Why Obama will end up taxing the middle class
President Obama likes to pretend that all he wants to do is tax the "millionaires and billionaires." That's all and then we are set - there will be enough money to fund entitlements without reform plus funding his new health care plan.
The problem is that there just isn't enough money even if he were to really jack up the taxes on those millionaires and billionaires and confiscate all their earnings. The WSJ does the math for us.
Consider the Internal Revenue Service's income tax statistics for 2008, the latest year for which data are available. The top 1% of taxpayers—those with salaries, dividends and capital gains roughly above about $380,000—paid 38% of taxes. But assume that tax policy confiscated all the taxable income of all the "millionaires and billionaires" Mr. Obama singled out. That yields merely about $938 billion, which is sand on the beach amid the $4 trillion White House budget, a $1.65 trillion deficit, and spending at 25% as a share of the economy, a post-World War II record.
Say we take it up to the top 10%, or everyone with income over $114,000, including joint filers. That's five times Mr. Obama's 2% promise. The IRS data are broken down at $100,000, yet taxing all income above that level throws up only $3.4 trillion. And remember, the top 10% already pay 69% of all total income taxes, while the top 5% pay more than all of the other 95%.
We recognize that 2008 was a bad year for the economy and thus for tax receipts, as payments by the rich fell along with their income. So let's perform the same exercise in 2005, a boom year and among the best ever for federal revenue. (Ahem, 2005 comes after the Bush tax cuts that Mr. Obama holds responsible for all the world's problems.)
In 2005 the top 5% earned over $145,000. If you took all the income of people over $200,000, it would yield about $1.89 trillion, enough revenue to cover the 2012 bill for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security—but not the same bill in 2016, as the costs of those entitlements are expected to grow rapidly. The rich, in short, aren't nearly rich enough to finance Mr. Obama's entitlement state ambitions—even before his health-care plan kicks in.
So there won't be enough money. Ah, who is next? Yup, you got it - the holy middle class, that big group of voters that Obama needs if he is going to get reelected.
So who else is there to tax? Well, in 2008, there was about $5.65 trillion in total taxable income from all individual taxpayers, and most of that came from middle income earners. The nearby chart shows the distribution, and the big hump in the center is where Democrats are inevitably headed for the same reason that Willie Sutton robbed banks.
This is politically risky, however, so Mr. Obama's game has always been to pretend not to increase taxes for middle class voters while looking for sneaky ways to do it. His first budget in 2009 included a "climate revenues" section from the indirect carbon tax of cap and trade, which of course would be passed down to all consumers. Such Democratic luminaries as Nancy Pelosi have often chattered about a European-style value-added tax, or VAT, which from a liberal perspective has the virtue of applying to every level of production or service and therefore is largely hidden from the people who pay it.
Now that those two ideas have failed politically, Mr. Obama is turning as he did last week to limiting tax deductions and other "loopholes," such as for mortgage interest payments. We support doing away with these distortions too, and so does Mr. Ryan, but in return for lower tax rates. Mr. Obama just wants the extra money, which he says will reduce the deficit but in practice will merely enable more spending.
Keep in mind that the most expensive tax deductions, in terms of lost tax revenue, go mainly to the middle class. These include the deductions for state and local tax payments (especially property taxes), mortgage interest, employer-sponsored health insurance, 401(k) contributions and charitable donations. The irony is that even as Mr. Obama says he merely wants the rich to pay a little bit more, his proposals would make the tax code less progressive than it is today.
On this day of paying the government your taxes, remember this math and study this table of where the money is.
You see where the money is? It's there in the middle and that is where the Democrats will need to be raising taxes if they reject any sort of comprehensive entitlement reform. And we need to do it now because otherwise it will become even more impossible to pass and take even more pain. Under Ryan's plan, we would keep Medicare as it is for those 55 and older. If we wait more time, that cushion won't be there.
Mr. Ryan isn't proposing controversial entitlement reforms because he likes pointless political risk, or because he likes being berated to his face from a front row seat, as he was on Wednesday. Medicare and Medicaid spending are consistently growing two to three times faster than the rest of the economy, while Medicare's cash-in-cash-out financing model means that seniors collect far more in benefits than they paid in taxes over their working lifetime. The entitlement state was designed for another era.
Mr. Obama is the master of false choices. When he pretends that there is no need for entitlement reform and everything can be made wonderful just with taxes on rich, you need your simultaneous Obama translator. Because the real message is that we are all going to have to pay to keep Democrats in charge and Medicare and Medicaid unreformed. That's the real Mediscare story.
What the Republicans need is someone who can explain this basic math to the American public. A few Ross Perot like graphs, including this one, would be useful. This is the message you can ponder as you celebrate paying your taxes today.
Posted by Betsy Newmark at 8:21 AM
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pumping-irony said...
The meme that we can fix all our fiscal problems by taxing the rich and the big corporations and cutting "foreign aid" are some of our most popular bits of demogoguery. It works because people want to believe there are easy ways out of our problems. It works for the same reason that selling diet aids is a path to riches for hucksters; tell folks that there is an easy solution to losing weight instead of the hard, slow and unpleasant work of counting calories and doing exercise and they'll leap at it like a politician jumping at an earmark. But no responsible physician would tell a patient such a pile of bull and no responsible leader would tell the public such things either. I guess that's why Obama and Democrats persist in doing so.
betsyspage.blogspot.com
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Obama’s $2 trillion stealth tax hike
Apr 17, 2011 22:57 EDT
Talk about fuzzy math. President Obama claims higher taxes will account for a mere third — $1 trillion — of his proposed $3 trillion debt reduction over 12 years, not counting less interest expense. Wrong. The actual number is probably around 50 percent of $4 trillion in savings — some $2 trillion — and could be closer to 60 percent. (More details below.) Instead of offering a template for a Grand Compromise, Obama seems to have created a Grand Obfuscation.
This is just one example among many that shows how Obama’s much-hyped new budget plan is actually neither new nor a budget nor a plan. To the extent that it’s even a “framework” — to grant the White House its preferred descriptor — it’s one whose ideas and goals are precariously fastened together by the chewing gum and sticky tape of rosy economic assumptions and fiscal opacity. Then again, the core purpose isn’t budgetary balance but political persuasion.
The Obama White House naturally wants the media to favorably compare his outline to House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan’s 73-page “Path to Prosperity” which is highly detailed and has been scored accurate by the Congressional Budget Office. It brings the budget into balance and eliminates the national debt by cutting spending — not raising taxes.
And how does Obama’s “Framework for Shared Prosperity and Shared Fiscal Responsibility compare?
1) Obama’s Framework is a speech, along with a roughly 15-page fact sheet that is unlikely ever to get placed under the CBO microscope. It’s tough to score generalities such as the president’s claim the plan would put “deficits on a declining path toward close to 2.0% of GDP toward the end of the decade.” “Close to”? “Toward the end”?
2) The Obama Framework also fails to give a clear trajectory of where the debt-to-GDP ratio is heading, other than to call for a trigger that would boost taxes or cut spending in 2014 if the ratio doesn’t appear to be bending lower.
3) Other oddities abound. The plan has a 12-year time frame rather than the customary ten. It doesn’t indicate what baseline it uses to make claims that it cuts debt by $4 trillion, if you include interest expense. Nor does it spell out what economic projections are being plugged in. Obama’s 2012 budget released in February was more bullish than the CBO’s, which Ryan uses.
4) Also unlike the Ryan Path, the Obama Framework doesn’t show how his plan affects debt and deficits over the coming decades. If it did, Obama would have to reveal that he can’t a) keep government spending above historical levels and b) balance the budget and reduce debt long term without c) jacking middle class taxes through the roof.
The Obama Framework is so vague and fuzzy that doing a true apples-to-apples comparison between the Ryan Path and the Obama Framework comparison is almost impossible. (Best guess: Ryan cuts $3 trillion more than Obama over a dozen years.) This could be intentional.
The tax issue mentioned earlier provides a perfect illustration. Toward the end of his speech last week, Obama said the following:
This is my approach to reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over the next twelve years. It’s an approach that achieves about $2 trillion in spending cuts across the budget. It will lower our interest payments on the debt by $1 trillion. It calls for tax reform to cut about $1 trillion in spending from the tax code. And it achieves these goals while protecting the middle class, our commitment to seniors, and our investments in the future.
But earlier in the speech, Obama also said this:
In December, I agreed to extend the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans because it was the only way I could prevent a tax hike on middle-class Americans. But we cannot afford $1 trillion worth of tax cuts for every millionaire and billionaire in our society. We can’t afford it. And I refuse to renew them again.
If you’re keeping score, what Obama is actually proposing is $1 trillion in new taxes on wealthier Americans (and small businesses) and $1 trillion in higher tax revenues by reducing tax breaks and subsidies for a total of $2 trillion in new taxes over 12 years. That means total debt reduction, not counting interest, would be $4 trillion, 50 percent of which would come from higher taxes. The econ team at Goldman Sachs ran a similar analysis and found that 56 percent of Obama savings over ten years could come from higher tax revenue.
In this way, Obama relies far more on taxes than the two-parts spending/one-part taxes formula of the Obama-Bowles-Simpson debt panel that is supposedly his model. As Obama said, “It’s an approach that borrows from the recommendations of the bipartisan Fiscal Commission I appointed last year.” Not really.
Now none of this is easy to discern from Obama’s speech nor from the accompanying fact sheet. Neither indicates which budget baseline Obama is using. If he is, for instance, using the standard CBO baseline which assumes all the Bush tax cuts expire, Obama’s budget plan might actually get close to 60 percent of its debt reduction from taxes, especially if he also used the CBO’s gloomier GDP forecast. And if his mid-decade tax “trigger” should get pulled …
Of course, the framework that really interests the White House is a political one. They want to set the terms of the 2012 presidential election debate. And with this budget plan they have, though surely not in the way they intended. America’s debt problem is one of too much spending, not too little revenue. By offering a tax-heavy fiscal fix that keeps Big Government firmly in place, Obama offers Americans a clear choice of economic futures, his or Paul Ryan’s
blogs.reuters.com |
