"Taxes and Business Strategies," an advanced text by Nobel Prize winner Myron Scholes and others, notes: "During the early 1970s ... many doctors, lawyers and consultants incorporated to escape the high personal tax rate and to shelter income at the lower corporate tax rate. After the Economic Recovery Act was passed in 1981, many of the corporations converted to partnerships (or Subchapter corporations or limited liability companies). This movement accelerated with the 1986 Tax Reform Act."
When the gap between the individual tax rate and the corporate rate narrowed, in 1982-88, and again in 2003, the previous 1970s rush to incorporate shifted into reverse. More professionals and private firms set up S-corporations, partnerships and limited liability companies, which pass company profits through to the tax returns of individual owners.
Since Piketty and Saez data only track income reported on individual tax returns, top incomes were artificially understated in the '70s and artificially overstated when individual tax rates were reduced. Moving income from the corporate tax to the individual tax shows up as brand new income in the individual tax return data of Piketty and Saez, but that it is a statistical illusion.
The endless journalistic misuse of the dubious Piketty-Saez data is often driven by a policy agenda. A recent New York Times editorial about the Piketty-Saez statistics, says, "Part of the reason for the shared prosperity of the late 1990s was ... a big expansion of the earned income tax credit (EITC)." But Piketty and Saez exclude transfer payments, so tripling the EITC would have no effect on their income shares.
The same editorial claims: "Bush ... tax cuts have overwhelmingly benefited the richest. As a result, the tax code does less to narrow the income gap now than it did as recently as 2000." But Piketty and Saez exclude taxes, so even a huge increase in tax rates on salaries, dividends and capital gains would have no direct effect on their data.
What reverting to such a Europhile tax scheme would do, however, is to shift business income back to the corporate tax form again, greatly reduce the realization of capital gains in taxable accounts and invite investors to dump dividend-paying stocks in favor of tax-exempt bonds. As a result, the top 1 percent's share would indeed appear to fall in statistics that naively rely on what affluent people choose to report in various boxes on various tax returns.
Such a reduction in visible top income shares would be little more than a bookkeeping illusion. The only certain effect would be that the rest of us would have to bear a larger share of the tax burden. |