Tristan ewins must have a bit of Greek in him if he thinks that we can spend forever.

Notice to Tristan. Australia is $600 billion in dept and that dept is increasing $700 million every week. To say that our government must spend more is economic insanity. Of course, I do understand your solution, everybody must pay more tax. But there are a couple of things wrong with that idea.

The first is, if we did that, people like yourself would then demand that we import more impoverished foreigners which we are then obliged to feed, clothe and provide accommodation. The only benefit from that exercise is to provide more jobs in the prisons, law enforcement, judiciary, public housing, anti terrorism, and social services industries. Oh, and provide more Labor voters to keep the incompetent Labor governments in power.

Secondly, the number of people paying taxes is shrinking. The productive people in this country who go to work and pay the taxes to keep your Labor supporters living on welfare, resent having to pay more taxes just so you can increase the numbers of Labor voters. The more you tax the productive, the more inclined the productive are to just give up and get on the welfare queue like everybody else. The solution is to reduce the number of people on welfare, not increase them. But that is inimical to Labor's strategy to win elections.

I know that as a Socialist, Tristan, you desperately need to believe that you can tax "the rich" (read, everybody who gets up in the morning and goes to work) forever and spend their money to solve every social problem you can dream up, but it is just not going to work. Look at Europe, especially Greece, Spain and Cyprus and reality bites. You can't max out your credit card forever. And you can't keep fleecing the productive to pay for the unproductive, while dreaming up more ways to increase the numbers of the unproductive (and counter productive.)

Three comments on Tristan's post:

First Tobacco excise, and its effect on the poor.

Doesn't Tristan see that the whole point of the excise is to discourage people from smoking, by making cigarettes unaffordable.
Compensating them for the excise increase would nullify the whole policy.

Second the need to cut the deficit.

Tristan does not seem to realise that Australia is the hands of our foreign creditors. Our gross foreign debt, which is almost all private debt, is over $2000 billion, and could be called in at any time. If this happened, the Reserve Bank could do nothing, as it cannot print foreign exchange, and it cannot make foreigners lend money to us.

Thirdly, the alleged cost of superannuation concessions.

People do not put money into super for fun; If it did not pay they would not do so.

Every dollar saved in super is a dollar we do not have to borrow from overseas.

When we borrow from overseas the only revenue the government gets is the 10% withholding tax.

The revenue the government currently gets from super is around 10%. I cannot find the precise figure, but around two thirds of super is in accumulation mode and pays 15%, and one third is tax free.

This means that super currently costs the government nothing, while contributing significantly to our financial stability.

The dilemma that Tristan should address is that internationally, for every dollar borrowed, someone else has to save one. As far as external finances are concerned, Australia is the same as a household. As only the rich can save, and will only save if is worthwhile, this necessary saving will serve to widen the gap between rich and poor.

The world is currently awash with unrepayable debt, and many think that another enormous crash is coming. If this happens, the government will be far better able to look after the people for whom Tristan professes concern, than if we become the Greece of the Pacific.

If we replace the current can of worms called a tax act, with a stand alone entirely unavoidable and very modest expenditure tax, we can simply end the need for tax havens at home stuff like negative gearing, family trusts and super that's is used to reduce the tax burden to in some cases, by 33 cents in the dollar, leaving only 15 cents in the dollar as liability!(Alan Jones)

I attended a convention on wealth creation some years ago, where the principal speaker was a multimillionaire. His message was, real genius is solving complex problems with the simplest solutions.

Given the simpler the solution the more transparent it became and the less could go wrong. Another visitor, a republican Senator said while a guest on Q+A, that at some point complexity always becomes fraud!

A simple stand alone entirely unavoidable expenditure tax will hurt some folks, mostly those who have to date been able to avoid paying a fair share, and placed their burden on less able shoulders?
Yet still expect to be able to access free health care and public education?

Finally a simple stand alone expenditure tax can be adjusted microscopically to alone control all inflation or stagnation, region by region if necessary!
Good reform and policies aimed at just growing and transforming our economy, will negate any perceived need for self harming Austerity! The only folk preventing that are the as usual self serving pollies, for whom logic, pragmatism and bipartisan agreement have just become dirty words

Tristan,

As Shorten's plan does not cover existing arrangements, and without negative gearing, no one is going to invest in existing houses, the increased financial take is not projected to be 10s of $bns but closer to $150m p.a.

So please, before advocating for yet another socialist spendathon, please check that you are going to get the money to pay for it.

Quick ABC Breakfast television program, clip has woman stating Australian federal government is borrowing AU$100 million every day. Assuming 5 days per week.
That's AU$2.5 billion each month.
That's AU$30 billion each year.
If money is taken out of wage earners pay packets and investors incentive by build wealth, working class's fewer money credits goes towards entertainment: restaurants; Internet services; products up for sale. By reducing expenditure by AU$30 billion per year. There will be fewer tax payers; more homeless people; more people on unemployment benefits needing tax payers money; less consumer consumption leading to private industry employment losses.

Invent credits to pay for deficits, deficit problem goes away. The solution is so obvious they must invent credits, yet establishment doesn't want citizens to know governments invent credits, otherwise citizens will want more free government services and won't want to pay taxes. Wanting more tax reductions. There's also the propaganda and entertainment value for those people who follow politics as a serious concern.

Budget deficits are excuses for having “end of time” depressions and recessions, to reduce working class accumulated wealth. So years of budget deficit propaganda allows people to believe why being unemployed, losing accumulated wealth is an act of god, capitalist reality.

Captain Col, lowering environmental standards certainly isn't the answer. The generation currently in power may dismiss it as green tape, but the younger people recognise its true importance.

And the claim that private hospitals are more efficient than public ones is very dubious. All attempts to take advantage of this alleged greater efficiency (such as by outsourcing the management of public hospitals) have been dismal failures.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Tristan, though personal debt is high by international standards, so is our ability to service it. We can afford to borrow as much as we do.

A business friendly environment doesn't constitute corporate welfare!

_________________________________________________________________________________

Andrew, it can easily be argued that some of our trade agreements go too far. But none of them go anywhere near as far as you seem to think!

_________________________________________________________________________________

Rhosty, if tax loopholes are the problem then we should close them. The worst thing we could possibly do is encourage their use by means testing access to government services.

_________________________________________________________________________________

rechtub, Labor don't have a monopoly on causing carnage.

_________________________________________________________________________________

LEGO, you don't need any Greek in you to recognise the truth. Unlike Greece, Australia has limited credit because it owns the Reserve Bank. And the Australian government does not borrow in foreign currencies.

And nearly everyone is economically productive during some stages of their lives and unproductive during others. It doesn't correspond with their voting habits.

_________________________________________________________________________________

plerdsus, you don't have to make something completely unaffordable to discourage its use, you just have to make it significantly more expensive.

Cutting Australia's deficit, or even eliminating it completely, will not decrease our foreign debt by a single cent. FWIW I think we should do a lot more to enable and encourage Australian banks to source more of their money domestically, but it's a separate issue.

Australians' foreign currency debts can't be called at any time, as they're mostly in the form of bonds. The RBA is not liable for them, and it isn't the RBA's job to bail out bankrupt Australian businesses.