Bruce Bartlett held senior policy roles in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and served on the staffs of Representatives Jack Kemp and Ron Paul.
Warren Buffett’s commentary in The New York Times on Aug. 15 has opened a new front in the continuing debate on whether taxes should be raised to reduce projected budget deficits.
Perspectives from expert contributors.
Perspectives from expert contributors.
Conservative groups such as the Tax Foundation pooh-pooh the idea of raising tax rates on the rich, asserting that there isn’t enough money available to bother with.
On Friday, however, the respected Tax Policy Center published estimates showing that the potential revenue would have a significant impact on projected deficits. It looked at several options, including a 50 percent top rate on incomes over $1 million and changes to the taxation of dividends and capital gains.
As one can see, the revenue potential depends critically on what baseline is assumed. That is because the top tax rate is already scheduled to rise to 39.6 percent on incomes over $380,000 in 2013. Moreover, dividends on corporate stock would go back to being taxed as ordinary income. And capital gains would go back to being taxed at a maximum rate of 20 percent.
The larger question is how much the well-to-do should pay. According to the Internal Revenue Service, in 2008, those in the top 1 percent of the income distribution, with incomes over $380,000, had an effective tax rate of 23.3 percent. In 1986, a year when the real gross domestic product grew a healthy 3.5 percent, their effective tax rate was 33.1 percent. It has been much lower every year since.
If this group were still paying 33.1 percent, federal revenue would have been more than $166 billion higher in 2008 alone. That would be enough to reduce the budget deficit by about 10 percent this year. If the top 1 percent of taxpayers had continued to pay the same effective tax rate they paid in 1986 every year from 1987 to 2008, the federal debt today would be $1.7 trillion lower.
Of course, these are not hard numbers. If the effective tax rate had stayed at 33.1 percent on the top 1 percent of taxpayers all these years, their behavior would undoubtedly have changed.
And it probably would have been impractical to maintain a higher rate on just the top 1 percent of taxpayers without having had higher rates on many of those below that percentile. But it does show the order of magnitude of how much revenue has been sacrificed from tax cuts on those with very high incomes.
Some will argue that those tax cuts bought higher economic growth, but that is very doubtful. Growth was stronger in the 1990s when the relative revenue loss was small and was dismal during the George W. Bush administration, when two-thirds of the aggregate revenue loss occurred.
It is not class warfare to suggest that the richest 1 percent of people in society pay one-third of their income to the federal government, as they did under Ronald Reagan. Keep in mind that dividends were taxable as ordinary income every year of his administration, and in the Tax Reform Act of 1986 he supported taxing capital gains as ordinary income as well.
Higher effective tax rates on the rich could even be achieved without raising the top tax rate bracket to 50 percent, as it was under President Reagan. There are many tax preferences that largely benefit the well-to-do that could be scaled back to avoid raising marginal rates.
The important thing is for people to accept that we can no longer afford such low effective tax rates on those with the greatest capacity to pay at a time when total revenue as a percentage of G.D.P. are at their lowest level in 60 years and we are facing a debt crisis. The issue is not whether the rich should pay more, but how best to accomplish it.
