Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Does taxing high incomes mean taxing the rich?

Politicians (particularly Democrats) and the media talk about high income and wealth as if they were the same thing. In fact, they aren't as correlated as you might think. Many rich people have low incomes (at least low taxable income), and many high earners are not yet rich.

A reasonable definition of rich is that level of wealth where you feel comfortable enough financially to quit your job. You can provide for all of your family's needs, live comfortably, and cover plausible emergencies or catastrophic events, just from the nest egg you have accumulated and the investment returns on that nest egg.

How much do you need to be rich? Most financially savvy people who have thought about the issue think that $3MM is a bare minimum. In today's low interest rate environment, you probably need more, but let's use $3MM as our benchmark.

Obama's tax plan says that households making over $250K are rich. Well, let's take a look at a household that's well into that "rich" bracket -- a 35-year old couple where both husband and wife work and are doing very well. Combined, they make $400K per year. They recently started making that kind of money and up until the present haven't been able to save much. They used to have $150K in retirement savings, which is now down to $100K, and they used to have $100K of equity in their house, but which is now basically nothing.

They have two kids in pre-school, a $400K mortgage, two 5-yr old cars and the usual assortment of modern amenities (groceries from Whole Foods, utilities, cell phones, broadband internet, cable tv, once a week housekeeper, landscaper, once a week babysitter, 2 vacations a year, etc).

I estimate that a fairly tight family budget would total at least $100K/yr outside of mortgage interest and taxes. This includes maintenance and insurance on the house and the cars (plus depreciation on the cars since they need to be replaced every ten years). Their current taxes are as follows:

Federal Income tax: $95K
FICA tax: $20K
State Income tax: $20K
Property tax: $5K
Mortgage interest $24K

At the end of the year, they get to save about $136K, and that's by being pretty frugal. So at that rate of saving, this couple won't be rich for over 15 years (this includes investment earnings on their savings), by which time the definition of rich will have moved from $3MM to $5MM.

Don't get me wrong, this family is quite affluent. They are living in a nice house and can easily afford the basic necessities of life. Their spending each year exceeds the total annual income of the vast majority of US households. But these people have very hectic lives, do not feel financially secure, and they are very worried about losing their incomes.

It is also important to recognize that much of the spending that seems extravagant is not really discretionary, but rather necessary to support a two-earner household. Pre-school ($15/yr), babysitters ($3K/yr), housekeeping ($5K/yr), maintaining more than one car ($3K/yr) -- these are items that a one-earner family can do without. So hiking taxes on income but not allowing deductions for these types of expenses definitely penalizes two-income families.

Anyway, my overall point is that income is a poor metric to use to decide who is rich. Income, at least wage income, is a better measure for determining how productive you are, although certainly far from perfect.

I would argue even further that wealth is not the right metric to use to determine who deserves to pay more for the burden of government. If you're rich, but you don't consume, then your wealth doesn't hurt anybody. You are not hogging finite resources for your own enjoyment.

A perfect example is Warren Buffett. He is worth tens of billions of dollars, but the guy probably hasn't spent more than $10MM for himself and his family in his entire lifetime. His vast accumulation of dollars doesn't do me any harm as long as he's not going to use it to consume (i.e. spend it), thereby raising the cost of resources (human, man-made, or natural) for everybody else.

So perhaps the people who deserve to pay the most are those who consume the most. By the way, even poor people can consume quite a great deal. My guess is that the inequality in rates of consumption in the US is far smaller than it is for net worth or income. Consumption should be the true measure of an individual's burden on society and his moral responsibility to pay.

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Earmarks -- Why are they really bad?

Obama has claimed before (and will soon claim again) that earmarks are a miniscule portion of the budget and therefore not that big an issue. But he's missing the point, probably intentionally.

The reason the earmark process is so bad is that it is a form of bribery. If congressman Blue Dog Democrat in Alabama doesn't want to go along with a 12% increase in the State Department budget or a 10% increase in Amtrak subsidies, well, maybe his vote can be bought by funding an $819K catfish genetics research project in his district. We're seeing this with the new 2009 Omnibus Budget bill. A lot of congressmen have qualms about the vastly increased spending in this bill, but the 8,500 different earmark projects (worth about $7.7B) embedded in it make its likelihood of passage very high.

Everybody knows an earmark is bad in and of itself because it is far more likely to be an inefficient allocation of money. It wouldn't be an earmark if it could survive scrutiny from the full congress, so it had to be tucked away in a bill where nobody could see it or remove it.

But the really bad thing about earmarks is never discussed. The earmark process corrupts the law-making function of congress. In essence, it is a legal form of bribery. It leads to a far less representative democracy and a far more inefficient government than we would otherwise have.

Monday, March 2, 2009

Is the Government Spending Taxpayer Money?

Who loses when the government wastes money?

Certainly not the past taxpayers or current taxpayers -- that money is a sunk cost. Maybe future taxpayers lose (nobody knows for sure who these people will be) if government officials try to remedy unhealthy deficits with future tax rate hikes.

But unhealthy deficits can instead cause future government spending and transfer payments to fall, or if government policies remain unchanged, cause the value of the dollar to drop. In the former case, beneficiaries of government spending and transfers (e.g. retired people, low-income people, or industries with powerful lobbies) will suffer. In the latter case, holders of finanical wealth in dollars will lose out. The big holders of dollar financial wealth, by the way, include large foreign holders of treasuries like foreign central banks and sovereign wealth funds.

I am not arguing that government waste doesn't have negative consequences -- it does, and waste should be avoided. But the losers include everyone except the direct beneficiaries of that waste. Past and current taxpayers do not have any special direct exposure to the negative consequences of waste, and probably not future taxpayers either. Given the tremendous political pressure not to reduce spending or to raise taxes significantly, it can be argued that the biggest direct losers of unhealthy deficits are entities with significant net wealth exposed to the value of the dollar. That is, wealthy people, who do not necessarily have a lot of taxable income, and foreign governments, who do not pay US income taxes at all. The winners are government employees, those entities with Washington connections, and people and companies which have negative financial net worth.

Thursday, February 26, 2009

Good (spending cuts) = Bad (repeal of tax cuts)

I have seen this line (snipped out of a bloomberg story) reported elsewhere:

"Obama pledged that his administration will 'go through our books page by page, line by line' to cut wasteful or inefficient spending, and said officials have already found $2T in deficit reduction."

The $2T (presumably over a 10yr time horizon) includes the extra "revenues" coming from letting the Bush tax cuts expire for people making over $250K (worth more than $60B/yr I'm guessing). This is thoroughly dishonest. A tax hike is not equivalent to cutting spending. From an economist's point of view, taxes (particularly income taxes) are bad and government spending is bad. They might be necessary, but they are bad and should be minimized. Cutting government spending should never be in the same category as raising taxes. Good does not equal bad.

There is a larger point here that Republicans and Democrats alike completely don't understand. Democrats are always claiming that judicious government spending is good because it can help grow the economy and increase government revenues. Republicans are always claiming that tax cuts are good because it can help grow the economy and increase government revenues. Always in the analysis is this idea that higher government revenues are good.

Why?

The government is not some private business where the goal is to maximize revenues. The goal of government is to facilitate the maintenance of a high standard of living and growth in that standard of living of the residents of the country. That is the proper goal. If somebody wants to argue that increasing government revenues is an important step towards that goal, they can make that case, but it sure isn't obvious to me.

It is particularly crazy to analyze policies based on government net revenues when we have a fiat currency system in which the government can print an unlimited amount of money. The larger goal once again should be maintenance of a high standard of living. This might include a sub-goal of maintaining the value of the currency, so maybe the government should be careful about how much money it prints, but we have to stop thinking of the government as a private business.

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Why aren't the banks lending?

We keep hearing that the economy is going south because the banks aren't lending money, and the banks aren't lending money because their balance sheets are clogged with toxic assets that nobody knows how to value.

It is certainly true that the banks aren't lending money, and this is certainly very bad for the economy, but the balance sheet argument is fundamentally flawed. There are two reasons banks aren't lending money:

(1) they think almost no borrower is creditworthy because of the outlook for the economy; and

(2) the market value of almost any loan they make to an entity other than the US government is at best 80% of par (i.e. worth at least 20% less than what they loaned).

The first reason should be obvious. Creditworthiness, and therefore bank profitability, is supercyclical. When the economy is good, companies are making money, unemployment is low, refinancing is easy, and everybody is a good credit. When the economy is bad, it's the reverse. And the fact that asset prices are falling fast just makes the risk of lending even higher because you never know when you might want the money back to buy something really cheap (there is opportunity cost on top of credit risk).

The second reason is more directly tied to asset prices, and it is something I haven't seen discussed much in newspapers, on TV, or elsewhere. The illiquid sectors of the fixed income market are incredibly distressed. The prices of assets are shockingly low relative to fundamental value. People keep blathering on about toxic assets, but there is no such thing as a toxic asset. "Toxic" means poisonous -- capable of causing injury or death -- and certainly implies that you would pay to get rid of it. But the so-called toxic assets have positive value. They are assets, not liabilities. They got the name "toxic" because their market value, and in many cases, their fundamental value (which is quite different as I'll explain), is now much lower than it used to be.

Now, if the fundamental value of an asset is much lower than where a bank is marking it on its books, then that is an issue of dishonest accounting and possibly fraud. I'll concede that a lot of banks have this problem, but I think the vast majority of them are domiciled in Europe and Asia.

If the market value of an asset is much lower than where a bank is marking it on its books (but the fundamental value is in the ballpark), then that is a potential liquidity problem. If the bank is forced to delever (e.g. pay back demand loans like poor George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life), then it might have to sell that asset in a distressed market and end up with a lot less capital than it and its regulators thought it had.

Banks have a liquidity problem which has been mitigated substantially by government action over the past 6 months, but it is still acute. By making new loans at par that they can't sell for anything remotely close to par (think of buying a new car in the morning, and then trying to sell it back to the dealer in the afternoon), they are just exacerbating their liquidity problem.

I will give just one example of how distressed prices are in the fixed income market. Consider the following mortgage-backed security:

WAMU 2006-AR10 1A1 (CUSIP: 93363EAA3)

This is something that some lazy commentator on CNBC might call a toxic asset. This bond is backed currently by 790 individual jumbo mortgage loans. The average FICO score of the mortgagors is 730, the average age of the loans is 30 months, the average loan size is $700K, and the average original loan-to-value ratio was 68%. All of the loans are so-called 5/1 hybrid ARMs, which means that they have a fixed rate (average is 6.3% for these loans) for 5 years, and then they reset to a floating rate (which is on average Libor + 2.2%) for the remaining 25 years.

These are pretty good loans, solid loans, to wealthy people living in expensive neighborhoods. The current loan-to-value ratio is obviously much higher than 68% right now because home values have declined even in good neighborhoods, but it's certainly not over 100%. The performance of the loans has been deteriorating modestly over the last year, and the percentage of delinquent loans is now 7.3%.

However, the particular bond mentioned above (the 1A1 class) is the supersenior bond in the deal structure. It has over 10% credit protection from other bonds in the deal which are subordinate to it. So for this bond to take its first dollar of principal loss due to foreclosures, the mortgage pool would have to suffer over 10% realized credit loss. Given that the average loss severity on a foreclosure for this deal is less than 50%, you would need at least 20% of the loans to default to touch the supersenior bond. In recognition of this fact, S&P and Fitch still assign this bond a AAA rating, although Fitch has had the bond on negative credit watch since August 2008.

The 1A1 bond is paying a 5.9% coupon and has been averaging about 1.5 pts (i.e. 1.5%) of principal paydown each month. Even in an extremely pessimistic scenario, it won't take more than 10 pts of principal loss total. If it was Fannie Mae guaranteed, this bond would probably be priced higher than 103. How much would you pay for this bond?

Well, I paid 54.5 cents on the dollar for this bond two weeks ago. It was offered at 59, and I bid 52.5 to start. In retrospect, I probably could have bought it lower. If this bond returns less than a 12% per annum yield over the next 4 years, I'll buy a hat and then eat it.

Another point -- it's absolute garbage that nobody knows how to price this ... garbage. This stuff trades. The problem isn't so much lack of transparency; it's that the prices are ridiculously low. It is as if the risk-free interest rate is 12% in the non-agency mortgage backed securities world and 1% everywhere else. If the government really thinks that these assets are clogging balance sheets, then it should hire some smart unemployed Wall Street bond traders and start buying this stuff up. I figure the government will get a couple billion dollars worth before the effective "risk-free" interest rate in this sector collapses to less than 5%. The market will heal, new loans will make sense again, and the government will turn a profit to boot.

Monday, February 23, 2009

S&P hits new low as Nero pours kerosene

Two news items struck me as the S&P index hit an 11-year low today -- yet more proof that our political leadership is not up to the task of addressing the economic crisis.

First, our dear leader called for fiscal restraint and cutting the deficit in half, indicating that he will "continue the failed policies of the last" 20 years and view the national debt as a "burden." Does anybody in Washington understand fiat currency economics? The private sector is starving for net financial wealth (dollars or treasury bonds -- same difference), and the administration is worried about the deficit. Oy!

I think part of the reason people are confused about this is that there has been an unfortunate conflation of government spending (which is generally bad) and government deficits (which generally are not). Government spending is generally bad because it means that significant economic resources are allocated (inevitably inefficiently) by politicians, lobbyists, and bureaucrats. But giving money to people, via either transfer payments or tax cuts is not resource allocation. Money comprises little green pieces of paper or bytes in a computer. Nobody is being forced to build a highway in West Virginia or a bridge in Alaska to get a check.

The stimulus bill is an abomination (an Obamanation?) mainly because instead of directly getting little green pieces of paper into the hands of the private sector it tries to do it indirectly over many years through government spending. Even the non-spending parts of the bill, e.g. expansion of benefits for the unemployed (which encourages people to stay unemployed), or aid to state governments (which encourages the expansion of government at the state level), provide the wrong incentives.

Warren Mosler (http://www.moslereconomics.com/) and others have been calling for suspension of the wage tax for 2009. That would be an excellent start. It gets money into the private sector fast and incentivizes work. I have no doubt that if this plan were implemented, the S&P would rally 20% within a week.

The second interesting news item was a report that the execrable Harry Reid was on CNBC talking up investment in alternative energy as priority number one. The world is fast-moving these days, and it seems to have left poor Harry far behind -- about 7.5 months behind. We are awash in oil, despite the sub-$40/barrel price, the supply of domestic natural gas is spiking (google around for Terry Engelder and Marcellus formation), and demand for everything is falling off a cliff. Harry and the rest of his minions remind me of the metaphor about rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Only instead they are installing solar panels on the roof and clean coal technology in the boiler room.