From today’s Politico Pulse:
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi did her part Wednesday to drum up support to use war savings to pay for the ‘doc fix,’ saying both parties have embraced the savings in the past. ‘It is not a gimmick,’ she told reporters during her weekly Capitol Hill press conference. ‘It’s what the Republicans used in the Ryan budget.’
My friend David Brunori announced this week that he is no longer a “liberal” but a libertarian, although he says of the “bleeding heart” variety.
This is interesting because David has long been one of the nation’s top state fiscal experts. He is currently an editor of the Tax Notes family of periodicals (which are subscription only).
What made David see the light about government?
I’ve been calling myself a liberal in the pages of State Tax Notes since I began this column in 1996. I’ve been introduced at conferences and bars as a liberal tax pundit, a liberal professor, and a card-carrying liberal. In my line of business, it was expected that one would either be liberal or, if you were a pawn of the 1 percent, a conservative. Decent tax policy folks weren’t libertarians. Libertarians had no tax policy. But I’m too old to hide my feelings.
I came to realize my true identity by taking a survey on the Libertarian Party website. I scored a perfect 100 percent on the personal freedom meter, but only an 80 percent on the economic freedom meter. Still, those scores make me a libertarian. Some of my liberal friends will hate me for coming out. But I’ll remind them that hate is not a tax policy value. Besides, by definition, I still care for the poor and dispossessed. I’m no anarchist. I’m no isolationist. I still believe that government has a positive role to play in society. I want good roads and teachers and appreciate that someone will answer the phone when I dial 911. But I think we should look at government more skeptically.
I’m weary of corporate welfare. I’m weary of tax incentives. I’m weary of government economic policy that’s largely intended to enrich politicians’ cronies. For example, California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) has been hellbent on spending $93 billion on a train that apparently no one wants and few will ride. But a small number of connected men would make a fortune building it.
I’m weary of the incessant arrogance of the nanny state. The Boston Public Health Commission recently voted to ban electronic cigarettes from the workplace. Memo to those in Boston: Electronic cigarettes are fake. They blow a harmless vapor of mist. Real cigarettes are banned from public places purportedly because of the dangers of secondhand smoke. Personally, I think the marketplace can handle smoking issues just fine, but let’s assume people are too stupid to make decisions about working at or patronizing places that allow smoking. What gives political elites in Boston the right to ban a product that has no secondary harm? Nothing. They do it because they don’t like people who smoke (even ersatz smokers). But more importantly, they do it because they have the power. I’d go blow real smoke rings in their faces if it weren’t so obviously immature.
David also provides a useful essay in Tax Notes this week: “A Practical Approach to Libertarian Tax Policy.” He proposes seven principles to guide tax policy from a limited-government perspective:
It’s a pretty good list. David and I particularly have a mind meld on the importance of fiscal federalism. David is an excellent analyst and concise writer, so I’m glad he’s now on the team.
For more on libertarian tax policy, readers can look at my “Options for Tax Reform.” I propose three broad principles to guide tax reform: simplification, efficiency, and limited government.
One of ObamaCare’s big selling points was that it would launch lots of pilot programs so that Medicare bureaucrats could learn how to reduce health care costs and improve the quality of care. Yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office threw cold water on the idea.
In 2010, Peter Orszag and Ezekiel Emanuel explained the promise of ObamaCare’s pilot programs:
[The law’s] pilot programs involving bundled payments will provide physicians and hospitals with incentives to coordinate care for patients with chronic illnesses: keeping these patients healthy and preventing hospitalizations will be financially advantageous…And the secretary of health and human services (HHS) is empowered to expand successful pilot programs without the need for additional legislation.
Atul Gawande wrote even more glowingly:
The bill tests, for instance, a number of ways that federal insurers could pay for care. Medicare and Medicaid currently pay clinicians the same amount regardless of results. But there is a pilot program to increase payments for doctors who deliver high-quality care at lower cost, while reducing payments for those who deliver low-quality care at higher cost. There’s a program that would pay bonuses to hospitals that improve patient results after heart failure, pneumonia, and surgery. There’s a program that would impose financial penalties on institutions with high rates of infections transmitted by…
You get the idea.
The thing is, pilot programs in Medicare are not new. And in a review of dozens of Medicare pilot programs released yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office revealed they aren’t very successful, either:
The disease management and care coordination demonstrations comprised 34 programs…
In nearly every program, spending was either unchanged or increased relative to the spending that would have occurred in the absence of the program, when the fees paid to the participating organizations were considered…
Only one of the four demonstrations of value-based payment has yielded significant savings for the Medicare program.
No big deal, you say. Startups fail all the time. What’s important is not that 37 startups failed, but that one succeeded.
That’s how things are supposed to work. But as Alain Enthoven explained to Gawande, the really perverse thing about Medicare pilot programs is that even the successful ones die:
Gawande got it wrong about pilots…The Medical Industrial Complex does not want such pilots and often strangles them in the crib. For example, nothing lasting and significant came of the pilot to reward people for getting their heart bypass surgery at regional centers of excellence. I don’t remember the details of how it died, but I believe it was tried and went nowhere. No doubt every hospital thought it was a center of excellence and wanted to be so rewarded.
Another more recent example is durable medical equipment. David Leonhardt had an excellent article in the New York Times on June 25, 2008 called “High Medicare Costs Courtesy of Congress.” Someone had sold the good idea that prices of durable medical equipment should be determined by competition, and there was a provision in law for pilots to test competition. The industry lobbied hard to stop it and promulgated scare stories. “Grandma won’t get her oxygen.” Leonhardt recounts how Democratic and Republican leaders got together and postponed the pilot— and, I suspect, postponed it forever. There were proposals to test health plan competition, fought off by the industry of course. So this is not a fertile political environment for pilots. In fact, one of the most important lessons that has come out of the current “reform” process is the enormous power of the medical industrial complex and their large financial contributions and armies of lobbyists to block any significant cost containment.
Rather than a reason for more government interference in health care, the death of these pilots is a consequence of government interference. If the federal Medicare program weren’t such an enormous player in the U.S. health care sector, industry lobbyists (and their servants in Congress) wouldn’t have so many ways to protect themselves from competition by more efficient providers.
Enthoven summed up ObamaCare’s approach to cost control best:
The American people are being deceived. We are being told that health expenditure must be curbed, therefore “reform is necessary.” But the bills in Congress, as Gawande acknowledges, do little or nothing to curb the expenditures. When the American people come to understand that “reform” was not followed by improvement, they are likely to be disappointed. Our anguish is only intensified by the fact that the Republicans are no better at fiscal responsibility, probably worse as they demagogue reasonable attempts to limit expenditures.
Congress is sending the world an unmistakable signal that it is unable or unwilling to control health expenditures and the fiscal deficit. That is not going to make it easier to sell Treasury bonds on international markets. I fear this will lead to higher interest rates.
FYI, Enthoven wrote those words in 2009.
As I explain in an op-ed in today’s Orange County Register, that’s not a theoretical question. After adjusting for inflation and enrollment growth, CA spent $27 billion more on K‑12 public schooling in 2010 than it did when Jerry Brown was first elected governor back in 1974. SAT scores fell over that period (see chart below).
And if a $27 billion spending boost was associated with a decline in SAT scores, why would anyone expect Governor Brown’s proposal to raise another $7 billion in education taxes to do any good?
Note that the above version of the chart includes an extra two years of (estimated) spending data from the Brown administration’s current budget document, compared to the version than ran in the OCR. I’d left off those years because I didn’t want to include estimates, only concrete figures, but I’ve already been asked about them so I include them here. The picture’s the same either way.
A new paper from postal expert Michael Schuyler compares the financial performance of the U.S. Postal Service to foreign postal service providers. Not surprisingly, the USPS, which has lost over $25 billion since 2006 and ranks near the bottom of the Postal Index of Freedom, doesn’t fare too well.
From the paper:
[Universal Postal Union] data indicate that, in each year, the majority of posts in high-income jurisdictions were profitable. Declining mail demand was stressful, though: the share of posts reporting losses increased from less than one in ten in 2007 to more than one in three in 2010. Nevertheless, few posts lost money consistently: under 20% over the period 2008–2010 and under 10% over the period 2007–2008, which suggests most foreign posts reacted quickly and effectively to financial setbacks. The good news is that posts can adjust to change and remain financially viable. Unfortunately, USPS is among the posts with consistent losses. Further, UPU data show that, in each year, more than half the reporting posts in medium-income jurisdictions were profitable. Few spilled red ink year after year.
Schuyler says that he will explore the reasons for the USPS’s comparatively poor performance in a future paper, but notes that “A key finding will be that Congressional restrictions and pressure often deny the Postal Service the operational flexibility needed to manage its costs properly.” In a Cato essay, I discuss the problems with Congress’s micromanagement of the U.S. Postal Service and conclude that it should be placed on the path to privatization.
Another postal expert, Alan Robinson, notes Schuyler’s piece and offers additional commentary on the need for policymakers to figure out what to do with the flailing postal service. Should the USPS go back to being subsidized by taxpayers? Or should the USPS remain a part of the federal government at all? Robinson concludes that “it is time for postal service stakeholders, and in particular its labor unions, to develop an acceptable path toward privatization.”
In the past 20-plus years, I’ve seen all sorts of arguments for class-warfare taxation.These include:
I suppose leftists deserve credit for being adaptable. Just about anything is an excuse for soak-the-rich tax hikes. The sun is shining, raise taxes! The sky is cloudy, increase tax rates!
But if there was an award for the strangest argument in favor of higher taxes, it would probably belong to a group of academics who have concluded that “progressive” tax systems make people happier.
I’m not kidding. There’s a new study making that assertion. Here are some passages from an announcement by the Association for Psychological Science.
…a new study comparing 54 nations found that flattening the tax risks flattening social wellbeing as well. “The more progressive the tax policy is, the happier the citizens are,” says University of Virginia psychologist Shigehiro Oishi, summarizing the findings, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. …Well-being was expressed in people’s assessments of their overall life quality, from “worst” to “best possible life,” on a scale of 1 to 10; and in whether they enjoyed positive daily experiences (such as smiling, being treated with respect, and eating good food) or suffered negative ones, including sadness, worry, and shame. …The degree of progressivity was measured by the difference between the highest and lowest tax rates, corrected for such confounding factors as family size, social security taxes paid, and tax benefits received by individuals. The results: On average, residents of the nations with the most progressive taxation evaluated their own lives as closer to “the best possible.”
The actual study isn’t available yet, but the release from APS screams junk science — especially since a study of American states found that high taxes lead to unhappiness.
But we should be skeptical of all this research. There are myriad pitfalls, including cultural differences.
But the most obvious problem is causality. Even if we assume it’s possible to make accurate cross-border comparisons of happiness, is there any reason to think that progressive tax rates are a causal factor, one way or the other? Heck, we may as well assume that crowing roosters cause the sun to appear.
Here’s one very obvious guess about what may cause the APS results. I’m guessing that people in Sweden and Denmark say they are happy. That’s not too surprising. They live in rich countries. But those countries became rich before the welfare state began and before high tax rates became the norm. So does it make sense to say they are happy because of high tax rates?
People in Mongolia and Bulgaria, by contrast, probably aren’t as happy as people in the Scandinavian nations. They live in relatively poor nations that suffered from decades of communist enslavement. In recent years, though, both nations implemented flat taxes in hopes of spurring growth and catching up to the rest of the world. But progress doesn’t happen overnight. So does it make sense to say that they are unhappy because the tax system isn’t “progressive”?
Ironically, the APS release does include the following results.
Higher government spending per se did not yield greater happiness, in spite of the well-being that was associated with satisfaction with state-funded services. In fact, there was a slight negative correlation between government spending and average happiness.
Since we do have good evidence that economic growth suffers as government expands, this conclusion makes a lot more sense.
But I’m still skeptical about happiness studies. Seems like they might suffer from the credibility issues associated with global warming research.
Actually, I retract that statement. Happiness research may be imprecise and susceptible to bias, but I doubt people in that field would ever make a claim as absurd as global warming causes AIDS. And I doubt they would try to do something as stupid as rationing toilet paper or create something as silly as a hand-cranked vibrator.
Contrary to what various news outlets are reporting, President Obama is NOT proposing to cut government. The administration is proposing to take four independent federal agencies that specialize in corporate welfare – along with the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative – and combine them with corporate welfare programs at the Department of Commerce to form what I would argue should be called the Department of Corporate Welfare.
According to reports, this rearranging of the deck chairs would save $300 million a year. That’s peanuts. Worse, those alleged savings will be of no consequence to taxpayers as there is nothing to suggest that the president intends to cut overall spending for the agencies comprising the new bureaucracy. That portends bigger government, not smaller. The president is trying to sell the American taxpayer a false bill of goods.
The president’s proposal is also an attempt to counter the perception – an accurate one – that the administration’s policies are detrimental to commerce. But corporate welfare is detrimental to commerce because the market distortions it creates hinder economic output. Making it easier for select businesses to help themselves to taxpayer-financed subsidies would only perpetuate the same sort of crony capitalist schemes that gave us Solyndra and the Chevy Volt.
Of course, no transparent attempt to appear “business friendly” would be complete without a bone toss to the Small Business Administration. The “bone” this time is the president’s intention to elevate the head of the SBA to the Cabinet. As I discuss in a Cato essay on the SBA, rather than helping small businesses compete against big businesses, the SBA’s loan guarantees mainly help a tiny share of small businesses compete against other small businesses. In reality, the biggest beneficiary of the SBA is the banks, which reap the profits from the loans guaranteed by the agency.
Finally, Republican policymakers talk a good game about cutting government, but they often hide behind calls for making the federal government “more efficient.” Now that the president has seized a political opportunity to sing from the GOP’s hymnal, it’ll be interesting – if not entertaining – to see how Republican policymakers respond. To avoid embarrassment, I recommend offering specific spending cuts.