Why not tax dead people - they are dead, after all?

Supporters of inheritance taxes do love to argue that we really should tax dead people. After all, they are dead so aren't going to squeal about it. Such taxation does therefore at least pass one test, the maximisation of feathers plucked with the least hissing.

However, this idea does meet one major obstacle, which is that the major economic unit among humans is not the individual but the family:

Ageing parents are drawing up legal documents to make clear that they would rather die than allow excessive care home fees to eat into their child’s inheritance.

The rising cost of elderly care is leading the middle-aged to create powers of attorney enshrining their desire to refuse treatment should they become incapacitated, a leading law firm said.

True, that is a piece of puffery from a law firm advertising, through he kind editors at The Times, their ability to write such legal documents. But even puffery has a basis in truth - why bother to advertise what no one is interested in? 

Which brings us to that family thing. Marriage, or at least pair bonding, are essential to the continuation of the species. We don't do that because sex is fun - it's because those for whom sex was fun bonded and thus raised more children through those decades human children need. There are indeed other species which take longer to reach sexual maturity than we do. But none that require such parenting for so long.

All of which has made the family that basic economic unit of us humans. At which point the detestation of inheritance tax makes sense. The aim and purpose of our travails in the vale of tears is the production of grandchildren. Passing on money rather than J. Corbyn getting to spend it on diversity advisers accords with our deeper instincts. Those rationalisations about how taxing dead people harms no one notwithstanding.

There's a larger point to this. We can build abstract arguments for many things just as sandcastles in the air are entirely possible. But we do have to recall, at least occasionally, that we're dealing with Homo Sapiens here. And he and she can be contrary little buggers at times. We must therefore check that our grand abstractions accord with what humans actually do.

Sure, it would be great if everyone would work flat out to create the perfect society, sharing everything equally as they did so. We've also tried that and it didn't work - because humans. So too with inheritance tax. There are all sorts of logical reasons why it's a stunningly good idea. But that people would seemingly rather pop their c logs rather than not be able to pass on inheritances would seem to indicate that this is one of those times when logic and humans don't mix well. Or perhaps that the wrong logic about humans is being deployed.

Bank of England stress tests inadvertently reveal the weakness of the UK banking system

For the first posting in this two-part series on the 2016 UK stress tests, see here.

The Bank of England’s latest stress test results are important for the following reason: in acknowledging the financial weakness of RBS, the Bank of England is implicitly acknowledging that its own past policies have failed. After all, had those policies worked, then RBS should have returned to financial health long before now. [1]

The results of the stress tests properly interpreted also show that RBS is not the only bank in trouble. The Bank of England flagged up ‘issues’ with Barclays and Standard Chartered too, but the truth is that all the banks are financially weak. The elephant in the room is that the Bank of England’s policies towards the UK banking system have failed to restore it to financial health despite the vast public subsidies involved and despite Bank of England protestations to the contrary.

Read on here:

To start with, we can dismiss the Bank of England’s headline results based on the ratio of Common Equity Tier 1 capital to Risk-Weighted Assets (RWAs). A substantial body of research – including work by its own chief economist Andy Haldane has discredited the RWA measure. Consider:

·      Average RWA fell in the years running up to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), suggesting that the banking system was getting safer when in fact risks were actually building up (see, e.g., Haldane, 2013).

·      Using latest data for the big four UK banks – Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds and RBS – the ratio of average RWA to Total Assets was 30.6%. However, many assets assigned zero or low risk weights are quite risky.

Thus, the RWA measure hides many (and maybe most) of the risks in the banking system. It did so before the GFC and is doing so still.

The only ratio that matters is the ratio of a bank’s core capital to an appropriate measure of its total amount at risk. The ratio used by the Bank in its stress tests is the Tier 1 Leverage Ratio, Tier 1 capital divided by an amount-at-risk measure known as the Leverage Exposure.

Unfortunately, Tier 1 capital is not a good measure of core capital because it includes items known as Additional Tier 1 (AT1), some of which (such as Deferred Tax Assets) are of no use as a capital resource to a bank in a solvency crisis. AT1 capital also includes items such as Co-Co bonds, whose usefulness in a crisis is also controversial. There is therefore a good argument that a prudent assessment of UK banks’ financial health should focus on CET1 and not include questionable AT1 items, i.e., we should use the CET1 Leverage Ratio instead of the Tier 1 Leverage Ratio. [2]

When we replace Tier 1 with CET1 as the numerator in the Leverage Ratio, then the average post-stress Leverage Ratio for the big 4 UK banks – Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds and RBS – falls from 3.9 percent to 3.6 percent. [3]

This figure of 3.6 percent can be compared to both regulatory standards and expert opinion:

·      Under the Basel III capital rules, the absolute minimum required leverage ratio is 3 percent. However, the best practice in this field is represented by the Federal Reserve: under rules coming through in the United States, the subsidiaries of the 8 big U.S. G-SIBs (Globally Systemically Important Banks) are soon to be required to maintain leverage ratios of at least 6 percent, i.e., twice that specified in Basel III.

·      Many experts recommend that the minimum required leverage ratio should be at least 15 percent, i.e., five times the Basel III minimum requirement. [4]

There is also a second elephant in the room whose presence has been emphasised by Anat Admati and Sir John Vickers: the price-to-book (PTB) ratio.

For a healthy bank, the PTB ratio would be comfortably above one indicating that the bank had a positive franchise value.

A PTB ratio below one indicates a bank that is sickly: for example, with a PTB ratio of 50%, then the bank has managed to convert £2 of capital provided by shareholders into just £1 of market value.

Yet the PTB ratios of major UK banks are all below 1 and in most cases, well below 1. For the big 4 banks the latest PTB ratios are 79 percent for Barclays, 71 percent for HSBC, 72 percent for Lloyds and 43 percent for RBS.

Such low PTB ratios contradict any narrative that the banking system has been fixed.

They also indicate that the market is signalling major problems that the book values are overlooking and we should take account of these signals.

When we do so, we get the following results for the post-stress market-value CET1 Leverage Ratios:

Market-Value CET1 Leverage Ratios Post BoE Stress

The post-stress market-value CET1 Leverage Ratios vary from 1.08 percent for RBS to 2.93 percent for HSBC and the average is 2.2 percent. All the big four banks fail the test. [5]

The natural inference is that the whole UK banking system is under water. [6]

An obvious follow-on is that the Bank of England narrative – “Banking system fixed because of our wise policies and you can see its resilience from the stress tests” to paraphrase Governor Carney from last year’s stress test press conference – is demonstrably falsified by the results of the BoE’s own stress tests.

References

Admati, A. et alia (2010) “Healthy banking system is the goal, not profitable banks.” Financial Times 10 November. 

Bank of England (2016) “Stress testing the UK banking system: 2016 results.” Available at

http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/news/2016/stresstesting.aspx

Haldane, A. G. (2013) “Constraining discretion in bank regulation.”  Speech by Andrew Haldane iven at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta Conference on ‘Maintaining Financial Stability: Holding a Tiger by the Tail(s)’, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, 9 April. Available at

http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/2013/657.aspx

End Notes

* Kevin Dowd (kevin.dowd@outlook.com) is professor of finance and economics at Durham University. He thanks Tim Bush, James Ferguson, Joel Hills, Martin Hutchinson, Gordon Kerr, Sir John Vickers and Basil Zafiriou for helpful inputs. The usual caveat applies.

[1] Steve Baker MP, Tim Bush (from PIRC), Gordon Kerr (from Cobden Partners) and I have been trying to tell them for over five years that RBS was an unfixable zombie that needed to be put through bankruptcy.  The response? A deafening silence.

[2] In its Stress Test report, the Bank of England set out a variety of alternative sets of results: (a) outcomes before assumed management actions or AT1 conversion, (b) outcomes after assumed management actions but before AT1 conversion, and (c) outcomes after assumed management actions and after AT1 conversion. I prefer the latter for reasons suggested in the text.

[3] If we had assumed case (b) in the above footnote, the difference would only have been slight: the average post-stress CET1 Leverage Ratio for the big four banks would have been 3.7 percent instead of 3.6 percent.

[4] For example, a famous letter drafted by Professor Admati and co-signed by 19 other distinguished economists suggested a minimum leverage ratio (although it did not use that term) of at least 15 percent and some signatories wanted the minimum to be much higher than that. See A. Admati et alia, 2010. Former BB&T chairman John Allison has also supported this position.

[5] We can also say that the post-stress leverage ratios reported here are over-estimates because they are based on Leverage Exposure numbers that fail to incorporate many derivatives exposures. Gordon Kerr, an expert in this area, assures me that the true exposures are at least twice those reflected in the Leverage Exposure numbers used here. Were we to take account of these additional exposures, we would obtain post-stress Leverage Ratios of less than half those reported here.

[6] Note too that the results in the chart are based on the lower of the Bank’s two pass standards, i.e., its so-called hurdle rate or 3 percent. It’s new, higher, pass standard, the ‘systemic reference point’ is in general higher: 3.4 percent for Barclays and HSBC, 3.2% for RBS and (unfortunately) ‘n.a.’ for Lloyds (but even so, presumably not less than 3 percent). Had I used these latter pass standards, the picture would have been worse than suggested by the chart.

Some people still aren't getting these finer distinctions of private property

It's quite obvious that out there in that political world there are people who don't get even the basics of this idea of private property. Those who insist that shareholders cannot pay their managers what they wish for example, or that someone else must be prevented from utilising their own land in their own manner because, you know, the view or something.

But there are also those who miss some of the finer distinctions in this area:

Taxpayers saved the Royal Bank of Scotland. Now it’s time we owned it

Gareth Thomas

That's interesting, not sure we agree, but it is interesting. Maybe the taxpayers should buy out the remaining private shareholders of this dog's dinner. And when put that way we definitely disagree with it. That isn't what is being suggested:

Together as taxpayers we saved the Royal Bank of Scotland – now we should each be allowed to own it. It should become a people’s bank, which every tax-paying British citizen would have the right to become a part-owner of.

Every taxpaying Briton is a part owner right now. For the government, which we fund with out taxes, owns some ungodly percentage of the shares in RBS.

More than £45bn of taxpayer funds have been injected into the Royal Bank of Scotland. This was the right thing to do, but neither keeping it as a state bank nor a fully privatised bank offer the same advantages as turning it into a mutual.

We can have private stock companies, public and even state. RBS is an odd little blend of those last two at present. A mutual is something different, it is owned by (usually at least, in the case of banks or building societies) the depositors. Who gain a slightly better rate of interest on their savings from the absence of that outside capital which would like to get paid a dividend or two.

So the demand here is that all of us taxpayers, who currently own however much it is of the bank, should make a free gift to the future depositors with RBS of £45 billion? Or at least whatever the current diminished value of that investment is?

You know, we really do think that's a deal we can reject. It might even be a good idea that RBS becomes a mutual - again, not that we think so ourselves. But we really are very certain indeed that if that is to happen it should happen with other peoples' money, not ours, us long suffering taxpayers.

We the heck should all of us gift such a thing to some subset of us?

Bank of England fails its stress test again

On November 30th, the Bank of England released the results of its third publicly disclosed set of stress tests of the financial resilience of the UK banking system.  

The good news is that the news is good: our banking system is in good shape, but the bad news is that the good news is not credible.

In this post, I would like to put the stress test results through my own favourite stress test – a reality check.

By this most basic of tests the Bank scores an ‘F’.

Read on:

The spin is that the banking system passes with flying colours even though one of the seven banks involved failed (RBS) and two others (Barclays and Standard Chartered) were deemed as problematic.

Let’s pass over the slight glaring contradiction at the heart of that narrative and quote Governor Carney:

The resilience of the system during the past year in part reflects the consistent build-up of capital resources by banks since the global financial crisis. … the UK banking system is well placed to provide credit to households and businesses during periods of severe stress.

That conclusion is corroborated by the 2016 stress test [which is] broad, coherent and severe …  (Governor’s opening remarks, p. 3)

Every one of these claims is questionable, but let’s focus on the severity of the Bank’s ‘doomsday’ scenario.  

The scenario consists of a bunch of adverse events, including world and UK recessions (annual global GDP growth troughs at -1.9% and UK GDP falls by 4.3%), major falls (over 30% and over 40%) in the prices of houses and commercial real estate, unemployment rising by 4.5 percentage points and sundry other stuff. However, the key phrase is this: “overall, the UK stress is roughly equivalent to that experienced during the financial crisis, albeit with a shallower fall in domestic output” (Bank of England, 2016 stress test results report, p. 6).

Take-home message: the stress scenario was not quite as stressful as the Global Financial Crisis (GFC).

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Now consider how this adverse scenario impacts the banks. To quote Carney, the adverse stress scenario led to “system-wide losses of £44 billion over the first two years of the stress – five times those incurred by the same banks over the two years at the height of the financial crisis.” (Governor’s remarks, p. 2)

This statement misled some commentators into thinking that the stress scenario was five times more severe than the GFC, but it isn’t.

Carney’ statement implies that the system-wide losses over the two height years of the crisis were less than £44 billion/5 = £8.8 billion.

This claim is misleading, however. In fact, the banks spread out their reported losses over the period since, because they were afraid of the adverse public reaction if they had disclosed them promptly. Consequently, the appropriate comparison is not with reported losses over these two years only but with cumulative losses post-2007. As James Ferguson of The MacroStrategy Group points out, the cumulative loan losses for the big 4 banks alone were nearly £200 billion and nearly double that if we include balance sheet reserves, securities losses, restructurings/goodwill write-downs and legal redress (Ferguson, 2016, p. 2). [1]

The £44 billion losses generated by the Bank’s stress model are not five times the losses incurred at the height of the crisis but 44¸ 450 or about a tenth of the gross losses banks experienced since 2007.

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But how can a supposedly severe stress scenario lead to the moderate losses projected by the Bank’s stress model?

The most plausible answer is that the Bank’s model is wrong. The Bank model’s estimated losses merely indicate that the feedback link between the scenario and the simulated losses in the Bank’s model must (greatly) under-estimate the losses involved.

This point in and of itself is enough to discredit the entire exercise.

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In the Q&A at the press conference, Carney makes a related claim:

the capital hit in this stress would have wiped out all of the capital that these same banks had prior to the crisis. So this is a big, big hit to capital. (Financial Stability Report Q&A, p. 19)

This claim is wrong. For the big four banks alone, their 2006 Annual Reports report that their capital going into 2007 was about £150 billion. The projected £44 billion loss from the Bank’s stress test model is barely 30% of this number, and would be even lower if we included the capital of the other banks in the exercise.

A loss of $44 billion is a fairly small hit anyway. With about £2.1 trillion in assets, a loss of $44 billion is equivalent to a loss rate of about 2 percent. Yet since the GFC, the accumulated loss rate so far has been about 10 percent, i.e., five times bigger rather than five times smaller than that simulated by the Bank.

---

Carney’s responses in the Q&A also alluded to another important issue that deserves more attention: the problem of the incurred loss accounting model by which losses are not recognised until they have occurred – implying that expected losses are not reported – and the inadequacy of the supposed solution to this problem, IFRS 9, which recognises expected losses so long as they are expected within 12 months. As he said in response to a question:

Now there is another issue which is not adjusted for in the stress tests which is coming which is IFRS 9, which not yet finalised and could have some impact. But I think you know the banks, the analyst community, ourselves, we all have equal line of sight to that and its timing. (Press conference Q&A, p. 18)

So Carney acknowledges that the Bank’s stress tests are based on accounting rules that ignore expected losses and some people might regard this omission as a bit of a worry.

But even when it is implemented, IFRS 9 won’t fix the hidden expected losses problem: it will merely encourage banks to adopt practices that make sure that losses are pushed out into the future so they are expected to occur more than 12 months hence. As the UK’s leading financial accountant Tim Bush wrote me: IFRS 9 “is going to be a disaster.”

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There is one last issue that surfaced in the discussion last week: the setting of the Countercylical Capital Buffer (CCyB). Back in July, the FPC reduced the CCyB on banks’ UK exposures from 0.5% to 0%. To quote Carney again:

The FPC was concerned that banks could respond to these developments by hoarding capital and restricting lending. The reduction of the CCyB rate was intended to reinforce the FPC’s expectation that all elements of capital and liquidity buffers are able to be drawn on to support the real economy.

That position has not changed. In light of the continued uncertainty around the UK economic outlook and the resilience demonstrated in the 2016 stress test, the FPC agreed to maintain the CCyB rate at 0% and that it expects, absent any material change in the outlook, to maintain this rate until at least June 2017. (Governor’s opening remarks, pp. 4-5)

I don’t understand this passage. What does it mean to say that the FPC expects “that all elements of capital and liquidity buffers are able to be drawn on to support the real economy” and how is this relevant to the decisions first to reduce the CCyB to zero and then to keep it there?

And what is the point of relying on “continued uncertainty” to justify any CCyB decision, given that uncertainty, like the poor, will always be with us?

There is a deeper problem: the FPC seems to have it the wrong way round. The purpose of the CCyB is to counter the financial cycle: as aggregate credit builds, markets boom and risks build up; then the boom breaks, markets fall and the risks are realised and subsequently fall. [2] The CCyB should rise in the first phase to help slow the euphoria, and then fall in the second phase to ameliorate the distress. Over the last few years markets have been booming, so we are presumably still in Phase 1. If so, then the FPC should be to increase rates instead of to reduce them. The FPC’s ‘countercyclical’ policy is therefore procyclical: it is aggravating the problems it is meant to ameliorate!

On the other hand, it may be that the FPC’s and Carney’s thinking is that we are actually in Phase 2, the down phase of the cycle, in which case reducing the CCyB would make sense – if one accepts that assessment and buys into countercyclical financial policy in the first place, which I don’t. However, that is not the message that clearly comes across from their statements.

At the very least, the Bank should always base its decisions on CCyB settings on a clear statement about which phase of the cycle they think we are in: Phase 1 implying that the decision to be considered is to raise the buffer or Phase 2 implying the opposite. However, I suspect they don’t do that because they don’t know themselves or because they don’t wish to expose their views on the matter to criticism. Hence the Bank waffle around the issue. If this latter conjecture is correct, they would be better off abandoning CCyB policy altogether.

One gets the distinct impression that all that they see is uncertainty, so they think “uncertainty is bad so we should ease” and cut the buffer. However, if that is what they do, they are not even attempting to follow countercyclical policy: all they have is a policy bias towards ease, which is the same bias that we see with unconventional policy for most of the past decade.

But this might just be me. All I can say is that I don’t understand their CCyB policy and I suspect they don’t either.

There are further problems with the stress test results too, but I will come to those in my next posting.

References

Bank for International Settlements (2016) “Countercyclical capital buffer.” July 20. Available at https://www.bis.org/bcbs/ccyb/.

Bank of England, Financial Stability Report Press Conference Q&A, 30 November 2016. Available at

http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/fsr/2016/conf301116.pdf.

Bank of England, “Opening remarks by the Governor.” Financial Stability Report Press Conference, 30 November 2016. Available at

http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/fsr/2016/fsrspnote301116.pdf.

Bank of England (2016) “Stress testing the UK banking system: 2016 results.” Bank of England 30 November 2016. Available at

http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/financialstability/Documents/fpc/results301116.pdf.

Ferguson, J. (2016) “UK bank ‘stress’ test.” The Macrostrategy Partnership, 2 December 2016.

Local Authority Pension Fund Forum (2011) UK and Irish Banks Capital Losses – Post Mortem. London: LAPFF.

Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards (2013) ‘An accident waiting to happen’: The failure of HBOS. London: Stationery Office.

End Notes

* Kevin Dowd (kevin.dowd@outlook.com) is professor of finance and economics at Durham University. I thank Tim Bush, James Ferguson, Martin Hutchinson and Basil Zafiriou for helpful comments.

[1] Let me also cite some other numbers give an idea of the true scale of losses. (i) Tim Bush in his LAPFF Post-Mortem report (LAPFF, 2011) cited bank losses over the 2007-2010 of over £89.4 billion. (ii) The Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards (2013) reported that the losses for HBOS alone were £46.5 billion. (iii) The Asset Protection Scheme has estimated the losses to RBS at almost £60 billion.

[2] Consider this quote from a recent BIS statement (BIS, 2016): “The countercyclical capital buffer aims to ensure that banking sector capital requirements take account of the macro-financial environment in which banks operate. Its primary objective is to use a buffer of capital to achieve the broader macroprudential goal of protecting the banking sector from periods of excess aggregate credit growth that have often been associated with the build-up of system-wide risk. Due to its countercyclical nature, the countercyclical capital buffer regime may also help to lean against the build-up phase of the credit cycle in the first place. In downturns, the regime should help to reduce the risk that the supply of credit will be constrained by regulatory capital requirements that could undermine the performance of the real economy and result in additional credit losses in the banking system.”

How Britain should fix its fisheries

Over at Brexit Central, Madsen has written about his plan to restore Britain's fisheries using property rights and market mechanisms – the Icelandic model, essentially:

Having seen its fish stocks depleted by over-fishing, Iceland instituted a quota system to restore and sustain them.  Each year its scientists estimate the biomass within Iceland’s waters.  They measure the amount and size of a variety of different species and calculate the quantity of each that can be fished sustainably.  Quotas of different types of fish are assigned to every boat, quotas which belong to the owners and which, crucially, can be traded.

Every catch is recorded, and no dumping is allowed.  All catches must be landed, and if a boat exceeds its quota for a type of fish, its owners must buy quotas from others to stay within the law. All catches and quota trades have to be made public, and are put online so that any vessel can inspect the current state of the market, and decide what and where to catch based on public information.

Read his post here, and his recent paper on these proposals here.

The Marijuana Transmogrification

'It was all Mrs. Bumble. She would do it,'

'That is no excuse,' replied Mr. Brownlow. 'You were present on the occasion of the destruction of these trinkets, and indeed are the more guilty of the two, in the eye of the law; for the law supposes that your wife acts under your direction.'

'If the law supposes that,' said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, 'the law is an ass—an idiot. If that's the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is, that his eye may be opened by experience—by experience.'

Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens

In Dickens’ story, Mr. Bumble, Oliver’s corrupt guardian, tosses the boy’s identifying heirlooms into a river. When questioned about the act, he blames it on his wife, only to be informed that the law views his wife as his agentless servant, rendering him guilty. While Mr. Bumble may be a villain, his ruin results not from the smooth functioning a justice seeking law, but the exploitation of its absurdity by Oliver’s friend. Oliver is glad of the man’s fate, but unlikely to gain much respect for the law from the episode.

Mr. Bumble’s claim holds weight not because he is innocent, but because in convicting him, the law reveals itself to be operating on an incorrect set of assumptions about the world. While Bumble hopes that the law’s eye will be opened by experience, the early 19th century provided the law with many examples of female agency. In the face of this reality, the law blinked, continuing to indulge a fiction, and depriving itself of a basis for respect. The ongoing prohibition of marijuana blinks similarly in the face of reality and experience, placing needless strain on the rule of law.

The law is not merely the specific statue in question, but the rule of law, an institution respected, in principle, as a set of constraints necessary for the enjoyment of ordered liberty. We are not expected to pick which laws we ought to obey, but to follow them all because they are equally law. This works only when the law is applied impartially, and corresponds to a set of broadly accepted moral norms. Each statue gains the binding power of law, but, with great power, comes great responsibility; each regulation’s individual legitimacy reflects back upon the law as a whole. A small number of bad laws can do great damage to the rule of law; only a donkey’s head is necessary to make a man Bottom.

Marijuana use, while not healthy, simply does not have the deleterious effects long promised by prohibitionists. Marijuana users are not generally regarded as particularly deviant, or antisocial. Prohibition affects poorer urban users more than others, both because of racial discrimination, and the relative ease with which densely populated spaces can be searched. As a result, the ongoing to prohibition of marijuana begs us to understand the law as scientifically ignorant, discriminatory, and a least an amoral restraint.

When marijuana use is both normalized and illegal, breaking the law becomes a normal act. Would-be law abiding marijuana users regularly interact with criminals, or delve into the dark web. We shrug when passing marijuana smokers in the park, seeing something illegal, but certainly not worth arresting anyone over. Police are distrusted as enforcers of an erroneous order, or begin selectively enforcing the law. A century of prohibition has made an ass of our law with little to show for it, the sooner we can open its eyes, and begin to reverse this spell, the better.   

On the subject of Google's search results

A complaint that searching Google for "Did the holocaust happen?" leads to, as its first result, something from Stormfront. Deluded idiots that they are they deny that it did. This is, apparently, an outrage. That we live in a society which has freedom of speech to the extent that people are allowed to say things which are wrong.

And, according to Google, it’s the most authoritative source on the internet on the “question” of whether or not the Holocaust actually happened. Sceptical, educated people will of course look for other evidence. These are the searches that Google lists at the bottom of the page as suggestions for what to search next: “Holocaust never happened theory” “proof the Holocaust happened” “Holocaust fake proof” “Holocaust never happened movie” “Holocaust didn’t happen conspiracy” “did the Holocaust happen during ww2.”

On our search, to replicate this outrage, we found that the second entry was the BBC explaining why the holocaust did happen, the third Wikipedia's entry on holocaust denial, the fourth and fifth from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (not known to  be a hot bed of deniers) and so on.

We're not overjoyed about Stormfront's placing either but that line from the play about Voltaire comes to mind, we disagree with what they say but we're damn certain that they should be allowed to say it - we are though ambivalent about whether we would put our lives on the line for that particular grouping even though it is traditional that we should claim we would.

A search for Fidel Castro produces the BBC on Cuba's revolutionary leader, The Guardian on how he corrected Gabriel Garcia Marquez's manuscripts, the NYT on some called him a hero, some a despot. A search for Mao Tse Tung gives us the History channel which notes that people died under his rule but is remarkably coy about apportioning any blame.

And no doubt further investigation will find more such "errors" in such search results. All of which is, we would maintain, the price of that liberty and freedom we have. That people are not only allowed to say, subject only to the laws of libel and incitement to violence, what they believe to be true, but even if it is wrong. And to prevent the presentation of this, these views, by the law is indeed censorship.

And that, of course, is where this is going:

This is hate speech. It’s lies. It’s racist propaganda. And Google is disseminating it. It is what the data scientist Cathy O’Neil calls a “co-conspirator”. And so are we. Because what happens next is entirely down to us. This is our internet. And we need to make a decision: do we believe it’s acceptable to spread hate speech, to promulgate lies as the world becomes a darker, murkier place?

Because Google is only beyond the reach of the law if it we allow it to be.

The case is very simple indeed. Do you believe in freedom of speech or not? If you do then Stormfront gets to have a website detailing whatever it is that it misunderstands about the world. As does every other vile and hateful group from left and right. There is no shortage of sites insisting that Stalin had nothing to do with the Holodomor, that it was disease not starvation, that the starvation was just bad weather, that there was no campaign against Ukrainians and anyway, it never happened did it?  

There is amusement here as well though:

Our problem too: because do we let these multinational corporations own us and all aspects of our lives? Is that the plan? The Google Transparency Project has documented how the company has become one of the biggest spenders on government lobbyists in the US.

Traditionally the Silicon Valley firms spent little to nothing on lobbying. They just got on with life and business. Then politicians noted that there was lots of money out there. So, they started to regulate the sector - a Danegeld, pay the political process or we'll regulate some more. Which is why they all now have lobbying operations because people are trying to use the political system to gain what they cannot through the normal market processes, control of those Silicon Valley giants.

And it is amusing that the very people arguing for political control use the evidence of resistance to said political control as the reason why control must be imposed.

Let's face it here, wouldn't you send someone to Washington DC to explain to politicians why Carole Cadwalladr should not gain political control over the free speech of billions? Yet that you have done so is evidence to Ms. Cadwalladr that she must have that power. And if you can't laugh about that then why not cry instead?

As we might have mentioned, idiocy is still idiocy even if it's political

Correct, a lot of you disagree with our solution to climate change - stick on a carbon tax and we're done. But given the head of steam that the idea has, rightly or wrongly, something is going to be done. Thus let's try to make sure that it's the right thing which is done, not the wrong.

For example:

Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party is considering radical plans to ban the sale of new petrol cars in the UK, The Independent can reveal.

The bold proposal would mean only zero- or low-carbon vehicles being sold after a set cut-off date, dramatically reducing air pollution and potentially saving thousands of lives.

Or, of course, kill tens of thousands as people cannot afford the transport that enables them to live and work. Then there are the people who get it right:

The Canadian government has agreed a deal with eight of the country’s 10 provinces to introduce its first national carbon price, Justin Trudeau has told reporters.

...

Under his plan, carbon pollution would cost C$10 (£6, US$7.60) a tonne in 2018, rising by C$10 a year until it reaches C$50 in 2022. The provinces can either implement a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade market.

That's a bit steep as a ramp up, something a little more gentle would be a better idea.

But the basic understanding is correct. And again, please, let's not say that it's all a scam. That doesn't matter - these people are going to do something so let's insist they do the right thing. Which is, of course, that some things are just too important to not use markets. If we really do have an externality about emissions then that one crowbar into market prices, that Pigou Tax, is the correct solution. Rather than politicians deciding that they're going to ban the greatest contribution to social freedom yet invented, the internal combustion engine powered car.

But there are those who argue differently:

One party source said: “It’s got nothing to do with whether the technology is there now. It is there, and this is already happening elsewhere in the world. It is only the political will that is lacking in this country.”

The European record of the Triumph of Political Will is just so inspiring, isn't it? But then Fascism always was a movement of the left....

To put Thomas Piketty's worries to rest

You might recall that Thomas Piketty told us all that capitalism was on its last legs, again, and that we needed to have that glorious revolution, again.

The particular worry this time was that capital was growing in relationship to GDP. Instead of said societal capital being 200%, or 300%, of GDP it was rising to ever higher multiples, perhaps 400% and so on. This could only mean that inherited capital was going to become ever more important as a determinant of positions in life, as was true in the 18th and 19th centuries, so tax the capitalists now and tax 'em good.

It's possible that we missed a little of the nuance there but that's a reasonable outline of his worries and his policy solutions. At which point we've this information from the OECD:

The 2016 OECD Pensions Outlook analyses how the pensions landscape is changing in the face of challenges that include ageing populations, the fallout from the financial and economic crisis, and the current environment of low economic growth and low returns.

The report shows that there were 13 OECD countries in which assets in funded pensions represented more than 50% of GDP in 2015, up from 10 in the early 2000s. Over the same period, the number of OECD countries where assets in funded private pension arrangements represent more than 100% of GDP increased from 4 to 7 countries.

We're living longer lives these days, we're working for fewer decades of them and thus people are rationally saving for their expected golden years. Thus capital as a percentage of GDP rises - not to produce inheritances, but to produces incomes in retirement. And rises by potentially at least more than 100% of GDP.

We can't see that this is a problem and we most certainly cannot see that this is an argument for greater taxation of capital. Quite the reverse in fact, people saving for their old age should be encouraged, not specifically taxed.

So much for the most recent French call for revolution then, eh? 

Will our Corporate Tax Cuts get Trumped?

Theresa May's decision to pledge that Britain will have the lowest Corporate Tax Rate in the G20 is undoubtedly good news. If we're to make a success of Brexit (another thing Theresa May has pledged), then preserving and building upon Britain's competitive tax code is essential. But, I suspect Theresa May hasn't quite grasped just how significant Trump's tax cuts will be.

Most of the media has focused on the headline tax cut from the absurdly high 35% to 15% in the tax plan on Trump's campaign website, but this is misleading. First, very few US corporations actually pay that 35% rate. There's a labyrinthine set of exemptions and deductions that mean the average US corporation pays a much lower effective rate of 12.6%. Trump's plan funds his headline tax cut through eliminating almost all (except the R & D tax credit) of these distortionary exemptions from the current system. This means in effect US corps won't be paying substantially lower taxes, even if they'll benefit from less distortionary and more efficient tax code.

Second, and more significantly Trump's tax plan isn't necessarily the tax plan that'll be put forward in the House of Representatives (where Speaker Paul Ryan and Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady hold the cards). The Ryan-Brady plan dubbed "A Better Way" differs from Trump's framework in a few key ways (for even more detail read Cameron Arterton and Lisa Zarlenga's excellent overview).

First, they cut the headline rate by much less. Under the Ryan-Brady plan, the headline tax rate only falls to 20%.

Second, they border adjust it. That means that imports are taxed, but exports aren't. To readers of this blog, that might sound worryingly mercantilist - but as AEI's Alan Viard points out it won't have this effect. Such a reform does however resolve some of the transfer pricing problems that plague modern corporate taxes.

Third, and this is the big one, the Ryan-Brady plan proposes unlimited immediate expensing of all wages and new capital investments (tangible and intangible). This turns the Corporate Income Tax into what economists call a business cash-flow tax. This isn't just tinkering with rates, this is fundamentally changing the structure of business taxation in the US. It removes entirely the tax burden on capital and shifts it to consumption. Economists generally believe that taxes on capital are excessively harmful because capital is incredibly mobile and even low capital tax rates translate to incredibly high taxes on future consumption. As my colleague Ben Southwood points out, even though it's meant to raise taxes from wealthy investors, it ends up leading to much lower wages for ordinary workers.

In essence, the Ryan-Brady plan turns one of the most inefficient taxes into one of the most efficient. Typically, Republicans (and libertarians) oppose such moves because they think making taxes more efficient will encourage the Government to spend more and only a painful, inefficient tax code will put the brakes on out of control spending. As Will Wilkinson points out, that's bunk. The Ryan-Brady plan breaks with that dogma.

What does that mean for Britain? Well, cutting corporation tax just ain't good enough. Theresa May and Phillip Hammond need to be more radical if they don't want to be Trumped by the Donald. Let's abolish corporation tax and replace it with a simpler, more efficient business cash-flow tax.