Tax cuts; spending. How about stopping borrowing and paying down the half-trillion dollar debt. This debt will be the first handed down to an incoming Labor government next year. Labor is used to having a Coalition surplus to squander before it starts its own borrowing. We have some really bad times coming.

"The Coalition government's current proposal to slash Australia's corporate tax rate from 30 per cent to 25 per cent is directly opposed to the Labor party's call for funding for schools and hospitals. It is an impossible decision for the ordinary voter to make."

No, it's a VERY EASY decision for the ordinary voter to make. Because despite rightwing think tanks and the Libs trying to spin corporate tax cuts as THE way to get businesses to invest more in Australia, in reality it's just one of many ways to do that, and is very expensive. It's still a worthwhile objective, but it doesn't deserve to be in the top hundred economic priorities for the government.

______________________________________________________________________________________

ttbn,
What you're advocating involves the government taking more money out of the economy than it puts in. That's a good strategy when business is booming (because it reduces inflation without the need to raise interest rates) but in the current economic climate, attempting it would be deeply counterproductive - businesses would have less opportunity to make money, so would invest less and lay off staff. Australia would plunge into recession, and the loss of taxation revenue would leave the government in an even worse budgetary position.

talking with a tourist yesterday, we were discussing the ineptitude of academics in things economical.
He told me that to establish an academic in small business you give him a big business & then wait a while.

The author, the ALP and others opposing company tax cuts obviously have the simplistic notion - which is often false that revenue the government would receive from taxing a particular activity is something like directly proportional to the tax rate imposed Is important to realise if the aim is to maximise government revenue from it, careful consideration of the most appropriate rate is necessary.

An important economic principle can be illustrated by a graph with tax percentage on an item on the horizontal axis and government revenue on the vertical axis. On it assuming the simplistic false notion that revenue is in direct proportion to the tax rate, the graph would be a straight line. In fact, it would start this way while rates are low. eg Maybe with tax rate increasing from 1 to 2 percent, 2 to 4 percent and 4 to 8 percent, revenue would double each time and the graph line would be close to straight. But then double the rate again from 8 to 16 percent, 16 to 32 percent and 32 to 64 percent, the graph would be more like a semi circle. The point at top of this illustrates the maximum revenue and rate at which it is achieved. Initially revenue would increase at diminishing rates compared with tax percentage and them decrease at increased rates. The government taking too much would discourage activity. Also make possible tax dodging schemes more worthwhile.

Is important when trying to obtain maximum revenue, the tax rate should be below that at the point of the top of the revenue semicircle graph. If above it, which is possibly currently happening with big companies, a tax rate drop should result in more rather than less revenue. One possible reason with multinational companies is that some internal figures can be juggled so tax is paid largely in countries with lower tax rates. If this applies, a reduced rate should result in more company profits being declared in Australia and less overseas. May then result in Australian government receiving more revenue for programs rather than less with lower tax rates.

mox,
What you think is obvious is actually completely wrong.

Those who oppose these tax cuts are well aware that tax revenue is less than directly proportional to tax rate. And many of them know the situation you're describing is known as the Laffer Curve - named after a Reagan staffer. I used to think Laffer was an eminent economist until I saw him on Lateline and realised he's just an idiot whose ideas caught on. He blindly advocates cutting taxes without realising where the peak of the Laffer Curve is - and it's a long way to the right of our current tax rates. Even in the 1980s the Reagan tax cuts which made Laffer famous didn't actually result in more revenue.

Treasury modelling has shown that cutting our corporate tax rate will result in LESS revenue. Try looking at overall effects instead of slavishly following an economic hypothesis which has never actually worked.

To Aiden especially: Of course initially the cut in corporate tax rates will result in a short term largely directly proportional drop in revenue from it. Re longer term, need to consider carefully the influence of various factors. Sometimes difficult to get this right so models prove wrong. Remember one factor is more company tax on multinationals likely to be paid in Australia rather than overseas if lower tax rate. Also, even if revenue from company tax is lower, the government may pick up more revenue further down the line if companies invest the tax saved into more productive activity. Then if they employ more people, the government may more than recover the revenue lost from less company tax in more income and other taxes collected.

mox,
> one factor is more company tax on multinationals likely to be paid in Australia rather than overseas if lower tax rate.

But not much more. There will always be places with lower corporate tax than Australia, and multinationals have become very adept at tax minimisation.

> more revenue further down the line if companies invest the tax saved into more productive activity
But there are other far more efficient ways of inducing more productive activity. The government could increase its spending on science - doing so is estimated to give an 800% total return. It could also invest more in infrastructure and education to improve long term productivity.

> Then if they employ more people, the government may more than recover the revenue
The government already has the power to create full employment - it doesn't need the multinationals for that!

The Left side of politics has a vote winning strategy. It buys the votes of a wide majority of the public by telling them that they are going to spend lots of money on them that they are going to take from somebody else. The Left pretends that this theft is some sort of moral virtue, as if they are the noble ones doing something for the public. They also pretend that the Right side of politics are the stingy ones who just want to help their rich mates get richer.

The only problem with appealing to public's venality, and their impression that they are getting freebies, is that the Left never knows when to stop. As Maggie Thatcher once so eloquently stated, "sooner or later, they run out of other people's money to spend."

Always thinking up new excuses to use the business class as a cash cow to buy votes puts a real damper on the economy. Eventually, this tactic results in less tax revenue as the people who create wealth get sick and tired of being squeezed, and they either flee or economically hibernate.

Donald Trump has reduced taxes in the USA and this has resulted in the US economy surging ahead from Obama's miserable 1% growth to 4%, and rising. This is what can happen when you stop screwing the most productive class. If there is a 9% difference between the tax rates in Australia and Trump's surging US economy, then that is indicative that Australian taxes are way too high.

Peter Bowden claims that US firms also pay state tax. No, few US states impose state taxes, but the Left dominated ones always do. And those high taxing Left dominated states like California, Illinois, and New York are going financially backwards as their most productive citizens flee their states to live in those with no state taxes at all. If your political regime buys the votes of the least productive by always screwing the most productive, then you can hardly be surprised if your most valuable citizens go to somewhere where they are welcome.

LEGO,
If you look at the reality rather than the spin, you'll find things are rather different. In Australia at least, the Left don't have a monopoly on wealth redistribution. Indeed it's the Right who use it as a vote buying strategy, while the Left are more inclined to use it to improve the lives of those who most need it (which is indeed morally virtuous despite your erroneous "taxation is theft" rhetoric blinding you to it).

BTW if you really think the definition of theft should be extended to include taxation, I suggest you have a look at this week's Freefall cartoons to see where else it could go:
http://freefall.purrsia.com/lastthree.htm

Though you are technically correct that the Right don't just want to help their rich mates get richer, the reason they give that impression has a strong basis in reality. They do serve the interests of the financiers, earnestly but erroneously believing that's the best way to increase productivity.

The most productive people are not usually the ones who are already the most wealthy. And some on the Right fail to understand that.

Others on the Right (including, I think, yourself) fail to understand that increasing the incentive for the most productive to become more productive is an inefficient strategy. It's very rare for incentive to be the limiting factor - opportunity is more likely to be in short supply, so increasing the incentive makes little difference. And increasing the productivity of the less productive is likely to have a greater effect on total productivity (for a start there are more of them) as well as greater social benefits.

The real reason the US economy is doing so much better under Trump than under Obama is nothing to do with "screwing the most productive class". It's because under Obama the Republicans in Congress tried to implement Hoovernomics. They wouldn't let the government run a sufficiently big deficit to revive the economy. But under Trump, because the benefits are skewed towards the rich (their base) they have allowed a sufficiently big deficit, hence the economy is being revived.

"The Coalition government's current proposal to slash Australia's corporate tax rate from 30 per cent to 25 per cent is directly opposed to the Labor party's call for funding for schools and hospitals".

http://phys.org/news/2018-04-google-parent-alphabet-profit-ad.html

"Google parent Alphabet reported a surge in quarterly profits Monday, lifted by strong growth in the digital advertising segment it dominates along with Facebook.

Profit in the first three months of 2018 soared more than 70 percent from a year ago to $9.4 billion, Alphabet said in an earnings report that was well above forecasts."

Why do these companies do business here but Australia makes not one cent?
They get all our data, what we do, where we go, who we see, what we buy; and Australia doesn't even get one cent of the profits?

What about all the rest of the multi-nationals?
You people really are all a bunch of idiots.

You let the biggest thieves off for FREE
You sell off the nations assets, or let those socialist scumbags among us run them into the ground.
Then you try to take more from the middle income wage earner, take them out of full-time work and make them casual, give jobs to immigrants under diversity quotas;
- And think we're dumb enough to argue amongst ourselves over schools or corporate taxes?

You try to make sense, but make me delirious with blind support of the nations pathetic incompetent bs.

I'm not thinking about schools or corporate taxes.
I'm thinking more along the lines of torches and pitchforks.

Labor party's call for funding for schools and hospitals".
Armchair Critic,
With all the money put towards education already, no other amount can do any more to improve the appallingly poor performance of our teachers.
Hospital funding would be quite adequate if we could agree not to waste it on drug abusers.

To Aiden.

The "right" side of politics in Australia does indeed engage in vote buying, primarily because the Left shamelessly indulges in it at every opportunity as a vote winning strategy. If the Right took the moral high ground and refused to engage in pork barrel vote buying, they would never win an election. But it is the Left which has always used class division, class envy, and the politics of entitlement, to further their political aims.

Here in Australia, the Labor Party was supposed to be the champions of the working and disadvantaged classes. But with rising prosperity who needed a Labor Party? What Labor needed was a new underclass of disadvantaged, "oppressed" that they could pretend to champion. That is why Labor abandoned it's own traditional voters and went all out for the immigrant vote. Preferably, they appealed to those minority groups who are always dysfunctional, welfare prone, and with high levels of criminality. In NSW, the new Labor heartland is within six primarily Muslim electorates.

If your society has a reducing social problems through increased prosperity, then the Left knows that the best thing to do is to import new and hopefully intractable social problems. To hell with Australia. The important thing here is jobs for Labor voters, namely the civil service, who are the ones who are supposed to solve these new social problems that their leftist leaders created. And of course they can never solve them without more money, more staff, more offices, more everything. And they can also buy the votes of the new immigrant voters with ever more pork barrelling.

California was the richest state of the richest country on Earth, and it is now bankrupt because the Californian Left was so successful in screwing the most productive to give ever more handouts to the least productive, primarily immigrant population. Their most productive citizens are fleeing. 2 million in ten years. Please give me your address so that I can send you a copy of "The Golden Goose", a politically incorrect story for that your leftist kindergarten teacher obviously expunged from the library

LEGO,
>But it is the Left which has always used class division,
Only insofar as they tried to do something about it. Australia almost became a classless society under the Hawke-Keating government, but governments since then have reinstated class divisions.

>class envy,
In Australia? You're going to need firm evidence if you want that claim to be taken seriously!
Here there's generally aspiration, not envy.

>and the politics of entitlement, to further their political aims.
And what's wrong with that? Australia is a rich country - why should only the rich have a good standard of living?

>with rising prosperity who needed a Labor Party?
Firstly, those who have not benefitted from the rising prosperity.
Secondly, those whose prosperity is under threat from the policies of the Libs.
Thirdly, those who see that Labor are better economic managers than the Libs.

>If your society has a reducing social problems through increased prosperity, then the Left knows that the best thing to do is to import new and hopefully intractable social problems.

Struth, I bet you're so ignorant about the Left that you actually believe that preposterous crap!

Social problems benefit nobody, and nobody wants more of them. The real question is what to do about them. While this is not entirely a Left v Right issue, the Right are currently dominated by conservatives, who tend to be more willing to sacrifice freedoms in an attempt to solve those problems.

(TBC)

LEGO (continued)
California's financial strife is nothing to do with "the most productive citizens leaving"; it's the direct result of Proposition 13 which has (over time) decimated that state's revenue base (as well as making the cost of land far higher).

As for the people leaving California, I suggest you read https://www.dailynews.com/2016/07/18/whos-leaving-california-not-who-you-think-thomas-elias/

Your attempt to politicise The Golden Goose is only a couple of orders of magnitude less stupid than the assumptions you make about your opponents. As I recall, the goose was killed in an attempt to get at the gold sooner. But nothing I, or indeed the Left, support is akin to killing the goose. You assume higher taxes on income and profits will cause the rich to flee - but the tax rates of the 1970s and 80s, despite being much higher than anyone is proposing now, did not have that effect.

To Aiden

There are two ways to deal with a debating opponent. The first, is to assume that that your opponent is intelligent, reasonable, and honest, and to engage in a one on one engagement using logic and reason. The second, is to assume that your opponent is either dumb or devious. In either case, the best tactic is to engage in a debate as if you are in a room full of impartial observers, and to pitch your premises directly to the audience and let them be the judge. I think I will take the second option in your case. But you should be glad to know that in choosing which type of opponent you are, I don't think you are dumb.

Now, a devious person always coaches his or her premises in terms of generalities which they have no intention of elaborating on. I submit your premise about the right side of politics engaging in vote buying, which although generally true, does not address the rampant, blatant, endless vote buying of the left side of politics, which shamelessly tells the poorer demographics that they are going to give them freebies by taxing "the rich."

My premise that the left has always promoted class division as a election strategy is so self evident that an honest and reasonable opponent would simply acknowledge the fact. But a devious opponent will vacillate forever on any point, and demand that I validate the obvious. So my response is, to leave the validity of that premise to the judgment of the audience.

As for your link to an article by Thomas Elias, I simply reject it. I would say that Elias is another Liberal in denial about the fact that 2 million of California's most valuable taxpayers are fleeing the high taxes and endless regulation of Democrat California. It is these regulations which are driving up housing, building and land costs. And it is Democrat "sanctuary cities" encouraging third world immigration that have turned Californian cities into sh--holes, where cleaning human waste off the streets is the only real growth industry.

LEGO,
The problem is you're assuming the entire Left to be either dumb or devious - and often both!
You don't bother to look at their real objectives - instead you assume altruism to be a cynical vote buying strategy, and that they'd resort to almost anything to stay in power. And those assumptions are genuinely stupid. I don't doubt you have the capability to think, but you seem to be too lazy to look at the actual evidence; instead you resort to stereotypes and incorrect assumptions you unthinkingly regard as self evident.

Your rejection of http://www.dailynews.com/2016/07/18/whos-leaving-california-not-who-you-think-thomas-elias/ is a case in point. You didn't find any evidence to the contrary, nor any logical flaw in what he was saying, but you rejected it because the author's political viewpoints go against your bias!

Do you doubt that were it not for Prop13, the state of California would be financially much better off, and land there wouldn't be so expensive?

Your claim about " the rampant, blatant, endless vote buying of the left side of politics, which shamelessly tells the poorer demographics that they are going to give them freebies by taxing 'the rich.'" seems rather dubious when you look at Chart 3 of http://archive.treasury.gov.au/documents/1156/HTML/docshell.asp?URL=01_Brief_History.asp

But before we go any further with this part of the discussion, please clarify: do you regard all of the government's wealth redistribution as vote buying?

As for class division, if it is an electoral strategy then it is a strategy for LOSING elections. The public don't want class division, and most in the ALP seem to know that. I acknowledge there are a few on the Left who do want it; Julia Gillard among them. But when she tried to promote class division, politically she became a dead woman walking!

Finally a reminder that when people claim something to be "self evident" it's usually because they believe it to be true but have no evidence at all.

To Aiden

Human beings think by using stereotypes. Of all the stupid slogans that your leftist peers have inculcated into your vestigial brain in lieu of developing it's ability for critical analysis, the one which claims that stereotyping is wrong, is the most stupid of all. Saying that stereotyping is wrong, is exactly like saying that thinking is wrong. Which why lefties always say it. The last thing they want Aiden to do is to think.

Now, your link presented a diatribe by some social justice warrior who claims that the best and the brightest are not fleeing California. Your premise appears to be, that just because he wrote this crap that I must believe it. I don't believe it. My information from numerous sources on Youtube is that in the last ten years, 2 million Californians and many leading corporations have fled the high state taxes and endless regulations in California, and are going to republican states like Nevada and Texas where state taxes do not exist and regulations are few. One industrialist claimed it would take his company two years to get through the numerous Californian state departments that would approve new construction. In Nevada it took one week.

This conforms with my unbiased historical observation, that whenever lefties get a hold of an economy through vote buying, they always stuff it up by taxing the most productive to death, sucking up to the least productive on the grounds that they are more numerous, and over regulating commercial activity to extinction in order to create regulatory non jobs for their numerous hangers on.

Your premise that the left don't want class division is a premise more worthy of hilarity than serious consideration. The Left has always portrayed themselves as the champions of the lower classes against the establishment, and the supposedly rapacious bourgeoisie. But their claim to want a classless society is beginning to fray because they just happen to be the biggest social snobs around who sneer at the lower "deplorable" class, and think themselves morally superior to the bourgeoisie, who are usually their parents.

LEGO,
I am disappointed that you've so far failed to answer the question: do you consider all wealth redistribution to be vote buying? Until you're willing to clarify what you mean, there's not much point in continuing that part of the discussion.

Human beings think very ineptly by using stereotypes. Doubly so when the stereotypes are as ludicrous as yours are, and doubly so again when, like you, they can't tell the difference between their stereotypes and facts! To think proficiently, one must frequently question one's assumptions.

>Your premise appears to be, that just because he wrote this crap that I must believe it

On the contrary, I don't want you to blindly take anybody's word for anything. What I want you to do is take it seriously; investigate its claims rather than instantly dismissing them because they don't fit your bias. And consider too the possibility that your preferred sources have the same bias you do, and are making the same mistakes.

Remember nobody's denying that there are people and businesses leaving California (and new ones coming in). If, as you claim, the high productivity workers are moving out and being replaced with low productivity immigrants, I'd expect to see a decline in the median wage (or at least stagnation and lagging behind the rest of the USA). Do the figures show this?

Most importantly, check the source that Thomas Elias uses:
http://next10.org/sites/default/files/california-migration.pdf

>The Left has always portrayed themselves as the champions of the lower classes against the establishment,
In the early 20th century of course they did, because a huge class divide existed. But the Left worked to close it, and were quite successful in doing so.

>and the supposedly rapacious bourgeoisie.
It appears you're having trouble distinguishing between the mainstream Left and the Communist Party!

>they just happen to be the biggest social snobs around who sneer at the lower "deplorable" class
No, it's not the lower class who are deplorable, it's the people like you who favour the interests of the rich over those of everyone else.

To Aiden.

No government has any constitutional obligation to "redistribute wealth". The usual western social contract is for those very productive individuals in society who are blessed with very high intelligence and business acumen, (and who are highly paid) to be taxed at a much higher rate in order for government to help get the genuine poor people on their feet.

But the whole system falls down when a very large percentage of "poor" people learn how to game the system and figure out that they are better off living on welfare than working. And the Left side of politics aids and abets this unacceptable situation by becoming the champions of this parasitic caste by always figuring out new ways to tax the productive caste, to keep the parasites voting for the Left. The Left also supports the immigration of ethnic groups who have proven to be intractable welfare, crime, and terrorism problems in every western society they have ever immigrated into. The only rational explanation for this insanity, is because the Left see the trouble prone immigrants as a new source of votes, as well as an opportunity to swell the public service in order to "solve" the unsolvable social problems that these immigrants will import with them.

Naturally, the Left's solution to the problem of finding the finances to buy the votes of their new electorate is to squeeze the productive lemons until the pips squeak.

And here is a bit of Psychology 101 Aiden. Human being think by forming concepts based upon generalisations, and stereotypes are a form of generalisation. Everybody does it. Everybody prejudges. Everybody stereotypes. Everybody thinks subjectively most of the time. We can think objectively, but we need to perform a physical act to do it. That act is called "concentrating." But nobody walks around in a permanent state of objective concentration. Your implication is that you and your comrades are superior thinkers to us deplorables because you don't stereotype or prejudge. That is wrong. All you are doing is chanting inculcated slogans that you do not understand and have never even thought about.

LEGO,
I notice again you've failed to answer the question, so again I ask: do you consider all wealth redistribution to be vote buying?

> the whole system falls down when a very large percentage of "poor" people learn how to game the system and figure out that they are better off living on welfare than working.

Can you identify even one real world example of the system falling down in this way?
It may have escaped your attention, but Australia's already put in place measures to reduce the likelihood of anyone being better off not working. And most countries don't have as much means testing as Australia does, so the working ones would still be eligible for some of the benefits.

Your view of welfare recipients as "parasites" strongly suggests you're a sociopath, valuing money more than people. And your categorisation into a "parasitic caste" and a "productive caste" is indicative of the mental deficiencies of many on the Right: viewing productivity as an inherited characteristic, and fail to recognise the two groups are often the same people at different stages of their lives.

As for those "unsolvable social problems" immigrants bring, ITYF most of them have actually been solved already!

Regarding thinking objectively, you should get more practice! Everything you're unfamiliar with initially requires a lot of concentration, but with a bit of practice it'll soon become second nature. Meanwhile I'm not asking you to walk round in a permanent state of objective concentration, but if concentration's so alien to you that you're unable to do it when writing on this board, I suggest you don't bother posting.

>All you are doing is chanting inculcated slogans that you do not understand and have never even thought about.

That's yet another of those views of yours that is based on a stereotype that bears no relation whatsoever to the truth. Yet I'm curious as to what inculcated slogans you think I'm chanting? And why do you think I don't understand and have never thought about them? Is is just because I haven't reached the same idiotic conclusions as you?

To Aiden.

I thought I answered your question in detail. Your euphemism "wealth redistribution" could mean anything. Armed robbery can reasonably be considered "wealth redistribution", but I presumed you meant the principle, that those with greater wealth in the community pay a larger share of tax than the poorer members. In principle I support that measure. The problem is, that at what point does "wealth redistribution" simply become "legalized theft from the productive" to buy the votes of the least productive and counter productive?

So to answer your question more specifically, I do not consider all "wealth redistribution" in contemporary western societies today as vote buying, just most of it.

My opinions as to parasites comes from being raised in poverty in a Housing Commission block of 84 units, and living among parasites. As an instructive social exercise, I learned a few things. The first, is that social welfare can be beneficial in helping the deserving poor to get on their feet and become upwardly mobile. The second, was that there are a large percentage of people to whom being professional social welfare recipients, preferably on the disability pension, is their primary goal in life. If you haven't figured that out yet, than you were obviously raised in a leafy suburb and was sheltered from life's unpleasant realities by your father's income.

Another thing I learned, was that intergenerational welfare dependence was primarily a product of low intelligence. The idea that classes are equal is complete socialist claptrap. Generally speaking, the smartest are at the top and the dumbest at the bottom. Smart poor people are (like my mother and myself) upwardly mobile.

As for "solving" the problems of imported dumb people, I suppose your are right. Such "solutions" include "diversity bollards" in our streets. Vastly increased security forces. Very serious restrictions on our cherished civil liberties through anti terrorism legislation. Vastly expanded police, courts, prisons and welfare services. Armed guards outside of newspaper offices and Jewish schools. And the fortification of every vital government department with steel gates and security guards.

And that is just for starters. Some "solution."