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THE way that black holes bend light’s path through space cannot be smoothed out by human ingenuity.
By contrast, a vast distortion in the world economy is wholly manmade.
It is the subsidy that governments give to debt.
Half the rich world’s governments allow their citizens to deduct the interest payments on mortgages from their taxable income; almost all countries allow firms to write off payments on their borrowing against taxable earnings.
It sounds prosaic, but the cost—and the harm—is immense.
In 2007, before the financial crisis led to the slashing of interest Tweet In this section The great distortion Be more libre Sweat the big stuff More hands to rock the cradle The hard journey Reprints Related topics United Kingdom United States Taxes Public finance rates, the annual value of the forgone tax revenues in Europe was around 3% of GDP—or $510 billion—and in America almost 5% of GDP—or $725 billion (see Briefing).
That means governments on both sides of the Atlantic were spending more on cheapening the cost of debt than on defence. Even today, with interest rates close to zero, America’s debt subsidies cost the federal government over 2% of GDP—as much as it spends on all its policies to help the poor.
This hardly begins to capture the full damage, which is aggravated by the behaviour the tax breaks encourage.
People borrow more to buy property than they otherwise would, raising house prices and encouraging overinvestment in real estate instead of in assets that create wealth.
The tax benefits are largely reaped by the rich, worsening inequality.
Corporate financial decisions are motivated by maximising the tax relief on debt instead of the needs of the underlying business.
Debt has many wonderful qualities—allowing firms to invest and individuals to benefit today from tomorrow’s income. But the tax subsidies have tilted the economy in a woeful direction.
They have created a financial system that is prone to crises and biased against productive investment; they have reduced economic growth and worsened inequality.
They are a manmade distortion and they need to be fixed.
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