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