It is hard to imagine a financial crisis that is not ultimately caused by creditors who had taken on too much debt. Debt is the root cause of most corporate financial failures and, if a snowball effect sets in, the root cause of financial system failure. Of course, debt also has advantages. Without debt, many privately and socially valuable projects could never be undertaken. Still, it is our current tax system that has pushed our economy to be too levered. Now is the time to address the problem—before it will again be too late.

From a creditor’s perspective, the two key advantages of debt are the tax deductibility of interest payments and the ability of lenders to foreclose on non-performing borrowers (which makes it in their interest to extend credit to begin with). Although both factors contribute greatly to the incentives of the borrower to take on debt, there is one important difference between them: the tax deductibility of debt is not socially valuable.

To explain this issue, let’s abstract away from the beneficial real effects of debt and consider only the tax component. In an ideal world, taxes should not change the decisions of borrowers and lenders. They would take exactly the same projects and the same financing that they would take on in the absence of taxes. At first glance, one might argue that the tax distortions of leverage are not so bad, because the interest deductibility of the borrower is offset by the interest taxation of the lender. But this “wash argument” is wrong. It ignores the fact that capitalist markets are really good at allocating goods to their best use. In this case, it means that the economy will develop in ways that many lenders end up being in low tax brackets (such as pension funds or foreign holders) ,while many borrowers end up being in high tax brackets (such as high-income households or corporations). The end result will be not only that the aggregate tax income is negative, but that debt is taken on by borrowed primarily to reduce income taxes and not because debt has a socially productive value.

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