Taxes: Appearance and reality in the US and everywhere else
Reducing the US corporate tax rate and the taxes applied to offshore profits earned by US corporations and the repatriation of cash generated offshore, has had perhaps unintended consequences that are proving very helpful to the tax reformers. Some leading companies have immediately converted lower taxes to come into bonuses for their employees.
These reactions help raise the issue of who actually pays an income tax or a payroll tax. Those employees soon to notice a lower tax charge on their salary slips will have no doubts about who pays the income tax – and how they benefit from any reduction in tax rates. Shareholders receiving extra dividends, because the company has more after tax cash to distribute, will draw similar conclusions about the immediate benefits of lower tax rates.
But these immediate reactions to lower tax rates in the US will not be the last or the most important consequences of lower income tax rates. Lower tax rates will have improved the prospective returns on capital invested by US companies. More than pay dividends or buy back shares, the company may therefore wish to invest more in plant and equipment.
If so, and this seems very likely judged by the reactions of CEOs, the additional capacity will give these firms the capacity to produce more. To sell more they may well have to reduce prices or improve the other terms on which they supply their customers. The benefits of lower tax rates will thus also go to their customers in the form of lower prices or better quality or better service, depending on the competition to attract more custom. And workers may benefit as the firm hires more of them, perhaps on more favourable terms, again depending on the competition in the labour market for new hires.
In the long run the benefits of a higher return on shareholders capital, higher because less is paid away in taxes, will tend to be competed away. Actual returns after taxes may then fall away to a new equilibrium of lower required returns on a larger stock of equipment and a larger, better paid labour force in which more intellectual capital has been embedded. The effects of higher tax rates would similarly be reversed into higher prices as investment and hiring activity responds negatively to higher required returns before taxes.
These long run effects will be hard to identify, precisely because nothing much of what else will affect the economy will remain unchanged after a tax regime is changed and economic actors respond. Exchange rates may change, while tax rates in other countries may change to make imports more competitive. Trade across borders may be become more or less open. Yet it would be hard to argue that changes in taxes will not have wider consequences than is revealed on a payslip or dividend payment.
It is also surely true that the benefits, medical or pension etc. that employers provide for their workers will influence the supply of workers, skilled and unskilled, to the firm. The better the benefits, the greater will be the potential supply of job applicants and the lower the quit rates. Increased supplies of actual and potential workers in response to improved other benefits of employment will mean the firm has to offer less take home pay to attract the workers it wishes to hire.
Employees may well be paying for the benefits in the form of a cash salary sacrifice, which is to the advantage of the hiring firm. And taxpayers will be contributing, should the benefits in kind rather than cash enjoy much lower tax rates, in other forms of tax. Such tax favours for employees may help make the firm more competitive, in the form of a lower wage bill. This in turn may enable it to offer lower prices or better terms to their customers – as in the case of lower income taxes.
In these and many other ways, hard to identify, taxes tend to find their way into the prices consumers pay for the goods and services they buy. And this applies to all taxes and not only the VAT or sales taxes imposed on final expenditures.
Higher taxes mean higher prices and vice versa. And as important for the supply side effects of taxes of all kinds is how well the tax revenues are utilised. A good ratio between taxes collected and benefits provided, for obvious example in the quality of education supplied by governments, will tend to increase the supply of skills and lower costs of production and prices to the benefit of consumers ultimately.
The conclusion to come to when recognising the full ramifications of a tax system on the supply of and demand for goods and services, is to keep the tax system as simple as possible. That is to avoid trying to redistribute income through taxes of one kind or another (that find their way into prices) and hence may not redistribute income at all. All taxes may become a tax on expenditure rather than on income. Appearances of redistribution of income through can be very deceptive and damaging to an economy.
It would be more helpful to recognise reality and simply tax expenditure of all kinds at the same rate, thus avoiding income taxes, including taxes on income of companies and taxing one form of income in cash or kind at very different rates. Redistribution is best done by targeting government expenditure – not taxes. As is raising the taxes to pay for benefits as least disruptively as possible. 9 February 2018