February 01, 2016
In today’s column he makes a pitch for Republican tax reform telling readers:
“If there is going to be growth-igniting tax reform — and if there isn’t, American politics will sink deeper into distributional strife — Brady [Representative Kevin Brady, the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee] will begin it. Fortunately, the Houston congressman is focused on this simple arithmetic: Three percent growth is not 1 percent better than 2 percent growth, it is 50 percent better.
“If the Obama era’s average annual growth of 2.2 percent becomes the “new normal,” over the next 50 years real gross domestic product will grow from today’s $16.3 trillion (in 2009 dollars) to $48.3 trillion. If, however, growth averages 3.2 percent, real GDP in 2065 will be $78.6 trillion. At 2.2 percent growth, the cumulative lost wealth would be $521 trillion.”
Of course 3.2 percent growth would lead to much more output than 2.2 percent growth. The problem is that there is no way on earth that any tax reform plan will add a full percentage point to growth. It would be an enormous success if a tax reform plan added 0.2–0.3 percentage points to growth.
While it is nice that Mr. Will can do compounding of growth rates, but we don’t have tax policies that will raise the growth rate by this amount even if we managed to over-ride every interest group that benefits from their special tax breaks.
So it’s nice that Republicans still want to believe in fairy tales, but those who are old enough to remember the Reagan tax cuts and the George W. Bush tax cuts or are slightly familiar with economics know better than to buy Mr. Will’s wild fables.
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