When Did Thrift Become Bad

When Did Thrift Become Bad?

By William C. Dunkelberg, Chief Economist of the National Federation of Independent Business

Supporters of letting the “Bush tax cuts” expire, especially for those with incomes over $200,000 (the “rich”), argue that money given to the rich is mostly “saved” while money to the “poor” is spent 100%, thus stimulating the economy. We can infer from that position that the argument is that “savings” don't matter for the economy or that the rich somehow destroy the income they do not spend (i.e. save) and it has no impact on the economy. A Brookings report (August, 2010) reports “…most Bush tax cut dollars go to higher-income households and these top earners don't spend as much of their income as lower earners”. So, economic policy is to take money from the successful and savers and give it to those who will spend spend spend?

Savings is defined as “non-consumption”, if you don’t spend it (on government or personal consumption), it is saved, whether in your mattress, or in an insurance premium, or buying stocks and bonds or putting the money in a bank. Savings make up the pool of funds we use to finance “investment”, the creation of new productive assets like equipment, office or warehouse buildings, inventions, new vehicles for business purposes, things that raise worker productivity and income in the long haul.

If you don’t put money in the local bank (i.e. save and deploy the funds in the financial system somewhere), we can’t finance any of these investment expenditures. It’s that simple. We are already a nation of poor savers, with our consumer saving rate reaching near zero in the housing boom (p.s. new housing is counted as investment, a new asset, but it doesn’t have much impact on productivity). So, the notion that rich people waste their incomes by saving a significant percentage of it is so off the mark! We need savers, and policies that transfer income earned by the successful to those who will spend 100% of it and don’t save anything is a recipe for economic disaster.

Most small businesses when started are financed almost entirely with the savings of the entrepreneur and small firms grow and create jobs with earnings that are “saved and re-invested” in the firm. The Brookings report argues that ending the cuts will have minimal impact on small business growth because “Less than 2 percent of tax returns reporting small-business income are filed by taxpayers in the top two income brackets”. This “2 percent” number uses as a denominator about 29 million tax returns with schedule C business income. But most of these employ nobody, many are part-time businesses. There are only 6 million employer firms, 90 percent with fewer than 20 employees. These are the job creators and far more of them would be impacted by the expiration of the Bush tax cuts.

We have borrowed the savings of the rest of the world for years so that we could “party” and still invest in some real capital at the same time. The problem is that those lending us their savings reap the returns, not Americans, and eventually might expect to be repaid. Every time we go through these cycles, we pile on more and more debt which claims more earnings each year from investments financed by the debt (and by foreign direct and financial investment) and increases the total amount of debt that must be refinanced and repaid in the future. The longer we put off making governments and firms seeking subsidies accountable, the more devastating will be the day of “settlement”. And we all know it will come. Each “crisis” brings the day of reckoning closer.