Must the Rich be Lured into Investing? Who are the Real "Job Creators?"

Why should Mitt Romney and the fabled "one-percent"  pay only a 15% marginal tax on investment income ... half the rate charged to a dentist or auto mechanic on wages earned from work?  This was not the case until recent Republican Congresses slashed taxes on passive, unearned dividends and capital gains.

The rationale for that immense tax cut for (mostly) rich investors was simple and alluring - that super-low rates would entice more of the rich to invest in companies within the U.S., helping them to increase their productive capacity and hire more workers. Moreover, the resulting boom in economic activity would then result in so much new tax revenue, even at low rates, that deficits would disappear.

Let's put this in context with a term you may have heard. "Supply side" economic theory maintained that this flow of investment capital would pump up the factory end of things, increasing the supply of goods and services, offering them cheaper, thus stimulating demand.

In contrast, the standard Keynsian "demand side" model was to fight recession by ensuring that poor and middle class folks had enough cash ("high-velocity" money) in their pockets to buy - or "demand" - goods and services. Whereupon producers would be drawn into greater production.

For a more detailed description of the differences between these two economic models, see my earlier missive  A Primer on Supply-Side vs Demand-Side Economics. (It really is one of the top issues of our day and an informed citizen should know about it.) Here in this place, I'll try to be brief.

Who was right? Blatantly, the Keynsian approach worked in the 1940s, when massive government spending on WWII resulted in a boom that ended the Great Depression.  A boom that then continued for 30 years, till Vietnam crushed it against a wall. Throughout that period, high tax rates and stimulative spending seemed to work, whenever the economy needed a little help. Moreover, during that era, a very flat social structure - (CEOs earned only a few times what factory workers did) - combined with the most rapid growth of the middle class and the most vibrant era of startup capitalism in human history.

That does not make Keynsianism perfect! Critics like Friedrich Hayek, have indeed exposed some faults and blunders that later Keynsians, like Paul Krugman, openly admit and have striven to correct. Still, the Demand Side approach can point to many clearcut successes.

In particular, it is plain that during recessions, when economic activity lags and deflation looms, what you want is "high velocity" money in circulation - money that will pass from buyer to seller and then to another seller and so on.  Not money that just sits.

Does Supply Side have a similar track record? Not even remotely.  Not even once. Simple charts - and hard conclusions from the Congressional Research Service - show that the Supply Side assertion was... and is... utter mythology.  None of its predicted effects ever happened.  And let me reiterate.  Not ever, even once.

Specifically, cuts in tax rates for dividends and capital gains have never had any long-term effects upon capital investment, since records were kept in the United States.  (See this cogent article putting the myth to rest, once and for all. Also my article: A Primer on Supply-Side vs. Demand-Side Economics.)

In fact, this is no surprise, for several reasons:

1) Supply Side assumes that the rich have a zillion other uses for their cash and thus have to be lured into investing it!  Now ponder that nonsense statement. Roll it around and try to imagine it making a scintilla of sense! Try actually asking a very rich person.  Once you have a few mansions and their contents and cars and boats and such, actually spending it all holds little attraction.  Rather, the next step is using the extra to become even richer. Naturally, you invest it.  Whatever the tax rates, you invest it, seeking maximum return.

Instead of enticing the rich to invest, these super low dividend and capital gains rates simply used money taxed from middle class wage earners to give bonuses for speculations wealthy folks were doing anyway.  If anything, the only major effect, other than budget deficits, was a pumping up of asset value bubbles.

2) Now to be sure, some of the rich ... a few... put a fair amount of their wealth into truly bold and risky new enterprises.  I know such men and women, who engage in Venture Capitalism or starting up creative new enterprises. And just so you know that I'm no socialist I believe this kind of investment truly should be encouraged by taxing it at a very low rate!  Not only because of the risk, but also because equity shares that are bought de novo directly from a new firm actually deliver nearly all of that value directly into capitalization and company development.

In contrast, most exchanges through the NYSE or NASDAQ are purchases from other stock-owners who happen to disagree with you about prospects for future capital gains and dividends. It is just as much a betting/gambling system as any Vegas casino, Your trades may marginally raise or lower the posted price, allowing the company to raise a little capital on the side, but almost nothing from your stock transaction actually goes to the company itself, or into new products or plants and equipment.

(Hence, that kind of investing - by far the largest portion - helps industry only at appallingly low levels of efficiency, but diverts management into spending nearly all its time trying to bribe stockholders with short term benefits, ignoring long-term company health.)

No wonder Adam Smith himself expressed contempt for passive investments that he called "rents"... compared to investments in which the owner actually gets involved in starting up or entrepreneurial development of long term company or enterprise health.

3) So what about "targeted investing"?  The towering hypocrisy of supply side tax cuts for the rich is that they are claimed (without a scintilla of evidence) to help create jobs. But then, why treat investments overseas equally to those made in domestic companies? President Obama proposes narrowing the super-low rates to U.S. companies that are (a) startups, or (b) demonstrably adding jobs, or (c) investing directly in new equipment or R&D.  For this he is derided for "picking winners and losers"... even though the list of targeted tax breaks for GOP-favored industries like coal and oil are myriad. (and outrageous.)

4) In fact, we spoke earlier about how stock and equities markets have lately become the tail wagging the dog.  Instead of serving the capital needs of companies, firms like Mitt Romney's Bain Capital show that productive corporations making goods and services are now like cattle, farmed by Wall Street, to be bled or dissected at whim.  Nor is the whim even human anymore! Most trades are now propelled by hyper-aggressive, parasitical "flash trading" computer programs that vastly amplify volatility, sap investor earning potential, and threaten our entire economic system in a dozen ways.

5) The reduction of dividend and capital gains tax rates almost to zero has coincided with the rapid ending of the relatively flat social structure that we inherited from the Greatest Generation of the 1950s and 1960s.  Back then, the rich managers of major corporations earned only ten or twenty times what factory workers got, a situation that still exists in Japan. Only now, American wealth disparities are approaching levels not seen since the American Revolution.

The last thing that the GOP or Fox wants you to do is look across the last 6000 years.  The class that they call "job creators" used to have another name. Lords.

6) The outrageous inherent unfairness of passive dividend-clipping getting far better tax treatment than earned wages is inherently suspect.  It is exactly what you would expect rich and powerful men to lobby for, whether or not their supply side rationalizations were true!  It should be no surprise that, in our money-drenched political system, those with such power and influence have benefited immensely.

But are the arguments and rationalizations valid at all?  At minimum, supply-siders should bear some burden of proof.  Their experiment has been run, now, for more than three decades, and never once has their core predication come true... that cutting taxes on the rich will result in increased overall revenues and a vanishing federal deficit.

Yes, reducing deficits would be good!  Indeed, under Clinton they vanished. The middle class, according to all opinion polls at the time, wanted any surplus to go to buying down debt.  It was the upper caste who used the surpluses as an excuse to demand immediate tax cuts.  So where does maturity reside?

The results are utterly conclusive.

Supply side is disproved, top to bottom.

What we need in this depression - and by most of the metrics it has been a depression, not a recession* - what's needed is what ended the last one. The circulation of high velocity money that goes hand to hand very quickly, generating economic activity with every transaction. Not the exact opposite, money that sits in portfolios, not helping capitalize industry but simply fostering the aggrandizement of a parasitic caste.  One the the founding father of free enterprise - Adam Smith himself - quite despised.

"All for ourselves and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind. As soon, therefore, as they could find a method of consuming the whole value of their rents themselves, they had no disposition to share them with any other persons."

Smith is not talking about charity, but the vigor of trade.  In this case, we "share" by buying from one another.  The middle class is very good at that.  It is the middle class that - assisted prodigiously by technology and science - propelled our economy to be the wonder of the world.

It is the middle class who should get whatever tax benefits can be doled out.  They'll use it to make small startups.  They'll use it to educate bright, competitive kids.  They'll spend it!

They are the real "job creators."

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Addendum: November 3, 2012 - R.I.P. "supply side economics" 

In a November 1 report we learn that that Senate Republicans applied pressure on the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) in September to withdraw a report finding that lowering marginal tax rates for the wealthiest Americans had no effect on economic growth or job creation. 

"The pressure applied to the research service comes amid a broader Republican effort to raise questions about research and statistics that were once trusted as nonpartisan and apolitical," the Times reported. Democrats in Congress resurfaced the report. Republicans objected that it underminde the governing fiscal philosophy of the party, that tax cuts for the wealthy will spur growth and benefit everybody.

Changes over 65 years in the top marginal tax rate and the top capital gains rate do not correlate with economic growth. Reduction in top rates appears to be uncorrelated with saving, investment, and productivity growth. However, top rate reductions do associate with increasing divergence of national income going to the top 0.1%

This is important... and was always obvious.  Even in 1776 Adam Smith described what the rich actually do with sudden cash infusions. They put it to work in "passive rent seeking" and only rarely into capital equipment or risky new products and services. (Risk taking can be rewarded in other ways.) And that cash flow to the rich reduces the velocity of money. If there were ever a time not to do that, it is during a recession, when we want high money velocity, put cash in middle class pockets! (In fairness, during runaway inflation, largesse to the rich - reducing money velocity - actually makes some sense.) 

George H.W. Bush called Supply Side "voodoo economics. It was and is.

A Primer on Supply-Side vs Demand-Side Economics

Russ Daggatt's latest missive discusses whether the Stimulus Bill has had good effects.  His analysis is well worth perusing... and spreading the link.

My own take on things is more abstract. So let's step back and examine how Democrats and Republicans have become identified with two quite opposite economic theories. We'll start with the Republicans, who still clasp fealty to Supply Side Economics (SSE), a theory once labeled "voodoo" by the elder George Bush, but now mainstream conservative catechism for three decades.

A PRIMER ON SUPPLY SIDE VS DEMAND SIDE ECONOMICS

Supply Side holds that you best stimulate economic activity by Increasing the net wealth possessed by society's top echelons -- people and groups who have no urgent material needs.  Instead of spending it on direct "demand" purchases, these wealth-owners will invest any marginal wealth-gain (say from tax cuts) on things that increase "supply" -- factories, new businesses, innovative goods and services.  Thus the name Supply-Side. 

Interestingly, the most famous proponent of this approach was Karl Marx, who maintained that the owner-capitalist class propels industrial development by re-investing profits in plants and equipment, thus building up society's capital stock and the means of production. SSE is, in that respect, an entirely Marxist theory.

Of course, Marx then looked farther ahead.  He hypothesized an eventual "completion" of this capital-formation process, a final phase when all the factories are finished - an image we now find ludicrous, since productive capacity must be updated at an accelerating pace. (Hence there will always be a need for capitalists.)  Still, it seems kind of sad that SSE supporters won't ever acknowledge this fundamental root of their theory. They do not study their ideological forebear. Nor do they try, as Marx did, to extrapolate where their prescription may eventually lead.

But let's examine the key SSE predictions. (All theories should make confident predictions that are clearcut and testable.) For thirty years we have heard Supply Side zealots forecast that reducing taxes on the rich will:

1) result in direct investment of the released wealth into "supply" capacity for producing innovative goods and services.

2) stimulate so much new economic activity that even lower tax rates will rake in enough new revenue to erase any deficit caused by reducing taxes on the rich.

3) eliminate government debt, resolving any apparent conflict between reducing revenue and fiscal responsibility.

EFFECTS UPON POLICY

This lengthy definition is needed understand why a credibility deficit now burdens the Republican Coalition.  All through the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, the mantra was:

- if the federal budget is in deficit, cut taxes on the rich, in order to repair that deficit.

- if the federal budget is in surplus, cut taxes on the rich, because it's their money, not the government's, and there will henceforth be no rainy days.

- in times of peace, cut taxes on the rich, because government has lower priority in peacetime.

- in times of war, cut taxes on the rich, because... well, this one never made sense even by conservative logic. Indeed, this was the first time in US history that the clade of uber-wealth demanded ever-increasing state largesse even while the nation was under deadly threat.

In any event, we must admit that the core demand of SSE believers has been utterly consistent. Reducing taxes on the uber-wealthy is good for America, across all circumstances, under all conditions and without limit.

TESTING SUPPLY SIDE THEORY

For three decades, SSE proponents told skeptics "just watch and see what will happen!"  (Whenever top tax rates were cut.)  Okay, we've watched. And absolutely every large-scale forecast made by promoters of Supply Side Economics failed -- diametrically -- without major exception.

The uber-rich did not take their tax-break largesse and invest it in innovative/productive equipment.  They poured it into either passive investments -- what Adam Smith derided as "rent-seeking" -- or else risky financial instruments and asset bubbles.  Above all, the direct forecast that reduced revenues would erase federal deficits went directly opposite to observed fact.

TESTING THE OPPOSING THEORY

The one period over which deficits decisively vanished came right after Bill Clinton got moderate increases in taxation on the rich, in 1993, followed by stringent pay-as-you-go budgetary management. What we saw then was a combination of budget balancing, strong economic activity and revenue-based debt reduction.

So now let's examine the competitive theory - Demand Side Economics (DSE)... also called modified-Keynsianism.

Named for long-ago FDR advisor John Maynard Keynes, this theory holds that economic activity is driven by demand for goods and services. Moreover, money in the hands of the middle and lower classes has greater inherent VELOCITY -- meaning that a given dollar will be spent and then re-spent more often, if the middle class is passing it around with sequential purchases, than if it is stockpiled in a rich person's portfolio.

(Mind you, by this theory, tax cuts for the rich might actually make sense when rapid inflation in an overheated economy calls for decreased monetary velocity!  I never said that such cuts are NEVER called for. Indeed, JFK's tax cuts did achieve all of its intended goals.)

Under Keynsian or Demand-Side theory, the government should spend heavily, even deep into debt, when the nation is in recession, in order to get high-velocvity economic activity going again.  Hence the recent surge in stimulus activity, in the first year of the Obama administration (see Daggatt's article)... in sharp contrast to the equal-scale "stimulus" measures taken in the last year of George W. Bush's term, most of which went to shoring up the positions of those at the top of the social-economic order.

Now, to a person who genuinely despises all deficit spending, both SSE and DSE methods may seem horrific.  Both claim to use deficits and state-largesse to stimulate the economy, under a notion that economic activity will thereupon surge ahead and resulting revenues will later erase the incurred debt.  Only there are some truly major differences.

1) Demand-Side (Keynsian) deficit spending goes to where each dollar will have high velocity impact, as their theory predicts. In contrast, Supply Side largesse for the rich definitely did NOT go into predicted capital formation. (Marx was wrong.) It simply made the rich richer.

2) Completely aside from macro-economic effects, the beneficiaries of Demand Side largesse - the poor and middle class - may have some actual direct need. Fulfilling that need (if done well) may result in creation of either more-skilled workers or more small businesses. In contrast, it is hard to see how Supply Side sends the money to a place (the rich) where a direct need merits government intervention.

3)  Supply Side is a monotone.  "Give money to the rich under ALL circumstances, at all times and conditions, no matter what.

In contrast, Keynsians have proved that their policy is adaptable and variable, un-dogmatic and contingent upon circumstance.  They spend lavishly in order to get out of recession, because that is what Keynsians do. (Right-wing rants and rails against the current governing party acting consistently with its own economic theory is simply hypocritical.  You had your turn, now it is theirs.)

But the 1990s prove that Democrats have credibility for being situationally flexible.  When a recession ends, they spend more cautiously, remove the largesse, and start building up savings. In fact, had Bush continued the Clintonian policy of debt buy-down in good times, a considerable reserve fund would have been available to help us ride out the present crisis.

4) The experts -  professionals who have actually spent their lives studying this difficult field - generally despise Supply Side Economics. That may seem a good thing from the perspective of those who increasingly call expertise a disqualifying trait. From contempt for the Civil Service and the US Officer Corps to distrust of universities and the climate experts who have achieved miracles in weather forecasting, it's become clear that one side in our tragic, debilitating "culture war" does not want to hear the professionals on any matter, least of all economics.

.5) In fact the situation is not entirely black and white! Keynsianism has had its failures. Economics is a dismal "science" and Demand-Side has many problems dealing with a complex economy.  Furthermore, pre-Clintonian Democrats sometimes acted as if the law of gravity did not apply. That potential always lurks on the left (witness Greece, today.) Moreover, Democrats did play some (lesser) role in the unleashing of our recent Asset Bubble.

Nevertheless, Keynsianism has a long, eighty-year record of being right in the most general sense.

Government should outspend its revenues in recession, directing high-velocity stimulus toward the middle class.  Then, in good times, it should use adequate revenues to build up reserves.  The Pharoahs knew this. It is even in the Biblical story of Joseph.  It is common sense.

What does not make sense is to hold fast to an alternative "voodoo" theory - Supply Side Economics - that has always and universally failed in every major prediction, after being tried repeatedly for three decades.

A theory that is quasi-Marxist, in that it openly aims to propel the rise of an all-powerful aristocracy of wealth in exactly the manner that Marx prophesied, taking us toward the sort of class divisions that had old Karl chortling and rubbing his hands, murmuring "Yessss!"

== Addendum November 2012  R.I.P. "supply side economics" ==

Only... in that context take this proof of what I've long held. The blatant fact that Supply Side economics has never been true. In a November 1 report we learn that that Senate Republicans applied pressure on the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) in September to withdraw a report finding that lowering marginal tax rates for the wealthiest Americans had no effect on economic growth or job creation. 

"The pressure applied to the research service comes amid a broader Republican effort to raise questions about research and statistics that were once trusted as nonpartisan and apolitical," the Times reported. Democrats in Congress resurfaced the report. Republicans objected that it underminde the governing fiscal philosophy of the party, that tax cuts for the wealthy will spur growth and benefit everybody.

Changes over 65 years in the top marginal tax rate and the top capital gains rate do not correlate with economic growth. Reduction in top rates appears to be uncorrelated with saving, investment, and productivity growth. However, top rate reductions do associate with increasing divergence of national income going to the top 0.1%

This is important... and was always obvious.  Even in 1776 Adam Smith described what the rich actually do with sudden cash infusions. They put it to work in "passive rent seeking" and only rarely into capital equipment or risky new products and services. (Risk taking can be rewarded in other ways.) And that cash flow to the rich reduces the velocity of money. If there were ever a time not to do that, it is during a recession, when we want high money velocity, put cash in middle class pockets! (In fairness, during runaway inflation, largesse to the rich - reducing money velocity - actually makes some sense.) 

George H.W. Bush called Supply Side "voodoo economics. It was and is.

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