On Monday, I wrote about the man who can’t be taxed. There were many comments, some confused, some insightful, and (at least) one brilliant. Let me highlight that brilliant comment, then beat the point to death a little, and then draw a large moral.

Our commenter Ken B invited us to imagine a dead man, with, say $84,000,000 in his bank account (and a will that requires this bank account to be maintained forever). And let’s suppose the government confiscates, say 82 of those 84 millions, thereby allowing it to reduce other people’s current or future taxes —making those people richer. They buy more stuff. They eat more, they burn more gas, they occupy more space. Where did that stuff come from?

(Alternatively, instead of lowering someone else’s taxes, the government takes the opportunity to spend more, in which case the government claims more stuff. We still have to ask where it comes from.)

It certainly did not come from the dead man, who was eating nothing, burning no gas, and occupying no more space than he continues to occupy. Instead, somebody else must decide to consume less.

But initially nobody wants to consume less. So people, collectively, are trying to consume more stuff than is available. This excess demand for stuff pushes up prices and/or interest rates until people are willing to cut their consumption.

There is no meaningful sense in which the dead man paid the tax. Instead, the tax burden is borne by those people who were hurt by rising prices and/or interest rates.

Continue reading ‘You Can’t Tax a Dead Man’

Nothing makes my job easier than a journalist who writes about something interesting and gets it 100% wrong.

Thanks, then, to Elizabeth Lesly Stevens for her column in yesterday’s Bay Citizen. Stevens wants to tax the “idle rich”, her Exhibit A being Robert Kendrick, heir to the $84 million Schlage Lock Company fortune. According to Ms. Stevens, Mr. Kendrick appears to do pretty much nothing but park and re-park his four cars all day long. Taxing people like Mr. Kendrick, she says, has to be part of any solution to America’s fiscal crisis.

Here’s what Ms. Stevens misses: Assuming the facts are as she states them, it is quite literally impossible to raise revenue by taxing the likes of Mr. Kendrick. We could argue about whether it’s desirable, but because it’s impossible, the discussion is moot.

Continue reading ‘The Man Who Can’t Be Taxed’

Gerald Seib, in the Wall Street Journal, reports that “There is a cancer eating away at the budget from within, one that steadily drains American wealth, sends much of it overseas and only gets worse over time.”

This is economic illiteracy in spades. The fact is that every single dollar of interest we pay on the national debt comes right back to the pockets of American taxpayers. If you don’t understand that, then you’re not thinking clearly about the national debt.

Suppose the government owes $100 and pays $3 a year in interest. The alternative to paying that interest is to raise current taxes by $100 and pay down the debt. If you do that, taxpayers are going to have $100 less in assets, and will therefore earn less interest on their savings. That costs them (roughly) the same $3 a year.

In other words, the damage was done back when the government spent that $100 in the first place. (Of course, if the $100 was spent wisely, the damage might have been worth doing. Or not.) Once that $100 has been spent, the taxpayers are out $3 a year forever regardless of whether the debt is ever paid off.

Continue reading ‘Defici(en)t Thinking’