Gerard
Jackson
It was
1962 when Jack Kennedy stated that “it is a paradoxical that tax rates are
too high and tax revenues too low”. In other words, high taxes were retarding
investment and output, thus keeping the American standard of living lower
than it would otherwise be. It was this belief that motivated the 1963 tax
cuts. The result was a surge in investment. From 1959 to 1963 only 27.8 per
cent of what is termed ‘investment’ went to business and 38.5 per cent to
real estate. In 1967, thanks to the cuts, the proportion going to business
had jumped to 58.6 per cent while the amount going to real estate had dropped
to 11.2 per cent and the demand for labour jumped. In addition, revenue from
the income tax rose from $48.7 billion in 1964 to $68.7 billion in 1968. (The
Kennedy’s tax cuts were enormous and, as a proportion of national income,
about twice as large as the Bush cuts).
But
from whom did Kennedy obtain his wisdom on the value of tax cuts? Keynesians,
that’s who. Prominent among these was Walter Heller who believed that tax
cuts could increase tax receipts. As he himself said:
The
upsurge of tax revenues flowing from economic expansion would finance higher
levels of local, state, and Federal spending than we would have had without
the tax cuts stimulus…1
The
positive economic response to the Kennedy tax cuts proved that you cannot
have a dynamic economy if venture capital is penalised, entrepreneurial
mobility severely restricted and the rewards of successfully satisfying
consumers’ needs are heavily taxed. In 1969, for example, President Nixon
raised the capital gains tax from 28 per cent to 49 per cent. Result: revenue
from the tax dropped sharply with realised gains from the sale of capital
assets diving by 34 per cent, and the stock issues of struggling companies
collapsing from about 500 in 1969 to precisely four in 1975. High-tech
companies in Silicon Valley were hit particularly hard.
So why
did President Nixon make this mistake? He had been assured by Treasury
economists that their economic model predicted that the tax would raise $1.1
billion in the first year and then $3.2 billion a year until 1975. The only
thing that the Treasury model proved, apart from the fact that these models
are useless, is that taxes do affect behaviour.
In 1978
Congress for once did the sensible economic thing and slashed capital gains
taxes, resulting in the supply of venture capital exploding. By the start of
1979 a massive commitment to venture capital funds had taken place, rising
from a pathetic $39 million in 1977 to a staggering $570 million at the end
of 1978. Tax collections on long-term capital gains, despite the dire
predictions of big-spending critics of cuts, leapt from $8.5 billion in 1978
to $10.6 billion in 1979, $16.5 billion in 1983 and $23.7 billion in 1985.
By 1981
venture capital outlays had soared to $1.4 billion and the total amount of
venture capital had risen to $5.8 billion. In 1981 the maximum tax rate on
long-term capital gains was cut to 20 per cent. This resulted in the venture
capital pool surging to $11.5 billion. Astonishingly enough — to conventional
economists that is — venture capital outlays rose to $1.8 billion in the
midst of the 1982 depression. This was about 400 per cent more than had been
out-laid during the 1970s slump. In 1983 these outlays rose to nearly $3
billion. Compare this situation to the period from 1969 to the 1970s which
saw venture capital outlays collapse by about 90 per cent. All because of
Nixon’s ill-considered capital gains tax. But then Nixon — unlike so many
journalists — never professed to know anything about economics.
In 1982
the US General Accounting Office sampled 72 companies that had been launched
with venture capital since the 1978 capital gains tax cut. The results were
startling. Starting with $209 million dollars in funds, these companies had
paid $350 million in federal taxes, generated $900 million in export income
and directly created 135,000 jobs. The figure below illustrates the Laffer
curve. The vertical axis is the tax rate and the horizontal axis is tax
revenue while point A is the optimum tax. When the tax rate exceeds point A
tax revenues fall. It follows, therefore, that any movement back to point A
will increase revenues.
The
actual basis of the Laffer curve is the knowledge that if you want more of
something then reduce the cost of producing it. In this case it is not really
tax revenues that we want to increase but investment. Investment is fuelled
by savings. Hence capital gains taxes strike at savings and investment which
in turn slow downs economic growth.
From
this we can deduce that capital gains taxes are also transaction taxes. Where
they are levied on the sale of assets, e.g., shares, they have the effect of
reducing the number of transactions because this is a legal and easy way of
avoiding the tax. Try to imagine for a moment what would have happened to
economic growth in nineteenth century England if, for example, investors had
been punitively taxed for trying to move their investments from canal companies
to railway and coal companies.
Now
this brings us to figure 1 which describes a production structure. This
concept is used by the Austrian school of economics to help explain the
fundamental operations of an economy and how savinging and investment shape
it. Each rectangle is a stage of production and the steps between the stages
represent the price margins for each stage2.
This
approach stresses two important facts for Austrian economics: a) the crucial
importance of time in production and b) and that production occurs in stages.
Now it is important to stress these two facts because the majority of economists
adhere to the Clark-Knight treatment of capital that views it as a permanent
and self-maintaining fund3. They also assume that production and
consumption occur simultaneously instead of occurring through time.
It will
be noted that figure 1 has 7 stages. Let us assume that the government
abolishes capital gains taxes. The first effect will be to widen the price
margins. The differences between the new price margins and the old ones are
capital gains. Now capital gains are profits. When these emerge it is an
indication that factors of production are undervalued in relation to the
value of their products. This means that it now profitable for capitalists to
employ more and more factors of production until the capital gains have been
competed away.
The result
is a longer and wider capital structure as represented by figure 2. We can
now see that the new capital structure is far more productive than the old
one. Gross savings — which by definition includes spending on intermediate
goods — has also increased. So long as this business spending is maintained
the capital structure will not shorten. It should be plain enough that in a
free market the amount of gross savings depends on decisions made by
capitalists. There is nothing permanent or automatic about the capital
structure or entrepreneurial decision-making. (This is why politicians need
to be educated on the nature of gross savings).
The
lengthening and widening of the capital structure is what happened in
nineteenth century Britain to an enormous degree. For example, We can see
from the chart above that general prices peaked in 1872 and then began a long
decline, falling from 150 to about 70, a drop of some 53 per cent. Whichever
way one looks at it this was a remarkable achievement. It was period that saw
a steady increase in both money wages and real wages even as the population
increased significantly. Of particular interest is government spending which
in 1841 was 11 per cent of GDP but only 9 per cent in 1890. However, a
halving of prices doubles purchasing power, so in real terms government
spending rose significantly during that period.4
Nevertheless,
none of the above directly tells us how the Laffer curve generates so much
revenue. This brings us to the dangerous fallacy of the stable price level,
according to which a stable price level indicates the absence of inflation.
For the price level to remain stable it is argued that monetary expansion
must equal the growth in output5. In plain English, monetary
policy must be manipulated in away that offsets the beneficial effects of
increased productivity.
Therefore,
as the cut in capital gains taxes stimulate investment and production and
exert a downward pressure on prices monetary policy increases the money value
of the increased output thereby countering the downward pressure on prices
created by increased productivity. The expanding money supply accelerates the
growth in tax revenues. Paradoxically, this monetary policy can offset to a
certain degree the beneficial effects of capital gains taxes6.
It
should be obvious that this is an argument against monetary manipulation and
not cuts in capital gains taxes. Furthermore, the British experience clearly
demonstrates that even in the absence of an ‘accommodating’ monetary policy
the government would still eventually raise its spending in real terms which
would compensate for any reduction in revenue due to cutting capital gains
taxes7.
Regarding
I need to emphasise a couple of points here. Firstly, the complexity of the
production structure is far too great for anyone to comprehend. Even in the
case of a single product there could be hundreds if not thousands of stages
of production as the following quote from Hayek explains:
What is
no less important is that, in the course of the lengthening of the process,
the stream of operations leading up to a given product will as a rule be
split up into many branches and sub-branches. And it may be that, long before
the first move is made to produce the actual material from which the product
is to be made, work is being taken in hand to provide some auxiliary material
or tool which will be needed later to convert the raw material into the final
product. At each stage of the process from the raw material to the finished
product the main stream will be joined by tributaries which in some cases may
already have run through a much longer course than the main stream itself.
But all these activities, many of which may be carried on at the same time at
different places, have to be regarded as part of the same process, and have
to be taken into account when we talk about its length. The series of
operations which are required in order to provide the fuel or lubricant, and
the tools or machines which are needed for turning the raw material into the
finished product, are just as much part of the process of production of the
good as the operations performed on the raw material8
When
speaking of tax cuts promoting growth one must always bear in mind the
effects of regulation. A stage can be reached where the regulatory burden has
become so onerous that it virtually negates the positive effects of tax cuts.
Additionally, those who advocate cuts always assume the absence of severe
politically-created uncertainty. It was not the case under Roosevelt and it
is not the case under Obama.
Note: The production structure diagram is
not meant to suggest that the structure can, in physical terms, expand its
length indefinitely. Therefore the lengthening of investment periods does not
always necessitate additional stages of production. In some cases it merely
requires the replacement of existing stages with more advanced but more time
consuming stages consisting of capital combinations embodying improved or new
technologies. The extent to which this happens determines the extent which it
affects capital combinations in other parts of the capital structure9.
For reasons of space I made only a passing reference to the role monetary
policy can play in shaping the capital structure. Hayek did, however, deal
with this problem in tabulated form6.
* * * * *
1Cited
in A. James Meigs’ Money Matters:
Economics, Markets, Politics, Harper & Row, Publishers,
1972, p. 38).
2This
analysis was pioneered by William Stanley Jevons, Theory of Political Economy, 4th
edition Augustus M Kelley & Millman, Inc. 1957, pp. 229-235) . Knut
Wicksell also used a structure of production approach with a time dimension
in Lectures on Political Economy,
Augustus M. Kelley Publishers 1977, pp. 151-153.
3John
Bates , Clark Essentials of Economic
Theory, The Macmillan Company, 1924, pp. 18-19 and p. 29.
4H.
S. Ferns, The Disease of Government,
Maurice Temple Smith, 1978
5According
to the thinking of the Austrian school of economics a monetary-induced
reduction in the rate of interest expands the demand for credit to fund
projects which become malinvestments. In addition, the Austrians stress that
money is not and cannot be neutral.
6Friedrich
von Hayek, Profits, Interest and
Investment, Augustus M Kelley Publishers, 1975, pp. 199-263.
7very
few economists know that nineteenth Britain was actually on a quasi-gold standard.
The amount bank credit always greatly exceeded gold reserves. It was the
deviations from the gold standard principle that caused recurring financial
crises.
8Friedrich
von Hayek, Prices and Production,
Augustus M. Kelley, 1967 and The Pure
Theory of Capital, The University of Chicago Press, 1975, pp.
74-5.
9Ludwig
von Lachman, Capital and Its Structure,
Sheed Andrews and McMeel Inc., 1978
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