Posted tagged ‘Peter Fisher’

Job Creationism

June 12, 2013
Peter Fisher

Peter Fisher

In the beginning, there was a CEO. And he said, “Let there be jobs.” Because he wanted to be a Job Creator, since he had heard that Job Creators get all kinds of public praise and respect, not to mention some significant perks, like being able to flash the Job Creator ID card whenever anyone threatens to raise your taxes. Others touted the ability of the Job Creator card to transfix governors and state legislators, who would then intone “We will grant you any incentives you ask for, oh wonderful Job Creator.” And amazingly, spending public money indiscriminately on Job Creators helps those public officials get re-elected. A win-win situation, at least if you leave ordinary working citizens out of the equation.

And his board of directors said, “Hey wait a minute; how about a new product first, and consumers who are willing and able to buy it.” So the CEO bought up an innovative start-up company, and conducted market studies. And it turned out that indeed there was a market for this product, and sales to be had, and profits to be made.

But the CEO discovered that his board of directors and his shareholders really wanted him to focus on that last point: profits. It turned out that maximizing profits required minimizing costs, which actually meant hiring as few people as possible. Workers, it seemed, could be a pain; they wanted to be paid, and to get benefits like health insurance, and work in safe and reasonable conditions, and maybe join a union. So the CEO set about creating as few jobs as he could, at the lowest wages that would get the skills he needed, with as little job security as he could get away with. He hired consultants to tell him how to keep them from joining unions. And he dreamed of a company that had no employees whatsoever.

As consumers spent more, the company produced more, and hired more workers. (Hmmm; seems like consumers are creating jobs. We can’t call everyone a Job Creator, though; sorry folks.) But then there was a recession, and consumers stopped buying and the CEO had to lay off half his work force. And when the economy recovered he found he could make more profits without hiring them all back, by mechanizing some operations and outsourcing others to low-paid workers overseas.

The CEO fretted for a moment. Would they repossess his Job Creator card, because he was actually destroying jobs? Well, not to worry. It turns out that you can destroy jobs right and left and that has no effect on your status. In fact, you can ship 1,000 jobs overseas and then get praised for opening a new U.S. branch that employs 50. Not just praised, but rewarded, with tax exemptions and credits and such. Things that really help that profit maximizing thing that your board is so worried about.  In fact, it seemed that the more Job Creators laid off workers, the more desperate people became for jobs, and the more lavishly they showered benefits on the Job Creators. How could you lose with a deal like this?

When he read the fine print on the back of the card the CEO understood how membership actually worked: Anyone in a position to hire (and fire) was a Job Creator. Your actual record didn’t matter. Nor did anyone seem to worry about the actual source of job gains being traced to innovation, and research, and public support of universities, and public investments in transportation and other infrastructure, and broadly shared income that allowed consumers to buy the products and services that workers were producing.

So the CEO quit worrying, and sipped his martinis on the beaches of various tax havens in the Caribbean, contemplating how well deserved was his status as a Job Creator, and how nice it was to be worshipped for who you were instead of what you did.

Posted by Peter Fisher, Research Director

Who benefits? No doubts — the ‘1 Percent’

June 4, 2013
Peter Fisher

Peter Fisher

For whose benefit is this country run? The events of the past 10 years should have erased any doubts about the answer to that question. Let’s recap for a minute just what happened.

First, federal regulators sat idly by while banks and investment funds, with help from their friends the bond rating agencies, put billions into high-risk mortgages that should never have been made, and mortgage brokers raked in closing fees. Millions of families became heavily in debt, and housing prices shot up at unsustainable rates. When all this collapsed, it drove the economy into the deepest recession since the 1930s. Millions lost their jobs and their homes, as banks chose to foreclose rather than work out a way for homeowners to remain in their homes.

There was a little seeming good news: Interest rates were at an all-time low. People could refinance at incredibly low rates. But wait: The banks reacted to the criticisms of their previous loose lending practices by drastically tightening credit rules. Ordinary people who were making house payments with mortgages at 5 or 6 or 7 percent were denied refinancing because their credit was bad — because of the recession and loss of jobs. So the banks were saying, in effect: Yes, we see that you are making your payments at 6 percent but we don’t think you could make the lower payments at 3.5 percent. Banks kept their very profitable mortgages, earning twice what they could get on new mortgages, and prolonging the recession as consumers were unable to free up money for other purchases.

So finally, after five years of economic hardship for much of the population, housing prices have hit bottom and started back up again. Great news. People who have a job again may also be able to buy a house again, and at still very favorable prices and interest rates. But wait: We can’t have the formerly unemployed, forced out of their homes, becoming homeowners again and getting all the benefit from future rising prices and cheap credit. No, that’s clearly a job for the rich.

Families who struggled and suffered during the recession saw their credit ratings sink, and with the tight credit rules, they are shut out of the mortgage market (and in some cases the job market as well). And who steps in? Wall Street firms and wealthy house-flippers. One firm alone, the Blackstone Group, has purchased 26,000 homes in nine states.[i] In a few years they can re-sell to ordinary working folks at higher prices (with mortgages at higher interest rates). The rich, it turns out, are the ones in a position to buy at the bottom and reap the capital gains that will follow (taxed, of course, at a much lower rate than wages).

It should hardly come as a surprise that the net effect of the housing bubble, the financial collapse and prolonged recession, and the beginnings of recovery, was to bring about a substantial redistribution of wealth. For much of the population, what little wealth they had was concentrated in home equity, which was wiped out by the collapse of the housing market; wealth continued to decline for the bottom 93 percent of the population during the first two years of “recovery.”[ii] But for the richest 7 percent, wealth increased 28 percent, from 2009 to 2011.

Income inequality is rising again as well, as profits have surged since the recovery began while wages have stagnated. The top 1 percent got 121 percent of all the gains in income from 2009 to 2011.[iii] If you are in the 1 percent, things have worked out just swimmingly; causing an economic collapse can be very profitable if you are in the right position.

If you are part of the 1 percent, you are also free to spend as much of that new wealth as you want re-electing public officials who will blame Food Stamp recipients, unions, and public school teachers for our economic troubles, while slashing any program that benefits the poorer half of the population in the name of cutting the national debt. Those elected officials can also be counted on to weaken those pesky new financial regulations, modest to start with, and making sure your tax rate doesn’t go back up to anywhere near what it was in the 1990s. Of course, curbing spending while unemployment is still above 7 percent prolongs the jobs recession and the hardships of working families, but who cares? Keep those wages down, profits up, and stock prices hitting historic highs. Meanwhile, having helped destroy several millions jobs during the recession, and having found numerous ways to restore production levels since then without hiring back your former employees, you will now find that you can claim an exemption from tax increases and qualify for all kinds of state and local incentives on the grounds that you are a “job creator.”

Is this a great country or what?


Posted by Peter Fisher, Research Director

Some bad ideas never die

April 24, 2013
Peter Fisher

Peter Fisher

The Iowa House today proved that bipartisanship is no guarantor of good policy. On a vote of 87-9, the House approved HF 641, which would authorize a new and wasteful incentive program that would divert money from the state general fund to support hotel and retail projects in cities. So we will be taking money that should be supporting state investments in education, health, the environment, public safety, and other services, and using it to subsidize hotel developers and retail strip malls. All in the name of “economic development.”

Cities already have more than enough ability to divert taxes to development projects through property tax TIFs and abatements. There is no need for additional diversions of revenue from other jurisdictions.

The House bill would authorize any city or county to establish “Reinvestment Districts.” From the date of establishment onward for the next 25 years, 4 cents of the 6-cent statewide sales tax, and all 5 cents of the state hotel-motel tax, from all “new” sales or room rentals would be diverted from the state general fund to the city for use in the district. What uses? Pretty much anything; any building, public or private, could qualify for a subsidy, and there is no limit on how much of the cost of a project can be subsidized.

“New sales” are sales from a business that first got a state sales-tax permit (or hotel-motel tax permit) after the date the district was established. Given the high rate of turnover among retail businesses, it is not hard to imagine a scenario in which most of the sales taxes in a district are diverted from the state general fund even though there has been little additional economic activity, or even decline. All that is needed is that old businesses are replaced by new ones, even if that means replacing an Applebees with a pawn shop.

Why will a city ever again be content to finance commercial redevelopment on their own, or with property tax TIFs alone? Why will a developer ever again finance a project entirely from private sources – try to remember, if you can, when that was the norm – when he or she can just ask the city to get the money from the state?

More importantly, what will become of market standards? While every legislator who voted for the bill surely believes in free markets and private enterprise, this measure undermines markets. There was a time, before the incentive wars got out of hand, when a project had to stand on its own – there had to be a sufficient market to support it, and banks had to be convinced that revenues would be sufficient to repay the loans. No more. Now local government officials are determined to force development to happen when it can’t stand on its own, creating oversupply that hurts existing businesses. Or the private sector happily rakes in all the new incentive cash to do something it would have done anyway. Those are really the only two alternatives for a local market activity: either market conditions support it and it can be financed privately, or the market can’t support it, and the city uses taxpayer money to force overbuilding.

We can hope that this bill gets careful scrutiny before it goes any further.

Posted by Peter Fisher, Research Director

The limits of transparency

April 3, 2013
Peter Fisher

Peter Fisher

You can’t fix problems you can’t find. That’s why transparency is so important in public policy and especially spending through the tax code.

You would never find some of this information just going to the Iowa Economic Development Authority website — you have to know where to look. And even then, there are limitations on what is available from the state for its citizens to see.

The Iowa Policy Project and Iowa Fiscal Partnership have long argued for greater transparency with regard to the state’s expenditures on economic development through the tax code. We are happy to see a new report from the Iowa Public Interest Research Group that brings attention to this issue, properly including business tax credits and other tax expenditures among the categories of state spending that citizens have a right to know about.

But it’s very important to look at the deficiencies that remain in Iowa. In our view, those problems tell far more about the state’s interest in transparency than the items that are given a favorable rating by PIRG.

While the PIRG report gives Iowa credit for having a website that allows a citizen to find economic development subsidies awarded by company name (including the amount, the jobs promised, the jobs created, and the location), two problems in particular should be addressed in the future.

  • First, only tax credits that must be awarded are listed; similar information should be available for all economic development tax credits, including those that are automatic.
  • Second, the database of subsidies is buried deep in the website of the Iowa Economic Development Authority (for those interested it is here: http://www.iowaeconomicdevelopment.com/annualrpt/?cmd=default&rptyear=2011). It’s hard for the public to find. A link to this database should be posted on the state’s DataShare website, where only aggregate information on tax credits is available.

The Legislature did pass a notable transparency improvement in 2009 that requires the state to identify by name the recipients of Research Activities Credits in excess of $500,000. The bill failed, however, to require identification of how much of a company’s credit was in the form of a refund check. Taxpayers have a right to know how much of their tax dollars are going to subsidize corporations that are paying no state income tax.

It should be clear by now that the disclosure of company-specific subsidy information does no harm to the company or to the state’s economic development efforts; there is no excuse not to make all of our business tax subsidies transparent.

Posted by Peter S. Fisher, Research Director

Flat tax plan legalizes cheating on Iowa taxes

March 11, 2013
Peter Fisher

Peter Fisher

The Iowa House of Representatives will soon take up a bill that would legalize cheating on your Iowa income taxes. While that isn’t the intent, it will certainly be the effect, at least for anyone who has an accountant or who can figure out how to do it on their own.

Officially, the bill is HF3, which would create an alternative flat tax of 4.5 percent. The taxpayer could choose between the current system and the flat rate. If you choose the flat rate, you get a standard deduction but cannot deduct federal income taxes, itemize deductions, or take any credits. But if you currently pay a higher rate than 4.5 percent, and don’t have a lot of deductions or federal income taxes, you might come out ahead picking the alternative flat rate.

To see how this opens the door to massive tax avoidance, you need to understand one important feature of Iowa’s income tax: federal deductibility.

Let’s say you earn $75,000 in Iowa adjusted gross income (AGI) for 2013 and you had $5,000 in federal income taxes deducted from your paycheck during the year. You can deduct the $5,000 from your AGI, leaving you with that much less income to pay tax on. But if you also got a refund check from the federal government in 2013 (because you had too much withheld during 2012, and deducted too much federal tax on your 2012 Iowa return), you have to add that back to your taxable income. This ensures that, over the years, you always end up deducting exactly what you actually paid in federal taxes.

HF3 changes the rules — and here’s how any taxpayer could game the system under HF3. Let’s call it, “Follow the 20,000.”

•  First stop, your W-4. During 2013 you file a W-4 to have five times as much federal income taxes withheld from your paycheck as you really need to. (Or, if you are self-employed, pay quarterly estimated taxes five times what is required.) So when you go to file your 2013 Iowa tax in April 2014, you can deduct $25,000 from your income instead of $5,000. This lowers your Iowa tax bill considerably. If you were in the top 8.98 percent bracket, the extra $20,000 deduction would save you $1,796 on your state income tax. So you choose to file under the current system instead of using the flat rate.

•  Why that’s a bad idea now. Under the current system, your strategy would bite you in the back the next year, because now the $20,000 excess withheld in 2013 comes back as a refund check in 2014. The $20,000 refund check from the feds in 2014 would have to be added back to your 2014 income. You have to pay state tax on it.

•  Flat tax changes the game. If you can take the alternative flat tax for 2014, you will see a huge break. While you would not be able to deduct federal taxes withheld during 2014 under that scheme, you don’t have to add back the $20,000 refund check either.

So for 2014, you pick the flat tax alternative, and pay 4.5 percent on “all” your income — but in the state’s eyes, it’s like that $20,000 never existed.

•  An endless payoff. By doing this, you magically avoid ever paying Iowa income taxes on that $20,000. You didn’t pay tax on it the year it was withheld, because that year you filed the old way and took federal deductibility. And you didn’t pay tax on it the next year, either, because that year you chose the flat tax alternative and didn’t have to add in the $20,000 refund check.

You could argue that if the Legislature makes it legal, it can’t be called cheating. But it sure smells like it. That’s a “tax avoidance” strategy useful only to those in the higher tax brackets.

And that strategy can be avoided if HF3 gets no further in the Iowa House.

Posted by Peter Fisher, Research Director

Remaking ‘Blazing Saddles’

December 13, 2012
Peter Fisher

Peter Fisher

Some of the arguments against raising tax rates on the richest 2 percent of Americans back to the level that prevailed during the boom years of the 1990s bring to mind Mel Brooks’ classic, Blazing Saddles. In the film, new Sheriff Bart is surrounded by an angry mob. He draws his gun, points it at his own head and warns he’ll shoot if someone makes a move. The mob freezes and Bart escapes to safety.

In the current remake of the film, Bart is being played by the wealthy businessmen claiming they will have to lay off workers if we raise the tax rate on their profits by 3.6 percentage points.

We can reasonably assume those workers are currently productive, earning enough for the owner to cover their wages and add something to the bottom line. If not, they would have been laid off long ago. So these owners would have us believe that an increase in the tax on profits would lead them to lay off these productive workers. That, in turn, would mean the business is producing less, earning less profit before taxes.

So the owners are actually saying, “If you raise my taxes, I will show you a thing or two — I’ll deliberately sabotage my business so you have less profit to tax.”

A business owner whose objective is to maximize after-tax profits will always be better off producing more, with more workers, and earning more before-tax profit, no matter what percent of those profits end up going to pay income taxes. On the other hand, making a political point may be so important to these owners that they are willing to shoot themselves in the foot, if not the head, to do it. If they are rich enough to afford that symbolic gesture, I guess we can’t stop them.

Fortunately, in the remake of Blazing Saddles, it appears that the angry mob is ready to call their bluff. They recognize that the “job-killing tax increase” is no such thing. It is simply an effort to reclaim for the average American a share of the increased wealth generated by workers in this economy in recent years that has been captured almost entirely by the richest among us.

Posted by Peter Fisher, Research Director

States should beware ALEC-brand snake oil

November 29, 2012

Peter Fisher

Legislative sessions will be starting across the country after the first of the year, and with them, some very bad ideas for public policy.

The purveyor of many poor prescriptions is a very influential right-wing organization, the American Legislative Exchange Council, known as ALEC. The organization promotes policies to cut taxes and regulations in the disguise of promoting economic growth, but what they really do is reduce services, opportunity and accountability.

In short, the ALEC medicine show is a prescription for poor results, and states should beware.

Our new report, “Selling Snake Oil to the States,” examines ALEC’s proposals and the misinformed, primitive methodology behind the study that supports them. The new report, a joint project of the Iowa Policy Project in Iowa City and Good Jobs First in Washington, D.C., illustrates how ALEC’s prescriptions really offer stagnation and wage suppression.

In fact, we find that since ALEC first published its annual “Rich States, Poor States” study with its Economic Outlook Ranking in 2007, states that were rated better have actually done worse economically.

Find “Selling Snake Oil to the States” at http://www.goodjobsfirst.org/snakeoiltothestates.

We tested ALEC’s claims against actual economic results. We conclude that eliminating progressive taxes, suppressing wages, and cutting public services are actually a recipe for economic inequality, declining incomes, and undermining public infrastructure and education that really matter for long-term economic growth.

ALEC’s rankings are based on arguments and evidence that range from deeply flawed to nonexistent, consistently ignoring decades of peer-reviewed academic research.

What we know from research is that the composition of a state’s economy — whether it has disproportionate shares of high-growth or low-growth industries — is a far better predictor of a state’s relative success over the past five years. Public policy makers need to stick to the basics and recognize that public services that benefit all employers.

Posted by Peter Fisher, Research Director

How about that timing of worker pay report?

October 31, 2012
Mike Owen

Mike Owen

Timing is everything.

Consider the announcement Tuesday by the Branstad administration of a new report produced by an outside company to examine whether Iowa state workers are paid too much.

Paid too much?

As the Department of Administrative Services was releasing the report, emergency rescue workers across the Eastern seaboard were putting themselves in harm’s way to help their neighbors in the path of the deadly Hurricane Sandy. And right here in Iowa, within a couple hours of the DAS news conference, bank robbers shot two law enforcement officers — critically wounding the Sumner police chief and injuring a state trooper.

We count on public servants every day, sometimes when lives are at stake, sometimes in enriching life with education, sometimes in just keeping life orderly enough that we can enjoy it without worrying whether the water or food will poison us, or that our job will not put us in danger we did not sign up for.

Oh, and the report? It found that pay scales for Iowa state workers are generally competitive. Where the report cited potential problems, the information provided was too sketchy to delve in and really go through it. And, being produced by a private company that copyrighted the report, we might just never know what our tax dollars produced. This is what happens with privatization, folks. But if you want a quick look at the holes in the report, see the review Tuesday by IPP’s Peter Fisher.

So, for those less inclined toward knee-jerk appeals against public workers, the timing of this report, you might say, wasn’t too bad.

Posted by Mike Owen, Assistant Director

 

Did Iowa just get taken to the cleaners?

September 21, 2012
Peter Fisher

Peter Fisher

The enormous package of state and local incentives provided to the Egyptian company Orascom to locate a fertilizer plant in Lee County has drawn considerable attention. The package includes $110 million in state tax credits and other incentives and $133 million in local tax abatements — a total of $243 million when all is said and done. All this to attract a plant that will employ just 165 workers.

At a cost per worker of nearly $1.5 million, the incentive is an astounding amount, well beyond the normal range of awards, in Iowa or anywhere else. (While the company claims a large number of ancillary jobs will follow, these claims are unverifiable, and it is not clear how many would even fall to Iowa residents; furthermore, there are always some spin-off jobs with any project, so the valid comparison with other awards is in terms of cost per direct job.)

Yet little attention has been paid to what is possibly the largest incentive provided: tax-exempt bonds, not even included in the above calculations.

Early on in the negotiations, in fact last April, the Iowa Finance Authority awarded Orascom up to $1.19 billion in Midwest Disaster Area (MDA) bonds. These bonds are exempt from federal income tax; Midwestern states affected by the 2008 flood were each given an allocation of these bonds to be awarded to projects in eligible counties — those declared disaster areas after the flood. The $1.19 billion loan would constitute 46 percent of the Iowa allocation.

Because the interest is exempt from federal income tax, the wealthy individuals and financial institutions that would purchase such bonds will accept a lower interest rate than they would require on taxable corporate bonds. The after-tax rate is what they focus on. This means that the company saves money. How much? That depends on the spread between corporate bond interest rates and tax-exempt rates.

Information from officials at the Iowa Finance Authority indicates that the spread would likely range from 1 percent to 2 percent. For a $1.19 billion bond issue to be repaid in equal annual installments over a 20-year period, the savings in interest would amount to between $153 million and $297 million, depending on what the interest rate differential turned out to be.

These tax-exempt bonds could have been used in Lee County or in Scott County; both were flood disaster areas and both, at one point, were under consideration as a location for the fertilizer plant. When the Scott County site was rejected, attention turned to Illinois, specifically the area near Peoria. But neither Peoria County nor any counties surrounding it were eligible for the Illinois allocation of MDA bonds.

This means that Lee County was starting with a huge advantage over the Illinois site: the availability of an incentive probably worth in the neighborhood of $200 million.

While the MDA bonds cost federal taxpayers, there is no loss of Iowa income-tax revenue. (The federal cost comes because the federal government forgoes income-tax revenue on the interest, which must then be made up by the rest of federal taxpayers.) But the point is that, whoever bears the cost, this was a very large incentive that Iowa could provide and Illinois could not.

Thus it raises the question: Given this advantage from the start, why was it necessary for the state of Iowa and Lee County to double down and provide another $200 plus million, especially when the Illinois tax incentives were not even a reality — they had passed the Illinois Senate, but not the House, and the Legislature had adjourned months ago?

Did Iowa just get taken to the cleaners?

Posted by Peter Fisher, Research Director

Does Iowa know when to walk away?

September 5, 2012
Peter Fisher

Peter Fisher

There’s Texas Hold ’Em,” and then there’s “Iowa Fold ’Em.”

Wouldn’t you just love to play poker against the folks who run this state?

They never call a bluff. Companies come calling with demands for tax breaks and big checks, or they’ll build somewhere else. And Iowa just happily falls in line with the demands. You can almost hear Kenny Rogers singing in the background: “Know when to walk away, and know when to run.”

The latest: Today the board of the Iowa Economic Development Authority (IEDA) is scheduled to consider sweetening its already generous offer to Orascom — $35 million to build a $1.3 billion fertilizer plant in Lee County — to about $110 million with a slew of new tax credits. As The Des Moines Register points out today, that’s $110 million for 165 “permanent” jobs paying on average $48,000 a year, plus construction jobs that will be gone when the project is finished.

The state tax credits are in addition to the enormous benefit the state is providing by allocating federal tax-exempt flood recovery bonds to this project. If the interest rate difference — between taxable and tax-exempt bonds — were 1 percentage point, the company would save $320 million in interest payments over the life of the $1.2 billion bond. That would bring the firm’s total benefits to $2.7 million per permanent job, a truly astounding number. Even without considering the federal interest subsidy, the state tax credits would total $687,500 per job, many times the typical level of subsidy in deals such as this.

There are no estimates available about the potential environmental costs that will be caused by this plant. Since Iowa does a poor job of monitoring for pollution damage, those ongoing costs might be low, but if there is an accident, it could be costly.

The Register also quotes Debi Durham, head of IEDA, that incentives wouldn’t be needed if Iowa were to reduce corporate income tax rates. Nonsense. Research has shown repeatedly that this is a myth, and that in fact, Iowa’s income taxes paid by corporations are competitive with other states. In many cases, giant corporations are paying not a dime in income tax yet getting huge subsidy checks from the state to do things they would do without incentives.

This hand is the one we are dealt from years of unaccountable economic development strategies by Iowa state government.

Time for a fresh deck.

Posted by Peter Fisher, Research Director

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