Why Romney's Tax Rate is Lower Than Yours (Maybe)

So now that Mitt Romney has released another tax return, we're going to get a rehash of stories on the fact that Mitt Romney's tax rate is lower than the average American's.  But let's take a look at whether this is true; and, to the degree it is, why it's true.

To start, we'll use the TPC estimates of 2011 tax rates.  Now Mitt Romney's tax rate was reported to be 14.1%.  So how does that compare?  Well, first we have to choose what to compare it to. One approach would be to compare Romney's rate to the sum of the income and payroll tax rates.  It's clear that neither the corporate tax nor the estate tax can be discerned from Romney's tax return.  It's also true that Romney's FICA tax is unknowable from his return but we can assume that Romney's FICA tax is pretty close to zero as a percentage of his income.

So if we look at income plus payroll taxes by income group, we find that middle income taxpayers (the middle quintile of earners) have a lower tax rate than Romney (12.1% vs 14.1%) and the second quintile has a slightly higher rate (16.0% versus 14.1%).

So what accounts for the difference?  Well, many people have claimed that the difference is driven by "preferential rates on capital gains."  But this just doesn't seem to be true.  Taxation on capital gains is different from ordinary income in two ways.  One, it's taxed at a flat 15% and two, there is no FICA tax on capital income.  So let's pull these two things apart.

To look at the effect of the rate differential, let's just look at the effective federal income tax rate.  By this measure, Romney's effective tax rate is higher than every group of taxpayers below the 96th percentile, hardly lower than most Americans.

So what's accounting for the difference is the fact that FICA taxes aren't applied to capital gains and (for most of them) are capped at an income threshold.  But these two things have been true of FICA taxes for as long as they have existed.  So, in effect, the root cause of all of this is the fact that FICA taxes don't apply to capital income.  Nobody has proposed changing this and it has always been this way.

Just thought it worth pointing out.

Now the New York Times is Doing it too

Further to my recent post on the Buffett rule, here's the New York Times on the Buffett rule.

Unfairness in the tax burden is one important example and driver of that divide. The White House released tax data showing that the average federal tax rate of the wealthiest 0.1 percent of Americans has fallen from 51 percent to 26 percent over the last 50 years. At the same time, the middle-class tax burden was basically unchanged or slightly higher, with those taxpayers paying 16 percent of their income in federal taxes in 2010, versus 14 percent 50 years ago.

But of course, the "tax data" that the White House released isn't tax data at all.  It's invented data invented by the Council of Economic Advisors to make the political point that the President wants to make.  They are not referencing historical data but a modeled exercise, a modeled exercise that does not comport to the actual historical data.

No doubt there's a reasonable argument for the data released as being a good way to assess changes in taxes but to argue (as the WH does) or infer (as the Times does) that this is somehow historical data is simply false.

Making Stuff Up About the Buffett Rule?

On the White House website, as of 7PM Eastern on April 10, you can find the following graph






Now if you read to the bottom, you'll see the source as "CBO."  I found this pretty interesting because, to my knowledge, the CBO has never published effective tax rates back to 1960.  I know because I've spent a lot of time looking for them.

They have published effective tax rates back to 1979 and you can find those here.  Let's do a quick comparison.  The WH chart shows the effective tax rates of the top 0.1% as below those of the top 1% from 2003 on and says the source is the CBO.  Meanwhile the CBO data (which only goes through 2005) shows no such thing.  The WH chart also appears to show (based on interpreting the axes) far higher tax rates than were actually in place according to the CBO report in 1980.  But since they haven't published the data or linked to the CBO, it's a bit hard to know.

But it's this chart that allows the WH to argue that tax rates have declined by more than 50 percent for "the wealthy."  Meanwhile the CBO data for the top 0.01% shows a decline of about 30 percent from 1979 to 2005, pretty much the same decline in percentage terms as most income groups although less than those in the bottom quintile.

So I'm left with 2 questions:  Did the WH misquote the CBO?  If they did, where did the data come from?  If they didn't, can they show us the CBO data?

Update:  The White House shows in a different report the same data but in this report, they clearly source the data as not coming from the CBO and not even being actual data but rather data created by the CEA.  The specific quote is: "Average Federal tax rates for a sample of 2005 taxpayers after adjusting for growth in the national wage index" and the source is basically CEA analysis.  CEA/CBO what's the difference?