Bruce Bartlett held senior policy roles in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and served on the staffs of Representatives Jack Kemp and Ron Paul. He is the author of the coming book “The Benefit and the Burden.”
In an effort to rejuvenate his flagging campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas announced his support for a flat-rate income tax in a Wall Street Journal op-ed article on Oct. 25.
Perspectives from expert contributors.
Perspectives from expert contributors.
The flat tax is an idea that has been kicking around Republican circles for 30 years. The publisher Steve Forbes made it the centerpiece of his unsuccessful 1996 and 2000 runs for the G.O.P. nomination. He is now advising Mr. Perry and was glowing in his praise for the governor’s plan. Writing in The New York Post, Mr. Forbes said it would “usher in a great economic boom.”
Larry Kudlow of CNBC, who has never seen a Republican tax cut he didn’t like, was so excited by Mr. Perry’s flat tax and Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan that he attributed the recent stock market rise to their influence. In a National Review column on Oct. 21, he said the stock market rally was “discounting a new G.O.P. growth plan that will replace the dreary Obama tax-the-rich mantra.”
Although Mr. Perry praised the simplicity of his plan, it would actually complicate the tax computation for many people, because they would have to calculate their taxes two or even three different ways when the alternative minimum tax was also included. That was because Mr. Perry’s flat tax would be an optional tax system; those who wanted to stay in the current system could do so.
This is really just a gimmick to allow Mr. Perry to say with a straight face that everyone would get a tax cut. “Taxes will be cut across all income groups,” he said. His plan allows Mr. Perry to skirt every difficult issue about the impact of tax reform, like the huge increase in taxes that would be paid by the poor because they would lose all refundable tax credits, including the earned income tax credit.
Keep in mind that refundable credits give many people a negative tax rate. That is, they pay no income taxes but still get a Treasury refund. Going from a negative rate to zero would mean a tax increase for such people, as a Tax Foundation analysis illustrates.
To prevent people from gaming the system, Mr. Perry would insist that all those choosing the flat tax would have to stay in that system permanently. It’s not clear if those paying income taxes for the first time would be permitted a choice.
The idea of an alternative flat tax system was originally cooked up by a Wall Street Journal editorial writer, Steve Moore. But at least his idea was that the alternative system would be something like a pure flat tax with no deductions whatsoever. However, Mr. Perry would keep three key deductions in his system, which undermines the whole point of the flat tax, which is to wipe the slate clean. It also makes no sense because those who want to keep the deductions for mortgage interest, charitable contributions and state and local taxes could simply stay in the current system.
One consequence of Mr. Perry’s flat-tax deviationism is that his proposed tax form is lengthened to a full page from the original postcard that Mr. Forbes promised. Because the 1040EZ tax form that most people use is also one page, it’s hard to see those who care about the length of their tax return flocking to the Perry plan.
Of course, if everyone could simply choose to be taxed less or not, it absolutely guaranteed that Mr. Perry’s plan would be a massive revenue loser. In 2007, the Tax Policy Center analyzed a plan similar to Mr. Perry’s that had been proposed by Senator Fred Thompson of Tennessee, who briefly competed for the 2008 Republican nomination. The analysis found that revenues from allowing people to choose would be substantially less than if everyone were forced into the new system.
Giving people a choice also substantially mitigated whatever positive economic effects would be achieved from a flat tax. Its whole point is to change economic behavior by, for example, forcing people to stop investing so much of their savings in owner-occupied housing and investing instead in corporate stock or other forms that will add to the economy’s productive capacity.
Because no one is forced to change their behavior under the Perry plan, there is no reason to think that there will be an increase in economic growth if it is implemented. It would just lose revenue and complicate the tax code. That’s all. Edward Kleinbard, a University of Southern California law professor, calls the Perry plan “a promise to put a unicorn in every pot.”
Mr. Perry has countered with an “analysis” by John Dunham, a former tobacco industry economist, that shows growth will explode under his plan. The analysis states that it was commissioned by the Perry campaign and presumably was not done free. Using “dynamic scoring,” the analysis says gross domestic product will be an astonishing $3.5 trillion larger by the year 2020. Implausibly, it says that federal revenues would be $407 billion higher than under the Congressional Budget Office’s current projections and will rise even as a percentage of G.D.P.
There is no explanation whatsoever for how these estimates were arrived at, and they appear to have come from some sort of black box. When I asked Professor Kleinbard, who was formerly staff director for Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation, what he thought about this, he corrected me. The estimates came from a “black magic box,” he said.
As Simon Johnson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently explained on this blog, studies show that perhaps a third of a tax rate cut might be recouped through higher growth, and only if spending is cut enough to keep the deficit from rising.
Governor Perry says he will slash spending to 18 percent of G.D.P. from its current level of 23 percent. No explanation was offered of how this would be done or how such a huge spending cut would ever be enacted by Congress. It should be noted that even if every domestic program other than Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is abolished, that would not be enough for Mr. Perry to reach his goal — all those programs together come to just 4.2 percent of G.D.P.
Thus, Mr. Perry’s plan cannot be taken seriously. I don’t think it’s meant to be, at least by those of us who don’t plan on voting in Republican primaries. It’s just a signaling device, telling the Republican faithful that they can trust Mr. Perry on the tax issue.
Whether the plan makes any sense as a matter of policy is irrelevant to its purpose, which is to win him the Republican nomination. With an Oct. 25 ABC News/Washington Post poll showing the flat tax much more popular among Republicans than Mr. Cain’s 9-9-9 plan, it might just work.
