The official personal and private saving statistics contain a number of conceptual measurement errors. In this paper we develop and analyze personal and private saving measures adjusted for the difference between income tax payments and actual liabilities, saving via net purchases of government pension assets (including social security) and consumer durables, and that part of after-tax interest income attributable to inflation. We find that the adjusted personal and private saving rates in recent years are only slightly below their post-1950 averages, not at all time lows as reported in the official NIPA statistics. Furthermore, over the past 35 years, personal saving has been more volatile and corporate saving less volatile than the official measures. Also, the inflation premium corrections remove the negative correlation between personal and corporate saving. That is, the often observed negative correlation between the official measures of personal and corporate saving is due solely to measurement errors in the two series. Finally, the decrease in federal government saving in the 1980s is the continuation of a 30-year trend, not a one-time aberration.

The Reagan Administration entered office in 1981 with one of the clearest and moat ambitious agendas in recent times. The new administration advanced five economic/budgetary goals to rebuild America economically and militarily: (1) reduce inflation, (2) deregulate the economy, (3) cut taxes, (4) increase military spending and (5) reduce nondefense spending sufficiently to balance the budget. Achieving, or not achieving, these economic/budgetary goals likely had a significant impact on interest rates. Six specific hypotheses are investigated in this paper. During the first Reagan term, the battle to lower inflation acted to maintain the high real interest rates carried over from the Carter years and, while the increase in structural deficits did not raise real rates much, the reduction in private saving due to the unwinding of the second OPEC shock and an aggressive foreign policy that heightened fear of nuclear war raised real interest rates to levels not seen since the late 1920s. Moreover, the increased volatility of interest rates during this protracted battle with inflation raised yields on callable fixed-rate mortgages by over a percentage point relative to the already inflated yields on noncallable Treasuries. By the end of Reagan's second term, inflation, marginal tax rates, nuclear fear, and interest rate volatility were all down. As a result, nominal Treasury rates have plunged (real bill rates since 1986 are below their average values for the previous quarter century), and yields on callable securities have receded to more normal levels relative to noncallable Treasuries. Yields on tax-exempt securities are one and a quarter percentage points higher relative to Treasuries than in the pre-Reagan years, and yields on fixed-rate mortgages are up by a half percentage point. These constitute an intended eduction in the previous financial subsidies to state and local and household capital formation, respectively.

This paper investigates empirically the effects of personal and corporate taxes on taxable interest rates and on the spread between taxable and tax-exempt rates. Two main sets of results emerge. First, we establish that the effective marginal investors in the Treasury bill market are households, as opposed to tax-exempt institutions or corporations. We find no evidence of corporate tax rate effects on Treasury bill yields. The study is then extended to an examination of the tax-exempt market. The results there contradict the hypothesis that commercial bank arbitrage generally ensures that the taxable-tax-exempt interest rate spread is determined by the corporate tax rate. Our estimates decisively reject the corporate in favor of the personal income tax rate as being the relevant tax rate of the marginal investor in this market as well.

This article demonstrates why the procedures used in previous studies do not permit inference about the relationship between interestrates and taxes. We present a model that leads to direct estimates of the degree to which interest rates respond to changes in tax rates. The empirical results imply that the adjustment of taxable interest rates has been large enough to render after-tax yields impervious to tax rate changes. Further, tax-exempt yields are unaffected by changes in taxrates. Thus, there is no evidence of fiscal illusion in interest rates.