Forbes Contributor, Sheila Callahan, covered USAFacts release of its third annual report on May 2, 2019. The report highlighted recent shifts in U.S. demographics, noting that seniors, 65 years and older, are now 16 percent of the population.
Gig Economy Workers Face Tax Hurdles
Knowledge@Wharton invited Senior Economist at PWBM, Richard Prisinzano, on as a guest speaker on April 12, 2019, as well as Christine Speidel of Villanova University’s Federal Tax Clinic , to discuss discuss personal taxes, focusing on gig economy workers.
First Tax Day Under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act
CNN reported on the first Tax Day under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Lydia Depillis highlighted key economic effects of the 2017’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
Analysis of Fiscal Therapy: Conventional and Dynamic Estimates
PWBM projects that the proposals in Fiscal Therapy by William Gale would reduce the debt to-GDP ratio from 188 percent to 17 percent in 2050 and increase long-run economic output by 7 percent.
Americans Startled by Impact of New Tax Law on Returns
Knowledge@Wharton invited Senior Economist at PWBM, Richard Prisinzano, on as a guest speaker on March 12, 2019, as well as the Center for Tax Law and Policy’s Michael Knoll, to discuss the impact of the TCJA’s tax changes on tax filers this year.
Annual Data is Better than Monthly for Understanding Tax Revenues
FactCheck.org’s Eugene Kiely explored how to think about the impact of 2017’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) on tax revenue through official measures of tax receipts. Treasury reports show that in 2018 tax receipts were slightly lower than in 2017. However, tax receipts in February 2019 were 10% higher than in February 2018. Kiely asked PWBM’s Alexander Arnon what these figures mean for future tax receipts.
The Social Security 2100 Act: Effects on Social Security Finances and the Economy
We project that The Social Security 2100 Act would nearly eliminate Social Security’s conventional long-range imbalance while reducing the program’s dynamic short-range imbalance.
The Act reduces annual shortfalls that would otherwise add to national deficits under current policy, but at the cost of new tax distortions. The two effects nearly cancel in the macroeconomy. We project that the Act decreases GDP by 0.7 percent by 2029 and decreases GDP by 2 percent by 2049.
Previously, PWBM showed that reforms that combined tax increases with progressive benefit reductions could boost GDP by over 5 percent by 2049.
Official BEA Measure of Real GDP Growth Meets PWBM’s Expectations
The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) recently reported that real GDP grew 2.9 percent in 2018, up from 2.2 percent in 2017. This official government measure falls just below the range projected by PWBM in December of 2017 for the year 2018. At the end of December 2017, including the effects of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, PWBM estimated that real GDP would grow between 3.1 and 3.6 percent in 2018.
Need Help Understanding the Impact of the New Tax Law on You? Check Out The Wall Street Journal Tax Calculator Powered By PWBM
On March 4, Dylan Moriarty and Richard Rubin presented the Wall Street Journal Tax Calculator, powered by Penn Wharton Budget Model, to help taxpayers understand tax law as they prepare their taxes. Taxpayers only need to enter a few key characteristics such as income and marital status to get an estimate of their tax liability from 2018 to 2027.
Decline in Housing-Driven Movement Ushers in Era of Less Migration
In a previous blog post, I considered how wage changes are related to the decision to move and the decline in household movement observed in the last two decades (see Figure 1 below). However, wage changes aren’t the only reason households choose to move. Changing motivations for moving are illustrative in examining the broader context of internal migration.
Options to Return Social Security to Financial Balance: The Impact on Economic Growth
We examine a range of policy options that put Social Security on a sustainable path.
The analysis emphasizes the need for analyzing Social Security reforms using deep modeling that reveals important interactions that challenge conventional wisdom.
Tax increases generally produce more growth than “current policy” analysis where shortfalls are combined with the standard unified surplus measure. Additional debt can be combined with changes in benefits to produce even more economic growth. Reforms that combine tax increases and progressive benefit reductions produce the most growth.
Experts Debate Impact of TCJA on Growth and Investment
The Economist’s print edition, published February 7th, reports that “Some Fights About the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act Seem Over.” Public opinion polls indicate that voters think that “large corporations and rich Americans” are the ones benefiting from the tax law. Meanwhile, policy analysts continue to debate the details.
Raising Taxes on the Rich Can Have Unintended Consequences
Penn Wharton Budget Model Senior Economist Richard Prisinzano discussed raising taxes on the wealthy with Alan Auerbach, Professor of Economics and Law at University of California Berkeley, and Knowledge@Wharton host Dan Loney. You can listen to the full discussion below.
Growth in Business Investments Tied to Oil Prices, Not Tax Cuts
The New York Times reported Tuesday that the Trump Administration’s “rosy” outlook on the U.S. economy is “increasingly diverging” from economists’ forecasts. The White House predicted that the economy will continue to grow at 3 percent through 2024 (adjusted for inflation), while the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released their forecasts standing at 2.3 percent for 2019, slowing to 1.7 percent in 2020. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve’s forecast also predicts 2.3 percent growth in 2019, and Goldman Sachs suggested a more conservative 2.1 percent growth this year based on consumer confidence figures and regional business surveys.
Furloughed Federal Workers Were Both Employed and Unemployed in January
Hundreds of thousands of federal government workers were recently on furlough due to a partial lapse in appropriations. Furloughed employees are barred from working and are not paid, but recent legislation guarantees that they will receive back pay “on the earliest date possible after the lapse ends.” The ambiguous status of federal workers on furlough--employed, but not working--will be reflected in next Friday’s jobs report. Furloughed federal workers will be counted as both employed and unemployed in January.
The Hidden Revenue Cost of a 70% Top Marginal Rate
In a recent interview on 60 Minutes, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez presented the idea of instituting a 70 percent marginal tax rate on income over $10 million. Many commentators have weighed in on this proposal, both with op-eds supporting and criticizing this type of policy.
A conventional revenue estimate of the new tax rate would incorporate a traditional elasticity of taxable income. However, a second factor is very important for high-income taxpayers: a significant share of income above $10 million is earned by owners of pass-through businesses. We project that a significant amount of pass-through business owners will respond to this tax by reorganizing as C corporations to minimize their tax liability. This shift could cause the new 70% tax rate to lose as much as 43 percent of revenue that would otherwise be raised.
The Price of Oil is Now a Key Driver of Business Investment
US production of crude oil has more than doubled since 2008. Starting in the mid-2000s, the application of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing to tight oil formations led to a surge in US supply known as the shale boom. In this post, I discuss the shale boom’s impact on the relationship between business investment and the price of oil. I then estimate the effect of the recent rise in oil prices on investment in 2018. I find that oil prices might even account for most of the increase in the growth rate of investment in 2018.
Federal Debt Maturity in PWBM’s Dynamic OLG Model
According to USAFacts, in 2015, the federal government paid more than $220 billion in interest, which is six percent of the federal budget and more than one percent of GDP. Thus, federal interest payments are a major component of the federal budget and significantly impact on the U.S. economy. The maturity structure of federal debt--the sizes of, due dates of, and interest rates on federal debt--affects federal interest payments. Longer-term debt issued at higher interest rates increases interest payments but “locks in” those payments for a long time. Shorter-term, lower-interest debt lowers interest payments but increases the impact of changes on interest rates on the federal budget as federal debt is refinanced.
Previously, we analyzed the maturity structure of federal debt back to 1953. Below, we describe how PWBM incorporates the maturity structure of federal debt into our dynamic overlapping-generations (OLG) model to make projections of interest paid on the federal debt.
A Response to the White House’s Recent Critique of PWBM’s Tax Analysis
This past Friday, Dr. Kevin Hassett, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, critiqued Penn Wharton Budget Model’s analysis of the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” (TCJA), signed into law by President Trump in December 2017. Dr. Hassett delivered his remarks at the 2019 American Economic Association meeting. The AEA meeting is the largest annual event of academic and government economists, held this year in Atlanta, Georgia.
More Gains to Moving for College Educated Workers
Internal migration of working-age people in the United States has fallen by more than a third – from 18.9 percent in 1994 to 11.4 percent in 2018 (see Figure 1). This phenomenon has received significant scholarly attention – Cooke (2013) for example, attributes this decline to the rise of information and communication technologies. Alternatively, Molloy, Smith, and Wozniak (2011) point to broad macroeconomic shifts.
Reduced internal migration has important economic implications, particularly for labor markets. We find that wages grow faster for movers, especially for those with a college degree.