Updated daily, InsiderOnline (insideronline.org) is a compilation of publication abstracts, how-to essays, events, news, and analysis from around the conservative movement. The current edition of The INSIDER quarterly magazine is also on the site.
January 11, 2013
Latest Studies: 46 new items, including a Reason Foundation study on how to revamp transportation financing, and a Mercatus Center review of what’s wrong with Dodd-Frank
Notes on the Week: More economic freedom means better lives, James Buchanan changed the way we think about politics, CRS wrong on taxes and growth, and more
To Do: Get ready for National School Choice Week
Budget & Taxation
• We Are the 98 Percent – American Enterprise Institute
• Legislators’ Guide to the Issues – Beacon Center of Tennessee
• Should U.S. Fiscal Policy Address Slow Growth or the Debt? A Nondilemma – Cato Institute
• A Housing Market Free from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: The Economic Effects of Eliminating the Housing Government Sponsored Enterprises – The Heritage Foundation
• A New, Extra-Extraordinary Debt-Ceiling Tool – The Heritage Foundation
• Effective Marginal Tax Rates for Low-Income Workers Are High – The Heritage Foundation
• Fiscal Cliff Deal: Tax Increase Spoils Permanent Victory for Most Taxpayers – The Heritage Foundation
• Hurricane Sandy Relief Bill: Starting the New Year with Bloated Deficit Spending – The Heritage Foundation
• U.S. Government Increases National Debt—and Keeps 128 Million People on Government Programs – The Heritage Foundation
• The Home Mortgage Interest Deduction – Mercatus Center
• Regaining America’s Balance – National Affairs
• Policy Analytics of the Tax Treatment of Charitable Contributions – Pacific Research Institute
• Cigarette Taxes and Cigarette Smuggling by State – Tax Foundation
• CRS Study on Tax Rates and Growth Still Flunks the Test – Tax Foundation
• Effects of Marriage on Tax Burden Vary Greatly with Income Level, Equality – Tax Foundation
• Income Tax Code No Longer Favors Parking over Transit... For Now – Tax Foundation
• Kentucky Tax Reform Commission Offers Disappointing Grab Bag – Tax Foundation
• What Is the Evidence on Taxes and Growth? – Tax Foundation
Economic Growth
• Becoming Europe: Economic Decline, Culture, and How America Can Avoid a European Future – Encounter Books
• 2013 Index of Economic Freedom – The Heritage Foundation
• Heritage Employment Report: In December Out with the Old, In with the Same Thing – The Heritage Foundation
• Can the American Dream Be Saved? – National Affairs
• Innovation and Inequality – National Affairs
• The Dangers of Quasi-Capitalism – National Affairs
Family, Culture & Community
• India’s Missing Women – American Enterprise Institute
Foreign Policy/International Affairs
• China, America, and the Pivot to Asia – Cato Institute
• Hagel, Kerry, and Brennan Senate Confirmation Hearings: U.S. Policy on Europe – The Heritage Foundation
Government Reform
• Latin America and the Caribbean: A Wish List for 2013 – The Heritage Foundation
Health Care
• A Mobile Device Is Not Your Grandmother’s Telephone Anymore: It’s A Mobile Health Center – Free State Foundation
International Trade/Finance
• China’s Global Investment Rises: The U.S. Should Focus on Competition – The Heritage Foundation
• Unleashing the Market in the India–U.S. Economic Relationship, Part 1 – The Heritage Foundation
Monetary Policy/Financial Regulation
• Central Bank Dreams, Monetary Realities – American Enterprise Institute
• Dodd-Frank: What It Does and Why It’s Flawed – Mercatus Center
• Against Casino Finance – National Affairs
National Security
• Bait and Switch on Nuclear Modernization Must Stop – The Heritage Foundation
Natural Resources, Energy, Environment, & Science
• Carbon Tax Would Raise Unemployment, Not Revenue – The Heritage Foundation
• The Future fo the Commons: Beyond Market Failure and Government Regulation – Institute of Economic Affairs
• Water, Water Everywhere but Not a Drop for Power – Public Interest Institute
Regulation & Deregulation
• A Rational Response to the Privacy ‘Crisis’ – Cato Institute
• Redefining the Poverty Debate – Why a War on Markets Is No Substitute for a War on Poverty – Institute of Economic Affairs
• Off-Label, Not Off-Limits: The FDA Needs To Create a Safe Harbor For Off-Label Drug Use – Manhattan Institute
• Sunset Recommendations Would Increase Regulations on Texas’ Electricity Market – Texas Public Policy Foundation
The Constitution/Civil Liberties
• The Sad Irony of Affirmative Action – National Affairs
Transportation/Infrastructure
• Funding Important Transportation Infrastructure in a Fiscally Constrained Environment – Reason Foundation
• Parks 2.0: Operating State Parks Through Public-Private Partnerships – Reason Foundation
Welfare
• The Unfinished Work of Welfare Reform – National Affairs
More economic freedom means better lives. More economic freedom—i.e., the freedom “to work, produce, consume, and invest in any way [a person] please[s], with that freedom both protected by the state and unconstrained by the state”—leads to better health, higher per capita income, more education, and greater environmental protection. And here’s the graph from the 2013 Index of Economic Freedom that shows it:
[Terry Miller and Anthony Kim, “Chapter 1: Economic Freedom: Global and Regional Patterns,” 2013 Index of Economic Freedom, The Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal, January 2013.]
Which economies are freest? Hong Kong still has the freest economy in the world, while the United States remains stuck in the mostly free category, according to the 2013 Index of Economic Freedom, published this week by The Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal.
On the Index’s scale of zero to 100, the average country score for the world was 59.6 in 2013, about where it has been for the last five years. It was 60.2 in 2008.
The ten freest economies in the world in are Hong Kong, Sinagapore, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Canada, Chile, Mauritius, Denmark, and the United States. The five unfreest economies in the world are Eritrea (173), Venezuela (174), Zimbabwe (175), Cuba (176), and North Korea (177).
The United States had the fifth freest economy in the world in 2008, but has fallen steadily in the rankings since then. The United States scored 76.0 this year, 0.3 points lower than last year. The Unites States’s economic freedom score has declined for six consecutive years since 2007 when its score was 81.2. The Index’s economic freedom score is based on ten components. Most of the U.S. decline over that period is accounted for by lower scores in four of those components: government spending (less is better); investment freedom (free movement of capital), financial freedom (limited bank regulations), and monetary freedom (stable currency). The U.S. scores for property rights, business freedom, and corruption have also all declined in the past six years.
Cigarette tax hikes lead to smuggling spikes. Michael LaFaive reports on the Mackinac Center’s latest analysis of legal sales data and cigarette consumption rates:
We find that New York currently holds the top position as the highest net importer of smuggled cigarettes in 2011, with smuggled cigarettes totaling a staggering 60.9 percent of the total market. Not coincidentally, New York also has the nation’s highest state cigarette tax at $4.35 per pack, plus another $1.50 levied in New York City. […]
Massachusetts increased its cigarette tax from $1.51 to $2.51 per pack in 2010, and in 2011 became an even larger market for smugglers, advancing 13 spots since our 2010 report.
Florida moved up 12 places on the smuggling index after hiking cigarette taxes in 2010 from 33.9 cents per pack to almost $1.34.
Utah moved up 10 positions. You guessed it — the Beehive State increased is cigarette tax from 69.5 cents to $1.70 in 2011. [Mackinac Center, January 8]
The tax code needs to be simpler, says the National Taxpayer Advocate. The complexity of the tax code is once again the number one taxpayer problem, according to the National Taxpayer Advocate in its annual report to Congress:
In 2012, TAS conducted a statistically representative national survey of over 3,300 taxpayers who operate businesses as sole proprietors. Only 16 percent said they believe the tax laws are fair. Only 12 percent said they believe taxpayers pay their fair share of taxes. […]
For fiscal year (FY) 2013, the Joint Committee on Taxation has projected that tax expenditures will come to about $1.09 trillion, while individual income tax revenue is projected to be about $1.36 trillion. This suggests that if Congress were to eliminate all tax expenditures, it could cut individual income tax rates by about 44 percent and still generate about the same amount of revenue. […]
If tax compliance were an industry, it would be one of the largest in the United States. To consume 6.1 billion hours, the “tax industry” requires the equivalent of more than three million full-time workers.
Compliance costs are huge both in absolute terms and relative to the amount of tax revenue collected. Based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data on the hourly cost of an employee, TAS estimates that the costs of complying with the individual and corporate income tax requirements for 2010 amounted to $168 billion — or a staggering 15 percent of aggregate income tax receipts.
According to a tally compiled by a leading publisher of tax information, there have been approximately 4,680 changes to the tax code since 2001, an average of more than one a day. [Internal citations omitted.]
While most taxpayers would probably agree with the National Taxpayer Advocate’s recommendation to simplify the tax code, they might not agree with another of the agency’s recommendations. Later in its report, this agency that is supposed to represent the taxpayers’ interests inside the government reports that the Internal Revenue Service is underfunded. It’s almost as if the people in charge of government have interests that diverge from the people they’re supposed to represent. Didn’t James Buchanan say something like that once or twice?
Bad tax analysis: The Congressional Research Service redid a recent report claiming that reductions in top marginal income tax rates have no effect on economic growth, but it still gets an F from the Tax Foundation’s Stephen Entin. Entin points out that you cannot, as CRS did, simply look at one tax or policy change in isolation to see if it had an effect. A better approach:
The first step is to calculate the “service price” of capital. That is the rate of return, or earnings, on capital needed to cover the cost of the asset, pay any taxes, and leave an investor with enough income after taxes to justify the investment. If one compares the service price for various assets under the old and new laws, one finds that the 1986 Act as a whole raised the service price and reduced the after-tax income from capital investment, which ought to have discouraged capital formation and retarded economic growth. That is exactly what happened following the 1986 Act.
Entin also points out that CRS analysts fail to understand how tax cuts affect the economy, so they look for the wrong measure of success:
Following a tax cut on capital income, the growth rate will surge for a while as additional capital is created by means of increased investment. Once the additional capital is in place, the GDP will return to a more normal rate of growth, but it will be expanding from the new, higher base level as workers have more capital to work with, enhancing their productivity and output. Thus, one should look at the long-term change in the capital stock and the ultimate level of output, not the short-term rise in investment and the short-term change in the growth rate. If one looks only at the growth rate, and not at the level of GDP, one could conclude that the tax rate change has only a temporary benefit, when in fact it is permanently helpful. [Tax Foundation, January 8]
Electronic health care records aren’t producing the savings expected, according to the think tank that generated those expectations. The RAND Corporation this week issued a reassessment of its 2005 report that claimed adopting electronic health care records could produce significant savings, reports the New York Times:
RAND’s 2005 report was paid for by a group of companies, including General Electric and Cerner Corporation, that have profited by developing and selling electronic records systems to hospitals and physician practices. Cerner’s revenue has nearly tripled since the report was released, to a projected $3 billion in 2013, from $1 billion in 2005.
The report predicted that widespread use of electronic records could save the United States health care system at least $81 billion a year, a figure RAND now says was overstated. The study was widely praised within the technology industry and helped persuade Congress and the Obama administration to authorize billions of dollars in federal stimulus money in 2009 to help hospitals and doctors pay for the installation of electronic records systems. […]
“The vast sum of stimulus money flowing into health information technology created a ‘race to adopt’ mentality — buy the systems today to get government handouts, but figure out how to make them work tomorrow,” Dr. [David J.] Brailer said. [New York Times, January 10]
James Buchanan, R.I.P. James Buchanan, the Nobel Prize winning political-economist who taught us that politicians have their own self interests quite apart from those of their constituents, died at 93 this week. In works such as The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (co-authored with Gordon Tullock) and The Demand and Supply of Public Goods, Buchanan applied economic analysis to politics and showed how government solutions could be worse than the “market failures” they were supposed to correct. In her remembrance, Amity Shlaes speculates on how Buchanan might have developed his ideas:
I have always wondered whether Buchanan turned to the study of sanctimonious government officials and their interests because he spent time in graduate school on the South Side of Chicago in the late 1940s (the neighborhood where I was later born). Hyde Park was lively, but uneven. Little shops along 55th Street, just north of the university, might thrive, but poor black migrants crowded together in apartments with insufficient heat during the city’s tough winters.
Buchanan earned his doctorate in 1948, about the time the politicians and other civic leaders promised that bulldozing large swaths of the neighborhood and creating new public-private projects would yield a better Hyde Park, prettier and more racially integrated.
But the result felt wrong, especially to residents. The new apartment buildings, in the minimalist international style, themselves felt as cold as winter. Instead of bringing people together, they separated them: One complex quickly became known as Monoxide Island. With the stores gone, there was less life on the streets. Yet Hyde Park locals lacked the vocabulary to criticize the transformation we had been told was progress or reform. Who wants to be construed as “pro-slum”?
Buchanan supplied that vocabulary. Instead of calling urban renewal “reform,” as the officials did, he called it “politics.” It was important, he said, that all such projects, whether urban renewal in Chicago or elsewhere, be viewed honestly, that we look at “politics without romance.”
The housing redevelopment in Hyde Park worked to the advantage of certain interest groups, political or business. Yet the high-and-mighty tone of the anti-slum language masked something. No party involved was any better or any worse than anyone else: They were all pursuing their own interests. Politicians often promoted such ugly ambitious projects not because the projects were good. They did so because the projects enabled politicians to award contracts to important campaign donors. [The Morning Call, January 10]
Buchanan’s ideas help us understand a wide range of public policy problems, including the political dangers of stimulus spending, as David Kreutzer explains:
While other economists debated the appropriate level and timing of federal deficits, Buchanan warned of the danger of deficit finance when it left the world of economic theory and entered the world of political gamesmanship. History has confirmed his theory—unlike economists, politicians will continually prefer to run up the debt. Deficits allow politicians to provide special-interest backers with costly projects during the current election cycle while deferring payment until after the next election. The result has been (as he predicted) a virtually unending string of budget deficits and an ever-rising national debt. [The Foundry, January 9]
To learn more about James Buchanan, see Don Boudreaux’s roundup at Café Hayek [January, 10], as well as The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan at the Online Library of Liberty.
• Get ready for National School Choice Week, January 27 – February 2. Across the country there are 3,000 events planned, and folks in all 50 states will be participating. The events will highlight the momentum and the successes of school choice. If your organization is planning on event, make sure you submit it to the National School Choice Week calendar.
• Learn about the Five Pillars of the First Amendment at this year’s Education Policy Conference, January 24 – 26 at the Hilton St. Louis Frontenac.
• Watch the Heritage event on one of the most talked about articles of 2012: What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense.
• Appreciate your constitutional right to own a gun, if you so choose, on Gun Appreciation Day, January 19.
• Find out how well you know your libertarianism: Take George Smith’s 30-question libertarian history quiz at Libertarianism.org.
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