Opinion

Middle-Income Wage Earners Need A ‘W’ — Cut Business Taxes First

Larry Kudlow Senior Contributor, CNBC
Font Size:

After the breakdown of health-care reform, both President Trump and the Republican Congress need a W — a win.

And not just any win, but one that will play into the public demand for faster economic growth, better jobs, and higher wages. Recent polls show the nexus of growth, jobs, and tax cuts vastly outranks health care.

So, most important, middle-class wage earners need a W.

We’ve had job creation, but it hasn’t reached all sectors of the population. Consequently, the employment-to-population ratio remains historically low. So does real-GDP growth.

From 1950 to 2000, growth averaged 3.5 percent a year. During the Obama recovery — and frankly going back to the year 2000 — growth has hovered at only 2 percent per year. Real wages have barely improved. New business startups have actually declined. And productivity has flattened.

The hole in the center of this tepid growth story is a lack of business investment. It’s the missing ingredient. From 1950 to 2000, total business fixed investment averaged a strong 5.3 percent annual growth. But since 2000, that figure has dropped to only 1.7 percent.

For 50 years, the capital-labor (K/L) ratio increased by an average 3 percent a year. The capital stock rose 4.3 percent per year. But since 2009, the K/L ratio has fallen by 0.2 percent per year, and the capital stock has grown by only 1.5 percent yearly. This is why productivity and wage gains have been minimal. And the root cause is the lack of business investment.

But the GOP can remedy this by providing new tax incentives (including a rollback of costly regulations) right now. Specifically, the new Republican priority should be business tax cuts first.

While health-care reform simmers on the back burner, the president should go right to business tax reform. It can be nice and simple and easy to understand. There’s virtually a bipartisan consensus for it. Separate it out from the broader and far more complex and controversial issues related to individual tax reform.

Yes, we desperately need personal-tax simplification. We also need lower tax rates across-the-board. We need to clamp down on loopholes and unnecessary crony-capitalist deductions to broaden the tax base. But that’s a much more difficult and longer battle. Save it for next year.

There are hundreds of tax lawyers in Washington who can separate out business income from personal income. That will allow legislation to reduce tax rates for the small S-Corp companies as well as limited-liability partnerships and proprietorships.

So let’s end the war on business. Let’s reward, rather than punish, success. Congress need only go for a 10 percent repatriation rate, a 15 to 20 percent tax rate for large and small businesses, and immediate expensing for new investments.

And perhaps to draw in some Democrats, legislators can use part of the roughly $200 billion in repatriation revenues to provide an equity base for a privately owned and run infrastructure fund. No new Fannie or Freddie. No government directors. Keep it all in the private sector.

And forget the crazy border-adjustment tax (BAT). It would badly damage consumers and the economy when what we need is faster growth.

Meanwhile, don’t obsess over various reconciliation rules. Reconciliation can be whatever you want it to be. The so-called Byrd rule, which stipulates deficit neutrality over the long run, has been broken many times over the past 30 years.

And maybe this time the GOP will talk to the Senate parliamentarian. Or perhaps the president of the Senate, Vice President Pence, can overrule the parliamentarian.

With lower business tax rates and more net business investment to grow the capital stock, the economy is capable of growing over 3 percent yearly. And that 1 percentage point increase from the 2 percent baseline would yield, according to the CBO, more than $3 trillion in deficit reduction over the next ten years.

The misbegotten BAT, and its phony $1 trillion pay-for, can be buried in a deep gravesite inside a large crypt.

Perhaps the major selling point for business tax cuts is the fact that the biggest beneficiaries are middle-income wage earners — not so-called rich people and rich corporations.

Importantly, the best research on this has been done by Kevin Hassett of AEI, and in recent years supported by a number of papers. Ironically, Hassett is slated to be chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisors, as soon as his vetting process is complete. No one makes the case better than Hassett that business tax cuts are a middle-class tax cut.

So, with the postponement of health-care reform, we now have more than four months before the August recess to give the country the fuel injection it needs: a boost for wage earners and businesses and consumers and productivity and better jobs.

Put business tax cuts first. Right now.

PREMIUM ARTICLE: Subscribe To Keep Reading

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign Up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
BENEFITS READERS PASS PATRIOTS FOUNDERS
Daily and Breaking Newsletters
Daily Caller Shows
Ad Free Experience
Exclusive Articles
Custom Newsletters
Editor Daily Rundown
Behind The Scenes Coverage
Award Winning Documentaries
Patriot War Room
Patriot Live Chat
Exclusive Events
Gold Membership Card
Tucker Mug

What does Founders Club include?

Tucker Mug and Membership Card
Founders

Readers,

Instead of sucking up to the political and corporate powers that dominate America, The Daily Caller is fighting for you — our readers. We humbly ask you to consider joining us in this fight.

Now that millions of readers are rejecting the increasingly biased and even corrupt corporate media and joining us daily, there are powerful forces lined up to stop us: the old guard of the news media hopes to marginalize us; the big corporate ad agencies want to deprive us of revenue and put us out of business; senators threaten to have our reporters arrested for asking simple questions; the big tech platforms want to limit our ability to communicate with you; and the political party establishments feel threatened by our independence.

We don't complain -- we can't stand complainers -- but we do call it how we see it. We have a fight on our hands, and it's intense. We need your help to smash through the big tech, big media and big government blockade.

We're the insurgent outsiders for a reason: our deep-dive investigations hold the powerful to account. Our original videos undermine their narratives on a daily basis. Even our insistence on having fun infuriates them -- because we won’t bend the knee to political correctness.

One reason we stand apart is because we are not afraid to say we love America. We love her with every fiber of our being, and we think she's worth saving from today’s craziness.

Help us save her.

A second reason we stand out is the sheer number of honest responsible reporters we have helped train. We have trained so many solid reporters that they now hold prominent positions at publications across the political spectrum. Hear a rare reasonable voice at a place like CNN? There’s a good chance they were trained at Daily Caller. Same goes for the numerous Daily Caller alumni dominating the news coverage at outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, Daily Wire and many others.

Simply put, America needs solid reporters fighting to tell the truth or we will never have honest elections or a fair system. We are working tirelessly to make that happen and we are making a difference.

Since 2010, The Daily Caller has grown immensely. We're in the halls of Congress. We're in the Oval Office. And we're in up to 20 million homes every single month. That's 20 million Americans like you who are impossible to ignore.

We can overcome the forces lined up against all of us. This is an important mission but we can’t do it unless you — the everyday Americans forgotten by the establishment — have our back.

Please consider becoming a Daily Caller Patriot today, and help us keep doing work that holds politicians, corporations and other leaders accountable. Help us thumb our noses at political correctness. Help us train a new generation of news reporters who will actually tell the truth. And help us remind Americans everywhere that there are millions of us who remain clear-eyed about our country's greatness.

In return for membership, Daily Caller Patriots will be able to read The Daily Caller without any of the ads that we have long used to support our mission. We know the ads drive you crazy. They drive us crazy too. But we need revenue to keep the fight going. If you join us, we will cut out the ads for you and put every Lincoln-headed cent we earn into amplifying our voice, training even more solid reporters, and giving you the ad-free experience and lightning fast website you deserve.

Patriots will also be eligible for Patriots Only content, newsletters, chats and live events with our reporters and editors. It's simple: welcome us into your lives, and we'll welcome you into ours.

We can save America together.

Become a Daily Caller Patriot today.

Signature

Neil Patel