The Economist: Why Americans Love the IRS

The Economist’s sarcastic takedown of the the US tax agency the IRS: (bold mine)

WHEN Barack Obama fired the acting head of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) earlier this month, he doubtless hoped to quell the hullabaloo about its seemingly partial treatment of applications for tax-exempt status from conservative groups. The IRS selected for extra scrutiny groups whose names included conservative buzzwords, such as “tea party”, “9/12” and “patriot”. Republicans accuse the taxmen of persecuting anti-tax groups. The IRS’s defenders insist that a few low-level functionaries simply made a clumsy attempt at an administrative short-cut. But the main reason why Americans dislike dealing with the IRS is not, however, the bureaucrats’ fault. Congress keeps making the tax code more complex. It is now 4m words long, and has been changed over 4,000 times since 2001. Americans spend 6.1 billion hours a year complying with it—enough work to keep over 3m people employed full-time without producing anything. Nearly 90% of filers pay for help with their returns. The cost of all this is equivalent to 15% of the tax raised says the Taxpayer Advocate, an ombudsman. Yet change may be a long time coming. Politicians usually balk at taking on the myriad vested interests which all ferociously defend their favourite tax breaks, says Bill Gale of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank. For that reason, he argues, “tax reform is always the bridesmaid and never the bride”

To give a better picture of what the bold highlights mean

US Tax code ballooned from 400 to 72,000+ pages

Here is the basic 1040 tax form

More tax laws equals more tax breaks which serves as rewards to the politically favorite vested interest groups.

Cato’s Dan Mitchell tells us more “why the IRS bureaucracy deserves scorn”.

• It has thieving employees.
• It has incompetent employees.
• It has thuggish employees.
• It has brainless employees.
• It has protectionist employees.
• It has wasteful employees.
• And it has victimizing employees.

As Chief Justice Marshall once wrote

The power to tax is the power to destroy.

Quote of the Day: How Different Policies Affect Entrepreneurs

1. In a nation with poor rule of law and weak protection of property rights, entrepreneurs are undermined in their efforts to innovate, expand, and create.
2. In a nation with bad monetary policy, entrepreneurs are hampered because the basic unit of account and medium of exchange is unstable.
3. In a nation with onerous fiscal policy, entrepreneurs are discouraged because government is misallocating resources and imposing punitive tax rates.
4. In a nation with protectionist trade policy, entrepreneurs are denied the ability to buy and sell in ways that enable the most productive use of labor and capital.
5. In a nation with interventionist regulatory policy, entrepreneurs are saddled with extra costs that make it more expensive to mix labor and capital in ways that most effectively satisfy consumer desires.

That’s from Cato’s Dan Mitchell.

High Taxes Equals Lower Revenues: UK Edition

The Wall Street Journal Wealth Blog writes,

To dig itself out of recession, Britain hiked its income-tax rate to 50% for those making £150,000 or more. Proponents said the tax was needed to bring fairness to an economy, in which the rich were getting richer and not contributing enough to the cause. Critics said the tax would chase out the job creators.

As it turned out, the real impact was in tax avoidance. According to the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s budget announced today, the income-tax hike caused “massive distortions” that cost the government.

A study found that £16 billion of income was deliberately shifted into the previous tax year. As a result, the tax raised only £1 billion – a third of the amount forecast.

This is another concrete example of a blowback of simplistic knee jerk policies embraced by the left.

In desperate attempts to raise revenues, the stereotyped recommendation by left leaning experts, which has often been adapted by politicians, has been to raise taxes.

They assume that people are like robots who will blindly comply with the regulations. They fail to understand that policies create incentives for people to act, particularly to circumvent on regulations whom they view as either undeserving or excessive.

And higher taxes, observes Cato’s Dan Mitchell, lower incentives to earn and report income, and lower tax rates increase incentives to earn and report income.

That’s exactly what transpired in UK. The response of the rich from higher taxes had been to use tax avoidance measures to withhold from paying more taxes. Common sense.

Unfortunately common sense is uncommon to people blinded by political self-righteousness

Video: Why Tax Increases Are Wrong (and Immoral)

Here is an eloquent video from Center for Freedom and Prosperity which shows why tax increases are baneful to an economy.

Note: these has universal application which means that the enumerated factors applies to the Philippines as well. (hat tip Dan Mitchell)


To add, taxation isn't just harmful, they are essentially immoral.

Ludwig von Mises (Human Action): [emphasis added]

It is important to remember that government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action. The funds that a government spends for whatever purposes are levied by taxation. And taxes are paid because the taxpayers are afraid of offering resistance to the tax gatherers. They know that any disobedience or resistance is hopeless. As long as this is the state of affairs, the government is able to collect the money that it wants to spend. Government is in the last resort the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen. The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.

To draw attention to this fact does not imply any reflection upon government activities. In stark reality, peaceful social cooperation is impossible if no provision is made for violent prevention and suppression of antisocial action on the part of refractory individuals and groups of individuals. One must take exception to the often-repeated phrase that government is an evil, although a necessary and indispensable evil. What is required for the attainment of an end is a means, the cost to be expended for its successful realization. It is an arbitrary value judgment to describe it as an evil in the moral connotation of the term. However, in face of the modern tendencies toward a deification of government and state, it is good to remind ourselves that the old Romans were more realistic in symbolizing the state by a bundle of rods with an ax in the middle than are our contemporaries in ascribing to the state all the attributes of God.

Murray N. Rothbard (Tax Day):

The first great lesson to learn about taxation is that taxation is simply robbery. No more and no less. For what is "robbery"? Robbery is the taking of a man’s property by the use of violence or the threat thereof, and therefore without the victim’s consent. And yet what else is taxation?

Those who claim that taxation is, in some mystical sense, really "voluntary" should then have no qualms about getting rid of that vital feature of the law which says that failure to pay one’s taxes is criminal and subject to appropriate penalty. But does anyone seriously believe that if the payment of taxation were really made voluntary, say in the sense of contributing to the American Cancer Society, that any appreciable revenue would find itself into the coffers of government? Then why don’t we try it as an experiment for a few years, or a few decades, and find out?

But if taxation is robbery, then it follows as the night the day that those people who engage in, and live off, robbery are a gang of thieves. Hence the government is a group of thieves, and deserves, morally, aesthetically, and philosophically, to be treated exactly as a group of less socially respectable ruffians would be treated.

Video: Repairing The Nation’s Balance Sheets By Limiting Growth of Government Spending

Cato’s Dan Mitchell has a nice video showing examples of the actual experiences of different nations in restraining government spending which has resulted to a reduction in budget deficits and likewise augmented their respective economic growths.

Says Mr. Mitchell,

These success stories from Canada, Ireland, Slovakia, and New Zealand share one common characteristic. By freezing or sharply constraining the growth of government outlays, nations were able to rapidly shrinking the economic burden of government, as measured by comparing the size of the budget to overall economic output.

A Video on Tax Cuts: Myths Versus Reality

Expiring tax cuts will be the next agenda of the incoming gridlocked US Congress.

And in this instructive video, Cato's Dan Mitchell debunks the propaganda used by the White House to justify higher tax rates on investors, entrepreneurs and the so-called wealthy class.

While this may be considered a domestic issue for Americans, this has geopolitical and international economic ramifications. For instance higher taxes rates may exacerbate capital outflows already impelled by the current monetary policies such as the QE 2.0.

Besides, Filipinos can learn about the fundamental ills of excessive government spending, the negative effects of taxation and the smoke and mirror propaganda employed by the 'powers that be' and their political cohorts, just to able sell the programs, that would unjustly inhibit property rights and curtail civil liberty, for the benefit of politicians.

Watch the video below.

Video: Best Way To Maintain Fiscal Discipline Is To Cut Government Spending

How to balance the budget? Simple, cut government spending.

Dan Mitchell of the CATO institute explains how...

Rahn Curve: Defining The Optimum Level Of Societal Benefits From Government Spending

There is a limit to everything. And this applies to government spending as well.

Cato's Daniel Mitchell, in another great educational video, explores to identify the optimum state point of government spending [up to what level of government spending benefits a society?] via the Rahn Curve.

Taxes 101: The Laffer Curve

Here is a nifty three part video series by Daniel Mitchell of the CATO Institute on how taxes influence people's behaviour, and consequently, the ramifications to the economy.

Part I: Understanding the Theory

Part 2: Reviewing the Evidence

Part 3: Policy Analysis Via Dynamic Scoring

What we'd like to show is that government spending always impact tax policies but to a diverse degree. These ultimately affects people's behavior which subsequently will be manifested on the performance of an economy and the state of capital (wealth) accumulation/consumption.

It's also very important to point out that taxes has been a highly sensitive political issue such that in certain periods of history, public uproar against taxes catalyzed revolutions.

Example, this article from Murray N. Rothbard,

"Seventeenth-century French kings and their minions did not impose an accelerating burden of absolutism without provoking grave, deep, and continuing opposition. Indeed, there were repeated rebellions by groups of peasants and nobles in France from the 1630s to the 1670s. Generally, the focus of discontent and uprising was rising taxes, as well as the losses of rights and privileges. There were also similar rebellions in Spain in mid-century, and in autocratic Russia throughout the seventeenth century."

Bottom line: Be wary and leery of politicos advocating for more government expenditures because these eventually translate to higher taxes, which translates to a lower standard of living.

Corruption Is A Symptom of BIG Government!

Filipinos have long been seduced to the notion that the only way to get rid of corruption is to elect or put in place a "virtuous" or "moral" leader or what I call "personality based" politics. Hence, the political cycle of hope and despair: great hope in a new leader and eventual despair from the unrealized expectations on the incumbents.

And this vicious cycle has seemingly translated to a perpetual fantasy or the ever elusive goal of good governance.

Unfortunately, hardly anyone including media and our experts in the academe or in private institutions would deal with political realities.

As the following video from Daniel Mitchell of Cato.org would show, corruption is only a symptom of excessive government interventions, welfare system wrought dependency culture, bloated bureaucracy, stifling web of regulations, scores of counterproductive hardly implementable laws, and government policy instituted handpicking of winners and losers.

In short, big government puts in the incentives that rewards corruption which leads to economic bondage. Ergo, the bigger the government the bigger risks of corruption. We partly dealt about this in our previous post The Economics of Philippine Election Spending.

Although the following video is referenced to Americans, this big government -corruption causality has a universal application. Just replace Malacanang with Washington and the political dynamics are all the same.

Anyway this introductory quote by Mr. Mitchell from Cato.org,

``Washington is riddled with both legal and illegal corruption, but why?

``Perhaps it is because government is too big and has too much power. The federal budget redistributes $3.5 trillion through more than 1,800 subsidy programs. The regulatory burden is $1.2 trillion and there have been 51,000 new regulations since 1995. And there are more than 70,000 pages of tax law and regulations.

``These are the reasons why Washington is a hornet’s nest of deal-making, influence-peddling, and back-scratching."