It’s like the tax Super Bowl in April 2025 as income tax is waffling between expirations and renewals, South Carolina is looking at moving toward a flat tax, and the President is hiking tariffs across a spectrum of international markets. Moore School economist Jason DeBacker came back into the studio to talk about why it’s a great time to be a tax researcher.
Season 2 Episode 15
Global Interconnectedness Through Business
It’s like the tax Super Bowl in April 2025 as income tax is waffling between expirations and renewals, South Carolina is looking at moving toward a flat tax, and the President is hiking tariffs across a spectrum of international markets. Moore School economist Jason DeBacker came back into the studio to talk about why it’s a great time to be a tax researcher.
Jason M. DeBacker is an associate professor in the Department of Economics at the Darla Moore School of Business. His research interests lie in the areas of public finance and macroeconomics. He has published papers on these topics in the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of Law and Economics, the Journal of Public Economics, the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity and other outlets. From 2009 to 2012, he worked as a financial economist in the Office of Tax Analysis at the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
Topics in this discussion include:
To learn more about Jason DeBacker click here
Learn more about the Darla Moore School here
Kasie Whitener (00:04):
Welcome into Moore Impact. This is Kasie Whitener. I'm your host for the show. As you all know, Moore Impact is our weekly radio program where we bring the Darla Moore School of Businesses best scholars and practitioners into the studio to talk about what they're working on and the different topics that are relevant to our South Carolina audience and our online audience at Make the Point radio.com. Welcome into the show today, Dr. Jason DeBacker, whose focus is taxes and tax policy. He's an economics professor at the University of South Carolina, darling Moore School of Business. Jason, I'm glad to have you back.
Jason DeBacker (00:34):
Kasie, good to be with you.
Kasie Whitener (00:35):
I'm so glad you're here. And I'm a big, huge tax nerd and so this is gonna be awesome. I'm super excited about it. And I was telling people on the Friday afternoon drive, I was like, everybody's asking tax question, tax question. I was like, just wait until Tuesday at nine o'clock and Jason's gonna be here and we're gonna break down this tax thing. And maybe get into tariffs too, because I think that's relevant to what we're talking about here as far as taxes. That's
Jason DeBacker (00:55):
Right. Yeah. The timing here is, is just right. We had what's known as tax day in the United States a week ago April 15th for US South Carolinians. This year, it's a little bit later. We are, our filing deadline is May 1st. So a week from Thursday we had a, been an extension because of the hurricanes. Right. That affected us in the fall. But taxes are in everyone's mind right now.
Kasie Whitener (01:16):
Yeah. We're all thinking about it and and trying to figure out whether or not it's fair. And so I wanna, I'm gonna start with a conversation I had on Friday night where people said to me, and I know you've heard this phrase before, that the top 1% isn't paying enough in taxes. They're not paying their fair share. And I thought, we really gotta understand what this means because my understanding is that the top 50% of the country pays the majority of tax, like 97% of taxes. So can you help kind of help us understand what a progressive tax code looks like and who's really doing the paying?
Jason DeBacker (01:47):
That's right. We have what is called a progressive tax system, where higher income people pay a larger percentage of their income and taxes. So you'll notice we have rate structures both in South Carolina at our state income tax and at the federal level where you pay a higher marginal tax rate as your income increases. And so we do have a progressive system through that. We also do a lot of our essentially kind of our, our income support programs through the tax code. Like really our largest federal income support program is the earned income tax credit. Mm-Hmm
Kasie Whitener (02:36):
I wanna I wanna just repeat this real quick. The income support program is the way you referred to the earned income tax credit. And this is the conversation on Friday night when I met, I said to them, like, there a lot of people don't pay taxes or don't pay as much as they think they do in taxes because they do have these credits that are applied to that. And this is an intentional program to help people get their money back, right?
Jason DeBacker (02:58):
That's right. Yeah. So as on the whole, at the federal level it's about, you know, just over 50% of people pay you know, income taxes. Most people file, but some people are having net zero or negative liability if they're getting a refundable credit, like they earned income tax credit. But I would you qualify that in that everybody pays taxes because even if you don't pay the income tax at the federal level, you're subject to payroll taxes. And payroll taxes are actually the opposite. They're regressive. So you pay, everybody's paying the same rate up until a maximum income threshold, and then you pay zero. So very high income people, let's say you're earning $500,000 a year, you're only paying payroll taxes on a fraction of your income. Whereas somebody earning a hundred thousand dollars a year or $50,000 a year is paying those payroll taxes on all of their income. Oh, wow. And those payroll taxes are about 30% of federal revenue. So they're quite significant.
Kasie Whitener (03:49):
Wow. Okay. So let's think about that then. If we think about the policy of reducing income taxes for the very, very wealthy, which is sort of the accusations being thrown around, is that, that they have reduced the amount of payroll taxes that the very wealthier or those top earners are paying.
Jason DeBacker (04:05):
I mean, that is one argument that the high income folks are paying less than they ought to because they're not subject to payroll taxes on, on the vast majority of their income. However, you know, the way we've set up the payroll tax system, it's to support what are what we call our mandatory spending programs at the federal level. Things like social security and Medicare. And so the idea is you're contributing in and then you're going to at some point, kind of take out in proportion to that. Okay. and so like that very high income person earning half a million dollars a year, they're only paying part of their income or payroll taxes on a fraction of their income, but their retirement benefits aren't five x what the person earning a hundred thousand dollars was getting. And so that system wasn't really meant to be something that is redistributing income so much across people who have different amounts of lifetime income rather is a program set up to just provide some basic retirement support for people.
Jason DeBacker (05:01):
But you know, there have been proposals, president Biden had proposed when he was a candidate in 2020 to un kind of that payroll tax limit. Essentially he was gonna have it once you made more than $400,000, you were again, subject to those payroll taxes on in amounts above that. But that does have a significant effect. And, and so when we talk about that tax burden being progressive, that is again, what you're paying is a fraction of your income. There is something else that's really important, which is how do taxes affect your decisions to work to save and so forth. What's relevant there is what do you pay on the next dollar of income? Mm-Hmm
Kasie Whitener (06:11):
Yeah. We were talking, or I've heard this before, where we think about this kind of gap or the cliff, right? Where if they're receiving assistance in the form of something like SNAP or some kind of some due program, some unemployment or that kind of thing, that once they get to employment, if the employment isn't quite high enough, then it, they still can't meet their needs, but they no longer qualify for SNAP or something to that effect. So the, that kind of gap there, there seems like that we are losing people in between those two things.
Jason DeBacker (06:39):
That's right. And I guess the point I want to make is our, our system is we have one of the most complex tax systems in the world in the United States. And it's complex in a number of ways, but one thing that I think that complexity adds to is a lot of confusion in terms of, you know, who's paying their fair share, right? 'cause Again, we do have a progressive system where higher income people on average pay a higher share of their income in taxes. But we also have a system because of its complexity where we are also imposing large burdens on low income people. Maybe not so much with the average tax rate they pay, but with the incentives they face for additional, you know, you know, to earn more income through work or through through saving. Right.
Kasie Whitener (07:21):
And trying to get that income up just a little bit. But then, so sort of like aging out of some of these programs that they really do need to be able to meet basic needs because their income isn't quite where it needs to be yet. Right. alright, so we're gonna run to break here in about a minute. But before we do that, why don't you just give us your, a little bit of background in terms of how you got to the Moore School and what you did before you got here.
Jason DeBacker (07:43):
Yeah, so probably the most relevant thing for this talk is prior to working at the Moore School, I worked for three years at the US Department of Treasury in the Office of Tax Analysis. That's really where I got my grounding in public finance economics, which is the economics of public finances, taxes, and spending. My research has been mostly around taxation, tax policy, and tax administration.
Kasie Whitener (08:03):
We're gonna talk a little bit about the decisions and the reason people make the decisions that they do based on their income and based on the taxes that they're going to be subject to. We're gonna get into I think the South Carolina State tax bill that you said you read the bill, the legislation mm-hmm
Speaker 3 (08:43):
Kasie Whitener (08:57):
Welcome back to Moore Impact. I feel like the Metallica is exactly the right vibe for this particular segment as we're talking tax policy. Kasie Whitener here, remember, the Moore Impact, the whole purpose of this show is to bring our researchers from the Darla Moore School of Business here to the point and to our point family, and share with you some of the insights that they have based on things like tax policy, which is why Jason's here today. We wanna talk a little bit about the, the South Carolina tax policy. This, this legislation that is in front, and everybody's talking about it. Everybody wants to know about it. And of course we're coming up on tax day. So alright. So as we went to break, I kind of teed up the South Carolina conversation. Tell us about this bill and, and what your thoughts are on it.
Jason DeBacker (09:40):
Yeah, so let's maybe take a step back and we talked about kind of the timing of this interview around tax day people are thinking about taxes, but not only are we near tax day, but also we're kind of in the tax Super Bowl here because we have at the federal level the expiration of many of the provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. So Congress either will act and make significant changes or they won't act, and we'll see significant changes in our income taxes regardless because of the expiration. On top of that, as you noted in South Carolina, we have a bill that the governor is, is standing behind that is set to really change significantly our income tax in South Carolina. And then of course we have the president's favorite taxes, tariffs, all over the news. And we now have tariff rates that we haven't seen in a hundred years in the United States. So from all sides, income taxes, as well as taxes on imports that are tariffs taxes are all over the news. And so it's a great time to be thinking about these.
Kasie Whitener (10:35):
It's a great time to be a tax researcher
Jason DeBacker (10:37):
Kasie Whitener (10:38):
And so many topics, Jason, for you to be like, oh, I wanna look at that and I wanna look at that, I wanna investigate that.
Jason DeBacker (10:44):
So we've got it from all sides and, and in South Carolina. So the South Carolina legislature brought forth a bill in March. It's been making its way through the legislature. This bill as the income tax bill anyway, is, is set to institute a, a flat tax in South Carolina. So rather than our current structure, which has three rates, the top rate right now is 6.2%. This bill proposes that we go to just a single rate of 3.99%. It's also going to change some of the amounts of income that are exempt from taxation. So right now we give taxpayers in South Carolina, in addition to those federal exemptions, an additional exemption in South Carolina. This bill is gonna kind of roll those back and, and make it more aligned with the federal system and then have that flat tax. So it's gonna bring the top rate down.
Jason DeBacker (11:34):
But for the majority of South Carolinians, this would represent a tax hike. So for about 60% of South Carolinians, they would see their taxes go up as a result of this bill. If you're in the top 40%, you're gonna see taxes fall potentially significantly. As a result, now the legislature has put into this bill a decrease in the tax rate over time. So after several years, assuming revenue targets are met the tax rate would continue to fall. And at some point you would see more and more South Carolinians see their taxes fall as a result of this.
Kasie Whitener (12:08):
Let's talk about the revenue targets, because as we talked about before we went to break, that's what taxation is, right? Tech, the whole purpose of taxation is to generate revenue for whatever government is collecting said tax. And so when we think about South Carolina as being a relatively fiscally conservative state, we don't carry the same debt as other states in the nation. I mean, we were actually solvent in our state, which is I know it sounds like, man, that's of course we're solvent, right? But you would be surprised, there are other states that are in a significant amount of debt and require a lot of assistance from the federal government. We don't have that problem. So here in South Carolina, as we think about generating additional revenue and this tax rate, to be able to do that is, so I guess my, I don't even know if there's a question here other than to say like, what are the revenue targets and do we know, is there a chance that when they go, when they get met, we'll lower the tax rate, but like they never actually get met?
Jason DeBacker (13:01):
Yeah, so they've legislated and I can't remember what the targets are, but they're legislated there as a, as a, you know, a, a fraction of current state revenues. So those would just, you know, again, this bill would just automatically reduce the tax rate, assuming those are met. But yeah, you're right. The situation in South Carolina is quite good. So we've seen a lot of growth in this state. I think we have the highest net in migration of any state in the country. And that, and other you know, progress in our state has really helped our, our state finances become solvent. And so we have run budget surpluses. And that's the reason for, you know, or one of the reasons, one of the motivations for the tax cut at this time is that, hey, we have this extra revenue. We haven't spent it. Let's give it back to the taxpayers. Now if you drive on South Carolina roads or go to South Carolina schools, you might say, well, maybe there's places we should spend some, some of that revenue. But nonetheless, given our current spending path, you know, thinking about let's say a revenue target, right, that we have, we're meeting that. And so the idea is let's give, give some of that back to the taxpayers.
Kasie Whitener (14:03):
Except in this particular version, it's giving it back to a certain group of taxpayers, but the rest of us are gonna be paying more.
Jason DeBacker (14:12):
That's right. Yeah. Okay. And so that's kind of e Exactly. But you know, again, they're right now high income people are paying more. So, right. We have that progressive system, this would make it less progressive. Right. it would still be a progressive system in that there is some small exemption amounts that, you know, are gonna help reduce the burden for, for very low income people. But,
Kasie Whitener (14:31):
But for the, for the most part, the folks that are not currently paying three point, what is it? 3.7, are now gonna see their tax rate go up to 3.7. That's right.
Jason DeBacker (14:39):
I gotcha. Or 3.99. Yeah.
Kasie Whitener (14:40):
Yeah. For the, for that flat rate flat tax. Everybody loves the flat tax
Jason DeBacker (14:45):
Kasie Whitener (15:38):
So let's talk about that. This the complexity of the tax code, because, and as your study, as your research has shown, the more, is it the more complex, the higher the level of revenue? Or is it the less complex, the higher amount of revenue? Because again, the goal is to generate revenue for the government. So would the government prefer a highly complex structure, or should the government want to simplify it? Well,
Jason DeBacker (16:02):
Let's, okay, so let's first start with the complexity. And this is why people don't love tax day
Kasie Whitener (16:27):
I feel like we pay way too much. I'm just gonna start there.
Jason DeBacker (16:30):
We're, we're paying only three quarters of the average of other developed countries.
Kasie Whitener (16:34):
So yes, it might be low compared to others, but it's still way too much
Jason DeBacker (16:36):
The thing is, it feels like a lot because it's so darn hard to file your taxes. So I am a PhD economist, I worked at the Treasury. It's hard to file taxes.
Kasie Whitener (16:44):
Tell me you pay somebody else to do it
Jason DeBacker (16:46):
Kasie Whitener (17:03):
Jason DeBacker (17:03):
And so on. Yeah. And so the US again, this is a real burden to us taxpayers and it's significant. So, you know, tax software, like I purchased, or if you hire an accountant, the out-of-pocket expenses for American American taxpayers is over a hundred billion dollars a year. In addition to that, we spend 6.5 billion hours filing taxes. So that's something like for each of us individual, 25 to 30 hours. So like right. Most of a work week,
Kasie Whitener (18:04):
They make us guess. It's like, Hey, we know how much you owe, but we're gonna see if you can guess and if you get it right, good job. And if you don't, we're gonna audit you
Jason DeBacker (18:13):
Which seems crazy, right? Like I could see if you had privacy concerns, like, okay, let's do it ourselves. 'cause The government doesn't have the information, we don't want 'em to have it, but the government currently has that information, so at this point, why not just let them do it? And Right. We did have, through the Inflation Reduction Act last year, the first direct file program, the IRS had offered, so they piloted last year partnering with 12 US states. And that is a program, the direct file program where you could go to the IRS website, it would pre-populate your return and then you could just confirm that That's right. Kind of like what other countries are doing. Right. And it took about 40 minutes for the average person to go through that and confirm things. So instead of 30 hours, 40 minutes,
Kasie Whitener (18:54):
But it doesn't have all the advantages, right? It's not gonna take off a percentage of your house for the amount that you use for your business. And it's not gonna, all the tax, all the electric vehicle stuff, like all those things that are additional tax credits. Those do, those don't show up in direct file.
Jason DeBacker (19:11):
Certain ones do like the earned income tax credit, but you're right. If you have maybe an electric vehicle that they wouldn't have had a record of, if you have a small business, it's not gonna work. But again, for like 90% of taxpayers, they don't have an electric vehicle credit. Right. They don't, you know, they're taking the standard deduction so their home interest, mortgage payments don't matter. Right. and so for many people it worked quite well. It's still, although it was kind of under threat. So the DOGE Department of Government Efficiency has been threatening to close this down. It still has been available to taxpayers this year. Unfortunately, South Carolina isn't one of the states that has partnered with the US government for this. So South Carolina residents can't take advantage of this. But it would be great to see in the future more availability to taxpayers in different states and with higher income levels because it really would simplify things quite a bit. And again, for most of us, the government already knows what we owe, as you said
Kasie Whitener (20:05):
For us to guess. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, and two, there's a, there are a lot of companies whose who ha earn revenue by doing tax preparation. And so when we think about those companies, they have interest in keeping the tax code complex, keeping it, I mean I, it's, I'm feeling like we're, like in the Catholic church, like back in the day when it was like, only priests could read the Bible, right?
Jason DeBacker (20:44):
There that something that's been a challenge? I mean, so prior to this direct file program and there still exists, the free file program, and this started the George W Bush administration kind of started looking into this. And then it was later launched in the two thousands. This was a program where you where the government partnered with these tax software companies, right. And allowed for, if you had a certain level of income and below you could have a, a free tax software. Right?
Kasie Whitener (21:10):
I remember that.
Jason DeBacker (21:10):
But what turned out was those companies made it very hard to find the free option. Of course they did. And that became a big issue because
Kasie Whitener (21:16):
You know, companies, company's gonna be companies. Yep. They're gonna do their company thing. They've
Jason DeBacker (21:20):
Got incentives,
Kasie Whitener (21:21):
Alright. It's more impact. It's Kasie and Jason will be right back.
Kasie Whitener (21:28):
Welcome back to More Impact. It's Tuesday morning, Kasie and Jason here breaking down the tax code. I mean, I know other people might not be that excited about having a tax conversation, but I can't stop laughing about this. Like, this is, everything about this is really interesting to me because the idea that we have, first of all, that the tax code is so complex that it's a struggle for like regular folks to kind of understand what it is, how much we're paying. And then there's all this rhetoric around it that is intentionally obscuring the truth of the tax code. Like intentionally saying things like the wealthiest don't pay their fair share or you know, people are taking unfair advantage and these kinds of things. And so I like that your research has been on tax policy, how we structure our tax code for the purpose of generating revenue for the government. That's what the taxes are for. And then trying to meet these specific revenue targets and then tweak the tax code in ways that it's helping our citizens. Yes. Do we want to help our citizens? Is that the purpose of this?
Jason DeBacker (22:32):
Kasie Whitener (22:49):
What else do we use the tax system for? Dr. Jason DeBacker
Jason DeBacker (22:53):
We mentioned income support with things like the earned income tax credit. Right? This is, you know again, an important program we in with the Clinton administration and the nineties really reformed the welfare system. And so rather than paying out benefits directly, we're giving these tax benefits, essentially spending through the tax code. And so I think one important thing to understand is this idea of what public finance economists call tax expenditures, which again, is spending through the tax code. Think about the earned income tax credit. Instead of having this tax credit, you could just as well have had a welfare program where you make payments to low income individuals. Mm-Hmm
Jason DeBacker (23:48):
Right. And so we've moved a lot of our spending programs into the tax code. And so that includes, these tax expenditures include not just earned income tax credit, but things like the home mortgage interest deduction. Mm-Hmm
Kasie Whitener (24:27):
But this creates incentives. Right. So that's part of, that's kind of what I was getting at with the question is like we use our tax code to incentivize specific behavior. And so in this case, we're using it to incentivize employee or employer compensated or employer supplemented health insurance. That's, we're trying to drive people toward employer provided health insurance. And in the same way with the housing, with the mortgage deductions, we're trying to make homeowners of people buy a mortgage. You will then, you know, and so we're driving them into this mortgage debt or into the arms of the banks to buy homes. And I'm not to say that like having a house is bad or having health insurance is bad, it's just that it erases that free market concept because it's saying like, yeah, but the government's incentivizing you to go this route instead.
Jason DeBacker (25:13):
That's right. So again, here we are, it's not just about raising revenue, it's about directing behavior providing social insurance with their earned income tax credit. But the way that credit's designed, it's to incentivize working. You get more of a benefit as you earn more up to a point. So it's there to incentivize people to work more. That mortgage interest deduction is there to help incentivize home ownership. It's very popular. But think about the opposite or the equivalent spending program. What if instead of the home mortgage interest deduction, which you know, has 80 plus percent support among the American public what if you had a program that just spent government money, wrote checks to homeowners, and you got a larger check. If you had a bigger house and your check was even bigger, if you borrowed more money to buy that house
Kasie Whitener (25:58):
People would lose their minds.
Jason DeBacker (25:58):
They would lose their minds.
Kasie Whitener (26:31):
I mean, I don't know. I don know if you have an electric vehicle, you're driving as much as somebody who doesn't, right.
Jason DeBacker (27:07):
It's like college. We have the 529 plans. We encourage savings a lot through the tax code. So the largest tax expenditure are lower tax rates on dividend and capital gain and income. Mm-Hmm
Kasie Whitener (27:26):
But it encourages people to invest,
Jason DeBacker (27:28):
Invest and save. And we've got 401k programs. So you've got different tax deferred retirement accounts that in, you know, encourage people to save through the tax code. And so we've, you know, we've got myriad of these programs for individuals, for businesses to invest in R and D to develop new drugs, et cetera, et cetera. And it's all of that that makes our code complex. And now you might say, well, maybe it's worth it because we're getting, we want people to save more
Kasie Whitener (27:55):
Like marionettes on a string. It's like just marry, it's on the string. If I want you to do the thing, I'm going to create some kind of tax benefit for it. And then I'm gonna see how many people actually do the thing I asked them to, given the tax benefit. I mean, it feels like this like massive manipulation using money to do it. I mean, it's a way of getting paid to do the things that the government wants us to do.
Jason DeBacker (28:17):
Right. And, you know, and the government could do it in a different way, as we said, they could just have outlays. And this is, you know, part of the reason those other OECD countries have higher tax revenue than us because they don't have all these different credits and exemptions. And rather they just support those other desirable outcomes, lower emissions income support, et cetera, directly through their spending programs, healthcare, they raise more revenue mm-hmm
Kasie Whitener (28:47):
Man,
Jason DeBacker (29:18):
Yeah. Yeah. So they, there might be some salesmanship saying, Hey, we're gonna reduce the complexity. As I said, I I think that's really not, that's kind of a, a false flag, if you will. It's, it's not really reducing complexity to any significant extent. But the incentive thing, maybe that's there. So you could think about, well now if you're paying, you know, 1.21 percentage points lower tax rate, now I'm gonna save a little bit more, or I'm gonna work a little bit harder.
Kasie Whitener (29:41):
I'm gonna buy a boat.
Jason DeBacker (29:43):
You know,
Jason DeBacker (30:32):
Because we have, you know, compared to our neighbor in North Carolina, a relatively high state corporate income tax rate, our property tax system in the state is frankly kind of a mess. Yeah. and that's been a real problem for getting business investment in this state. And whereas businesses are quite mobile, where am I gonna do businesses? Individuals, it's less so, you know, like it wasn't gonna matter to me the marginal rate. Right. When I got the job at South Carolina. Right. I was gonna come here. Right. I wanted to live near my family in Georgia. This is a great university and town and I think many of those people we talked about South Carolina having some of the highest net immigration are attracted to the jobs here and the amenities South Carolina offers like the, the weather and so on. Yeah. So, you know, it's, I I don't think you're gonna get an influx of people from that lower rate. And I think the academic research bears that out. If there's an exception, it may be Florida, which has no state income tax, has the nice amenities and so on. Mm-Hmm. Does seem to attract disproportionate number of high income people. But other states, Tennessee, et cetera, that don't have income taxes, haven't seen the flow of, you know, really high earners, productive entrepreneurs coming to their state because of those, those tax rates.
Kasie Whitener (31:40):
But these corporate rates that you mentioned, they could be determining whether or not an entrepreneur decides to bring their business here.
Jason DeBacker (31:48):
Yeah. That's a much bigger deal because again, that entrepreneur isn't, they, they don't care about the weather or you know, the University of South Carolina, they need a place where they can find employees mm-hmm
Kasie Whitener (32:24):
That's not a statewide low property tax rate. That's, that's a specific deal run through specific partnerships through specific handshakes. And so there's a little bit of like, that doesn't feel like this is for the good of the people necessarily as much as it's like there's some folks that are really gonna benefit from this.
Jason DeBacker (32:44):
Well, yeah. There are people that are gonna benefit. And the real problem, like from my perspective as an economist and thinking about economic efficiency is that this handshake deal means that it's not necessarily available to anyone. Right. Right. It, you're scout and you're building this massive facility. It's worth it to hire a bunch of lawyers and lobbyists and come in and get that tax break. But if you're just a smaller business, it's so much work to go and, and get your one-off tax break, you're gonna say, forget about it, I'll just go to Georgia or wherever. Right. Right. And so that's where having a system that is fair and just has a lower rate for everybody
Kasie Whitener (33:19):
Or transparent any. Exactly. I mean, even just transparent, it doesn't necess like the word fair always makes me feel like a little bit, okay, well fair to whom. But I mean, if we just think, hey, this is transparent, this is the way it is and we do it this way for everybody and no, we can't make it better for anybody because you've shook my hand or because you brought Sir Purr down here and let him hang out with the cheerleaders
Jason DeBacker (33:39):
Kasie Whitener (33:54):
I gotcha. All right. On the other side of the break, 'cause we're coming up right on it we're gonna talk about these tariffs and we're gonna talk about how, what that looks like from a from a tax perspective too. I like that you called it the, the favorite tariff. The our favorite taxes, which are tariffs,
Kasie Whitener (34:18):
Welcome back into Moore Impact, Kasie here, your host for more impact every week we like to bring our scholars outta the Darla Moore School of Business, dust 'em off and set 'em in front of the microphone and ask them to tell us a little bit about their research and what they've been working on. I've got with me, Dr. Jason DeBacker from the economics department, Jason we've been talking about taxes as a way to generate revenue taxes as a way to create incentives and, and turn our citizens into little marionettes
Jason DeBacker (34:59):
That's right. Yeah. So this is the third part of what I call the tax Super Bowl. We got the federal individual income tax expirations, the state taxes here in South Carolina. And then thirdly for us here is, are the tariffs. And again, tariffs are attacks, as you mentioned, attacks on imports. Think of it like a sales tax. When something comes into the country, there's a tax on it. Tariffs are a great way to illustrate one important principle of the economics of taxation that I think many people miss. And that there's a difference between what we would call as economist, statutory incidents and economic incidents. Statutory incidents is what most people think about with taxes. Who writes the check? Okay. So for a tariff, the check is written by the importing company, the company bringing those goods into the U.S.
Kasie Whitener (35:41):
Which are very frequently US-based businesses, individuals who are US citizens running import businesses in the country. Yeah.
Jason DeBacker (35:49):
Yeah. It usually you're using some kind of broker to help bring, bring your goods in. And so they're writing the check to the federal government in this case with those tariffs. The economic incidents though, is harder to see. The economic incidence is who really bears the burden of that tax, who ends up truly paying, right. Because like we see with the sales tax, and as we see with tariffs, companies can just change the prices they list in order to pass those on to consumers. And so for tariffs, what we see are that indeed prices do rise. Typically, you know, 90% or more of the tariff is passed on to the consumer through those higher prices. This can actually be even higher than than a hundred percent. We have a former student from the Moore School who now works at the Board of Governors and had a research paper a few years ago in the top economics journal, looking at some of the 2018 tariffs from Donald Trump, which included tariffs on foreign produced washing machines.
Jason DeBacker (36:44):
And kind of relevant to us since we have a Samsung plant up in Newbury. Right? That's right. Built there to help avoid the tariffs. But what he found was, you know, these foreign imports, the prices of those washers were raised, but also because people typically like their washer and dryer to match. Right. I never even thought about, you could not match them, but
Kasie Whitener (37:47):
I wanna, I wanna say that again, and I wanna say it a little bit slower so that I can make sure that people are understanding it, which is that a regressive tax hits our lower income folks harder because they're spending a higher proportion of their earnings on these things. So we bought the same washer and dryer, me and this other person, but it's less of proportion of my earnings than it is of this other person. For them it could be 10, 15, 20% of their paycheck. For me it might be three, four, 5%. Right. And so as we look at, you know, the, the idea that these tariffs are hitting everybody, they're not hitting everybody proportionally, they're hitting our lower income earners at a higher level.
Jason DeBacker (38:30):
That's right. Yeah. And now, you know, when we think about taxes, oftentimes there's a real, a real trade off between that equity or how regressive or progressive something is and how efficient it is. Often, I wouldn't say all the time, well, certainly I'm gonna give you a counter example that are tariff. But oftentimes it's things that are more regressive or kind of more efficient because you know, if we look at like a value added tax or a sales tax, taxes on consumption tend to be regressive for the reason you mentioned lower income. People spend a higher fraction of their income on consumption goods. But they're often very efficient ways to raise revenue. They don't cause a lot of economic distortions, tariffs we mentioned are regressive, but also they're very distortionary. And the reason for that is because we have very complex supply chains and there's a lot of specialization.
Jason DeBacker (39:15):
Like we can't grow bananas in the United States. You know, so taxing bananas, there's really nothing else. We, if we're gonna eat a banana, there's nothing else we can do. Right. But pay the tax. Right. You know we, and then on top of that, we've got supply chains where, like we talked about the Scout plan or other, you know, other complex manufacturing processes. Goods go across the border multiple times as you build this vehicle. Mm-Hmm
Kasie Whitener (40:07):
And we think about too in order for them to build those plants and train those folks and get those products in, I mean, we think of something like the BMW plant up in Spartanburg. It's been 30 years since we got BMW and all of these small manufacturers that have grown up as entrepreneurs around BMW and tried to fill that supply chain for BMW, it's taken 30 years for all of them to get up and going and get where they're at. It's not like they, it's not like BMW sat down and was like, y'all come and everybody showed up within a year and a half. Right. Right. And we're gonna have the same challenge with Scout as they're gonna need things that other manufacturers are gonna have to provide. And some of those manufacturers aren't here. They're not in South Carolina, at least not yet.
Jason DeBacker (40:46):
That's right. Yeah. And this kind of gets to another really kind of disappointing point about the, the tariffs going on again, from my perspective as economists and caring about just economic efficiency and how the economy grows and becomes productive, is that not only are the tariffs very high, and we talked about that discouraging production, but there it's very uncertain and it's very highly unlikely that the next president would follow along with this president's executive order, with these tariffs. And so if your goal were to increase domestic manufacturing, maybe one way you could stimulate that, and I, I'm not sure it's a good way, but a way to do that is to have very high tariffs on foreign goods. But as you noted, for that to work, those tariffs have gotta be in place for a long, long time because it takes years and years to set up, you know, the domestic manufacturing plant Scout in your neighborhood. Mm-Hmm
Kasie Whitener (41:59):
So when we, the complexity of the tax code, right, from that federal level, the state level, using the tax code as an incentivizing tool, trying to get people to behave a certain way, we think of these tariffs and the purpose of the tariffs is to incentivize specific behavior as well. It's like another layer to this marionette manipulation and trying to achieve specific outcomes. So imagine as an economist, what happens if we just remove all of that? Like, if we just get it all completely outta the way and we just say, okay, the, we're not gonna try to manipulate behavior anymore and we're certainly not gonna use a tax code to do it, then does the market fix these things? Like do we see that products are gonna continue to be built, that individuals are gonna continue to get hired? Like do things continue to happen? Or is it like, oh no, we don't have the tax code anymore. What will we do? Like, I, I don't
Jason DeBacker (42:55):
Yeah. So a world without taxes would certainly be a different world. And we have in kind of abstract economic models, we have very well-founded proof that, you know, under certain conditions, a free market produces the best outcome for everybody. But those perfect conditions involve things that are not, we know, aren't perfect in the world. Right? We know that there are problems people collectively getting together to build public goods like roads, for instance. And so we would probably have trouble producing some of those public goods that we need the public finances right now to help support. And then beyond that, there are also those issues of what economists call externalities essentially costs you impose on others when you take a certain behavior, right? Mm-Hmm
Jason DeBacker (43:47):
'Cause You get fuel in your car, it's benefiting Circle K 'cause you're, you're giving them money. But there are other parties who are affected by that transaction, right? When you drive off, you're emitting pollutants that cause harm to people. When they breathe them in, you are congesting roads, which means for others it's gonna take them longer to get to work. And so those externalities without some kind of tax to help correct your behavior could impose big costs on others. Right. we don't do a good job necessarily taxing those externalities. We have some tax credits to try to like provide a carrot rather than a stick to get you there. Right. But there are some reasons taxes can make things more efficient Right. Than that free market equilibrium.
Kasie Whitener (44:28):
And to try even at that small level to help us treat one another better and get along a little bit better and you know, maybe think about the common good a little bit more.
Jason DeBacker (44:38):
Yeah. And I think that is something, you know, we, we, in this tax week, we're huddled down
Kasie Whitener (44:58):
And if it's not, call your congressman. That's right.
Jason DeBacker (45:02):
If it's not, they have the power of the purse and they control taxes and spending. Yeah. So that is who to call.
Kasie Whitener (45:08):
This has been fascinating, Jason. Look, we're gonna spend a lot of time together over the summer. You're gonna teach me all this tax stuff. I'm gonna need to know as, as much of it as I can possibly learn as we're moving through the end of the year. What are you working on right now? Gimme like a five second clip. What are you working on right now?
Jason DeBacker (45:24):
I have a few projects. One line of research is around
Kasie Whitener (45:27):
This happens to me every week. Every week
Jason DeBacker (45:28):
Is around tax compliance. But we can talk about
Kasie Whitener (45:30):
That later. We'll talk about that next time. This has been more impact. When you learn more, you know more, when you know more, you do more. Thanks for listening.