Tag Archives: political economy

Of Course They Are

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Universities and businesses are objecting to losing the tax-exempt status of tuition assistance, tuition that the universities receive in exchange for pretending to educate our youth and that businesses provide as an employment perk.  The House version of the tax bills currently in the offing eliminates this exemption status.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co, Starbucks Corp, and others say offering tax-free tuition assistance makes it easier for them to keep and train employees.

Schools say they could lose thousands of students if the tuition program is taxed. The nation’s economic development would be stunted if employees shy away from pricey training programs, they say.

Both groups are being disingenuous.  If everyone loses the exemption, no business gains an advantage, and so there is no hit to competition in keeping and training employees.  The businesses just have to make their decisions in this arena based on what’s truly good for the business and not on what works based on Government involvement—those taxes.

The schools won’t lose much either, other than students for whom college isn’t the best choice, anyway.  If their training programs are pricey, too, well, the answer to that is both obvious and wholly within the purview and capability of the schools to effect.  The exemption of tuition assistance from taxation, after all, is nothing but a subsidy, and so it contributes to inflating the price (not the cost) of the programs involved.

Tuition assistance is income; of course it should be taxed, as should all income regardless of source.  The questions here are whether income will be taxed at a low rate—as it should be—and whether our tax code, including tuition assistance being exempt, should be used for social engineering—as it should not be.

“major distortive impact on international trade”

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That’s the claim of European nations–Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and the UK—as they worry about the drop in corporate tax rates that the House and Senate bills propose.

Well, of course.  They also don’t like the highly competitive tax rates applied by Ireland and Luxembourg and routinely excoriate those nations for having the temerity of competing via tax treatment for business.  While the nations bleat about double taxation and how European businesses operating in the US would be at a tax disadvantage compared to US companies operating in the US, here’s the nub of the thing:

Even without those provisions, the reform would leave US businesses facing lower domestic-tax rates than some of their European peers, putting governments under pressure to reciprocate.

The horror.  And those nations—and the EU generally—still have not justified either their high tax rates or their high spending rates that underlie those tax rates.  The nations also have exposed their hypocrisy:

[T]he proposed “base erosion and anti-abuse tax provision” contained in the Senate bill could harm international banking and insurance businesses because it would treat cross-border financial transactions between a company and a subsidiary as nondeductible, subjecting it to a 10% tax[.]

Never mind that the EU already is attacking the international banking industry (and the insurance industry won’t be far behind) by demanding a tax on all financial transactions (currently masqueraded as a tax on investment transactions, but what else does an international bank do?), which itself can only depress international banking.  But hey, it’s a tax, so it’s all good.  Or so insist the Know Betters of EU Big Government.

The UK’s concern is especially interesting both as that nation drifts away from Thatcherism, even in its allegedly Conservative coalition and as the UK stands to make out like bandits in international trade following Brexit and the loss of EU fetters on its economy (always assuming the timid May government doesn’t surrender the farm in the face of EU intransigence).

Individual Mandate and Risk Pools

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Louise Radnofsky and Stephanie Armour had a piece in The Wall Street Journal that looked at the small and shrinking impact of removing the Individual Mandate (or more accurately, removing the penalty Supreme Court-created tax imposed for not satisfying the IM) on the health coverage providing industry.  The piece is worth the read, but there was one remark quoted at the end that wants a particular look.

“Making the risk pool stable is a vital part” of keeping individual insurance premiums in line with the overall cost to cover a person insured through a larger group or employer, said Andy Slavitt, a top health official in the Obama administration.

You bet. However, in order to stabilize a risk pool, it’s necessary to understand risk pools. A healthy young man does not have the same risks as an elderly man or woman, and so he does not belong in either of their risk pools, either of them in his, and neither of those two in each other’s. A healthy woman of child-bearing age does not share the same risks as a post-menopausal woman, and neither share the same risks as a man of any age. None of those three groups belong in the same risk pool as any of the others.

Health-related risk pools, to be effective and accurate at estimating future health coverage costs and so arriving at reasonable fees for accepting the transfer of the risks involved, need to be reasonably homogeneous.  Belonging to the species homo sapiens is not sufficiently homogeneous.

An Infrastructure Program

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In the coming year, the Trump administration intends to push for an infrastructure improvement program for its next major legislative effort.  It’s certainly true that we need much improvement in our roads, bridges, and transportation networks in all mediums, for both economic and national security reasons (bonus points to those who can identify President Dwight Eisenhower’s motivation for pushing the Interstate Highway System like he did).

It’s also true that such a program would be broadly popular among American citizens.

It’s also true that the proposal coming onto offer, rather than being another Federal boondoggle, would only commit $200 billion as seed money, with the States and locals putting up the bulk of the funding and work.

That’s all well and good, but it’s insufficient: the program would remain vulnerable to inflated costs.  To complete the effort and make the overall program more efficient, Congress and President Donald Trump, in parallel with the infrastructure effort, need to get rid of the Federal requirement that contractors pay union prevailing wages instead of competitive wages, and the administration also needs to encourage the States to get rid of their own, similar, requirement.

The Fed’s Interest Rates

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In a Letter to the Editor in a recent Wall Street Journal, was this remark:

[A] major reason for doing this [artificially suppressing interest rates] is an attempt to raise inflation to their sacrosanct 2% level.

Interest rates are inherently inflationary, since they raise the cost of money. If the Fed were serious, they’d set their benchmark rates at levels historically consistent with 2% inflation, and then they’d sit down and shut up.

One factor keeping the Fed interfering, though, is universal to all bureaucracies—the bureaucrats can’t sit down and shut up, they think they have to be constantly doing or yapping.

Sometimes it’s necessary to clean out the whole rat’s nest, not just go through the motions with scheduled rotations of the political appointees at the top.