tax

The government is unique among economic institutions insofar as it can use coercion legally. But not all activities are coercive. Clearly, taxation is overwhelmingly coercive. Some people say that they are happy to pay taxes, but the voluntary gifts to the US Treasury are itsy-bitsy (just over $1m for FY 2023). Most regulations also include the threat of fines or jail time for non-compliance.

But once the government has the money in their coffers, there is plenty that they can do consensually. Once they have the resources, they are often just another potential transactor in the markets for goods and services. While the government can transact as well as anyone else, there is a fundamental theoretical difference for how we should interpret those transactions. Specifically, there is a principal-agent problem such that we can’t quite identify the welfare that is enjoyed by consumers when the government makes purchases. We really have very little idea.

Garett Jones uses the analogy of the government confiscating potatoes. The worst use would be for the government to throw the valuable resources into the river. Those resources help no one. Improved welfare would be yielded if the government just transferred those potatoes back to people. Sure, there’s the transaction cost of administration, but people get their potatoes back. Finally, the great hope is that the government takes the potatoes and makes tasty potato fritas such that they return to the public something more valuable than they took. These might be things that fall into the public goods category or solving collective action problems generally.

The above examples illustrates that how the government spends matters a lot for the welfare implications of the newly purchased government resources. But, we need to recall that there is an entire private segment of the market that is affected by the government transactions.

Short-Run Analysis

In a competitive market, firms face increasing marginal costs and make decisions about their levels of output. When the government makes purchases, it’s simply acting as another demander. How does the entry of a larger demander affect everyone else in the market? See the below GIF.

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Public utilities are funny things. The industry is highly capital intensive and many argue that it makes for natural monopolies. At the same time, access to electricity and water (and internet) are assumed as given in any modern building. Further, utility providers are highly, highly regulated at both the state and federal levels of government. Many utilities must ask permission prior to changing anything about their prices, capital, or even which services they offer.

Don’t get me wrong. Utility companies have a sweet deal. They are protected from competition, face relatively inelastic demand for their goods, and they have a very dependable rate of return. I just can’t help feeling like state governments are keeping hostage a large firm with immobile fixed business capital. For that matter, given what we know about the political desire for opaque taxation, I also have a suspicion that many states might tax their populations by using the utility companies as an ingenious foil. “Those utility companies are greedy, don’t you know. It’s a good thing that they are so highly regulated by the state.”

There are two types of utility taxation. 1) Gross receipts taxes are like an income tax. From the end-user’s perspective, the tax increases with each unit consumed. 2) A utility license tax is like a fee that the utility must pay in order to operate in the state. From the user’s perspective, well… This tax may not even appear on the monthly bill. But if it does, then the tax per household falls with each additional household that the utility serves. Either way, state governments can get their share of the economic profits that protection affords. Below is map which shows the 2021 cumulative utility tax per resident in each state.

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