When I was younger, and a more disagreeable libertarian, I was staunchly against almost all taxes. And not just all taxes in general. Each type of tax was a specific affront to human dignity in its own egregious way.
Sales taxes represented government meddling in private contracts.
Income taxes represented government stealing people’s time.
Property tax represented that living on land was a privilege provided by the state landlord. Private property was a myth.
I won’t win the fight over whether the state governments should be spending money. But, given that we have to pay for services, I can definitely opine on the desirable and undesirable traits of one tax or another. Economists tend to like sales taxes because they encourage saving, investment, capital formation, and greater output. Maybe that’s a good idea. But it’s not clear to me that we should incentivize consumption tomorrow at the cost of consumption today. There is no singular right answer to that tradeoff.
I would love to have a per-adult lump sum tax in which everyone pays the same dollar figure no matter what. I would also love to receive a million dollars – and that ain’t going to happen either. In lieu of a lump sum tax on people, I think that the next best thing is a lump sum tax on land. Each acre in a county can pay the same tax bill. On the margin, firms would economize on land and tend toward density. That would bring lots of agglomeration and economies of scale. Jeremy wrote recently about land taxes, which have a lot of proponents. I share the concerns about estimating land value and I think that it’s a non-trivial challenge.
I have previously wrote about living standards in Ireland, and how GDP per capita overstates typical incomes because of a lot of foreign investment.
This is not to say that foreign investment is bad — to the contrary! But standard income statistics, such as GDP, aren’t particularly useful for a country like Ireland.
Norway has a similar challenge with national income statistics, but a different reason: Oil. Norway has a very large supply of oil revenues relative to the size of the rest of its economy, and oil revenues are counted in GDP. But those oil revenues don’t necessarily translate into higher household income or consumption.
Using World Bank data, Norway appears to be very rich: GDP per capita in nominal terms was about $90,000 in 2021. Compare that with $70,000 in the US, which is a very rich country itself. Sounds extremely wealthy!
Of course, by that same statistic, average income in Ireland is $100,000. But after making all the proper adjustments, as we saw in my prior post, Ireland is right around the EU average in terms of what individuals and households actually consume.
I love data, I love maps, and I love data visualizations.
While we tend not to remember entire data sets, we often remember some patterns related to rank. Speaking for myself anyway, I usually remember a handful of values that are pertinent to me. If I have a list of data by state, then I might take special note of the relative ranking of Florida (where I live), the populous states, Kentucky (where my parents’ families live), and Virginia (where my wife’s family lives). I might also take special note of the top rank and the bottom rank. See the below table of liquor taxes by State. You can easily find any state that you care about because the states are listed alphabetically.
A ranking is useful. It helps the reader to organize the data in their mind. But rankings are ordinal. It’s cool that Florida has a lower liquor tax than Virginia and Kentucky, but I really care about the actual tax rates. Is the difference big or small? Like, should I be buying my liquor in one of the other states in the southeast instead of Florida? Without knowing the tax rates, I can’t make the economic calculation of whether the extra stop in Georgia is worth the time and hassle. So, the most useful small data sets will have both the ranking and the raw data. Maybe we’re more interested in the rankings, such as in the below table.
But, tables take time to consume. A reader might immediately take note of the bottom and top values. And given that the data is not in alphabetical order, they might be able to quickly pick out the state that they’re accustomed to seeing in print. But otherwise, it will be difficult to scan the list for particular values of interest.
On May 6, 2022, the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, signed House Bill 7071. The bill was touted as a tax-relief package for Floridians in order to ease the pains caused by inflation. In total, the bill includes $1.2 billion in forgone tax revenues by temporarily suspending sales taxes that are levied on a variety of items that pull at one’s heartstrings. Below is the list of affected products.
A minor political point that I want to make first is that the children’s items are getting a lot of press, but they are only about 18.4% of the tax expenditures. The tax break on hurricane windows and doors received 37% of the funds and gasoline is receiving another 16.7%. There are ~$150 million in additional sales, corporate, and ad valorem tax exemptions. Looking at the table, it seems that producers of hurricane windows and doors might be the biggest beneficiary and that that the children’s items are there to make the bill politically palatable. Regardless, this is probably not the best use of $1.2 billion.
There are at least three economic points worth making.
In the past several years there has been increasing salience and support of pronatalist policies. Several people have turned to the IRS income tax code, which already includes some incentives regarding children. The Child Tax Credit (CTC), which lowers a person’s tax liability on a dollar-per-dollar basis, is the most obvious item that addresses children. The other tax credit is for child care expenses, but I won’t be focusing on that here.
Below are the 2021 marginal tax rate brackets and the standard deductions. The standard deduction reduces the taxable income, and then the tax rates are applied.
After the tax liability is calculated, it’s reduced by any tax credits, such as the CTC. In 2021, households earned a credit of $3,600 for every child under 6 years old and $3,000 for every child under 18 years old. Median household income in 2020 was $67,521. That means that the tax liability was reduced by 5.3% – or 3/55ths – of median gross income. But, I have a problem with that.
Last week I wrote about the Simpsons’ mortgage payment. In short, I found that using a reasonable assumption of Homer’s income, the median housing price, and the rate of interest, the Simpsons are likely paying less of their household budget on housing today than in the 1990s.
But what about the family’s taxes? Are they getting squeezed by the taxman? Taxes are referenced throughout The Simpsons series. Here’s an article that collects a lot of the references. And that makes sense: the Simpsons are a normal American family, and normal American families love to complain about taxes.
Using the same reasonable assumption about Homer’s income from last week’s post (that Homer earns a constant percentage of a single-earner family, rather than merely adjusting for inflation), we can calculate the family’s average tax rate and how it has changed over the year. Conveniently, “average tax rate” is just economist speak for “how much of your family’s budget goes to the government.”
First, let’s just look at the federal income tax, since this is where most of the changes happen. Don’t worry, I’ll add in payroll taxes below, though this is a constant percent of the family’s budget since it is a flat tax on income!
The chart below shows the average tax rate the Simpsons paid for their federal income taxes. I didn’t go through every year, because: a) it’s a lot of work (I’m doing each year manually); and b) it’s more interesting to look at years right after or before major changes in the tax code. So no cherry picking here — the years selected are picked to tell a mostly complete story.
I’ll now briefly explain each of the years chosen, and what changes in the tax code impacted the Simpsons. But as you can see, just like their mortgage payment, the Simpsons are now spending less of their household income on federal income taxes (don’t worry, the trend is similar with payroll taxes included). In fact, they are now getting a net rebate from the federal government, and have been since the late 1990s!
We know that density is good for most environmental measures. With greater density comes less water runoff, less carbon emissions, less burned fossil fuel. With density, fewer people own vehicles, implements of yard curation, and we require fewer roofs per person.
What else do we know?
We know that in a static economy, progressive taxation makes after-tax incomes more equal. There are formal models that say the same thing about dynamic economies. Progressive taxation results in more income equality, and regressive taxation results in less. For clarity, income tax progressivity is determined by percent of income paid in taxes. When the rich pay a higher percent tax rate, that’s more progressive.
Are you ready?
Wealthy people tend to have more valuable land. That is, they improve the land and the things built on it. Do you want to tax land progressively? Then what you want is a property tax with a sliding tax rate. This way, you can make those rich people pay their ‘fair share‘. Even without a sliding scale, rich people will pay more dollars for their improved land.
Uh-oh.
Now that we are taxing property on land proportionally, rich people are seeking alternatives. They’re trying to avoid taxes! What do they do? Well, a smaller and cheaper house is a nonstarter. What is all that wealth for, if not to enjoy it partly through one’s home environment? The rich are going to find a place to live where they can be comfortable and where their property taxes are lower. Maybe a place where the land is not so expensive. Hello rural estate!
Do you want a proportional property tax so that rich people pay for the value of their property? Be ready to say hello to suburbanization and sprawl. All those benefits of urbanization mentioned above? Invert all of them to see the results.
Okay…
I see the attraction of taxing immovable property. Taxing a residence is nice for the government because the tax revenues are nice and stable, given the relatively inelastic demand for real property.
If only there were a real property tax scheme that provided stable revenues and encouraged urbanization… Well, the answer is not to try taxing the value of the land without taxing the value of property. What am I? A Georgist?
A Georgist I am not. But, I do have an affinity for lump sum taxes.
If, as a polity, you want urbanization, then impose lump sum taxes per area of land owned. Doesn’t matter if it’s a house. Doesn’t matter if it’s commercial. Doesn’t matter if it’s unimproved farm land. Just sit back and watch the skyline rise, our environmental footprint shrink, and plenty of land being turned into wildlife preserves and parks.
Oh dear.
People have feelings. Consider a beautiful multi story single-family home on an acre. Now consider a mobile home with a large yard and some trees – also on an acre. With a standard, flat proportional property tax, the owner of the big pricey house pays more. With lump sum taxes per square foot of land, they pay the same dollar figure. In other words, the less wealthy person pays a higher proportion of his properties value in taxes. In case you missed it, this beautiful solution to sprawl and environmental degradation comes hand-in-hand with proportional regressivity.
BTW:
I live in Collier County Florida. If all of the land, excluding surface water, in the county was taxed at the same lump sum per square foot, then we would need to pay about $1,600 per acre in order to replace all revenues currently collected from a variety of sources. If we assume that government property is excluded from the tax and we assume that the government owns a very liberal 10% of all property, then it is more like $1,780.
I haven’t even discussed all of the improved economic performance that an already developed counties might enjoy by eliminating the distortionary excise taxes and ad valorem taxes. I don’t know about you, but $1,600 doesn’t sound too bad in exchange for eliminating all the other nickel and dimes that add up to quite a bit.
(Just as I am not a Georgist, I am also not a revolutionary. We need not jump in head-first. We could ease our way into such a system. We’d just add a fixed lump-sum portion to existing property tax bills that increases over time. Property taxes bills would be calculated slope-intercept style with a portion being constant and a portion being dependent of property value.)
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