The exchange I had with Jared Bernstein and subsequent comments by others have led to me do more thinking on the corporate income tax. First, just to respond to various notes and comments, I was not all upset that Jared and I disagreed. Jared is an old friend and a very good economist. I value his views, which is why I write books with him. I learned from his comments and I appreciate his concern for losing revenue even if it doesn't over-ride my my reasons for thinking that eliminating the corporate income tax (CIT) is a good idea.

I think the most useful way to think of the CIT is an optional levy placed on corporate income. We tell corporations that they have to pay 35 percent of their income in taxes to the government. It's optional in the sense that we allow them to cut this amount by two-thirds, if they instead pay one-third of this levy to Wall Street investment banks, accounting firms, and tax lawyers. (Using 2014 numbers  nominal corporate tax liability would be roughly 6 percent of GDP or $1,050 billion, with actual tax collections around 2.0 percent of GDP or $350 billion.) This is roughly how the tax boils down, with the Government Accountability Office estimating that companies pay about 13.0 percent of their income in taxes to the government, compared to the 35 percent nominal tax rate. This means that 22 percentage points of the profits, that in principle are owed as taxes, are escaping taxation by the government.

In fairness, I don't know how much corporate America is actually paying to escape its taxes. (Someone have a good study to send me?) Essentially, I am just assuming that they spend half of their tax savings on avoidance costs. 

These avoidance costs have real economic consequences. We are paying people lots of money to do activities that have zero value to the economy even though they are hugely valuable to their corporate employers. The people working on tax scams at the major accounting firms, or working out inversion mergers at Goldman Sachs, or creating new tax shelters at private equity companies could all be employed doing something productive. This is like giving companies a tax credit to pay people to dig holes and fill them up again. The difference is that these are highly educated people and they are getting paid really big bucks for the pointless hole-digging.

Social media and the commentariat are abuzz with updates and analysis on the Ice Bucket Challenge, an internet phenomenon where people do some combination of dumping cold water on themselves and donating money, raising over $90 million for the ALS Foundation so far.  While the ice bucket challenge has drawn support and criticism from various corners, it’s worth pointing out that foundations like the ALS Foundation, which fights “Lou Gehrig’s Disease on every front,” exist in their current imperfect form because of the structure of patent law.

Eileen AppelbaumFortune, August 28, 2014

In a recent post, I argued that Avery and Turner’s research, cited by The New York Times' David Leonhardt, ignores the experiences of students of color. For a variety of reasons, such as labor market discrimination, workers’ outcomes diverge significantly based on race. Research from CEPR, for example, showed that in 2013, recent black college graduates had more than double the unemployment rate (12.4 percent) of recent college graduates in general (5.6 percent), and more than half (55.9 percent) worked in jobs that do not require a college degree. Against this background, simply looking at the average return to college does not cut it; the payoffs are smaller and less certain for some groups of students than the overall average suggests.

I see that my friend Jared Bernstein has some more thoughtful (if mistaken) arguments on ending the corporate income tax. I recognize his concerns about giving more money to the people who have the most (hey, it’s the American Way), but I still think this is a policy that could be a big winner in the battle against the enemies of the people.

I will quickly address two issues Jared raised, the extent to which any of the savings will be passed on in wages and the ability to replace the revenue. However my main focus is the nature of the corporate tax avoidance industry. This is a pernicious drain of economic resources. It is also a major source of upward redistribution. I consider its elimination an enormous benefit – even if on net we give up some government revenue to do it.

First, I followed the Tax Policy Center in assuming that 20 percent of the benefits would go to workers in higher wages. Jared rightly pointed out that this will depend on workers bargaining power. However, it is worth noting that even in the worst of times workers have gotten some fraction of productivity gains. And if we look at the last year, the data show that average real hourly compensation increased almost as much as productivity growth (1.0 percent rise in real compensation versus a 1.2 percent increase in productivity). So the Tax Policy Center’s 20 percent pass back to wages hardly seems out of line.

The second question is how we would make up the lost revenue. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects we will get $351 billion or 2.0 percent of GDP from the corporate income tax in 2014 (Table 4-1). This is the average for the next decade as well. Much of this can be gotten back from eliminating the special treatment of dividend and capital gains income. The major rationale for their special treatment was the argument that it amounted to double taxation since profits were already taxed at the corporate level. Since the corporate income tax will have been eliminated, there is no rationale for special treatment.

In 2012, the most recent year for which data is available, the Internal Revenue Service reported $260.4 billion in taxable dividend income and $2.217 trillion in capital gains distributions. If we assume an average increase of 10 percentage points in the tax rate on dividends and 5 percentage points in the effective tax rate on realized capital gains, this gets us $137 billion in tax revenue (26.0 billion from dividends and $111 billion from taxing capital gains). If we adjust this figure up by 10 percent to account for nominal growth from 2012 to 2014 we are up to $151 billion.

In addition, eliminating the corporate income tax will cause both sources of income to increase, which would imply a further increase in revenue. If half of profits are paid out in dividends (a bit less than the historic average) then we would see dividends increase by $175 billion (using the 2014 numbers), which at a 30 percent average tax rate gets us $53 billion in tax revenue.

The ending of the corporate income tax would increase after tax profits by around 25 percent, which presumably would lead to a corresponding increase in stock prices. That would lead to a one-time windfall for both stockholders and also the government in the form of capital gains tax revenue. However going forward stock prices should rise on average at the same pace but at base that is roughly 25 percent higher. In 2011 (sorry, most recent year I could find) the CBO projected capital gains income for 2014 of $103 billion. If we up that by 25 percent, it gets $26 billion.

This brings the total from additional capital income to $79 billion. Adding that to $151 billion from raising the tax rate, get us to $230 billion. Suppose we raise the top marginal rate by three percentage points. CBO projected that the ending of the Bush tax cut for high end individuals would raise $109 billion in 2014 (Table 3), so a three percentage point hike should get around half that, or $55 billion. That gets us to $285 billion, still a bit short of the $351 billion in lost corporate tax revenue, but it is within spitting distance.

Dean Baker
Truthout, August 25, 2014