The Mortgage Corner
Now that the Democrats will be taking back the US House of Representatives in January, can they enact programs that improve the record income inequality in America? American citizens have the least equal incomes in the developed world, as the EPI graph shows. And that has been a major reason for the sluggish recovery from the Great Recession, when 25 percent of Americans still live below the poverty line for a family of four, incredible as that may seem.
The Economic Policy Institute, a labor think-tank reports newly available wage data for 2017 show that annual wages grew far faster for the top 1.0 percent (3.7 percent) than for the bottom 90 percent (up only 1.0 percent). The top 0.1 percent saw the fastest growth, up 8.0 percent—far faster than any other wage group.
This fast wage growth for the top 0.1 percent reflects the sharp 17.6 percent spike upwards in the compensation of the CEOs of large firms, thanks to the massive stock buyback programs.
There is much evidence that the Republicans’ December 2017 tax cuts are largely responsible for the surge in buybacks. That has been little noticed because of the initial 3.5 percent GDP growth estimate for Q3, when consumer spending shot up 4 percent, and inventories were replenished that boosted growth.
Apple, for instance, in May announced a $100 billion share repurchase program and so far in 2018 it's tripled its share repurchases over the first half of last year. S&P 500 companies are on track to return a record $1 trillion (via buybacks and dividends) to shareholders.
Cisco Systems said earlier it would bring back to the United States $67 billion of overseas cash in response to the tax package, using $25 billion to finance additional share repurchases. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, authorized up to $8.6 billion in stock purchases. PepsiCo announced a fresh $15 billion in planned buybacks. Chip gear maker Applied Materials disclosed plans for a $6 billion program to buy shares. And late last month, home improvement retailer Lowe’s unveiled plans for $5 billion in purchases.
Nancy Pelosi, who will be returning as the House Majority Leader, has said one of the Democrat’s priorities is a new infrastructure bill that would require $1 trillion of federal spending. Where would that money come from with a projected federal deficit of $1 trillion in coming years due to reduced tax revenues from the Republican tax cuts?
Another Democratic House leader has said they will want to boost the nominal corporate tax cut from its current 21 percent rate. In fact, the actual tax rate is far below that for most major corporations, because of the various loopholes and tax shelters available to corporations, including having headquarters in low taxation countries, such as Ireland.
Josh Bivens, the EPI research director, estimated that “the effective rate will all but surely dip below 15 percent and get close to 10 percent.” An analysis from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School Budget Model, the average effective tax rate for corporations will be about 9 percent in 2018 but go up to 18 percent by 2027, thanks to some of the provisions that will expire over the next 10 years.
There are in fact many other ways to divert federal funds from overfunded programs, such as reducing the defense budget. Estimated U.S. military spending is $716 billion, according to the Washington Post, now 17 percent of the $4 trillion federal budget. That's part of the spending bill signed by President Trump on August 13, 2018. It covers the period October 1, 2018 through September 30, 2019. Military spending is the second largest item in the federal budget after Social Security. The United States spends more on defense than the next nine countries combined.
More important was the 3.1 percent rise in wages in the Q3 GDP report that may mitigate the record income inequality, as do the various minimum wage boosts is some cities and states. But the overall picture remains bleak, as the EPI graph shows, unless other labor friendly legislation is enacted to strengthen, for instance, collective bargaining rights of unions in right-to-work states enacted by Republican legislatures since 2010 in particular.
Harlan Green © 2018
Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen
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