Author: Patrick Honohan

Income tax exemption limit

In my post on income tax of a few days ago, the sample structure that I presented went part of the way back to the rates and bands in effect in 1996, a good year.

One feature of the mid-1990s income tax structure was the much lower exemption levels effectively achieved nowadays through tax credits. Should this trend be reversed?

Two comments on my earlier post point to problems in lowering the effective threshold. Colm McCarthy worries about incentive effects given the interaction with social welfare. Aedin Doris finds it difficult to justify taxing a low income single mother with two kids.

I have sympathy with both views, and this is not a make or break issue for revenue (though there is some revenue potential even at the low end).

I also note counterpoints. The more revenue we seek from the system as a whole, the more a high exemption threshold/general tax credit pushes other workers into higher marginal tax rates; bad for incentives. And, depending on their family/household circumstances, not all low income part-timers have low consumption.

Then there is the political/ideological view that as wide a range of citizens should feel involved in the national housekeeping by paying some income tax (though all pay expenditure taxes anyway).

The impact of a lower exemption threshold on low income tax payers could be considerably eased, as has been suggested, by re-introduction of a third low income tax rate.

My guess is that, for a Minister of Finance, lowering the effective threshold (by lowering personal tax credits) offers too big a hostage to fortune to be worth the revenue it would raise.

What do others think?

(Update: the first version of this posting used misleading language about thresholds, I have modified it without changing the intended sense).

Both tax and spending need attention

Now that we all recognize the way in which the tax system has gone wrong and the need for adjustment so that it collects more revenue, it’s time to have a look at the balance between tax and spending adjustments needed to get back to the kind of reasonable budgetary structure that we had in the late 1990s.

To this end, I thought it would be useful to post charts showing total government expenditure and total government taxation as (i) % of GDP; (ii) Real terms.

I’ve used the latest NIE and the data in the October 2008 budget book, together with the ESRI’s latest GDP forecast. So this is all a little out of date.

Both charts reveal both the sudden collapse in taxation.

They also show the way in which real spending had a strong upward momentum which ran ahead of economic growth, especially as soon as this started to slow in 2007. (Some of this is the operation of automatic stabilizers, so important not to overcorrect.)

Pretty clear then that, if we’re to get back to the comfortable zone we were in in the late 1990s, it’s not just a tax adjustment that’s needed,  but also a reining in and rollback of spending.

Bringing the income tax structure back into sustainable shape

In a previous post I pointed out how growing reliance on cyclically-sensitive taxes had left Ireland’s tax revenue exceptionally vulnerable to a downturn. In effect we were running a sizable structural deficit without noticing.

So clearly we now have to ramp up the more reliable and less cyclically sensitive taxes again.

Rates and bases of lots of taxes need to be changed. The most complicated one is income tax. In 1996, before Charlie McCreevy’s first budget, standard and higher rate income taxes were 27 and 48 per cent. Yet we were happy, growing rapidly and in effect “Europe’s Shining Light”. Such an income tax schedule did not destroy the economy.

Now the tax rates are 20 and 41, plus the new income levies of between 1 and 3 per cent. (I’m going to ignore the health levy, the public sector pension levy and PRSI in this). Even more important, the standard rate band has been about doubled in real terms and the exemption limit increased by an even larger margin.

I thought readers might be interested to compare the average income tax rates (including the 1,2,3% levy) paid under the current tax schedule with what would be implied by the 1996 tax schedule adjusted for CPI inflation since 1996. This is shown in the following charts.

Wow, what a sizable reduction there has been. Average income tax rates in 1996 were 6-15 per cent higher than today. And interesting to see that the changes have not been uniform. That means it would be quite politically contentious to go back to 1996.

But we do have to go some way if sufficient tax revenue is to be generated. And it may take a few years to get there.

Here’s a first shot at a tax schedule that, starting from the current situation, gives a roughly proportionate increase in average tax rates from where they are at present. It’s just a first shot and illustrative of the sorts of decision that need to be taken.

The parameters are: 22% basic rate and 48% top rate (to include the 1,2,3% levies); Tax credit lifted from €1.8K to €2.5K; standard rate band reduced from €36.4K to €25K. This is a lower schedule than in 1996, especially for the lower paid, but still a sizable increase from the present. My guess is that this should yield upwards of €2.5 billion in additional income tax revenue–though depending on savings response there would be a negative impact on expenditure tax receipts.

I know this can be improved upon, with only a modicum of additional work.

I presume/hope these kinds of calculations are being worked on in a much more precise way by the Commission on Taxation and/or in the Department of Finance and discussed with key politicians.

Update: There were some flaws in the original version which I have fixed now. Exemption in 2009 is now achieved only through the tax credit and thus is not tightened in the sample schedule (affects the comments by Colm and Aedin below)

Ireland’s borrowing capacity

I didn’t expect to be asking this question again (I thought about it a lot a quarter century ago), but how much Government debt do contributors believe the Irish economy can support? A lot more than it has at present, of course.

But I raise the point now because Morgan seems sure in his latest newspaper article (not as incendiary as the previous one). It’s OK, he says, if the Banks have “bad debt” of only €10-20 billion; not OK if this number goes up to €50-60 billion.

OK, by “bad debt” I presume he means prospective loan losses. And I suppose he also may be ignoring the fact that the banks still have upwards of €20 billion of book equity capital to burn through before the Government starts taking the hit — but let’s ignore such details.

The interesting point is that the difference between his low figure and his high figure is only 22% of forecast GDP for 2009. Can we be so sure that one figure is affordable, and the other not?

Seems to me that the taxation collapse, and the resulting surge in the deficit on normal operations, is at least as big an issue in terms of a sustainable debt path as the prospective banking losses, large though these are.

Why do bank share prices fall when government buys preference shares?

The two main Irish bank shares fell back again today following the announcement of the details of the recapitalization — down 16 and 14 per cent respectively. There could be lots of reasons. To begin with there was the extraneous factor of the back-to-back deposits between Anglo and ILP mentioned in a previous post. ILP fell back 15 per cent as well.

Then there is the possibility that shareholders expected a more lenient deal? But how lenient could that have been? The interest rate on the preference shares is stiff enough, but not out of line with prevailing practice in other countries and anyway was well-flagged.

To all intents and purposes, however, the share prices are close to zero — down over 95 per cent on their peak.

My purpose in writing, though, is to point out that even though the preference shares are senior to equity, an injection sufficient to assure solvency going forward could nevertheless have been expected to lift ordinary share prices.

I suspect this is not a well-known effect. Permit me to present a very simple model.

Thus, suppose that there are just three periods. For convenience, assume our bank begins with zero capital.

In period 1, the government decides the amount S it will inject through purchase of preference shares.

In period 2 we discover the true state of the world, i.e. the size of the loan losses (H high in the bad state, L low in the good state). If the losses exceed the funds the government injected, then the bank is liquidated and the shareholders get nothing; If the losses are equal to or less than injection, then the bank continues in operation.

In period 3 the bank, if still in operation, earns franchise profits Z on the rest of its business. It is then wound up; the government receives its injection back if possible. Any surplus goes to the shareholders.

Clearly, if the values H and L are known and if the government injects any amount equal to or less than L, the market value of the shares at the end of period 1 is zero. (Of course, the analysis assumes rational market expectations.)

If the government injects more than that, the market value of the shares at the end of period 1 is p*max{0, (Z-L)}, where p is the probability of the good state. A longer expression gives the share value if the injection S is higher than H.

The point is that even an injection S that is only sufficient to ensure the bank’s survival in the good state will, when announced, increase the market value of the shares.

The Irish Government injection of yesterday was insufficient to do that.