Per one's request, my latest quarterly letter to Peridot Capital clients included a section on the current macro-economic outlook for the United States. The question they wanted me to address had to do with possible hyperinflation resulting from ever-increasing budget deficits at the federal level. As with any question like that I try to completely ignore everything I have heard and instead rely on what the numbers tell me to form an opinion. Numbers don't lie, people do.
The latest set of numbers I have looked at are very interesting and so I thought they were worth sharing. The consensus viewpoint today is that higher budget deficits will ultimately lead to higher income taxes on Americans, which is likely to hurt the economy over the intermediate to longer term. Interestingly, historical data does not necessarily support his hypothesis. Let me explain.
Despite current political debates, which are more often than not rooted in falsehoods, the United States actually saw its level of federal debt peak in 1945, after World War II. Back then the federal debt to GDP ratio (the popular measure that computes total debt relative to the size of the economy that must support it) reached more than 120%. Even after a huge increase over the last decade, currently the ratio is around 80%. As a result, our federal debt could rise 50% from here and it would only match the prior 1945 peak.
Given all of that the first question I wanted to answer was "how high did income tax levels go after World War II to repay all of the debt we built up paying for the war?" After all, the debt-to-GDP ratio collapsed from 120% all the way down to below 40% before President Reagan spent all that money in the early 1980's. Surely tax rates went up to repay that debt, right?
The reality is that the top marginal income tax rate went down considerably over that 35 year period and even if Congress maintains the top rate at 39.6% (up from 35% under President Bush) the rate will still be near historic lows since the income tax was first instituted nearly 100 years ago.
Below is the actual data in graphical form. All I did was plot the top marginal income tax bracket along with the federal debt-to-GDP ratio. This makes it easy to see what was happening with tax rates as debt levels were both rising and falling over the last 70 years.
As you can see from the data, tax rates did not go up even as debt was paid off dramatically. As a result, it appears to be a flawed assumption that increased federal borrowing automatically means we will have to pay higher taxes in the future. Political junkies won't like what this data shows, but again, numbers don't lie.