Slate's Bizbox
fixing it: Repairing some of the worst Bush administration screw-ups.

The EconomyRethink taxes, revisit the home-mortgage deduction, regulate the investment banks and hedge funds.

By Daniel Gross
Posted Friday, April 4, 2008, at 1:59 PM ET

With President Bush's approval rating hovering in the 30s, just about everyone has an opinion on what George W. has done wrong in the past seven years. But not everyone can explain what the next president must do to fix it. So we've called in some experts to tell us. Fixing It is a 10-part series to be published over the course of the week by some of our favorite writers, offering detailed policy prescriptions for the next president, whoever that may be, on how to quickly undo some of the damage that's been wrought. One of our contributors wryly describes the series as "News You Can Use. If You Happen To Be President." Read the other entries here.

Illustration by Jason Raish. Click image to expand.

Discussion of how to reform the financial system is the topic du jour. And just as the technology bust and corporate scandals begat Sarbanes-Oxley (a highly detailed set of new rules that has helped reduce accounting disasters but has done little to improve financial management), the credit/housing meltdown of 2007-2008 will likely bring with it a new set of rules that will alter certain practices but do little to change the culture that spawned the mess.

The economy today faces a bunch of head winds, from the weak dollar to rising commodity prices. But perhaps the main issue it faces is a lack of faith in the financial system and in the way things work generally. Stagnant wages, rampant inequality, and bewilderment at the cock-ups on Wall Street are likely behind the surge in pessimism about the nation's direction and the economy. And while the sources of such angst are legion, it strikes me that one of the main problems in recent years has been the excess in a particular kind of reckless speculation. The technology boom of the 1990s, which engendered the same level of financial lunacy as the subprime bubble, didn't cause as much psychological and economic damage when it burst. The reason for that may be that, at least in the financial arena, the profits this time have been massively privatized while the losses have been broadly socialized.

During the orgy of debt creation, leverage, and speculation of this past decade, the benefits went overwhelmingly to a few: hedge-fund and private-equity managers and high-level financial services employees, all of whom received massive bonuses based on short-term performance. Since the housing bubble burst, however, the populace at large is largely shouldering the cost—and not just in the form of bailouts for the mortgage industry and investment banks and eroding home values. The Federal Reserve has sought to help the financial sector recover from its self-inflicted wounds by cutting interest rates sharply. And since these reductions have come at a time of high inflation and haven't translated into lower consumer borrowing costs, they're making us all poorer. We receive less interest on our savings, pay more for imports, and generally find our dollar-based assets being debased.

The current problems in housing and credit may defy quick fixes. But as long as we're reconsidering how to manage the financial system, it's worth taking a look at a few relatively simple measures that could reduce some of the perverse incentives encouraging reckless speculation, and that mitigate the effects and broad societal costs of such activity. Here are some suggestions to that end:

Fix-it List: The Economy

• Rethink taxes. The compensation and tax regimes for hedge funds and private-equity funds encourage managers to shoot for the moon. The current compensation scheme allows them to receive a 2 percent management fee and 20 percent of returns they can notch in a calendar year. And the tax law allows such managers to pay an absurdly low 15 percent capital-gains tax on money they make for managing other people's money. The compensation is a matter for managers to negotiate with their clients. But the tax break for such activity is one of the least defensible loopholes out there, given: (1) the sums many managers take home, (2) the scope of our fiscal morass, and (3) the tendency for private-equity and hedge funds to jump the shark and wreak havoc in the financial systems in ways that affect the economy at large. So, let's do away with the fiction that such managers are putting their own capital at risk. Most of the players in these industries notch ordinary returns, so let's tax their earnings at ordinary income-tax rates. Believe me, they'd still do the job. In the 1990s, when capital-gains taxes and ordinary income were higher than they are today, professional investors managed just fine.

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Daniel Gross is the Moneybox columnist for Slate and the business columnist for Newsweek. You can e-mail him at . He is the author of Pop! Why Bubbles Are Great for the Economy.
Illustration by Jason Raish.
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