The Turnbull government’s solemn pledge to cap the growth in tax receipts at 23.9 per cent of gross domestic product is a political gimmick to which no government committed to economic responsibility would bind itself.
So it’s good we can be confident that, should the Coalition remain in power in the years to come, it will ditch its solemn pledge the moment it becomes politically inconvenient.
Why can we be confident? Because this very budget ditches two earlier solemn pledges to “bank” any unexpected improvements in tax collections or government spending and to get the budget balance back to a surplus of at least 1 per cent of GDP “as soon as possible”.
As the independent economist Saul Eslake has noted, this budget gives away about 40 per cent of the revenue windfalls Treasury discovered.
For more reason to doubt the strength of the Coalition’s commitment to keeping its commitments, remember the way its determination to fix the debt and deficit “crisis” evaporated after its first attempt to do so in the 2014 budget caused its standing in the opinion polls to plunge.
What political imperative required ScoMo to ditch his earlier budget-repair commitments in this year’s budget? The government’s still well behind in the polls, but must face an election within a year, so is offering personal income tax cuts worth $144 billion over 10 years to bolster its claim to be a low-taxing party, unlike Labor.
Its latest solemn commitment to cap tax receipts at 23.9 per cent of GDP – which the government’s rosy projections say will be reached in 2021-22 - is also intended to boost the credibility of the Coalition’s claim to be a low taxer.
Where does the magic number of 23.9 spring from? The budget papers don’t bother to say. But the government has been waving this figure around without committing to it since its first budget, which says it’s “the average tax-to-GDP ratio of the years following the introduction of the GST and prior to the global financial crisis (from 2000-01 to 2007-08 inclusive)”.
That is, it’s quite arbitrary. There’s no science to it. The government could have picked any other run of years to average.
Note that in none of those eight years did the ratio actually hit 23.9 per cent. Rather, it ranged between 23.3 per cent and 24.3 per cent. Indeed, it exceeded 23.9 per cent in five of the eight years.
Is this starting to worry you? Only in the government’s medium-term projections do tax receipts move in smooth curves as a percentage of GDP. In real life, they bounce around from year to year.
The budget papers don’t bother to spell out the rules by which the cap would work (another sign of lack of commitment), but it seems it would apply prospectively.
If your forecast for the coming financial year was that receipts would exceed the cap, you’d have to use that budget to begin tax cuts big enough to prevent the cap being breached.
Of course, if the economy had up a head of steam and you breached the cap in spite of your tax cuts, you’d need to have bigger tax cuts the following year, and keep cutting taxes every year until the boom finally turned to bust.
Getting worried yet? In such circumstances, the more you kept cutting taxes, the more you’d be feeding the boom, making it more inflationary.
So, rather than using the budget and its “automatic stabilisers” (the biggest of which is what economists call “fiscal drag” and punters call bracket creep) to help stabilise the economy as it moves through the business cycle by acting to counter the cycle, you’d be acting “pro-cyclically”, the most damaging thing you can do with a budget.
Of course, the Reserve Bank wouldn’t be sitting idle while the treasurer was throwing tax-cut fuel on the inflationary fire. It would be seeking to counter the wrongly timed budgetary stimulus by jacking up interest rates. In the jargon, monetary policy would be at war with fiscal policy. Great idea.
Is this improbable scenario ringing any bells? It’s what actually happened under treasurer Peter Costello in the first stage of the resources boom. And it explains why, had such a cap existed at the time, it would have been breached four years in a row, despite annual tax cuts.
All these worries before you get to the question of whether the Coalition would have either the political courage or the wit to restrain its spending to fit within a cap on tax collections.
Nothing in its sorry history, nor its latest “guarantee” to continue to fund “the essential services that Australians expect and are entitled to receive”, suggests it would have such courage.
A party making no promises on the extent of its tax raising is more to be believed.
