Paul Krugman today argues in favor of a financial-transactions tax on the grounds that it would discourage over-reliance on ultra-short-term repo markets, among other reasons. In other words, reliance on repos is a bad thing, and it’s a good idea for government policy to “nudge” financial institutions away from it.

That’s something that opponents of the Miller-Moore amendment should bear in mind, when they complain that it could hit the repo market hard. Here’s Agnes Crane:

The repurchase agreement, or repo, market is a critical source of financing for dealers, hedge funds and others who use leverage to finance short-term trading positions. It’s a source of extra income for those holding virtually risk-free securities since they can squeeze out extra return by lending them out.

Such financing makes for a deeper and more liquid market that gives investors confidence that if they buy a Treasury note, for example, they can quickly sell it if they want to.

The problem is that we don’t want to encourage the use of leverage to finance short-term trading positions. Indeed, from a public-policy point of view, we’d ideally want to discourage it.

Would a less liquid repo market mean, in turn, a less liquid Treasury market? I daresay it would. But that’s no bad thing: the more liquid the Treasury market, the more that investors flock to it in times of crisis, exacerbating the systemic downside of the flight-to-quality trade, and reducing the amount of liquidity elsewhere in the markets, especially among credit instruments.

There are serious systemic consequences to living in a world where a Treasury bond — or any asset, for that matter — is considered a safe haven from all possible harm. Investing shouldn’t be about safety: it should be about calculated risk. Excess demand for triple-A-rated risk-free assets, as we’ve seen over the past couple of years, can be much more systemically damaging than excess demand for risky assets like dot-com stocks. So yes, let’s throw some sand into the wheels of the repo market, either through a Tobin tax or through the Miller-Moore amendment or both. Because liquidity is not ever and always a good thing.

Alex Pareene has a wonderful rant about New York’s MTA, which picks up on this astonishing line from the Daily News:

In addition to the 2010 budget, the MTA released a four-year fiscal plan. It envisions 7.5% fare and toll hikes in 2011 and 2013 as the agency tries to establish a pattern of regular inflation-based increases.

‘Cos obviously consumer prices generally are going to rise by 15.5% between now and 2013.

Pareene also has a very good point about the fungibility of city revenues:

Fares are simply taxes—incredibly regressive taxes, just like the sales taxes that New York City residents suffer to fund our own transit while suburban New Yorkers bitch about the prospect of being charged to clog our streets with their cars, and Jersey dicks bemoan the tolls they have to pay to enter the city where they make all of their money while contributing nothing back.

This is one reason why Charles Komanoff’s plan for reducing MTA tolls while implementing a congestion charge makes so much sense — and it’s a reason which has yet to fully penetrate the consciousness of most New Yorkers. There’s no particular reason why the MTA’s revenues should cover the MTA’s costs, especially when the MTA benefits the city in so many other ways, such as reducing congestion and increasing possible population density and therefore total taxes. Yet somehow everybody seems to blindly accept that the MTA should cover most of its costs through selling MetroCards. Sad.

Lynnley Browning looks today at the 4,450 clients that UBS is going to give up to the IRS, going down the list of characteristics that UBS is going to look for when deciding which of its accounts to choose.

What’s interesting is that it looks as though more than 10,000 UBS clients have already approached the IRS voluntarily. Clearly if client focus is UBS’s number-one priority (as all banks always say that it is), UBS will have every incentive to try to pick a subset of that group when it hands over the 4,450 names. And given how close UBS private bankers are to their clients, I’m sure that UBS knows which of its clients have chosen the voluntary-disclosure route.

There’s no obvious way that the US government can force UBS to give up a certain number of names the IRS doesn’t already have. After all, it can hardly complain if UBS told some of its clients that they were probably going to be given up anyway, so they should probably hand themselves in voluntarily.

But it will still be interesting to see whether UBS ends up handing over to the US government any information that the IRS hasn’t already been given voluntarily. My guess is that of the 4,450 names, only a tiny fraction will be unknown to the IRS at this point.

Philosophically speaking, why don’t we tax corporate interest payments? (Practically speaking, the answer is that it’s politically impossible.) So far, the answers have fallen into three broad categories.

The first one feels like a category error to me, and basically says “the corporate income tax is a tax on income, and a tax on interest payments isn’t a tax on income, so you can’t expand corporate income taxes to include a tax on interest payments”. Well, yes, if you taxed interest payments you’d be taxing something other than income. That’s the whole point. Private equity shops love to load so much debt service onto their portfolio companies that they never make a profit, and therefore never have to pay taxes. This is not something we want to incentivize. There are lots of non-income taxes in the US; this would just be another.

The second two answers are better. Kyle says that it would be almost impossible to build such a law without loopholes: “there are lots of ways to create debt like exposure that appear to be expenses”. And Megan McArdle writes that debt really is a legitimate business expense for certain companies:

Heavy industrial companies need more capital to make new investments, and it can make good sense to match the duration of the financing to the expected life of the asset. That’s accomplished by borrowing money, not floating a new stock issue or trying to accumulate enough retained earnings to keep up with your competitors.

Interestingly, these two objections seem to cancel each other out somewhat. If an industrial company wanted to finance the purchase of a major asset, it could simply sign a long-term lease instead, turning a taxable interest expense into a legitimate business expense. And it would be quite easy to say that leasing companies had to be part of federally-regulated bank holding companies (which would be exempt from this tax), and couldn’t be part of the same corporate ownership structure as the companies they were leasing to.

I agree with Megan that implementing this tax “would make companies that do use debt finance much more risky”. That’s the whole point. We want to move away from over-reliance on debt finance, and towards a world where equity finance becomes much more common and much more boring. If investors want to leverage corporate profits with debt they can do so themselves, by buying stock on margin. But let’s not implement the leverage at the corporate level, where it’s imposed on even the most risk-averse equity investor.

Update: Steve Waldman adds that what we’re talking about is eliminating a tax deduction, rather than imposing a new tax. A useful thing to bear in mind.

There’s a curious coincidence of newspaper stories today: just as the NYT’s Louis Uchitelle writes a long piece about Paul Volcker being marginalized, the WSJ runs a story about how he could end up being responsible for what would arguably be the single most important piece of economic policy implemented by the Obama administration.

Here’s how Uchitelle ends his piece:

He travels infrequently to Washington, he says, and when he does, the visits are too short to bother with the office. The advisory board has been asked to study, amid other issues, the tax law on corporate profits earned overseas, hardly a headline concern.

So Mr. Volcker scoffs at the reports that he is losing clout. “I did not have influence to start with,” he said.

Well yes, the tax law on overseas corporate profits is one of the issues that Volcker is looking at. But he’s also, says the WSJ, looking at something much bigger and much more far-reaching:

White House advisers are examining whether to curb the corporate tax code’s bias toward raising money from tax-deductible debt issues rather than from stock sales…

Tax experts for decades have bemoaned the tax code’s bias toward debt over equity: Interest on most corporate debt is tax deductible, while dividend payments are not.

“The disparity between debt and equity financing encourages corporations to finance themselves more heavily through borrowing. This leverage in turn increases the financial fragility of the economy, an effect we are seeing quite dramatically today,” Jason Furman, now deputy director of Mr. Obama’s National Economic Council, told a congressional panel last year.

This is something I’ve been pushing for a while, and it’s a really good idea. As the WSJ article shows, the US, with its 39.1% corporate tax rate, manages to raise just 3.2% of GDP through corporate taxes. Meanwhile, Australia, with a 30% corporate tax rate, raises 6.6% of GDP from corporate taxes. If Volcker starts taxing debt as well as equity, that would do wonders for the US fisc, and would reduce the systemic danger that debt poses to the economy. What’s not to love?

The UBS numbers, as reported by the WSJ, don’t make a lot of sense to me:

UBS AG will hand over some 4,450 names of U.S. account holders as part of a U.S.-Swiss tax-evasion settlement and investigation that could produce in total 10,000 account identities, according to people familiar with the situation…

Aside from the account identities being turned over by UBS, some 5,000 names are expected to be produced through a special IRS amnesty program where UBS clients acknowledge unpaid income tax.

How is this IRS amnesty supposed to work? I was under the impression that they’ve tried this already: “if you fess up now, before we get our list of 4,450 names, and you’re on the list, then we won’t hit you with massive penalties — but if you don’t fess up and you’re on the list, then we’ll be much harsher”.

But 4,450 is a lower number than expected, and I’m pretty sure that substantially all of UBS’s clients will opt to take their chances rather than voluntarily going to the IRS. If they get caught, then so be it. But if they don’t, they’re basically home free: after all this back-and-forth, no one has any appetite to go through the whole thing all over again.

Indeed, there’s a possible upside to this whole affair for UBS: if I were a private-banking client of a major Swiss bank which wasn’t UBS, I’d be inclined to move my funds to UBS right now just on the grounds that lightning is most unlikely to strike twice. Not that UBS has any interest in condoning US tax-evasion any more, of course. Oh no.

Ryan Avent quotes Alice Rivlin:

The CFO’s office estimates that if DC were able to tax non-resident income at its current tax rates it could raise more than $2 billion additional revenue, more than doubling the current yield of the District’s individual income tax of about $1.3 billion.

If the District of Columbia were to become a state, it could and almost certainly would start taxing people who work in DC but live elsewhere. Which is a huge proportion of DC’s professional classes. Needless to say, this is a Very Good Idea. Not that it’ll ever happen.

The WSJ, on both its print and its online front page, as well as in the headline of the article in question, says that the “Health Bill in House Relies on Wealth Tax“.

But the weird thing is that it doesn’t:

Under the Rangel plan, married couples making $350,000 would also be subject to a 1% surtax to cover the health plan. The levy would rise to 2% for those making above $500,000 and 3% for those with incomes of $1 million or more.

This is an income tax, pure and simple, not a wealth tax. Personally I think a modest wealth tax, in conjunction with an income tax, makes a certain amount of sense. Why tax income, which people work hard for, but not unearned wealth? But in any case, this isn’t a wealth tax, and I don’t understand why it’s being characterized as one.

Update: Tom Lindmark says he’s “not quite sure what constitutes unearned wealth”, saying that “the only way to accumulate wealth is to earn it via hard work or diligent investing”. If that’s true, then really a wealth tax is a (delayed) income tax, and so the choice between an income tax and a wealth tax basically just comes down to choosing whether you tax income as it’s earned or only after it’s been accumulated and invested.

On the other hand, I think there’s lots of unearned wealth in this world, most but not all of it in the form of inherited funds. (There’s also all those lottery winners.) To a large degree anybody who became wealthy by selling their home for much more they bought it for can’t really be considered to have been diligently investing, and can be considered one of the few beneficiaries of the housing bubble. So that wealth, too, might well be caught by a wealth tax but never by an income tax.

The July/August “ideas” issue of the Atlantic is now online, and I’ve contributed two ideas to it. The first is essentially the Baker-Samwick proposal from August 2007, which makes so much sense to me I can’t believe it never even came close to taking off. The second is my old argument in favor of arts subsidies: you get much more bang for your buck there, especially when it comes to employment, than you do with any other kind of government spending.

Elsewhere, Megan McArdle gets rather more space than I got (she does work there, after all) to argue for abolishing corporate income taxes while raising all capital gains and dividend taxes to the general rate of income tax. The problem is that if corporate entities don’t need to pay money on non-dividended income, then rich individuals will turn themselves into companies and pay tax only on what they spend, rather than what they earn. Which might be a good thing from Megan’s perspective, but I don’t think it would do any favors for the government fisc.

How to structure a gas tax? You could make it a flat X cents per gallon; alternatively (and this is essentially what a cap-and-trade system does, too) you could make it Y%, with the tax increasing with the price of gasoline.

Today, Jim Surowiecki comes up with a third option, where the tax decreases when the price of gasoline goes up:

Rather than leave so much of our fate to chance, we’d be better off doing what politicians always say they want to do: lessen the U.S. economy’s dependence on oil. One step toward that would be to phase in a gas tax designed to smooth out oil’s spikes and plunges by keeping the price of gasoline fixed (the tax would rise when the price of gas fell, and vice versa).

Surowiecki makes a strong case that consumer behavior, when it comes to reducing gasoline consumption, only really changes when there’s a spike in gas prices. As a result, his proposal would seem designed to have the least possible effect on gasoline consumption, and on our dependence on oil. Sure, it’s a sensible way of raising government revenues and reducing the fiscal deficit.

Either you want to effect consumer behavior and reduce gasoline consumption — in which case you actually welcome price spikes. Or else you want to smooth out price spikes, in which case you slowly boil the frog (to use one of the stupidest metaphors ever) and keep consumption high. But you can’t have it both ways. Which is it to be, Jim?