Why So Much Inflation?

 Popular Economics Weekly

“For far too long, we have relied on taxing our Great People using the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Through soft and pathetically weak Trade agreements, the American Economy has delivered growth and prosperity to the World, while taxing ourselves. It is time for that to change. I am today announcing that I will create the EXTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE to collect our Tariffs, Duties, and all Revenue that come from Foreign sources.” @realDonaldTrump (cited by Paul Krugman)

This is just another insane fantasy Trump seems to believe—or is practicing his politics of diversion—to mask the fact that tariffs are a tax that we pay on what is imported, just as foreign citizens pay taxes on what enters their countries, which boosts the prices of those products.

Trump collected more than $400 billion in tariffs during his first term, some of which he had to pay out to subsidize American farmers who had lost their soybean and wheat exports when China retaliated in kind.

But such a fantasy can reassure his loyal supporters that there is a way to escape their overriding fear of inflation. And the latest inflation news was good news for the financial markets as well.

FREDcpi

The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) increased 0.4 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis in December, after rising 0.3 percent in November, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Over the last 12 months, the all items index increased 2.9 percent before seasonal adjustment.

Stock and bond investors were so hungry for good inflation news when the Consumer Price Index surprised on the downside that financial markets rallied. Core inflation without food and energy prices factored in rose just 0.2 percent, which was below expectations.

The DOW immediately rallied +744 points, the S&P Index +140 pts., in the first 10 minutes of trading. They are now betting that the Fed will continue to ease credit by lowering interest rates further this year.

It’s a relief rally because Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation of retail goods and services has been increasing since it went slightly negative in June of last year (see graph). This raised fears that the Fed might not cut interest rates further this year at all.

The next day’s wholesale Producer Price Index report was also good news. U.S. producer prices (PPI) that are the major part of retail costs rose less than expected in December, as the higher costs for goods were partially offset by stable services prices, suggesting inflation remained on a downward course.

Trump, of course, would like to abolish income taxes as do most Oligarchs. Wouldn’t it be nice to return America to the pre-income tax, Gilded Age of President William McKinley and the Robber Barons! Americans didn’t tolerate the Robber Barons taking so much of their wealth for long, however, which was the reason for creating the personal income tax with the 16th Amendment.

Trump’s misinformation is just one propaganda diversion that Trump will use to hide the fact that tariffs on imports, like all taxes, will be inflationary. As every successful investor knows, it’s better to focus on facts instead of the fiction that we can avoid paying taxes on what we buy, if we want a government that works for the many rather than the few.

Harlan Green © 2025

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Trumponomics 2.0--What To Expect?

 Financial FAQs

George Will, the conservative pundit, gave the best description of Trump’s incoherence in a Washington Post Op-ed: “It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly about President Trump’s inability to do either. This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability. It is not merely result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence.”

This was a leading conservative writer’s prediction of what did happen in President Trump’s first term as President—chaos. Trump’s second term should be a rerun if he succeeds in getting most of his initial cabinet picks confirmed by (or rammed through) the U.S. Senate.

Huffington Post

Many have no qualifications for those jobs, just as in Trump’s first term when most were lobbyists with blatant conflicts of interest, which resulted in many having to resign when their corruption was uncovered. Such dysfunctional behavior was a reason President Trump lost the House of Representatives to Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats in 2018, and Trump lost to President Biden in 2020.

Sadly, the incoming all-Republican congress will probably give him the tax cuts, inflationary tariffs and the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants that will be a repeat of Trump’s first term. And many in the working class who voted for him will suffer again, and as they have throughout Trump’s working life.

A 2016 USA TODAY article catalogued more than 3,500 lawsuits filed by or against Donald Trump over his business career. Many were filed by small businesspeople and firms that Trump refused to pay for work done on his various real estate holdings.

“Donald Trump often portrays himself as a savior of the working class who will "protect your job." But the USA TODAY NETWORK analysis found he has been involved in more than 3,500 lawsuits over the past three decades -- and a large number of those involve ordinary Americans, like the Friels, who say Trump, or his companies have refused to pay them."

The Friel's family cabinetry business, founded in the 1940s by Edward's father, finished its work in 1984 and submitted its final bill to the general contractor for the Trump Organization, the resort's builder, said USA TODAY.

Edward's son, Paul, who was the firm's accountant, still remembers the amount of that bill more than 30 years later: $83,600. The reason: the money never came. "That began the demise of the Edward J. Friel Company... which has been around since my grandfather," he said.

I wrote then, “The greatest nightmare of 2017 may be the record income inequity that was exemplified in the just-passed tax cuts that are to be paid for with up to $3 trillion in added federal debt plus spending cuts to Medicare and Medicaid over the next ten years, which will impoverish the poorest among us.

Professors Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez were the first to examine 100 years of income tax returns that highlighted the wide swings in income inequality. They found that income inequality rose substantially between 1979 and 2002 because the top 10 percent of the income distribution took 91 percent of the income growth during that period. As the real incomes of the top 10 percent soared, the incomes of the bottom 90 percent stagnated..

With nothing to replace the economic destruction that will follow Trump’s policies, other than the “Drill baby Drill” for more fossil fuels, we will be poorer with predictions for an additional $5 trillion added to the national debt. As in his first term, I do not foresee a happy two years ahead, at the least.

It turns out very few of us need a tax cut. MarketWatch economist Rex Nutting calculated that those in the 60 percent middle-income brackets—from $32,000 to $140,000 per year—pay just an average 2.5 percent in income taxes. It’s only the richest 0.1 to 1 percent income earners that pay more, and so want the huge tax cuts congress and the Trump administration are proposing.

“A bill that cuts federal income taxes for middle-class families makes absolutely no sense, except as a sad way of camouflaging the real intent of the bill: Giving millions of dollars to the very wealthy, who happen to be the only people who are really benefiting from our uneven economic growth,” said Nutting.

It was Trump and his family that profited most from his first term in retaining ownership of his assets rather than either divesting or putting them in a blind trust, blatantly ignoring the emoluments clause of the constitution that forbid profiting from foreign governments seeking his favor.

Donald Trump suffered no consequences for his lawless behavior as has former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who is banned from running again until 2030 for casting doubt on Brazil’s 2022 election outcome that voted him out of office.

The greatest chaos may come from his pick of Pam Bondi for Attorney General, who is replacing Matt Gaetz. She has sworn revenge for perceived weaponization of the Justice Department by weaponizing it even more to persecute his perceived enemies.

“When will the 2017 nightmare end?” I wrote in 2017. “Maybe in 2018, if most Americans realize the fantasy world the current administration and congress has created is not theirs. Americans desire a world in which life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is available to all, not just the few.”

That is what happened in Trump’s first term. Must it get even worse before it gets better?

Harlan Green © 2024

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Let's Make America More Equal Again!-Part 2

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

Piketty-Saez

Why did our record income inequality begin to worsen in 1980, as can be seen from the above graph? The Arab-OPEC oil embargo of 1973 was the first indication that Big Business under the newly created Business Roundtable of corporate executives wanted more of the national income pie.

No one liked the long gas station lines and fears America could run out of oil, so it was relatively easy for fear mongers to push through economic changes that lessened the incomes of working folk and increased the incomes of Big Business.

The fossil fuel industry needed more money to find new oil sources, and create new technologies such as fracking, so they wanted a larger income share of the national income, which was achieved by suppressing wages and cutting taxes without cutting spending. and it became a national security priority with the ongoing cold war and arms race that followed.

The Reagan administration ran up the first $400 billion federal budget deficit during his eight years in part because tax rates for the wealthiest were slashed. The highest personal income tax rate was first reduced from 70 to 50 percent in 1981, then down to a 28 percent maximum personal tax rate in 1986 when he was re-elected.

Because most of the income gain went to the top 10 percent, the Reagan tax cuts became known as ‘trickle-down” economics. It could also be called “stealth economics,” because Wikipedia cites at the time, “people weren't substantially informed about the tax cuts, as an ABC News Poll in September 1986 showed that 63% of Americans didn't know enough about the Tax Reform Act of 1986 to say if it was good or bad.”

Republicans sold it to the public with an unproven theory. A Doctoral student named Arthur Laffer in the 1970s had convinced conservative Republicans with a diagram on a napkin (the so-called Laffer Curve) that lower taxes gave people the incentive to work harder and earn more, whereas higher taxes discouraged work.

It's hard to believe such a theory today because the federal budget deficit only grew under the Republicans’ trickle-down theory. GW Bush created the first $1 trillion deficit, and Donald Trump’s added another $5 trillion to the federal budget deficit with his tax cuts. That’s as good proof as any that lower taxation rates didn’t increase tax revenues enough to pay down the extra debt as promised.

Perhaps the most shameful result of the redistribution of Americans’ wealth, the richest country in the world, was we now had the worst income inequality of developed countries, as measured by the CIA’s authoritative World Factbook.

It measures the income inequality of countries with what is called the Gini Index coefficient of families that calculated the percentage of wealth held by a country’s different socio-economic brackets. A higher percentage means a larger share of a nation’s income is held by the wealthier segment of its population.

“The more nearly equal a country's income distribution, the lower its Gini index, e.g., a Scandinavian country with an index of 25,” says the World Factbook. “The more unequal a country's income distribution, the higher its Gini index, e.g., a Sub-Saharan country with an index of 50. If income were distributed with perfect equality the index would be zero; if income were distributed with perfect inequality, the index would be 100.”

The latest US Gini index Coefficient of family income was 39.8 percent, which is even higher than Russia’s, and close to that of African and South American Third World countries, whereas the European Union averaged 30.8 percent in its most up-to-date report.

That is why two out of three Americans are dissatisfied with the way income and wealth are currently distributed in the U.S. This includes three-fourths of Democrats and 54 percent of Republicans, according to a Gallup poll, I said last week.

It is also why much of that inequality is in the Midwestern rust belt states that lost blue-collar manufacturing jobs during the globalization and multi-nationalization of US corporations that President Trump promised to bring back again.

It is also why an election-denier even won one term as President and can endanger our Democracy with a Supreme Court majority now giving him a helping hand.

The most efficient way to right the inequality is to bring back tax rates that prevailed during Americans’ most prosperous times, the 1950s to 1970s when the maximum personal tax rate was 70 percent, or even higher.

The maximum tax rate was 92 percent during President Eisenhower’s administration because we were building the nation’s post-WWII infrastructure and modern technologies, as well as going to the moon.

President Eisenhower was reputed to have said, “Because high corporate tax rates create incentives for big business to spend on things like new locations, new hires, new equipment and product research and development which are deducted from taxable earnings, in other words, it’s better to spend a majority of earnings on expansion than to horde it and pay Uncle Sam 90% of it.”

No one likes higher taxes, of course. And much of the middle class bought into Reagan’s myth of trickle-down economics that brought on its demise and poverty levels we have today. But if Americans won’t pay the bill for modernizing the US economy, rather than put off payment with more borrowing, America’s record income inequality will not improve.

Harlan Green © 2024

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

A New Year’s Wish—Greater Prosperity for All!

Popular Economics Weekly

Although this cannot happen until results of the 2020 presidential election overturn a Republican Senate, I wish for something that President Eisenhower has said best. With higher tax rates that prevailed in the 1950-1970s, corporations in the past chose to spend their wealth on investments for future growth that were tax deductible, rather than pay the government.

Corporate tax rates since then have dropped to a low of 21 percent today.  What have corporations done instead with their record profits? Rutgers Economic historian James historian has been sounding the alarm about the results:

” So corporate profits do not drive economic growth — they’re just restless sums of surplus capital, ready to flood speculative markets at home and abroad. In the 1920s, they inflated the stock market bubble, and then caused the Great Crash. Since the Reagan revolution, these superfluous profits have fed corporate mergers and takeovers, driven the dot-com craze, financed the “shadow banking” system of hedge funds and securitized investment vehicles, fueled monetary meltdowns in every hemisphere and inflated the housing bubble.”

The architects of the Reagan revolution tried to reverse these trends as a cure for the stagflation of the 1970s, said Professor Livingston, but couldn’t. “In fact, private or business investment kept declining in the ’80s and after. Peter G. Peterson, a former commerce secretary, complained that real growth after 1982 — after President Ronald Reagan cut corporate tax rates — coincided with “by far the weakest net investment effort in our postwar history.”

There are many ways to look at the huge wealth disparities suffered by Americans whose household incomes have stagnated since the 1970s, when maximum tax rates were still in the 70 percent range. Americans wanted lower taxes so they could become voracious consumers, rather than pay for government services, which caused public investment to decline at the same time that it became the government’s job to create all the necessary public investments to protect consumers, and invest in their future.

It was public spending that in the past had enabled the building of our modern infrastructure of interstate highways and energy grid, as well as scientific research that led to the moon landing and Internet, for starters.

President George W. Bush’s tax cuts had similar effects between 2001 and 2007: real growth in the absence of new investment. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, retained corporate earnings that remain uninvested were 8 percent of G.D.P. in 2000. 

They have reached a record 14 percent of G.D.P. since then, even with a looming $1 trillion annual federal budget deficit.

Populareconomics.com

Sadly, corporations began to spend their growing wealth from lower taxation on themselves and their lobbyists that where able to push through legislation to strengthen their monopolistic consolidation (via deregulation) and labor unfriendly legislation,

It has resulted in the likes of such undemocratic lobbying entities as ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the advancer of red state policies such as voter ID laws that restrict voting rights, protector of NRA gun rights like Florida’s Stand Your Ground law that protects shooters rather than their victims, and the fossil fuel industry that has no interest in protecting our environment.

The ironic result is that consumers haven’t become wealthier with all the available and cheap consumer goods, haven’t really benefited from higher GDP growth, even with the increased employment we have today in lower-paying service jobs.

The decline in corporate tax rates to the current 21 percent has been disastrous for householders’ wealth and health. It is at the core of America’s record income inequality.

So let us wish for a greater prosperity for all in the New Year!

Harlan Green © 2019

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Who Needs Tax Cuts?

Popular Economics Weekly

It turns out very few of us need a tax cut. Marketwatch economist Rex Nutting calculates that those in the 60 percent middle-income brackets—from $32,000 to $140,000 per year—pay just an average 2.5 percent in income taxes. It’s only the richest 0.1 to 1 percent income earners that pay more, and want the huge tax cuts congress and the Trump administration are proposing.
 

Graph: Marketwatch

Their rationale? That it will boost GDP growth to 3 percent from the current 2 percent average since the end of the Great Recession. But guess what? Q2 GDP growth was already 3 percent in Q2 and just revised to 3.1 percent, the highest growth rate in 2 years. Q3 GDP growth was just reported today at 3 percent, due to higher consumer spending and Durable Goods orders on hurricane replacement. 

Businesses are already investing in expansion, in other words—business investment in structures rose a stronger 7 percent instead of 6.2 percent in the revision. So, why not pay down the huge budget deficits accumulated since then, instead of cutting tax revenues?

“A bill that cuts federal income taxes for middle-class families makes absolutely no sense, except as a sad way of camouflaging the real intent of the bill: Giving millions of dollars to the very wealthy, who happen to be the only people who are really benefiting from our uneven economic growth,” said Nutting.

Because the budget deficit cannot be increased more then $1.5 trillion in ten years, due to prior budget agreements, spending has to be cut somewhere, and guess where. The just passed House and Senate budget resolution cuts $1trillion from Medicaid, and $500 billion from Medicare.

Guess who is hurt most by those benefit cuts? Trump's lower-income voters in the red states that depend most heavily on  health benefits. So, once again Repubs are attempting to disguise a tax cut for the wealthiest.

A corporate tax cut also benefit the wealthiest, since the top 10 percent of income earners own 80 percent of stocks, which is where most of the benefits from their increased profits will show up.

Graph: Econoday

Top this off with another record for corporate profits, up 7.4 percent in a year, and there is no reason to be cutting their taxes. They haven’t been using their profits for productive purposes, so what’s needed is for them to pay higher taxes so government can use that money to invest productively in the $2 trillion plus in outmoded infrastructure that badly needs replacement.

As a bonus, any such investments in new airports, power grids, better water treatment facilities (such as Detroit’s), alternative energies, roads, bridges—you name it—will increase labor productivity that has been cut in half since 2000.

And increasing labor productivity is the only real ticket to higher economic growth, and increasing the take-home pay for those middle-income wage earners.

Harlan Green © 2017

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Who Needs a Tax Cut?

It turns out very few of us need a tax cut.  Marketwatch economist Rex Nutting calculates that those in the 60 percent middle-income brackets—from $32,000 to $140,000 per year—pay just an average 2.5 percent in income taxes.  It’s only the richest 0.1 to 1 percent income earners that pay more, and so want the huge tax cuts congress and the Trump administration are proposing.

 

Graph: Marketwatch

Their rationale? That it will boost GDP growth to 3 percent from the current 2 percent average since the end of the Great Recession. But guess what? Q2 GDP growth was already 3 percent in Q2 and just revised to 3.1 percent, the highest growth rate in 2 years. Businesses are already investing in expansion—business investment in structures rose a stronger 7 percent instead of 6.2 percent in the revision. So, why not pay down the huge budget deficits accumulated since then, instead of cutting tax revenues?

“A bill that cuts federal income taxes for middle-class families makes absolutely no sense, except as a sad way of camouflaging the real intent of the bill: Giving millions of dollars to the very wealthy, who happen to be the only people who are really benefiting from our uneven economic growth,” said Nutting.

Graph: Econoday

Top this off with another record for corporate profits, up 7.4 percent in a year, and there is no reason to be cutting corporate taxes. They haven’t been using their profits for productive purposes, so what’s needed is for them to pay higher taxes so government can use that money to invest productively in the $2 trillion plus in outmoded infrastructure that badly needs replacement.

As a bonus, any such investments in new airports, power grids, better water treatment facilities (such as Detroit’s), alternative energies, roads, bridges—you name it—will increase labor productivity that has been cut in half since 2000.

And increasing labor productivity is the only real ticket to higher economic growth, and increasing the take-home pay for those middle-income wage earners.

Harlan Green © 2017

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Judge Tentatively Denies Dismissal of Trump RICO Charges

Financial FAQs

It looks like Donald A Trump will be on trial under RICO, or The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. A federal judge strongly indicated last Friday he would allow a lawsuit to move forward against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump under RICO by former customers who contend they were defrauded by his defunct real estate program, Trump University, reports Greg Moran, for the San Diego Union-Tribune.

U.S. District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel issued a tentative oral ruling from the bench at the start of a hearing in San Diego on a motion to dismiss the case by Trump’s lawyers. The ruling came a day after Trump accepted the GOP nomination at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, said Moran.

RICO is a United States federal law that provides for extended criminal penalties and a civil cause of action for acts performed as part of an ongoing criminal organization, says Wikipedia. The RICO Act focuses specifically on racketeering, and it allows the leaders of a syndicate (such as a corporation) to be tried for the crimes which they ordered others to do or assisted them in doing, closing a perceived loophole that allowed a person who instructed someone else to, for example, murder, to be exempt from the trial because he did not actually commit the crime personally.

Curiel said that plaintiffs had met the legal requirements to move the case forward and have a jury decide it.  Trump “participated in a scheme to defraud” people who signed up for the seminars, some at a cost of about $35,000.

The complaint, filed in 2013 by former customer Art Cohen, is one of two class-action lawsuits that Trump is facing in San Diego over Trump University before the same judge. Trump also faces a lawsuit in New York.

The lawsuits allege that Trump University gave seminars and classes in hotel ballrooms across the country that were like infomercials, constantly pressuring customers to buy more and, in the end, failing to deliver. Cohen went to a three-day seminar in 2009 in Palo Alto, California, for $1,495 and bought into the "Gold Elite" mentorship program for $34,995.

But that may not be the most serious financial crime Trump is guilty of. He won’t release his tax returns, even though he has said he would in the past. And that means he could be hiding a whole lot of sins.

It’s been well-documented that Donald Trump has a history of promising to release his tax returns — and then not doing so. In 2011, when Trump was spearheading the movement questioning whether President Obama was born in the United States, Trump told ABC News that he would release his tax returns if Obama released his long-form birth certificate. “I’d love to give my tax returns,” he said, in the ABC interview.

But once Obama released his birth certificate, Trump hedged. “At the appropriate time I’m going to do it,” he said. The appropriate time never came.

Then, in 2012, Trump criticized Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney for being slow to release his tax returns. Trump was asked by Fox News whether he’d ever have a problem releasing his returns.

“No,” he said. “I actually think that it’s a great thing when you can show that you’ve been successful, and that you’ve made a lot of money, that you’ve employed a lot of people. I actually think that it’s a positive.” But again, he refused.

This is even though such Republican luminaries as former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney has criticized Donald Trump for failing to disclose back taxes, repeatedly suggesting that the billionaire’s financial records may contain “a bombshell” that could damage his White House bid.

“I think we have good reason to believe that there’s a bombshell in Donald Trump’s taxes. I think there is something there,” Romney said on Fox News’ “Your World” with Neil Cavuto. “The reason I think there is a bombshell in there is because every time he is asked about his taxes, he dodges and delays.”

What could he be hiding? The first thing the public would find is Trump's tax rate. The candidate has bragged about paying a very low tax rate and taking advantage of the complex US tax code with its many loopholes. This is what Romney’s tax returns revealed—that he paid a lower tax rate than his secretary.


Then there is the much-publicized claim that he has a net worth of “billions”, even ten billion, he has claimed most recently.  This would be hard to ascertain from tax returns alone, as they report income rather than assets. Tax expert David Cay Johnston has uncovered past audits of Donald Trump from the 1980s and 90s that show no income at all, but lots of undocumented expenses.

In fact, Trump’s taxes may have been fraudulently filed, in some cases.  When shown a photocopy of Trump’s 1984 tax return during an appeal, Jack Mitnick, Trump’s accountant for more than 20 years, testified that “we did not” prepare that return, referring to himself and his firm, and he said did not know who did. However, Mitnick did not dispute that it was his signature on the photocopy.

The original tax return was never found, the judge noted.  “Among the issues raised by Mitnick’s 1992 testimony is whether Trump or someone acting on his behalf substituted a return that he or someone else prepared and then transferred Mitnick’s signature using a photocopier,” said Johnston.

So the fact that Trump is worth "billions" would be hard to ascertain from tax returns alone.  But his repeated promises to release his taxes, and then refusing to do so, should be a red flag to voters. What is he hiding that he is willing to break the precedent of every President since Richard Nixon to release their taxes and that will further damage his reputation for truthfulness?

We should know within days what Judge Curiel’s verdict will be on Trump’s RICO indictment. It doesn’t look good, needless to say, as he could be convicted of a felony, which would be grounds for impeachment should he be elected President.

Harlan Green © 2016

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Deflation and Our Plunging Deficit

Popular Economics Weekly

The federal budget deficit is shrinking rapidly, says Goldman Sachs Chief Economist Jan Hatzius. And that is not such a good thing at the moment, since the private sector isn’t spending enough. It means this very weak recovery will continue, with deflationary tendencies still in the air.  And we do not want even lower inflation right now, as it depresses both incomes and economic growth.

President Obama’s new budget proposal doesn’t really help, since he wants to cut entitlement spending, which takes money out of circulation when more money in circulation is needed.

Deflationary tendencies are showing up in the Producer Price Index for wholesale goods, which has been close to zero since the end of the Great Recession. The annual rate in March just dropped to 1.1 percent from 1.8 percent in February (seasonally adjusted). The core rate held steady at 1.7 percent.

 

Graph: Econoday

The federal budget deficit is a subject Hatzius has been following for some time....”[I]n the 12 months through March 2013, the deficit totaled $911 billion, or 5.7 percent of GDP,” he said in a research note. “In the first three months of calendar 2013--that is, since the increase in payroll and income tax rates took effect on January 1--we estimate that the deficit has averaged just 4.5 percent of GDP on a seasonally adjusted basis. This is less than half the peak annual deficit of 10.1 percent of GDP in fiscal 2009.”

So it’s not hard to understand what caused the March plunge in retail sales of 0.4 percent, versus the 1 percent increase in February. Some of it was due to bad weather and the payroll tax increases, but most was due to shrinking private and government spending.

Personal incomes are fluctuating wildly due to the payroll tax increases, so my take is, it ain’t the weather as some pundits are saying! Sure personal income rebounded 1.1 percent in February after a drop of 3.7 percent in January and a 2.6 percent jump in December, as we said last week. But it’s not enough to boost demand. Consumer spending just isn’t holding up, the main reason for government to keep spending.

Graph: Econoday

Personal spending jumped 0.7 percent after rising 0.4 percent in January. Strength was in nondurable goods, but that was mostly higher gasoline prices. Consumer outlays are up 3.3 percent annually, but if prices aren’t rising then that’s not enough to boost overall growth.

Government spending has already decreased 4 percent in the past 2 years, the largest amount since demobilization of the Korean War. For then important spending priorities can be met—such as infrastructure, research and development, as well as hiring back some of the 600,000 teachers let go because of state budget shortfalls.

What about the mounting debt? Rutgers Economic Historian James Livingston has an answer. Bring corporate taxes back to the levels during the Eisenhower era, when they were taxed at a 52 percent rate and made up some one-third of tax revenues, instead of the much less progressive payroll tax that burdens most of us. Corporate taxes now make up just 9 percent of revenues, according to Professor Livingston.

So where there’s the will there’s a way, as the saying goes. We know how to climb out of the debt trap. Lessen the burden of taxing personal incomes and increase it for corporations that have record-breaking profits and are hoarding some $4.25 trillion in cash, according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve. It is a case of some good history repeating itself, for a change.

Harlan Green © 2013

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: www.twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Romney’s 47 Percent Solution

Popular Economics Weekly

We know that Mitt Romney at a Florida fundraiser claimed that there are 47 percent of the people who will vote for President Obama no matter what, and "my job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives," quoted Mother Jones Magazine in the news coup of the year.

But really, why isn't he worried about them? Because due to record income inequality, age, the recession, or disabilities, they have the least amount of wealth, and we know he is really about continuing to redistribute the wealth upward since the advent of government-is-the-problem, trickle-down economics of President Reagan.

As the Center for Budget Policy and Priorities has said: "Given all the talk about who does or doesn't pay federal income taxes and what this means for tax policy, here are a few basic facts.

• The vast majority (83 percent) of households who owe no federal income taxes are either working households that pay payroll taxes (61 percent) or elderly (22 percent).

• The remaining 17 percent of those who don't pay federal income taxes are mostly those who are not working due to illness or disability, or are in school.

His program, which I call the '47 percent solution,' will in fact further impoverish the 47 per cent who don't pay federal income taxes by continuing to cut back on the federal safety net of social security and Medicare. It does so by adhering to the Republican Party Platform, a combination of his 5-Point Plan and that of Veep candidate Paul Ryan, which is the only Republican budget plan with any detail that was passed by the House.

"House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's budget plan would get at least 62 percent of its $5.3 trillion in nondefense budget cuts over ten years (relative to a continuation of current policies) from programs that serve people of limited means said the CBPP. "This stands a core principle of President Obama's fiscal commission on its head and violates basic principles of fairness."

Whereas the core principal of Republican ideology is that the wealthiest create jobs and so most wealth should flow to them, hence the "trickle-down' name. But in fact too much debt, both private and public, caused our greatest recession. What built up so much debt? The so-called trickle-down economics of Presidents Reagan and Bush II that ran up the largest budget deficits since World War II with meager economic growth to show for it.

President Clinton even said it at the Democratic convention. Democrats who believe that government has to work for the people have 'outgrown' Republican administrations over the past 52 years. “We Democrats think the country works better with a strong middle class, real opportunities for poor people to work their way into it and a relentless focus on the future, with business and government working together to promote growth and broadly shared prosperity. We think 'we're all in this together' is a better philosophy than 'you're on your own.'

Who's right? Well since 1961, the Republicans have held the White House 28 years, the Democrats 24. In those 52 years, our economy produced 66 million private sector jobs. What's the jobs score? Republicans 24 million, Democrats 42 million!"

Neither trickle-down economics, nor the wealth redistribution upward that accompanies it have been good for the country, such as Romney's 47 percent solution.

Harlan Green © 2012

Warren Buffet’s Truth—No Shared Sacrifice

Popular Economics Weekly

The Oracle of Omaha wrote a very profound New York Times’ Op-Ed recently. Warren Buffet said to “Stop Coddling the Super-Rich”; that what we needed was shared sacrifice in such times of plunging confidence in economic growth. But “when they did the asking, they spared me,” he said.

This cuts to the heart of why we even had a Great Recession, and how to dig ourselves out of the huge debt hole that resulted. There has been no shared sacrifice to date, and without it the economy and financial markets cannot recover. Firstly, the deficit cannot be paid down unless the richest individuals and corporations allow their tax breaks to expire.

The non-partisan Center for Budget and Policy Priorities has calculated that making all of the GW Bush tax cuts permanent would cost roughly $3.8 trillion over the next 10 years. And the Joint Committee on Taxation has calculated all the tax loopholes given oil, agriculture and the like will cost the U.S. Treasury roughly $1.3 trillion just in 2011 tax expenditures. That is our tax monies, folks, that is being paid to keep the super rich.

This is part of the redistribution of wealth that has occurred just since 1992. The top 400’s aggregate taxable income has risen from $16.9 billion to $90.0 billion in 2008, said Buffet. And their federal income tax rate fell from 29.2 to 21.5 percent. So the general taxpayer has been paying a multi-billion tax bill for the tax breaks of Big Business and the wealthiest. Reagan Budget Director David Stockman has labeled it the “reverse Robin Hood effect”.

What have the richest done with our tax monies? Certainly some have expanded their businesses, but much of it went overseas. U.S. corporations have some $1 trillion in unrepatriated profits from their overseas’ businesses sitting in foreign accounts, at the moment.

Much of it has also boosted executive incomes and stock buyback plans. USA Today recently reported that median CEO salaries increased 27 percent in 2010. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows, however, that workers in private industry experienced only a 2.1 percent pay increase last year. As USA Today points out, though, the great increase in CEO pay in 2010 is not really indicative of booming profits, but rather reflects the fact that many companies have been cutting costs and laying off workers.

In fact, the largest single chunk of the highest-income earners, it turns out, are executives and other managers in firms, according to a landmark analysis of tax returns by economists Jon Bakija, Adam Cole and Bradley T. Heim, says USA Today. These are not just executives from Wall Street, either, but from companies in even relatively mundane fields such as the milk business.

The top 0.1 percent of earners make about $1.7 million or more, including capital gains. Of those, 41 percent were executives, managers and supervisors at non-financial companies, according to the analysis, with nearly half of them deriving most of their income from their ownership in privately-held firms. An additional 18 percent were managers at financial firms or financial professionals at any sort of firm. In all, nearly 60 percent fell into one of those two categories.

And there is even less shared sacrifice in our increasingly unprogressive tax structure. To understand why, Buffet says you need to examine the sources of government revenue. Last year about 80 percent of these revenues came from personal income taxes and payroll taxes. The mega-rich pay income taxes at a rate of 15 percent on most of their earnings but pay practically nothing in payroll taxes. But for the middle class typically, they fall into the 15 percent and 25 percent income tax brackets, in addition to heavy payroll taxes.

“Back in the 1980s and 1990s,” said Buffet, “tax rates for the rich were far higher, and my percentage rate was in the middle of the pack. According to a theory I sometimes hear, I should have thrown a fit and refused to invest because of the elevated tax rates on capital gains and dividends.

“I didn’t refuse, nor did others. I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone — not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 — shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000.”

There is much more to Republicans’ disavowal of shared sacrifice, of course. GW Bush thought that by borrowing the monies for his 2 wars, he would prevent widespread anti-war sentiment so soon after Vietnam, our longest war. And it also muted criticism of his tax breaks for the wealthiest. Vice President Cheney’s infamous saying, “Ronald Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter.” was its incredible rationalization that helped to plunge us into the Great Recession.

“Twelve members of Congress will soon take on the crucial job of rearranging our country’s finances,” says Buffet. “…It’s vital, however, that they achieve far more than that. Americans are rapidly losing faith in the ability of Congress to deal with our country’s fiscal problems. Only action that is immediate, real and very substantial will prevent that doubt from morphing into hopelessness. That feeling can create its own reality.”

But that is clearly the objective of Tea Party Republicans in their budget cutting crusade. With the economy still recovering, unemployment still high, we cannot afford the taxpayer subsidies that are setting record budget deficits. The taxpayer paid tax breaks won’t reduce the debt load, but it will prevent any real economic growth before 2012, as I have said.

So there is even a deeper reason to bring back the idea of shared sacrifice. For as Americans become more hopeless about their economic futures, they become more passive. And passivity means they don't vote, and so participate in the democratic process, as is evidenced by progressively declining voter roles since the 1970s. The massive redistribution of wealth that has occurred most recently has bred a greater cynicism about the democratic process. Warren Buffet may not know this, but less participation in our democracy means fewer control the levers of power, as happens in Third World countries controlled by oligarchies made up of the wealthiest families. And it was depression-era Germans badly discouraged by the destruction of their economy that elected a Hitler.

Harlan Green © 2011