Dean Baker
Truthout, October 2, 2017

Mark WeisbrotBuzzFeed News, September 30, 2017

Neil Irwin seems to get a bit lost in his concerns about treating owners of pass-through businesses fairly. His NYT Upshot column argues that there is a problem where we are left with a choice between large-scale evasion, treating them unfairly, and micro-monitoring their behavior. The story is actually far simpler than he presents it.

The basic story is that the tax rate on a pass-through business is zero. The business itself pays no taxes, all its income is passed on to its owner(s) to be taxed at the individual rate. As it stands now, the income from pass-through businesses is treated as ordinary income and taxed at the same rate as labor income.

The Republicans are proposing to put a cap on the tax for income from pass-through businesses at 25 percent. This means that high-income people who own pass-through businesses will be able to pay taxes at a 10 percentage point lower rate than the 35 percent top marginal rate they are proposing. (The savings are 14.6 percentage points compared to the current 39.6 percent top marginal tax rate.)

Irwin correctly points out that this gap will be an invitation for every high-end earner to set up a pass-through business so that they can pay a 25 percent tax rate on their income rather than a 35 percent rate. Treasury Secretary Mnunchin has noted this problem but said that the I.R.S. will scrutinize pass-through corporations to prevent this sort of scamming. (Mnuchin's claim must be taken with a continent worth of salt. The Republicans have worked for the last two decades to do everything they can to weaken the I.R.S.'s enforcement powers.)

While Irwin recognizes the incentive this structure creates for gaming and also the difficulty of enforcement, he seems to accept that there is some inequity that the lower tax rate on pass-through income would address. This is not true.

Irwin is concerned that genuine pass-through income is income from capital, which we tax at a lower rate than income from labor. The current maximum tax rate on dividends and capital gains is 20 percent, compared to the rate of 39.6 percent on labor income. He argues that by taxing pass-through income at the rate on ordinary income we would be imposing too high a rate on the capital income from these companies.

Mark WeisbrotUS News and World Report, September 28, 2017

Donald Trump will soon make a decision on whether to reappoint Janet Yellen as chair of the Federal Reserve Board or to pick someone else. This decision is getting far less attention than it deserves.

The Fed makes an enormous difference in the lives of tens of millions of people, especially low- and moderate-income people. Its decisions on interest rate policy can determine how many people in the country have jobs. If the Fed raises interest rates and slows the rate of job creation, the people who are most affected are the most disadvantaged in society. Blacks, Hispanics, and the less educated will be the ones who are most likely to be denied jobs as a result of higher interest rates.

Furthermore, a weaker labor market also reduces the bargaining power of those who do have jobs. This means that they will get lower wages than if we had a lower unemployment rate.

September 2017, Eileen Appelbaum

My friend and occasional co-author, Jared Bernstein, had a piece in the NYT saying that Republicans don't care about budget deficits. The evidence certainly supports that view. As Jared points out, they repeatedly push through large tax cuts that come with no offsetting cuts in spending. As fans of arithmetic everywhere know, if you spend the same amount (sometimes they increase spending, by appropriating more money for things like prisons, walls, and the military), and take in less money, then you have a larger deficit.

Presumably, people who keep acting to raise the budget deficit, don't care about high budget deficits. I'll add two points here.

First, the media, including often the NYT, cover for Republicans on this issue by telling their audience that Republicans "believe" that lower taxes increase growth, thereby raising enough revenue to offset the tax cut. This is incredibly irresponsible reporting. (You could even call it "fake news.")

Reporters don't know what the politicians believe. When they assert politicians "believe" something to be true, they are just making things up. As we all know, politicians don't always tell the truth. Reporters know what politicians say, not what they believe. Furthermore, since the assertion is so obviously not true, it seems unlikely that many Republican politicians really believe it.

The responsible way to report on this issue is to tell readers that a politician "claims" or "says" that tax cuts will pay for themselves with stronger growth. (A BTP reader told me of an exchange with a NYT reporter in which the reporter said that the NYT doesn't use the word "claims," because it implies that the person may not be telling the truth. If this is the case, that is an unfortunate feature of NYT's reporting.)

Dean Baker
Truthout, September 25, 2017