Category - Taxes

Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas W. Elmendorf summarizes his testimony to Congress (there’s also a link to the pdf file of the full testimony). Unfortunately, the simplest way to ‘distribute the value of carbon allowances,’ to paraphrase Elmendorf, is not mentioned: dividing it up equally. The technical details (division!) have been dealt with before on this blog by Jonathan.  Why would this obvious alternative be left out? My inner conspiracy theorist whispers that it’s left out to make giving away allowances the most politically viable alternative on the table. After all, why should all those poor folks benefit, when the rest of us have to shell out more at the pump?

Director’s Blog » Blog Archive » Testimony: The Distribution of Revenues from a Cap-and-Trade Program for Carbon Dioxide Emissions

UPDATE, below

The part of the new bailout bill that’s supposed to bring along the most formerly reluctant House members is to raise the coverage limit for Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) insured personal deposits (which includes savings and checking accounts, cds and money market accounts) from the current level of $100,000 to $250,000. Obama, McCain and the FDIC all approve. See this story, for instance. But who does this really affect? Using data from the 2004 Survey of Consumer Finances (the 2007 numbers aren’t yet available) and adding all covered accounts within households (note that this overstates coverage, since the insurance covers accounts not households) produces this table:

That’s right, this plan will help to insure that 3.5% of households with deposits over $100,000, but not the 1.5% with deposits over $250,000. I guess they’re on their own. Actually, most people in both of these categories already keep multiple accounts, to stay under the insured limit, so it will help not that much. However, it does make it look like a “compromise was reached on an improved bill,” allowing representatives to say that they held out for their constituents while they’re campaigning over the next month.

You don’t suppose that’s the point, do you?

UPDATE:

meanwhile, FDIC is doing a fine job slowing down lending.

As discouraging as votes on things like FISA and telecom immunity have been, there are still some enormous differences between the two (?) major party candidates. For example, there’s the distributional impacts of their tax policy proposals, as well-illustrated in the figure below from the Tax Policy Center’s newly updated analysis (click on image to embiggen).

(Tip of the Econ-Atrocity chapeau to Paul Krugman)

J.S. at Environmental Economics seems to think so. Maybe. According to a NY Times piece the bill

would revoke $17 billion in tax breaks extended to big oil companies like Exxon Mobil Corp and slap a 25 percent windfall profits tax on firms that don’t invest in new energy sources.

My question is: will the Democrats grow a spine in time to pass such a bill, even in the face of some opposition?

BusinessWeek has a recent article about the new law requiring improvement in automobile and small truck fuel efficiency (”The Road to a Stronger CAFE Standard“). Among other things, the article describes how the law changes the way that the CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) measurement is calculated. Under the old CAFE calculation, fuel economy is measured separately for each auto manufacturer. Under the new calculation, all manufacturers will be measured together, and a trading scheme is established so that companies beneath the industry-wide average must buy credits from companies that are above the average. Since American auto manufacturers produce a disproportionate share of minivans, pickup trucks, and SUVs (all lumped together as “light trucks”), the American companies are more likely to be on the buyer side of the credit buying while companies like Toyota and Honda will be more likely to be on the seller side of the scheme. Says one guy from the American company perspective,

it’s SUV and pickup buyers who will be stuck with the tab, suggests Chrysler Vice-Chairman Tom LaSorda. “It’s likely to be another big hidden tax on the consumer, as well as small businesses and building trades.”

What BusinessWeek’s writer fails to mention is the other side of the equation: this system also results in a hidden subsidy for buyers of efficient cars. If Honda is selling lots of relatively efficient cars, and therefore is able to sell credits to Ford (which is selling more in the way of trucks), then Honda can hold down the price of the cars while still making the same overall profit. The pressure on Ford that pushes up the price of trucks will be an “equal and opposite” pressure on Honda to hold down the price of their small cars. All in all, it could be a completely neutral system in terms of the overall effect on consumers. Of course, lots of details and corporate decisions might end up making it either more or less than perfectly neutral in the end, but BW’s article is misleading when it only highlights the one side of the equation. On this general concept, see more about “feebate” proposals.

Oh, and by the way, all of Detroit’s (and Toyota’s, the Prius notwithstanding) hemming and hawing about how hard it is to make more fuel efficient is pretty obviously a load of bunk, even if the people doing the hemming and hawing believe their own bunk.

[Crossposted at my work blog.]

BusinessWeek’s GreenBiz blog tipped me off to a recent BW article on carbon labeling. Carbon labeling means to label consumer products with an indicator of how much greenhouse gas was emitted in the production and distribution of each product to the point of having it on the shelf in front of the customer. The idea has been around for a while, but only recently have manufacturers (like Timberland shoes) and retailers (like Tesco, a British chain of mega-grocery stores) started to implement carbon labeling programs. As it turns out, according to BW’s article, carbon labeling is tricky for a few reasons. First, it can be tremendously difficult to squeeze all the aspects of modern, globalized manufacturing into a single numerical measurement of greenhouse emissions. Second, for such programs to work, there needs to be a fair bit of consumer education so that people will have any idea of what these carbon labels actually mean. (If a label says, “50 grams of carbon,” is that good or bad or what?)

Here are some thoughts suggestions that probably have been thought of by other people as well, but what the hey:

1) The ideal carbon label will be structured similarly to the energy guide labels on refrigerators and other appliances we see in the US. That is, on a line that shows the minimum-to-maximum amount of greenhouse emissions caused by similar products to the one in your hand (like all canned vegetables or all pasta products or all color televisions) as well as an indication of where on this line the individual product falls. If canned vegetables incur anywhere between 10 and 100 grams of carbon-equivalent greenhouse emissions (using made up numbers for sake of the example), and the can in your hand incurred 30 grams, then you’d see something like “10—–30————–100″. That’s the first part of the labeling scheme, and would be called the “Manufacturing & Distribution” count. For some products, like canned vegetables, that would be enough. For products like TVs that require the ongoing consumption of energy in use, there would be another line (like the existing energy guide labels on refrigerators and such) that indicates the relative use of energy going forward, based on the average greenhouse emissions of the electric grid across the country. This would be the “Usage” count. Finally, for products that have both counts on their label would be a third measurement line called “Expected Lifetime” which would be a combination of the “Manufacturing & Distribution” count and an estimate of the probable cummulative lifetime “Usage” count, for example the combination of M&D plus 10 years worth of normal usage of a TV. Some products might have high M&D counts but be more efficient in use, and therefore their lifetime impact would be lower than an alternative product that had a lower M&D count but was inefficient in usage.

2) I realize that this notion of an ideal carbon label still ignores the difficulties in actually figuring out accurate counts for greenhouse emissions; but if you can get decent estimates of the emissions, then I think that’d be a good way to do the labeling in a way that consumers could interpret and make meaningful choices between products. You have to have the relative position of each product on a scale for the number to mean anything.

3) If you want to educate the populace on how to use these things, teach 10 year olds about it. They will quickly and insistently instruct the rest of us, treating us like absurd fools until such time as we master the system as well as they have.

4) The trickiness of figuring out accurate and consistent greenhouse emission labeling is an argument in favor of using carbon taxes/cap-and-trade systems. Sorta. On the one hand, the financial tool of carbon tax/cap-and-trade — implemented on upstream sources of carbon (and other greenhouse gases) — easily introduce an effective alternative to the carbon label into the economy. Product prices will rise relative to the amount of extra cost their manufacturers & distributors face as a result of the greenhouse gas emissions incurred during manufacturing and distribution. The can of corn that involved more greenhouse emissions will incur a greater carbon-cost increase than the alternative can of corn that involved less emissions. However, this isn’t totally satisfactory, because so much else is involved in pricing: the “price signal” is terribly noisy and prone to distortion and/or misinterpretation. In addition, there are some — how many? — people willing, even eager, to pay more for products that they are confident involve less greenhouse emissions. Working the greenhouse effect of a product into the product’s price is a good thing, but that doesn’t obviate the usefulness of a more fully informed consumer as a second level for reducing carbon footprints. One further thought on this, though: it’s possible that if a carbon tax is implemented, the tax itself could be used as a tool for measuring the greenhouse emissions on a product and therefore be the basis of the carbon label. Businesses already keep track of the taxes they pay, and so the added burden of accounting should be less than trying to account for a new system of purely physical carbon emission counting. Right? Because the carbon tax itself is predicated (or should be) on a carbon-equivalent scale, it would be an easy translation to take the cumulative taxes paid on a product through its manufacturing and distribution lifetime and restate that as an amount of carbon emitted during the process. The increasing use of rfid chips in distribution chains only makes this easier to implement, as you have better tracking going on and the ability to link movement of materials and goods to the taxes those materials and goods incur for the businesses making and moving them. (Having said this, I still favor a Peter Barnes’ style cap-auction-trade-dividend approach over the carbon tax approach.)

5) I gotta get back to work!

Here is a quick quiz question and reality redefinition brought to you by President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers. Fill in the blank:

“[A]s people’s real incomes grow, they become subject to higher tax rates.”

This phenomenon is known as _______________________.

[The following is a guest post emailed in to the Center for Popular Economics by a reader of CPE’s newsletter]

by Ben Leet

I am a retired school teacher who has done research on the U.S. economy partly for personal reasons and also because I had been teaching at a school in a poverty neighborhood in Oakland. There were many murders, crimes and depressing events in the neighborhood where I taught. Children brought in bullets that had passed through their walls, or one described a murder that happened in his back yard. Those were the worst examples, but violence was not uncommon. Bad economics, I concluded, contributed to poor student performance, poor behavior, and stunted emotional development. Here are the salient facts I’ve uncovered that point to a society mired in inequality.

Here are the problems we face:

Here’s an interesting take (read the whole thing, it’s short!) on the Laffer Curve (the theoretical source of the arguments made by people like Rudy Giuliani, that cutting taxes increases government revenues). One reason is that the higher tax rates are, the more people will try to avoid them.  Taking the logic, to it’s absurd conclusion:

If you’re the sort of person who is willing to use these tax avoidance schemes - and I would hazard to guess that not that many people in that situation are not - how low do tax rates have to be in order that you do not engage in those schemes? The answer: half a percent. Guess how low tax rates would have to be for someone making $200 million a year not to use the same schemes.

The implication, of course, is that we want to close the loopholes that allow corporations and the wealthy to dodge paying their share, unless you find 0.5% tax rate on Paris Hilton’s income (I do love to pick on her, but fill in the blank with whoever you want that makes more in a year than whole towns will make in their lifetime) to be a reasonable amount. Do you? I don’t.

Is the New Supply Side Better Than the Old? by Austan Goolsbee is getting a lot of play in the econoblogosphere today. It’s an interesting article that points out some of the weaknesses in the supply-side argument for cutting income tax rates on the highest income people. One small point of correction, however: when referencing the fact that top incomes soared after the tax cuts of the 1980s and 2001, but also soared after tax hikes in other periods, Goolsbee says:

Seeing the same pattern when taxes rose as when they fell indicates that tax cuts weren’t responsible. It suggests that cuts for high-income taxpayers likely gave windfalls to those whose incomes were already rising sharply because of broader market forces.

One might note the impact of the policy climate in various periods, as well. Since the 1980s, it hasn’t just been tax policy that has favored high-income earners over their less fortunate fellows, but deregulation and lax enforcement on a broad range of policies including labor and the environment, as well as overt war-on-the-poor measures such as welfare reform.

Hat tip to Mark Thoma.

Check out Lane Kenworthy’s piece on Taxes at the Top. Interesting and timely, given the likely call for making Bush’s high-income tax cuts permanent.

The first President Clinton focused his 1992 campaign with the motto, “it’s the economy, stupid.” As the second President Bush enters his final year in office, with the pressure on to prevent a total rout of the Republican Party next November, he’s discovering a new concern for the economy himself.

President Bush said Tuesday that he is watching very carefully to see if the struggling U.S. economy needs a short-term boost from the federal government.
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“We’re listening to different ideas about what may or may not need to happen,” he said. “We’ll work through this. We’ll work through this period of time.”

He wouldn’t comment on any specific ideas he is considering, such as tax cuts aimed at lessening the chance of a recession. “We’ll look at all different options.”

On Monday, Bush talked about recent indicators that have been “increasingly mixed,” a new recognition of the challenges now facing the economy, primarily resulting from a severe housing crisis. Previous Bush statements have paid attention to the financial fears of many American families and the effects of the housing slump, but focused on what he calls the strong fundamentals underpinning the economy… [cont’d]

How shocked! shocked! will we be if he ends up pushing for new tax cuts designed to work some trickle down magic?

Devilstower at DailyKos has done us the favor of a great analysis of the past few years experiment in privatized social security.

Congratulations, Citizen!
by Devilstower
Sun Dec 02, 2007 at 10:29:22 AM PST

Back on 2001, right after Inauguration Day, $10,000 of your Social Security funds were placed in a special private personal magic pony account where it would enjoy the explosive benefits of the our surging prosperity, and the Longest Peacetime Terra-fightin’ Expansion in HISTORY… History… history. All of this made possible by cutting taxes on the productive people at the top of the food chain and removing those regulations that prevented our financial institutions from using all their imagination in creating new ways to loan give… to give you money! We at the Treasury know there was some discussion about not going along with the president’s plan, but I think you’ll agree that what we’ve learned over the last seven years is that the president can do anything he wants and no one will do more than talk about stopping him. So we just did it! Say, why not send us a subpoena? That’d be a hoot!

Now, as we close in on the last year of this glorious wondertime, here’s a quick report on how your outsourced, privately-managed fund has done.

[cont’d]

Kudos to the folks at the Center for Constitutional Rights and their allies in the struggle to end exploitative telephone contracts in New York state prisons. The problem is not restricted to New York, but that’s where the Telephone Justice coalition has been focusing its efforts.

Typically, states receive kickback commissions from the phone companies who receive the contract, creating a situation in which there is no incentive to seek competitive bids. Unsurprisingly rates for such calls are well above market rates, as much as $6 per minute. The phone companies and prison officials justify the high prices by saying there is a need for added security measures. There is little evidence to justify this claim, especially since calls from all Federal prisons cost just 7¢ a minute.

In any case, the records show that companies and states often make millions of dollars in profits from surcharges and inflated per-minute rates. In New York State, 57.5 percent of the profits - over $200 million since 1996 - were kicked back to the state in the form of commissions.

So it turns out that crime does pay, only it’s the state and telephone companies that are getting paid, not the perpetrator or victim of the crime. The joys of being the middleman. Is it possible that schemes like this contribute to state legislatures’ ongoing practice of finding new ways to put and keep people in jail, from “three strikes” laws to mandatory minimums for victimless crimes? State governments like to find ways to generate revenue without imposing general taxes, and ripping money off from the families of inmates is probably a good way to do so without incurring the wrath of most voters. That’s just one of the arguments made by lawyers at the CCR who helped to end this practice.

The contracts are also unjustifiable as a matter of public policy. The profits returned to the states are treated as income - in New York, they are said to pay for basic prisoner services such as health care and release clothes - and this system is analogous to an unlegislated, regressive, and highly selective tax, under which specific individuals are asked to bear the financial burdens that are the proper responsibility of the state. By imposing such burdens on families of prisoners, the practice resembles a form of collective punishment.

Given the class divide in who goes to jail, and the divide in who tends to vote, relatively few voters are from families with someone in jail. So the people who are being squeezed have no clout with the lawmakers. Well, in New York they’ve managed to earn some clout through the efforts of the Telephone Justice coalition, which was launched by the CCR.

Since 1999, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) has been fighting on the ground and in the courts to end the exploitative telephone contract between New York State and MCI/Verizon which charged family members 630% more for collect phone calls from their loved ones in prison than the average consumer. Single-carrier collect call systems are the norm for telephone service in prisons across the United States. Prisoners may only call collect, and loved ones who accept the calls must accept the terms dictated by the chosen phone company. At a time when prisoners are increasingly housed in facilities hundreds of miles away from their home communities, telephones become for many the only way to stay in touch.

This year, after three years of tireless work, we won. [cont’d]

Next step: take the campaign to all the other states. (See the campaign’s endorsers page for links to some other telephone justice efforts around the country.

I’ll be writing more later, but for now, just a couple of things I thought make up a good contrast. Not many people would be surprised by the assertion that economic classes receive different treatment before the law in the U.S., but the following two items are certainly remarkable. First, take a look at this story, about a group arrested for feeding the homeless in Orlando. Yes, apparently charity begins and ends at home: “mass feeding in one area” is banned by a city ordinance. Don’t worry though, not everybody suffers from such casual and needless oppression. Gazillionaire hedge fund managers will get to keep their huge tax break: their income is considered capital gains and so is subject to the 15% capital gains tax, not to the regular income tax or to the payroll tax that funds social security benefits. Mark Shields explains why. Thanks to MoJoBlog for the tip on the lack of legislation.

Oh and by the way, Keith Knight tells it like it is.

FedSpending.org is a new website sponsored by effective OMB watchdog organization and Right-to-Know enforcer OMBWatch.org, which keeps an eye on the deregulatory manias of recent administrations. The new FedSpending.org website allows visitors to track Federal grants and contracts using various search criteria, e.g., location of the recipient (how about “Halliburton”), place of performance (try “Iraq”), sponsoring agency (”Defense”), and whether or not the contract was open to competitive bidding.

The Federal government was supposed to produce such a website itself, but Senator T. Stevens (Alaska) put a secret hold on the legislation. Although the hold was eventually withdrawn, the government still has not come up with the promisted user-friendly database.

Here’s the Halliburton search. Notice that you can refine the search by asking for more years and more detail.

Leave comments that describe your searches.  Ethanol?  Pharmaceuticals?

The main finding of Peter Lindert’s intriguing 2003 paper, “Why the welfare state looks like a free lunch” (a warm-up for his 2004 book Growing Public: Social Spending and Economic Growth since the Eighteenth Century is that generous social democratic welfare states, with a variety of universalist and means-tested safety net and family support programs, grow just as robustly as stingy laissez-faire states. Here’s the key summary from the abstract:

There is no clear net GDP cost of high tax-based social spending on GDP, despite a tradition of assuming that such costs are large.

The finding should obviously be plastered on bumper stickers, refrigerator magnets, and dorm-room walls and played continuously on a loudspeaker outside the Chamber of Commerce, Club for Growth, Council on Competitiveness, etc. The welfare state doesn’t just look like a free lunch, it is a free lunch, at least from the standpoint of national aggregates.

Class conflict may mean that it’s hard for us to order that free lunch in the U.S. anytime soon, but the barrier between us and the free lunch doesn’t come in the obvious way.

This just came out a couple days ago. It even crossed the desk of Rush Limbaugh, who used it as an opportunity to recommend increasing taxes on those below the poverty line. Rush, egalitarian that he is, feels it is unfair for people with low-incomes to avoid sharing equally in the funding of the state. Har!

THE IMPACT OF STATE INCOME TAXES ON LOW-INCOME FAMILIES IN 2006
By Jason Levitis

Summary

Poor families in many states face substantial state income tax liability for the 2006 tax year. In 19 of the 42 states that levy income taxes, two-parent families of four with incomes below the federal poverty line are liable for income tax. In 15 of the 42 states, poor single-parent families of three pay income tax. And 29 of these states collect taxes from families of four with incomes just above the poverty line.

Some states levy income tax on working families in severe poverty. Six states — Alabama, Hawaii, Indiana, Michigan, Montana, and West Virginia — tax the income of two-parent families of four earning less than three-quarters of the poverty line such families. All of these states except Indiana also tax the income of one-parent families of three earning less than three-quarters of the poverty line.

In some states, families living in poverty face income tax bills of several hundred dollars. A two-parent family of four in Alabama with income at the poverty line owes $573 in income tax, while such a family in Hawaii owes $546, in Arkansas $427, and in West Virginia $406. Such amounts can make a big difference to a family struggling to escape poverty. Other states levying tax of more than $200 on families with poverty-level incomes include Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Montana, New Jersey, and Oregon. In 2006, the federal poverty line for a family of four was $20,615, and the line for a family of three was $16,079.

States’ tax treatment of low-income families for 2006 has improved in some states since 2005 but gotten worse in others. Between 2005 and 2006, Oklahoma and Oregon reduced the income tax liability of poor families, Delaware entirely stopped taxing the incomes of poor families of three, and Virginia entirely stopped taxing the income of poor families of four. But four other states increased their taxes on poor families by 25 percent or more, and New Jersey began taxing poor families of four for the first time since 1998. The reason for these tax increases is that provisions designed to protect low-income families from taxation — including standard deductions, personal exemptions and low-income credits — were not increased to keep up with inflation. Overall, there was virtually no change this year in the number of states levying income taxes on families with incomes below the poverty line.

The outlook for the future is somewhat better. A number of states have recently enacted significant reforms that will reduce taxes on low-income families. Between 2007 and 2010, Alabama, Arkansas, Hawaii, Michigan, Oklahoma, Oregon, and West Virginia each will improve their income tax treatment of the poor. In Arkansas, Michigan, Oklahoma, and West Virginia, the changes will wipe out or dramatically reduce tax liability that now costs poor families hundreds of dollars. Overall, the number of states taxing poor families of four could decline from 19 to 16. And quite a few other states are currently considering similar measures.

Taxing the incomes of working-poor families runs counter to the efforts of policymakers across the political spectrum to help families work their way out of poverty. The federal government has exempted such families from the income tax since the mid-1980s, and a majority of states now do so as well.

Eliminating state income taxes on working families with poverty-level incomes gives a boost in take-home pay that helps offset higher child care and transportation costs that families incur as they strive to become economically self-sufficient. In other words, relieving state income taxes on poor families can make a meaningful contribution toward “making work pay.”

States seeking to reduce or eliminate income taxes on low-income families can choose from an array of mechanisms to do so. These mechanisms include state Earned Income Tax Credits (EITCs) and other low-income tax credits, no-tax floors, and personal exemptions and standard deductions that are adequate to shield poverty-level income from taxation. Some states go beyond exempting poor families from income tax by making their EITCs or other low-income credits refundable. These policies provide a substantial income supplement to families struggling to escape poverty, but they are relatively inexpensive to states, since these families have little income to tax.

Despite some progress, there remains much to do before state income taxes adequately protect and assist families working to escape poverty.

A sweet week for family policy in the print media. Don’t miss Ruth Rosen’s cover article on “The Care Crisis” in The Nation of March 12, 2007 OR the special report entitled “The Mother Load” in The American Prospect of March 2007, with contributions by Heather Boushey and Janet Gornick, among others. Both magazines insist that creative feminist family policy ideas should move to front and center-left of the Democratic party agenda.

First, a confession. I am a virgin blogger so I may not get the links–or the lingo–quite right. But here goes:

By Jonathan Teller-Elsberg, CPE Staff Economist

In the U.S., talk of tax reform usually means debates about taxes on income and wealth. A little less common are discussions of flat taxes and a shift from payroll, income, investment, or property taxes to consumption taxes—that is, a federal sales tax.

We’ve seen the miserable results of lowering taxes on the rich, and we’ll be dealing with the massive government debts for decades to come. Flat taxes are simply another way to lower taxes on the rich, under the guise of simplifying the tax system. (To be sure, simplifying taxes is not exactly something to dismiss out of hand—the system is far more intimidating than it should be.) The supposed advantage of a shift to consumption taxes is that the shift away from payroll and/or other taxes should lead to more jobs. This is because a payroll tax makes it “expensive” for a business to have an employee. If the payroll tax is reduced or eliminated, the business will have more money available to hire additional workers. The problem with consumption taxes is that they tend to be regressive—meaning that they fall hardest on lower-income members of society.

Another type of tax reform that deserves more attention is the environmental tax shift (ETS), also known as the green or ecological tax shift. The idea here is to increase taxes on activities that result in environmental damage and use the money generated to reduce other taxes by the same amount. As with the consumption tax idea, most proposals center around reducing payroll taxes.

(4/21/04)
By Alanna Hartzok, Co-Director, Earth Rights Institute

One day, while riding horseback in the Oakland hills, merchant seaman and journalist Henry George had a startling epiphany. He realized that speculation and private profiteering in the gifts of nature were the root causes of the unjust distribution of wealth. The insights presented in Progress and Poverty, George’s masterwork, launched him to fame. His policy approach was known at that time as the “single tax” - meaning that taxation should be shifted off of labor and onto the socially created surplus value of land and other natural resources. His message reached as far as the great Russian Leo Tolstoy, who was so taken with the idea that he frequently referred to George and “Georgism” in his novel Resurrection.

During the last 20 years of the 19th century George built an impressive populist movement bent on solving the problem of the wealth gap, and he died in 1897 while campaigning to be New York’s mayor. The “Georgists” were determined to free labor and all productive effort from the burden of taxation. Land and natural resources were gifts of nature to be fairly shared by all. The role of government would be to secure democratic rights to the earth for all people via the collection of resource rents, the surplus value accruing to natural wealth, which would be distributed in social goods, services or by direct citizen dividends.

But just as this solution to the rich/poor gap was gaining momentum, the Georgist movement was stopped in its tracks. Wealthy individuals poured their money into leading schools of economics to encourage the writing of treatises against George and the movements he had spawned. The ethical perspective that land is a common heritage and the policy approach of land value taxation were subsequently eliminated from the field of economics. The newly dominant theory focused on only two primary factors - labor and capital - with capital having the upper hand as “employing labor.” “Labor,” of course, is quite capable of self-employment given access to land. This is what the elites and the plutocrats feared most - that labor would gain full power to directly produce capital given conditions of equal rights to the resources of the earth.

Despite the elites’ success in mangling the science of political economy, the Georgist paradigm has had some influence over the years. The 1887 Wright Act in California enabled bonds raised by local irrigation districts to be paid from the increase in land values, resulting in a powerful and beneficial land reform, though this equitable and successful public finance approach was eventually undermined by private banking institutions. Now taxpayers nationwide subsidize the irrigation needs of agribusiness. Alaska’s state constitution vests the ownership of oil and other natural resources in the people as a whole and the state’s Permanent Fund distributes substantial oil revenue as citizen dividends to state residents. With no state income or sales taxes, Alaska has been the only state where the wealth gap has decreased during the past decade. This is essentially a Georgist paradigm approach, and surface land values and electromagnetic spectrum rent could be similar sources for citizen dividends.

Meanwhile, Georgist economics is again making steady progress. In Pennsylvania, eighteen municipalities, including Harrisburg and Allentown, have been revitalizing their local economies via property tax reform which shifts taxes off of homes and the built environment and onto the value of land sites. Movements for land value taxation are growing now in Scotland, UK, Ireland, South Korea and elsewhere, while Venezuela, Russia and other countries are pushing for greater resource rents from oil and mineral resources. Georgist economics is increasingly recognized as a key to economic democracy based on equal rights to the earth for all.

Recommended:

Mason Gaffney, Fred Harrison and Kris Feder, The Corruption of Economics. Shepheard-Walwyn Ltd., 1994.

Henry George’s books can now be read online. Hardcopies of his books, and those of other Georgist authors, can be ordered from The Robert
Schalkenbach Foundation (212-683-6424).

J.W. Smith, Economic Democracy: The Political Struggle of the Twenty-First Century. This excellent Georgist paradigm book can be ordered from The Institute for Economic Democracy (866-588-7445).

Kenneth C. Wenzer, ed. Land Value Taxation. M.E. Sharpe, 1999.

Georgist paradigm articles and links to other sites: Earth Rights Institute.

The Council of Georgist Organizations 2004 conference will be held in Albuquerque, New Mexico, July 21 - 25. For details: www.progress.org/cgo.

The International Union for Land Value Taxation conference is scheduled for May 27 - 30 in Madrid, Spain. For details: www.interunion.org.uk/.

Leo Tolstoy’s novel Resurrection can be read online.

(c) 2004 Center for Popular Economics

Econ-Atrocities are a periodic publication of the Center for Popular Economics. They are the work of their authors and reflect their author’s opinions and analyses. CPE does not necessarily endorse any particular idea expressed in these articles.

The House of Representatives decided to follow George W. Bush’s advice and vote to abolish the estate tax, thus making life easier and more fun for the wealthiest 2% of the population–the only segment of the population to which this tax applies.

The cost to the rest of us: about $30 billion a year. That’s far more than the federal government spends on cash welfare programs (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families) every year.

Even Jane Bryant Quinn, the Newsweek columnist who is best known for her investment advice, editorialized against the cut. She systematically rebuts claims that estate taxes are breaking up family farms or destroying small business. As she puts it: “If the estate tax isn’t fair, I don’t know what is.” (Newsweek, July 31, 2000).

For more technical details, and some good arguments in FAVOR of the estate tax, check out what Citizens for Tax Justice have to say, at http://ctj.org/html/estbob.htm

Here’s an excerpt:

“The parent who leaves his son enormous wealth,” wrote steel magnate Andrew Carnegie a century ago, “generally deadens the talents and energies of the son, and leads him to lead a less useful and less worthy life than he otherwise would.” You’d think that Republicans, if anyone, would sympathize with Carnegie’s point. After all, if giving a single mother $10,000 a year in welfare stifles her incentive to work, just think how much worse it must be for someone who gets a windfall of 100 or 1,000 times that much.

Econ-Atrocities are a periodic publication of the Center for Popular Economics. They are the work of their authors and reflect their author’s opinions and analyses. CPE does not necessarily endorse any particular idea expressed in these articles.