It’s All About Obamacare

September 18, 2013Danny Vinik Leave a comment

Wonkblog’s Ezra Klein penned a piece this morning that misses the main reason why we are rapidly heading towards a government shutdown. Klein compares the current negotiations over the continuing resolution to the ones that took place in 2011 and sees two main differences:

1) In 2011, the White House knew whom to deal with. Back then, House Speaker John Boehner actually did seem reasonably in sync with his party on these issues, and so the White House was able to negotiate with Republican leadership on a deal. Today, the relevant negotiations are happening in the Republican Party, with GOP leadership trying to fight conservatives who want to shut down the government, and no one knows who actually has the power to cut and close a deal.

2) In 2011, the White House was willing to deal. The White House believed, in its gut, that Republicans had been given a mandate in the 2010 elections to extract exactly the kind of concessions they were demanding. In addition, the White House believed President Obama would be a likelier bet for reelection if he could cut a “grand bargain” with the newly resurgent Republicans, taking their key issue away from them.

This year, it’s the White House that won the last election, and so they see no popular legitimacy behind Republican demands. In addition, they are deeply, fervently committed to the proposition that they will never again negotiate around the debt ceiling, as that’s a tactic history will judge them harshly for repeatedly enabling. So even if Boehner could cut a deal on the debt ceiling, the White House isn’t open to negotiating.

Both of those points are correct, but they obscure the fact that for House Republicans, these fiscal fights are all about Obamacare. That’s been the key all along.

There is an inherent contradiction in the Republican belief that Obamacare will be an unmitigated disaster and their desperate, politically suicidal attempts to defund the law. If the law is going to catastrophically fail, the Republican Party should have no problem waiting for that to happen and use it to take back the Presidency and Senate in 2016. If they really believe it will be such a disaster, then they shouldn’t threaten a government shutdown over it. But House Republicans are making that threat and many are willing to follow through on it. That indicates that Republicans are worried that Obamacare will succeed and that’s why yesterday, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) said, “this short-term budget represents our last chance to stop it.”

In fact, the Republican Pary’s last chance to stop the law was the 2012 election. This fight is over and Obama has won. He’s not going to delay the law or defund it, but House Republicans are so against it that they will do anything to stop it. As Rep. Lee Terry (R-NE) said today, “Obamacare is worth throwing yourself on the sword.”

The GOP doesn’t care about cutting spending, approving the Keystone XL pipeline or cutting taxes. Right now, it’s all about Obamacare.

Two year ago, the White House and Republicans could negotiate with each other because both had something the other wanted and were willing to compromise (barely). The same is true today, but the White House will never, ever defund the law and House Republicans will not accept any deal that doesn’t do that.

That’s what really makes the 2013 showdown different from 2011.

Sen. Mike Lee Takes The Lead on Conservative Tax Reform

September 17, 2013Danny Vinik 3 Comments

At the American Enterprise Institute today, Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) unveiled the broad outlines for his tax plan, which he will introduce into the Senate in the upcoming days. The plan focuses on broadening the base, lowering rates, consolidating tax brackets and simplifying the tax code. However, the emphasis of Lee’s plan is to eliminate the parent tax penalty. Here’s how Lee described the penalty today:

Under the current system, all seniors are entitled to the same benefits, based on their total lifetime contributions.

But parents are required to contribute to this system not once, but twice. First, when they pay their taxes, just like everyone else. And then again, by bearing the enormous economic costs of raising their children, who in time, of course, grow up to become the next generation of taxpayers.

Under the current system, parents receive no additional benefits for having contributed or sacrificed hundreds of thousands of additional dollars raising their kids.

Lee’s plan, appropriately titled the Family, Fairness and Opportunity Tax Reform Act, creates a $2,500 per-child tax credit applicable to both payroll and income taxes. This last part is particularly important. Many poor Americans don’t pay income taxes, but they do pay payroll taxes. Making the credit applicable to payroll taxes allows those low-income parents to benefit from it as well. This corrects the parent tax penalty for all parents.

The freshman senator emphasized later that the purpose of this credit was to correct an unfairness in the tax code, not to influence the childbearing decisions of Americans.

“My plan would simply level the playing field to treat all taxpayers more equally,” he said. “It’s not social engineering.”

The Family, Fairness and Opportunity Tax Reform Act would create two tax brackets. The first would be at 15% for individuals with incomes less than $87,850 (and double that for married couples). All income above those thresholds would be taxed at 35%. In addition, Lee would create a new mortgage interest deduction capped at $300,000 worth of principal and a new charitable deduction available to all taxpayers, not just those who file itemized deductions. Both of these are alterations to current popular deductions intended to distribute the benefits of them more evenly across the income spectrum. At the moment, high-income homeowners reap most of the benefits of the home interest deduction as they pay a large proportion of mortgage payments. Low-income individuals are also less likely to itemize their deductions so they are unable to take advantage of the charitable deduction in the current system.

Lee’s plan also eliminates special interest loopholes, the state and local deduction and repeals Obamacare taxes and the AMT. You can read the rest of it here. He estimates that it will raise revenue equal to approximately 18-20% of GDP, which is right in line with the historical average. The Joint Committee on Taxation will take it up in the near future after Lee officially files the bill and will score it. Hopefully others will look at the distributional impact of the plan as well. It’s a promising piece of legislation that deserves an honest debate and conversation. I’m looking forward to having it.

The Magically Disappearing Deficit

September 17, 2013Danny Vinik 4 Comments

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its 2013 Long Term Budget Outlook today and there’s a lot of good news. Total public debt is projected to hit 100% of GDP in 2038, thanks to growth in entitlement spending and interest payments. However, this number is well below CBO’s estimate last year that public debt would hit 200% of GDP in 2037.*

This is thanks to slightly higher taxes and significantly reduced spending on entitlements and interest payments.

The fiscal cliff deal at the end of last year (officially known as the American Taxpayer Relief Act) made the Bush tax cuts permanent for most Americans and fixed the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) to limit its reach. However, the deal also allowed taxes to rise on the wealthiest Americans. Due to that, the CBO now projects that revenues will equal 19.7% of GDP in 2038, up from 18.5% in last year’s report.

On the spending side, two major developments drastically reduced the CBO’s projected spending totals.

First, health care cost growth has slowed considerably over the past couple of years and there is more and more evidence demonstrating that this slowdown is not a short-term result of the recession, but is a permanent bending of the cost curve. This led the CBO to lower its projected health care costs:

A particular challenge currently is estimating the extent to which the recent slowdown in growth can be attributed to temporary factors like the recession or instead reflects more enduring developments. Studies have generally concluded that a portion of the observed reduction in growth cannot be linked directly to the weak economy, and CBO’s own analysis has found no link between the recession and slower growth in spending for Medicare. Accordingly, over the past few years, CBO has substantially reduced its projections of spending on Medicare and Medicaid during the coming decade and slightly lowered its estimate of the underlying rate of growth for health care spending per person for the country as a whole. CBO’s estimate of that underlying rate takes into account spending trends since 1985 but gives greater
weight to the recent experience; because of the pressures to constrain spending growth, the underlying rate is projected to decline gradually in the long run.

The CBO’s 2012 Report projected Medicare and Medicaid spending (plus CHIP and the exchange subsidies) to hit a combined 10.4% of GDP in 2037. In this year’s report, the Budget Office expected those programs to be just 8.2% of GDP. That’s a significant drop.

Second, the extended baseline scenario assumes that sequestration is not repealed, compared to last year’s extended alternative baseline scenario that assumed otherwise. This projection made sense in 2012 when it was widely assumed that Congress would find a way to replace the sequester. But now, sequestration is already in effect and the parties aren’t any closer to finding a replacement. It’s more and more likely that sequester could be here to say. This reduces the CBO’s spending projections significantly:

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that if current laws generally continued without change, other federal noninterest spending would drop from a total of 11.3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2012 to 7.6 percent in 2023 and then to 7.1 percent in 2038.

Under the extended alternative baseline scenario in 2012, the CBO projected that spending to be 9.6% of GDP in 2037.

The icing on the cake is that all of this reduced spending will lead to significantly lower debt payments, compared with the CBO’s 2012 projections. Debt payments will still rise from today’s low level of 1.3% of GDP to nearly 5 percent of GDP in 2038 (that’s why it’s a sin we aren’t taking advantage of today’s low rates). But that is much less than the CBO’s 2012 projection of 9.5%.

Having gone through all of that, here’s the overall change in U.S. revenues and spending between last year’s Long Term Budget Outlook and this year’s report:

The deficit has dropped by almost two-thirds in the last year alone!

Now, the sequester is still dumb policy and the current projections still leave us with an unsustainable budget (economists and budget wonks agree that we need to get our budget down to around 3% of GDP). But the overall picture is abundantly clear: we’ve already done a huge amount of deficit reduction.

*Note: I’m using the extended alternative baseline scenario from the 2012 Report because it more accurately represents the future policy of both taxes and spending. In this year’s report, I’m using the extended baseline scenario as the Fiscal Cliff deal cleared up the unrealistic assumptions that the CBO used under this scenario in 2012.