Who Killed Cock Robin?

From the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco:

While our estimates show that fiscal policy has held back the recovery slightly to date, the effect over the next three years looks much bigger. The CBO projects that the federal deficit as a share of GDP will drop 1.4 percentage points per year over the next three years. This projection would ease slightly to 1.2 percentage points per year if sequestration spending cuts were reversed. By contrast, our calculation of the historical-norm deficit decline through 2015 is 0.4 percentage point per year based on the CBO’s output gap projections. This implies that the excess drag from the rapidly shrinking deficit would reduce real GDP growth annually by between 0.8 and 1.0 percentage point, depending on whether sequestration is reversed. Thus, with or without sequestration, fiscal policy is expected to be a much greater drag on economic growth over the next three years than it has been so far.

Surprisingly, despite all the attention federal spending cuts and sequestration have received, our calculations suggest they are not the main contributors to this projected drag. The excess fiscal drag on the horizon comes almost entirely from rising taxes. Specifically, we calculate that nine-tenths of that projected 1 percentage point excess fiscal drag comes from tax revenue rising faster than normal as a share of the economy. As Panel B shows, at the end of 2012, taxes as a share of GDP were below both their historical norm in relation to the business cycle and their long-run average of about 18%. However, over the next three years, they are projected to rise much faster than our estimate of the usual cyclical pattern would indicate. The CBO points to several factors underlying this “super-cyclical” rise, including higher income tax rates for high-income households, the recent expiration of temporary Social Security payroll tax cuts, and new taxes associated with the Obama Administration’s health-care legislation.

The emphasis is mine. You cannot be simultaneously in favor of economic growth and the fiscal policy on which we’ve embarked and, of spending cuts forced by sequestration and tax increases, tax increases are enormously more significant.

My main gripe about the tax increases have been the form that they’ve taken. Restoring the payroll tax is horribly regressive. People who complain about income inequality and then move to increase payroll taxes make me ill.

The three most important things that we could do to foster a reduction in income inequality are a) more jobs; b) eliminating payroll taxes; and c) reducing the subsidies paid to the top 10% of income earners. Those subsidies include both direct payments and tax expenditures like the home mortgage deduction, most of which goes to the highest income earners.