actually work less and play more if I were twice as rich (assuming, of course, all gov't services magically continued without cost).
I think you meant "would you turn down that opportunity if ALL your other money making opportunities also pay half as much?"
Suppose that was true for a day. Are there jobs you would turn down at $300 but accept at $600? And if it's true for one day, shouldn't it be true all the time?
"In theory the solution is to consolidate all forms of public (and ideally, private) assistance into a single, fairly large grant, which can then be taxed away via the income tax at a reasonably slow rate for people who don't need it."
As Charles Murray proposed in "In Our Hands". Or as we call it on my side of the pond, a citizen's basic income.
Mankiw's post was even worse that what "a student" suggests. Details provided over at Angrybear. I would hope Greg decides one day to engage in the real debate rather than attacking a straw man.
ian said...
I think you meant "would you turn down that opportunity if ALL your other money making opportunities also pay half as much?"
Suppose that was true for a day. Are there jobs you would turn down at $300 but accept at $600? And if it's true for one day, shouldn't it be true all the time?
No, Ian, because if it was only one day there would be no income effect--only a substitution effect. This is the effect that Mankiw is trying to point out, but it's quite clear that if he ignores the income effect then of course marginal tax rates are distortionary. It should be clear then that Mankiw is begging the question.
If you cut taxes to zero (from the 50% MTR that Mankiw points out) then ALL income opportunities would double, not just a single opportunity, so "student" was correct in his clarification of the question.
Further, Mankiw is suggesting that the total deadweight loss of taxation is large. He is essentially saying, "A 50% MTR has large behavioural effects, and it's obvious because there's probably a profit opportunity that you would take if you didn't have to pay that 50% MTR."
Well, even if we grant this argument, despite it's complete lack of rigor, it does not imply that a tax cut or increase would have large effects. Mankiw is making the mistake that any undergraduate microeconomics student would lose exam points for: equating total DWL effects to marginal ones.
Even if total DWL is large, marginal DWL is not necessarily large as well.
I'd suggest thinking of this in terms of a dual income family. If one parent earns $200k, and the other $80k, the amount they'll pay in taxes(fed,state,local) is roughly equivalent to the second income. Add the cost of a sitter, commute, and you'll likely have one parent forgoing their work to stay at home with the kids. The government is left with about $25k less in taxes. A babysitter is without a job, home improvements are shelved, the purchase of durable good delayed... etc., etc., etc.
The bad trickles down, as does the good.
I don't see any need to be half-assed about my utilitarianism: some things are good, and some things are bad; "justice" and "right" belong to some other ethical theory.
Yes, the other solution is to make sure all the phase-outs and sliding scales slide very slowly, so that when you add them all up, you still get a reasonable effective marginal tax rate. That's more or less equivalent to consolidating them into a single grant and taxing it away gradually as income rises. It's still a tough sell, because you end up with people with rather substantial incomes still getting government benefits. And both solutions are problematic in that one can't realistically enforce constraints on charities and price discriminators in the private sector. Somehow we have to convince people that the best way to help the poor is to give alms to the middle class as well.
Greg now has a nice clarification on his site pointing out that one should ignore income effects and only look at substitution effects. This is a good point, but I still don't think it settles the issue.
In particular, if one opportunity pays twice as much, I may choose it, as he suggests. By necessity then, I will do LESS of something else. (Hours are finite, after all.) In contrast, if that something else also pays 2x, then I am more likely to stick with my original choice which means zero distortion.
This has nothing to do with income effects. Instead, think of a Holmstrom-Milgrom multitask model or the Theory of the Second Best.
In fact, I suspect Greg's favorite undergraduate text has an example somewhere of how a tax on coal but not oil could be very distortionary (because it changes the oil/coal mix) while a tax on both would not be distortionary. Taxing only one substitute or option vs. taxing all options is very different.
Thus, it seems the right question remains: "Would you act differently if ALL your opportunities were twice as lucrative?"
a student of economics said...
In particular, if one opportunity pays twice as much, I may choose it, as he suggests. By necessity then, I will do LESS of something else. (Hours are finite, after all.) In contrast, if that something else also pays 2x, then I am more likely to stick with my original choice which means zero distortion.
In fairness to Mankiw, he's talking about the labour-leisure decision. If the 50% MTR disappeared, then you'd (very likely) choose less leisure and more labour, since the price of leisure doubles.
You're talking about distortion between two opportunities. You're right that the income tax shouldn't really affect decisions between jobs, but he's right in pointing out that the income tax will probably affect decisions between labour and leisure.
On a different point, Mankiw posted a response about how the distortion of income taxation is solely due to the substitution effect. Well, to a point, he's right: the difference between the DWL from an income tax vs. the DWL from a lump-sum tax IS due to the substitution effect, since the income tax generates both income and substitution effects, but the lump-sum tax only generates income effects. Singling out the size of the substitution effect may be useful if we're considering replacing the income tax with a lump-sum tax, but as far as I know, we're not.
So shouldn't we be concerned about the total DWL of the income tax, not just how it compares to a lump-sum tax?
"Well, even if we grant this argument, despite it's complete lack of rigor"
Simply take a look at CEO compensation packages. Marginal taxes are so exhorbitant on high levels of ordinary income that the rich give up on earning wages in ways the government steals 50% of it. They start paying themselves with options and stocks, investing in real estate and businesses that are taxed at much lower rates.
No one ever got rich and stayed rich being someone's slave. So it is no surprise that those with high earnings potential find ways to not have to pay Uncle Sam.
anonymous said...
"Well, even if we grant this argument, despite it's complete lack of rigor"
Simply take a look at CEO compensation packages. Marginal taxes are so exhorbitant on high levels of ordinary income that the rich give up on earning wages in ways the government steals 50% of it. They start paying themselves with options and stocks, investing in real estate and businesses that are taxed at much lower rates.
I said that Mankiw's argument lacked rigor because it provided no evidence; that does not mean that ALL arguments for the behavioural effects of taxation lack rigor.
But anyway, your example actually works against Mankiw's point in some ways. Mankiw says that people will avoid the tax by working less. In your example, the CEO is avoiding the tax by shifting his payment method, while leaving the amount worked unchanged. While there are distortions caused by the shifting of payment methods, there is no labour-leisure distortion if the CEO does not change his work habits in response to the tax. In this way, the shifting of his payment plan actually minimizes the distortion of the labour-leisure decision.
Brian: Good point that Mankiw is thinking mainly about leisure vs. work.
However, his thought experiment is likely to lead most people into thinking about a single, isolated lucrative opportunity, which can substitute for other work they're doing. In that sense, it might create the wrong intuitions about what tax rates do since most people would readily substitute a more lucrative task for a less lucrative one.
On labor vs. leisure, I guess Mankiw's premise is that Americans, especially high income Americans, don't spend enough hours at work and they spend too much time with friends, family, sleep and leisure. If the reverse is true, then if there is a "distortion" toward leisure due to income taxes it would be a good thing, just as pigovian carbon taxes are efficiency enhancing.
brian,
There is another alternative to replacing the income tax with a lump sum tax. You can also radically cut government spending. To spend is to tax.
The point being that government spending is thus far more distortionary than many may believe under this line of thinking. And that is not even taking into account the other side of the distortionary effects of spending, the point that knzn was talking about regarding the disincentives to produce for poor(ish) people of government means tested redistribution.
On a similar note, I am less than impressed with broad aplicability of actual large labor changing effects of the Laffer Curve for most marginal tax rate cuts (above 50% though it seems like a slam dunk that Laffer is correct, having to work like a dog to get less than half ones income seems "visually" unfair in a way that a 45% tax rate might not), although I can think of plenty of reasonable exceptions.
However I think it is eminently possible, indeed maybe even probable, that those in semi-self employed professions have an awful lot of wiggle room regarding work vs leisure, especially those in the infamous top 1% of income earners who coincidentally (???) had their incomes soar since crica 1980.
Should the lawyer who owns his own firm, or in partnership with a smallish number of others with a similar attitude, take on more clients going from 90 hours a week to 100 hours a week, or 70 hours to 80 hours a week, or 40 hours a week to 50 hours a week, or for that matter, from 20 hours a week to 30 hours a week (think individuals nearing retirement for the latter)?
One can apply the same logic to doctors, dentists, and anyone else with a reasonable ability to turn down new customers at will with a symmetrical lesser hours worked response. What might these top 1% types do instead of making more money at a (e.g.) 50% federal/state income tax rate? Play golf, play with the kids, "work" in the garden (older folks seem to like doing this a lot), actually take more vacations, see a mistress (or the wife) more often, etc.
I also agree that the marriage penalty whenever or wherever it applies is a factor (as someone else pointed out in this thread). Also, in addition to the top 1% types, there are those who might work two jobs to get nest egg to then go to night school to upgrade their skills so they can work asingle great job instead. But if the second job is taxed too highly, or the difference in after tax income going from that ok job to a great job. In other words, if the increase in (effective) marginal tax rates is too steep then progressive tax rates are seriously retarding of growth.
The bizarre effects of benefit programs on marginal tax rates have been long studied.
See Kotlikoff's papers (just Google him)
As to the effet of marginal rates on high earners: absolutely makes a difference. Also has an aggregate effect on firm performance under which the earner works; e.g. the question you should ask is whether some sales person will pick up the phone to land another call if his work is commission based, or a broker will spend another 10 mins placing a trade. It is more than what the earner takes home (multiplier effect)
Finally(?), I want to point out that most (all?) empirical research on the Laffer Curve effects (or lack thereof) seems to have overlooked the until-very-recently-highly-unknown (by most of us anyway) degressive tax rate on "carried interest".
It seems to me that people need to go back and check the effects of that degressive rate (effective I believe in 1982 if I am not mistaken, which I could be).
Note degressive is not a typo.
The bizarre effects of benefit programs on marginal tax rates have been long studied.
See Kotlikoff's papers (just Google him)
As to the effect of changes in marginal rates on high earners: absolutely makes a difference. Also has an aggregate effect on firm performance under which the earner works; e.g. the question you should ask is whether some sales person will pick up the phone to land another call if his work is commission based, or a broker will spend another 10 mins placing a trade. It is more than what the earner takes home (multiplier effect)
LookingForSensibleParties made a good point which reminded me of something else I wanted to add. Hopefully I will stop after this. :x
My point about some doctors deciding to stop taking new customers after a certain income level has been imputedly achieved has profound implications for health care costs going forward, not to mention simple availability of supply of doctors at all, noting that doctor supply seems highly inelastic.
If we jack up tax rates on "rich" income earners to pay for more goverment financed health care we could easily be reducing the effective supply of doctors, thus increasing real health care costs.
As I noted in an update, I now have a more relevant post for the subject of high-income earners. I would encourage people to put comments on that topic on that post instead of this one.
I have long thought that the 2nd bottom quintile is in worse shape than the bottom. The difference is that the bottom is eligible for programs, as you stated. The 2nd bottom has to pay exorbitant health care premiums (expensively regulated), high housing costs (zoning regs), punitive taxes, etc...
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