Politics – Page 9 – Donald Marron

Thanksgiving Reading

So many fascinating economic issues, so little time to blog.

Here are some of the fun items that I would have discussed in recent days if I had infinite time:

How OpenTable uses its market power. Over at Incanto, Mark Pastore describes how OpenTable uses its dominant position in online restaurant reservations to get as much profit as possible from participating restaurants.

The battle against the lionfish. Over at the New York Times, Erik Olsen discusses the battle against the beautiful, venomous, and extremely-out-of-place lionfish in the Florida Keys. As I discussed some time ago, this is a rare case in which the tragedy of the commons is a good thing.

How did instant run-off voting do in the most recent elections? Also over at the New York Times, Zusha Elinson and Gerry Shih describe how Jean Quan won Oakland’s mayoral race by appealing for voters’ second-place votes in a ranked-choice election. (ht: Kim R) Or if you prefer, check out the PBS Newshour video (ht: Rob R.)

Dilbert explains oligopoly pricing. (ht: Robert J.)

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

The Biggest Tax Policy Mistake of the Year

The fine folks over at the New York Times Freakonomics blog recently asked me to identify the “biggest potential tax policy mistake that might be made this year.” Here’s my answer:

With little time left on the legislative clock, policymakers will be hard-pressed to top the tax policy blunders they’ve already made this year. Most notable is their failure to decide what this year’s tax law should be. While politicians, analysts and the media endlessly debate how expiring tax cuts might affect taxpayers in 2011, the real disgrace is that we still don’t know what the tax law is in 2010.

Will our leaders really allow the alternative minimum tax to hit 27 million taxpayers this year, a whopping 23 million more than in 2009? Did the estate tax really expire back in January, making 2010 the year without an estate tax? Will companies really receive no tax credits for their investments in research and development?

Under existing law, the answer to each of these questions is yes. Unless Congress acts, the AMT will expand its reach almost 500 percent, George Steinbrenner’s estate will pay no estate tax, and America’s most innovative companies will go without the R&E tax credit. But in today’s world, existing law doesn’t mean much until Congress throws in the legislative towel. The upcoming lame-duck session will thus feature healthy debate about patching the AMT, retroactively resuscitating the estate tax and extending a host of expired business tax credits — all policies that would determine 2010 taxes.

Such retroactive policymaking is an embarrassment. In a well-functioning democracy, policymakers should establish the laws of the land in advance so that families and businesses can knowledgeably plan their activities. Surprises may sometimes necessitate mid-course corrections. An economic downturn may justify mid-year tax cuts, or a sudden crisis may require mid-year tax increases. But persistent retroactive lawmaking undermines the core idea that ours is a nation of law.

Needless uncertainty also creates real costs. Uncertainty about the R&E tax credit, for example, limits its usefulness as an incentive. If businesses think that it might expire, they have less reason to take it into account when planning their research efforts. That can turn a helpful incentive into a pointless giveaway.

Needless delay also undermines the IRS’s ability to implement the tax system. In 2007, for example, Congress fiddled until just before Christmas before deciding to enact that year’s AMT patch. Because of that delay, affected taxpayers couldn’t begin filing their returns until February 15, when IRS computers finally reflected the new law.

Congress has made a huge mistake by leaving taxpayers in limbo for more than 10 months. Let’s hope they resolve that quickly when they return for what promises to be a frantic lame-duck session.

Joel Slemrod, Bill Gale, and Clint Stretch also contributed to the discussion.

Will Budget Concerns Ever Influence Carbon Policy?

Climate change legislation died an ignominious death in the Senate earlier this year. If you’d like to understand why, check out Ryan Lizza’s autopsy of the effort in the latest New Yorker. Lizza documents how the “tripartisan” trio of John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham came up short in their effort to craft a 60-vote coalition in the Senate. Among the bumps along the way:

On March 31, President Obama announced a dramatic expansion in offshore waters open for oil and natural gas drilling. In so doing, he gave away one of the sweeteners that the trio was hoping to use to attract pro-drilling senators.

On April 15, Fox News reported that, according to “senior administration officials”, the White House was opposing efforts by Senator Graham to increase gasoline taxes. That claim was perverse–the bill didn’t include higher gasoline taxes and Graham certainly wasn’t pushing them–but not surprisingly it created problems for Graham back home.

Lizza’s article is rich with such anecdotes, but it’s the larger picture I’d like to emphasize. Kerry, Lieberman, and Graham adopted a traditional approach to building a Senate coalition. They identified their main goal–comprehensive climate change limits–and then started negotiating with individual Senators and special interests to see how they could get to 60 votes. Nuclear power, electric utilities, oil refiners, home heating oil, even cod fisherman all make an appearance at the bargaining table. But it’s not clear that such horse-trading could ever yield 60 votes.

This failure makes me wonder whether the traditional approach will ever generate a substantive climate bill. I suppose that’s still possible, particularly if the EPA begins to implement a burdensome regulatory approach to limiting carbon emissions. That might bring affected industries running back to the table.

But I would like to suggest another strategy: Perhaps the environmental community should make common cause with the budget worrywarts. In principle, a carbon tax is a powerful two-birds-with-one-stone policy: it cuts carbon emissions and raises money to finance the government. (This is equally true of a cap-and-trade approach in which the government auctions allowances and keeps the proceeds.) Perhaps there’s a future 60-vote coalition that would favor those outcomes even if various energy interests would be opposed?

Such a coalition is unthinkable today. Opposition to energy taxes runs deep, as Senator Graham experienced. But fiscal concerns will continue to grow in coming years, and spending reductions may not be enough to get rising debts under control. If so, maybe we’ll see a day in which a partnership of the greens and the green eyeshades will take a stab at a carbon tax.

The Feud over the 2009 Burlington Mayoral Election

In March 2009, Burlington Vermont used a non-traditional system of voting—Instant Runoff Voting—to select its mayor. The voters returned the incumbent, Progressive Bob Kiss, to the mayor’s office and, in so doing, set off a surprisingly fierce debate among advocates for voting reform. Some tout the Burlington results as a success for Instant Runoff Voting, while others cite them as evidence of its fundamental flaws.

In this post, I will try to settle one part of this debate: whether the Burlington results display a voting pathology known as non-monotonicity. That sounds geeky—ok, it is geeky—but it boils down to a simple question: could a candidate lose an election if voters showed more enthusiasm for him or, equally perversely, win an election if voters showed less enthusiasm?

Several readers asked me to weigh in on this debate after my previous post on alternative voting systems (check out the comments on that post if you want to get a flavor of the debate). I should state from the outset that I am not an expert on voting systems, but I am a card-carrying math and economics geek and enjoy mediating interesting debates, so I gave it my best shot. I reached three main conclusions:

The Burlington results provide a fascinating case study in American voting for reasons that have nothing to do with non-monotonicity. In what was effectively a three-way race, Instant Runoff Voting (henceforth IRV) appears to have chosen a better winner than our usual system, plurality voting. That’s great news for IRV except for one thing: it failed to choose an even better winner. IRV thus appears to have elected the “wrong” candidate, but traditional voting would have elected an even “wronger” candidate. That weird result illustrates how challenging it can be to design a democratic voting system.

The debate about non-monotonicity–which pales in importance next to the larger issues posed by the Burlington results–confuses technical semantics and electoral substance. The Burlington results do illustrate the possibility for non-monotonicity in real world voting data, as IRV critics claim. But, as IRV proponents emphasize, that potential had no effect on the election outcome.

The debate among voting reformers would be more fruitful if they adopted some new lingo to distinguish between the potential for non-monotonicity and its actual impact. Inspired by the world of accounting, my suggestion is to distinguish between material non-monotonicity, in which it affected an election outcome, and immaterial non-monotonicity, in which it didn’t. The Burlington election results display the immaterial variety. (Suggestions welcome for better ways of saying this.)

For further details in a handy-if-lengthy Q&A format, keep on reading.

Continue reading “The Feud over the 2009 Burlington Mayoral Election”

What’s the Best Voting System?

Last February I highlighted a New Yorker piece about instant runoff voting (IRV) in awarding the Oscar for Best Picture. (Kudos to author Hendrik Hertzberg for correctly predicting the winner: The Hurt Locker.)

As I said at the time, I think elections to public office would benefit from IRV as well:

Why? Because it eliminates the downside of voting for a third-party candidate. In a race between D and R, you may worry that voting for third-party candidate I is “throwing your vote away.” That worry disappears with IRV. You can give I your number one vote and either D or R your number 2 vote. If I loses in the first round, you’ll be disappointed. But you won’t have wasted your vote since your second-place vote now becomes operative.

I think that would be a substantial improvement over the winner-take-all vote tallying that dominates the American political system today. But would it be the best of all possible voting systems?

In this week’s New Yorker, Anthony Gottlieb answers no, pointing to a potential flaw in IRV:

Such transferrable-vote elections can behave in topsy-turvy ways: they are what mathematicians call “non-monotonic,” which means that something can go up when it should go down, or vice versa. Whether a candidate who gets through the first round of counting will ultimately be elected may depend on which of his rivals he has to face in subsequent rounds, and some votes for a weaker challenger may do a candidate more good than a vote for that candidate himself. In short, a candidate may lose if certain voters back him, and would have won if they hadn’t.

The practical importance of this theoretical concern is a matter of heated debate, much of which has focused on a 2009 mayoral election in which Burlington, Vermont used IRV (as it had in 2006). According to IRV detractors Burlington ran right into the “non-mononicity” issue, with the “wrong” candidate winning (at least by some voting metrics). IRV supporters reject that view. (Sorry, I haven’t had time to sort this through; if you are interested, just Google “Burlington 2009 election” and have fun.)

As best I can tell, however, both sides agree that the current system is flawed. For example, many of the IRV detractors believe we should adopt a different system: range voting, which allows voters to express how much they like or dislike a candidate. Rather than just ranking Oscar movies, for example, voters would award scores: (e.g., Hurt Locker 10 points, Up in the Air 9 points, Avatar 2 points). The movie with the highest score would win.

That would also solve my primary concern about not discouraging votes for third-party candidates. But perhaps range voting has other hidden problems as well? As Gottlieb notes there is a limit to how far theorizing can take us in this debate:

Mathematics can suggest what approaches are worth trying, but it can’t reveal what will suit a particular place, and best deliver what we want from a democratic voting system: to create a government that feels legitimate to people—to reconcile people to being governed, and give them reason to feel that, win or lose (especially lose), the game is fair. The novelty of range and approval voting in modern politics is so great that we can’t know how they’ll work out without running experiments.

Let me second that recommendation: more experiments with IRV, range voting, approval voting, and other innovations would be well worth the effort.

But I think we can take a pass on the voting system of old Venice, which Gottlieb describes as follows:

Thirty electors were chosen by lot, and then a second lottery reduced them to nine, who nominated forty candidates in all, each of whom had to be approved by at least seven electors in order to pass to the next stage. The forty were pruned by lot to twelve, who nominated a total of twenty-five, who needed at least nine nominations each. The twenty-five were culled to nine, who picked an electoral college of forty-five, each with at least seven nominations. The forty-five became eleven, who chose a final college of forty-one. Each member proposed one candidate, all of whom were discussed and, if necessary, examined in person, whereupon each elector cast a vote for every candidate of whom he approved. The candidate with the most approvals was the winner, provided he had been endorsed by at least twenty-five of the forty-one.

The Budget Uncertainties of Health Reform

Back in March, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the new health legislation would reduce the federal budget deficit by about $140 billion over the next ten years and by about 0.5% of gross domestic product in the decade after that. Ever since, analysts have been debating whether we should believe those estimates. Some say the legislation will deliver much larger budget savings than those modest estimates suggest, while others insist it will greatly increase future deficits.

That debate reflects two types of uncertainty about the legislation’s fiscal impact.

The first is technical. As physicist Niels Bohr (not Yogi Berra) once said, prediction is difficult, particularly about the future. CBO had to make hundreds of educated guesses about future health costs and how consumers, employers, providers, insurers, state governments, and federal officials will respond to dramatic changes in the insurance market. Some of those assumptions will be wrong. But observers disagree on which ones and in what direction.

The second uncertainty is political. The new law will change the landscape for future health policy debates. Those changes (which rightly fall outside the scope of CBO cost estimates) may make it easier or harder for future policymakers to address our long-run budget challenges. I suspect that these political uncertainties are the main reason that optimists and pessimists disagree so strongly on the law’s budget impact.

Pessimists argue that to pay for coverage expansions, the legislation ate up budget savings that could otherwise have been used to address our long-run fiscal challenges. By “emptying the quiver” of some desirable policy options, the health law thus indirectly worsened the long-run budget outlook in a way CBO could not capture.

The pessimists also predict that future Congresses will water down or eliminate some budget savings. To make the budget numbers work, lawmakers combined a large helping of dessert (most notably health insurance for an additional 31 million Americans) with a large serving of spinach (for example, a new excise tax on “Cadillac” insurance plans and cuts in Medicare provider payments). History suggests, however, that policymakers often lose their appetite for the greens (see, for example, physician payments in Medicare).

The optimists believe that the fiscal impact will turn out better than CBO predicted. They note the law includes numerous experiments aimed at uncovering ways to rein in health costs while maintaining or improving quality. Among them: restructuring provider payments, increasing funding for comparative effectiveness research, and creating a new independent board to review Medicare payments. We don’t really know how to reduce medical costs today, but by trying many different approaches and learning from their results, the law will eventually enable future Congresses to adopt the most promising reforms.

Successful health reform may also improve future budget politics. Some past proposals to reduce federal involvement in health care – such as increasing the Medicare eligibility age or rolling back the enormous tax subsidy for employer-provided health insurance – have foundered on fears that some people would lose insurance. But by covering millions of uninsured, the health law reduces that risk, and policymakers may be able to take hard steps that until now have been politically impossible.

It’s hard to know how these political uncertainties will balance out. The law did indeed remove some arrows from the policy quiver, and it is easy to imagine policymakers backing down from scheduled spending cuts or tax increases. So the pessimists have a strong case. But the optimists are also right that if the new law succeeds, it will open new ways to rein in federal health spending. I certainly hope so.

This post first appeared on TaxVox, the blog of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

The Looming Budget Battle over the Bank Tax

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner appeared before the Senate Finance Committee today to push the Administration’s proposal for a Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee, more commonly known as the Bank Tax. The purpose of the fee is to

[M]ake sure that the direct costs of TARP are paid for by the major financial institutions, not by the taxpayer. Assessments on these institutions will be determined by the risks they pose to the financial system. These risks, the combination of high levels of riskier assets and less stable sources of funding, were key contributors to the financial crisis.

The fee would be applied over a period of at least ten years, and set at a level to ensure that the costs of TARP do not add to our national debt. One year ago we estimated those costs could exceed half a trillion dollars. However, we have been successful in repairing the financial system at a fraction of those initial estimates. The estimated impact on the deficit varies from $109 billion according to CBO to $117 billion according to the Administration. We anticipate that our fee would raise about $90 billion over 10 years, and believe it should stay in place longer, if necessary, to ensure that the cost of TARP is fully recouped.

As noted by other participants in today’s hearing, the bank tax raises a host of questions: Is it possible to design the tax so that it is ultimately paid by major financial institutions (by which I presume Geithner means their shareholders and top management), or will it get passed through to their customers? How much, if at all, would the tax reduce bank lending? Is it fair to target the banks even though the bank part of TARP actually made money for taxpayers? Would the tax reduce risks in the financial system?

Those are all interesting questions, but today I’d like to highlight another one: Can Congress embrace the idea of a bank tax that would be used to “ensure the costs of TARP do not add to our national debt”?

As described by the Administration, the bank tax would be used to reduce the deficit, thus offsetting budget costs of TARP. Congress, however, is hungry for revenues that it can use to offset the budget costs of new legislation, e.g., extending the ever popular research-and-experimentation tax credit or limiting the upcoming increase in dividend taxes. With PAYGO now the law of the land (for many legislative proposals), some members are looking at the $90 billion of potential bank tax revenues as the answer to their PAYGO prayers.

All of which points to a looming budget battle: Will the bank tax be used to pay off the costs of TARP, as the President has proposed, or will it be used to pay for other initiatives?

How Did Treasury Vote Its Citigroup Shares?

The United States Treasury is Citigroup’s largest common shareholder, owning 7.7 billion shares, or about 27% of the company. Which raised an interesting issue at today’s annual meeting: how should the Treasury vote its shares?

Treasury answered as follows:

As we have previously stated, Treasury is a reluctant shareholder in private companies and intends to dispose of its TARP investments as quickly as practicable. When it acquired the Citigroup common shares, Treasury announced that it would retain the discretion to vote only on core shareholder issues, including the election of directors; amendments to corporate charters or bylaws; mergers, liquidations and substantial asset sales; and significant common stock issuances. At the time of the exchange, Treasury agreed with Citigroup that it would vote on all other matters proportionately–that is, in the same proportion (for, against or abstain) as all other shares of the company’s stock are voted with respect to each such matter. Treasury is abiding by the same principles in the few other companies in which it owns common shares, which are very few, as most TARP investments were in the form of nonvoting preferred stock.

Those sound like good principles. So how did Treasury actually vote?

Treasury voted FOR three ballot proposals:

15 Nominees to the Board of Directors
To issue $1.7 billion of “common stock equivalents” to workers in lieu of cash incentive compensation (a way to conserve cash that Citi agreed to in a deal to repay some TARP money)
Reverse stock split

Treasury voted PROPORTIONALLY on the remaining proposals:

Ratify KPMG as the firm’s accountant
An increase in shares for a stock incentive plan
Executive compensation (nonbinding “say on pay”)
A “Tax Benefits Protection Plan” which discourages ownership changes that would reduce the value of Citi’s $46 billion in deferred tax assets
Six shareholder proposals covering such issues as corporate governance and political activity.

Treasury emphasizes that its proportional votes don’t mean it lacks an opinion on these proposals. Referring to two corporate governance proposals, for example, Treasury noted that it may have a policy preference but:

Treasury believes that it would be inappropriate to use its power as a shareholder to advance a position on matters of public policy and believes such issues should be decided by Congress, the SEC or through other proper governmental forums in a manner that applies generally to companies. For this reason, and because voting on such matters was not necessary in order to fulfill its EESA responsibilities, Treasury refrained from exercising a discretionary vote.

Although Treasury expressed that view with respect to the corporate governance provisions, I can’t help but wonder what it felt about the “Tax Benefits Preservation Plan.”

You can see all the proposals in Citigroup’s proxy statement.

Disclosure: I own no Citigroup securities of any kind (see this post for a summary of my previous thoughts about Citi securities).

About that Government Takeover of the Student Loan Business …

Health care understandably dominated the headlines leading up to — and beyond — yesterday’s historic House vote. It’s important to remember, however, that the reconciliation legislation also includes major reforms in the way that the government supports student loans.

Under current law, federally supported loans are made both direct from the government and through private lenders. The government loans are direct loans (i.e., the government lends directly to students). The private loans are guaranteed by the government (i.e., private organizations lend to students and the government guarantees the lenders against the risk of default). The health/revenue/education legislation will eliminate the private lending channel. (The market for non-government private loans will continue to exist.)

Opponents have denounced this change as a government takeover of the student loan market. That makes for a great soundbite, but overlooks one key fact: the federal government took over this part of the student loan business a long time ago.

In a private lending market, you would expect lenders to make decisions about whom to lend to and what interest rates to charge. And in return, you would expect those lenders to bear the risks of borrowers defaulting. None of that happens in the market for guaranteed student loans. Instead, the federal government establishes who can qualify for these loans, what interest rates they will pay, and what interest rates the lenders will receive. And the government guarantees the lenders against almost all default risks.

In short, the government already controls all of the most important aspects of this part of the student loan business. The legislation just takes this a step further and cuts back on the role of private firms in the origination of these loans.

That step raises some interesting questions about the costs of the current system (see this post), possible benefits of the current system (some colleges and universities appear to prefer working with private lenders), and the potential budget savings of cutting out the middle man (which appear to be large but somewhat overstated in official budget analyses).

But it hardly constitutes a government takeover.