New Orwellian Tax Scheme in England Would Require all Paychecks Go Directly to the Tax Authority

Our tax system in America is an absurd nightmare, but at least we have some ability to monitor what is happening. We can't get too aggressive (nobody wants the ogres at the IRS breathing down their necks), but at least we can adjust our withholding levels and control what gets put on our annual tax returns. The serfs in the United Kingdom are in much worse shape. To a large degree, the tax authority (Inland Revenue) decides everyone's tax liability, and taxpayers have no role other than to meekly acquiesce. But now the statists over in London have decided to go one step farther and have proposed to require employers to send all paychecks directly to the government. The politicians and bureaucrats that comprise the ruling class then would decide how much to pass along to the people actually earning the money. Here's a CNBC report on the issue.

The UK's tax collection agency is putting forth a proposal that all employers send employee paychecks to the government, after which the government would deduct what it deems as the appropriate tax and pay the employees by bank transfer. The proposal by Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) stresses the need for employers to provide real-time information to the government so that it can monitor all payments and make a better assessment of whether the correct tax is being paid. ...George Bull, head of Tax at Baker Tilly, told CNBC.com. "If HMRC has direct access to employees' bank accounts and makes a mistake, people are going to feel very exposed and vulnerable," Bull said. And the chance of widespread mistakes could be high, according to Bull. HMRC does not have a good track record of handling large computer systems and has suffered high-profile errors with data, he said. ...the cost of implementing the new system would be "phenomenal," Bull pointed out. ...The Institute of Directors (IoD), a UK organization created to promote the business agenda of directors and entreprenuers, said in a press release it had major concerns about the proposal to allow employees' pay to be paid directly to HMRC.

This is withholding on steroids. Politicians love pay-as-you-earn (as it's called on the other side of the ocean), largely because it disguises the burden of government. Many workers never realize how much of their paychecks are confiscated by politicians. Indeed, they probably think greedy companies are to blame when higher tax burdens result in less take-home pay. This new system could have an even more corrosive effect. It presumably would become more difficult for taxpayers to know how much government is costing them, and some people might even begin to think that their pay is the result of political kindness. After all, zoo animals often feel gratitude to the keepers that feed (and enslave) them.

Nazis, Communists, and Moral Bankruptcy

Jeff Jacoby righteously - and rightfully - condemns the moral perversion that allows people to overlook the barbaric cruelty and oppression of communism.

If Jose Saramago, the Portuguese writer who died on Friday at 87, had been an unrepentant Nazi for the last four decades, he would never have won international acclaim or received the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature. Leading publishers would never have brought out his books, his works would not have been translated into more than 20 languages, and the head of Portugal’s government would never have said on his death — as Prime Minister José Sócrates did say last week — that he was “one of our great cultural figures and his disappearance has left our culture poorer." But Saramago wasn’t a Nazi, he was a communist. And not just a nominal communist, as his obituaries pointed out, but an "unabashed" (Washington Post), “unflinching’’ (AP), “unfaltering’’ (New York Times) true believer. A member since 1969 of Portugal’s hardline Communist Party, Saramago called himself a “hormonal communist’’ who in all the years since had "found nothing better." ...the idea that good people can be devoted communists is grotesque. The two categories are mutually exclusive. There was a time, perhaps, when dedication to communism could be absolved as misplaced idealism or naiveté, but that day is long past. After Auschwitz and Babi Yar, only a moral cripple could be a committed Nazi. By the same token, there are no good and decent communists — not after the Gulag Archipelago and the Cambodian killing fields and Mao’s “Great Leap Forward.’’ Not after the testimonies of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Armando Valladares and Dith Pran. In the decades since 1917, communism has led to more slaughter and suffering than any other cause in human history. Communist regimes on four continents sent an estimated 100 million men, women, and children to their deaths — not out of misplaced zeal in pursuit of a fundamentally beautiful theory, but out of utopian fanaticism and an unquenchable lust for power. Mass murder and terror have always been intrinsic to communism. “Many archives and witnesses prove conclusively,’’ wrote Stéphane Courtois in his introduction to “The Black Book of Communism,’’ a magisterial compendium of communist crimes first published in France in 1997, “that terror has always been one of the basic ingredients of modern communism.’’ The uniqueness of the Holocaust notwithstanding, the savageries of communism and of Nazism are morally interchangeable — except that the former began much earlier than the latter, lasted much longer, and shed far more blood.

A Totalitarian Future for Europe?

I don't often agree with the statist president of the European Commission, but Mr. Barroso may be right when he warns that some nations are at risk of descending back into dictatorship. But while he may be correct in his diagnosis, his proposed solution is more of the policies - redistribution, handounts, bailouts, and subsidies - that have caused nations to get in trouble in the first place. At best, this approach postpones the day of reckoning - but it also causes a much bigger collapse.

During my recent visits to Europe, I was surprised by the level of pessimism from all segments of the population. The general assessment is that Europe is heading downhill and that there is little hope of changing direction because too many people have been convinced by politicians that they are entitled to mooch. But, as Margaret Thatcher famously warned, the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money. That is what is happening in Europe. But rather than sober up, the Greeks and others are rioting in hopes of finding new victims to consume. Many people I talked to expressed concern that this attitude eventually would cause economic collapse and lead to some sort of anti-democratic rule. The optimists (if you can call them that) think the result may be some sort of soft despotism dictated by Brussels and enforced by bribes from (mostly) German taxpayers. Others are more dour and fear the rise of more malignant forms of dictatorship.

Here's a blurb from the U.K.-based Daily Mail:

Democracy could ‘collapse’ in Greece, Spain and Portugal unless urgent action is taken to tackle the debt crisis, the head of the European Commission has warned. In an extraordinary briefing to trade union chiefs last week, Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso set out an ‘apocalyptic’ vision in which crisis-hit countries in southern Europe could fall victim to military coups or popular uprisings as interest rates soar and public services collapse because their governments run out of money. The stark warning came as it emerged that EU chiefs have begun work on an emergency bailout package for Spain which is likely to run into hundreds of billions of pounds. ...Leaders are expected to thrash out a rescue package for Spain’s teetering economy. Spain is expected to ask for an initial guarantee of at least £100 billion, although this figure could rise sharply if the crisis deepens. News of the behind-the-scenes scramble in Brussels spells bad news for the British economy as many of our major banks have loaned Spain vast sums of money in recent years. Germany’s authoritative Frankfurter Allgemeine Newspaper reported that Spain is poised to ask for multi-billion pound credits. Mr Barroso and Jean-Claude Trichet of the European Central Bank are united on the need for a rescue plan. The looming bankruptcy of Spain, one of the foremost economies in Europe, poses far more of a threat to European unity and the euro project than Greece. Greece contributes 2.5 percent of GDP to Europe, Spain nearly 12 percent.

Americans Are More Ethical than Europeans - and We Should Fight to Preserve that Exceptionalism

Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute explains in the Wall Street Journal that Americans protest to restrain government while European riot to expand the burden of the state. But this American spirit of self reliance may not last if government seduces more and more people into dependency - and I think fighting against this grim possibility is the chief motivating force of the tea party movement.

Many Europeans also expect others to work so they can live. The International Social Survey Programme asked Americans and Europeans whether they believe "It is the responsibility of the government to reduce the differences in income between people with high incomes and those with low incomes." In virtually all of Western Europe more than 50% agree, and in many countries it is much higher—77% in Spain, whose redistributive economy is in shambles. Meanwhile, only 33% of Americans agree with income redistribution. Simply put, Europeans have a much stronger taste for other people's money than we do. This is vividly illustrated by the recent protests in the U.S. and Greece. Why are citizens rioting and striking in Greece? Despite the worst economic crisis in decades, labor unions and state functionaries demand that others pay for the early retirements, lifetime benefits and state pensions to which they feel entitled. In America, however, the tea partiers demonstrate not to get more from others, but rather against government growth, public debt, bailouts and a budget-busting government overhaul of the health-care industry. In other words, the tea partiers are protesting against exactly what the Greeks are demanding. It is an example of American exceptionalism if there ever was one.

Will "Hauser's Law" Protect Us from Revenue-Hungry Politicians?

David Ranson had a good column earlier this week in the Wall Street Journal explaining that federal tax revenues historically have hovered around 19 percent of gross domestic product, regardless whether tax rates are high or low. One reason for this relationship, as he explains, is that the Laffer Curve is a real-world constraint on class warfare tax policy. When politicians boost tax rates, that motivates taxpayers to earn and/or report less income to the IRS:

The feds assume a relationship between the economy and tax revenue that is divorced from reality. Six decades of history have established one far-reaching fact that needs to be built into fiscal calculations: Increases in federal tax rates, particularly if targeted at the higher brackets, produce no additional revenue. For politicians this is truly an inconvenient truth. ...tax revenue has grown over the past eight decades along with the size of the economy. It illustrates the empirical relationship first introduced on this page 20 years ago by the Hoover Institution's W. Kurt Hauser—a close proportionality between revenue and GDP since World War II, despite big changes in marginal tax rates in both directions. "Hauser's Law," as I call this formula, reveals a kind of capacity ceiling for federal tax receipts at about 19% of GDP. ...he tax base is not something that the government can kick around at will. It represents a living economic system that makes its own collective choices. In a tax code of 70,000 pages there are innumerable ways for high-income earners to seek out and use ambiguities and loopholes. The more they are incentivized to make an effort to game the system, the less the federal government will get to collect.

Several people have asked my opinion about the piece. I like the column, of course, but I'm not nearly so optimistic that 19 percent of GDP represents some sort of limit on the federal government's taxing power. There are many nations in Europe with tax burdens closer to 50 percent, for instance, so governments obviously have figured how to extract much higher shares of national output. Part of the difference is because America has a federal system, and state and local governments collect taxes of about 10 percent of GDP. That still leaves a significant gap in total tax collections, though, so the real question is why American politicians are not as proficient as their European cousins at confiscating money from the private sector?

One reason is that European countries have value-added taxes, which are a disturbingly efficient way of generating more revenue. So does this mean that "Hauser's Law" will protect us if politicians are too scared to impose a nationwide sales tax? That's certainly a necessary condition for restraining government, but probably not a sufficient condition. If you look at the table, which is excerpted from the OECD's annual Revenue Statistics publication, you can see that nations such as New Zealand and Denmark have figured out how to extract huge amounts of money using the personal and corporate income tax.

In some cases, tax rates are higher in other nations, but the main factor seems to be that the top tax rates in other nations are imposed at much lower levels of income. Americans don't get hit with the maximum tax rate until our incomes are nine times the national average. In other nations, by contrast, the top tax rates take effect much faster, in some cases when taxpayers have just average incomes. In other words, European nations collect a lot more money because they impose much higher tax rates on ordinary people. Here's a chart I put together a few years ago for a paper I wrote for Heritage (you can find updated numbers in Table 1.7 of this OECD website, but the chart will still look the same).

Europeans also sometimes impose high tax rates on rich people, but this is not the reason that tax receipts consume nearly 50 percent of GDP in some nations. Rich people in Europe, like their counterparts in America, have much greater ability to control the amount of taxable income that is earned and/or reported. These "Laffer Curve" responses limit the degree to which politicians can finance big government on the backs of a small minority.

But high tax rates on the rich do serve a very important political goal. Politicians understand that ordinary people will be less likely to resist oppressive tax rates if they think that those with larger incomes are being treated even worse. Simply stated, higher tax rates on the rich are a necessary precondition for higher tax rates on average taxpayers.

For "Hauser's Law" to be effective, this means proponents of limited government need to fight two battles. First, they need to stop a VAT. Second, they need to block higher tax rates on the so-called rich in order to prevent higher tax rates on the middle class.

Competition Between Governments Can Help Thwart Over-Regulation

A new study from the University of Michigan Law School's Empirical Legal Studies Center finds that it is more difficult today for politicians to impose excessive financial regulation because firms can migrate to jurisdictions with more pro-market policy. The author notes tht this is less true for institutions, such as big banks, that want government protection, but laissez-faire entities such as hedge funds have substantial ability to flee bad government policy:

Jurisdictional competition spread from corporate law to its close cousin, securities law. Historically, issuers listed their stock for trading on one of the exchanges in the country where they principally did business. Improvements in communication and related technologies, however, have made possible an international market for stock exchange listings that resembles in many respects the long‐standing federal market for corporate charters in the United States. Now companies can list their shares for trading on exchanges in any number of countries; there is no longer a logical nexus between the site of a company’s headquarters and where its shares are traded. ...Does that free movement of capital limit the ability of the Obama administration to reform financial regulation in the United States? ...After the United States effectively raised listing standards by enacting the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act in 2002, foreign companies headed for the door. London seized the opportunity; fourteen of the top twenty initial public offerings (“IPOs”) listed on the London Stock Exchange (“LSE”) came from outside the United Kingdom in 2005 to 2008. By contrast, only four of the top twenty IPOs in New York came from outside the United States. Further, it was not only foreign companies that were leaving; United States companies left the public market in droves, headed for the greener (or at less regulated) fields of private equity, and they were not being replaced. A Grant Thornton study documented a staggering thirty‐nine percent decline in United States listings from a peak of 8,823 in 1997 to only 5,401 in 2008. ...hedge funds can go elsewhere if a country tries to enmesh them in red tape. Running a hedge fund only requires an office and an Internet connection. ...Debates over hedge fund regulation take place against the shadow of the threat of the flight of these financial intermediaries. And that flight has already begun. The United Kingdom raised its top tax rate to fifty percent in April. That move, along with EU restrictions on borrowing by hedge funds, already prompted a number of hedge funds to emigrate to greener pastures. ...Hedge fund bankers are not happy about being treated like bankers. Unlike bankers, however, they do not have to stick around and take it. “About [twenty] percent of the hedge‐fund community could leave the [United Kingdom] in the next two or three years. The feeling among the hedge‐community is there is a better place to be.” Where is that better place? Asia. Places like Singapore are attracting hedge funds... Of course, the fact that Singapore does not tax capital gains may have had something to do with its attractiveness. ...So what does global competition mean for populist retribution against the money changers? Apparently it depends on the mobility of the money changes you are talking about. Big banks need government backing to be credible with depositors and counterparties, so the bankers at those institutions are going to have to stick around and take it. Smaller institutions, like hedge funds, are much more portable, and if Western governments attempt to impose banker‐like restrictions on them, they will head elsewhere. ...The forces of financial capitalism can no longer be confined within the boundaries of a single nation, so regulation is not simply a matter of mustering the requisite political will. There is no shortage of anger against the bankers in the current environment, but it can only be deployed against financial intermediaries who cannot flee the regulatory wrath. ...International competition in financial services regulation now serves as a check on populist retribution, but only a partial one.