too-high corporate tax rate

The rate at which the domestic earnings of US corporations are taxed by the federal government is unusually high by world standards.

Corporate response has been what one would expect:  some firms leave for lower-tax jurisdictions; others engage in elaborate tax avoidance schemes, the bare bones of which I wrote about yesterday; still others spend tons of time and money lobbying Congress for exemptions.  Not a pretty picture.

What to do?

The straightforward answer would be to lower the tax rate and eliminate the special treatment.  Of course, congressmen, lobbyists and the industries receiving tax breaks are all against the latter.

border tax

That’s one reason for the appeal of a flat tax of perhaps 20% on the value of all imports–it leaves the status quo untouched but raises tax dollars to offset those lost through reducing rates.

A border tax would have another advantage, eliminating abuses from transfer pricing.  This is a practice whereby goods imported into the US are first shunted on paper through a tax haven where their price is raised.  The effect is to redirect profits from the US to the tax shelter country.

problems

The biggest theoretical issue with a border tax is the law of comparative advantage, the idea on which most international commerce is based that countries all gain by specializing in what they do best and buying everything else from abroad.  Contrary to what one might think at first, trying to do everything in-country and taxing imports reduces national wealth.

A big practical defect of the border tax, to my mind, is that there are mammoth categories of everyday goods–food, clothing, furniture, toys–that are only available at low cost in the US because they are made abroad.  Another is the question of retaliation, as the US is now doing against Canadian efforts to favor local milk products over imports from Wisconsin.

a rising dollar?

Border taxers reply to the higher-cost-of-imports issue by claiming that implementing a border tax will cause the dollar to rise–maybe even by enough to offset the effects of the border tax in dollar terms.  How so?

The argument is that every day US parties go into the currency markets wanting to exchange dollars for foreign currency.  Similarly, foreigners come with their currency to exchange into dollars to buy US-made stuff.  The interaction of supply and demand sets the exchange rate.

Post border tax, higher prices of foreign goods means less demand in the US for them, which means fewer dollars available for exchange, which means the price of dollars goes up. Some border tax advocates claim the dollar spike could be as much as +25%-30%.

huh?

I suppose this line of reasoning could be right. But it seems to assume, among othe things, that, contrary to what we’re doing with Canada, no one retaliates; and that demand for now-higher-priced US goods remains relatively unaffected.  Good luck with that.

Ultimately, though, I think that, whatever the strength of its conceptual underpinnings, the border tax is an attempt to avoid attacking the rats nest of special interest exemptions in the tax code while still lowering the headline rate. So it’s “fixing” one tax distortion by creating another.  That’s vintage Washington.  But making taxes more complex, not less, is a recipe for trouble.