Will tax cuts boost the economy? Yes - and no

When politicians seek to win elections by promising tax cuts, they invariably cloak the inducement by claiming it will do wonders for the economy. You’re not accepting a bribe, you’re helping improve things for all of us.

Treasurer Scott Morrison has said that next week’s budget will include cuts in income tax for low and middle income-earners – presumably, to be delivered sometime after the next election. Labor will also be promising tax cuts at the election.

According to Morrison: “Lower taxes will further strengthen our economy to create more jobs.”

But can you believe it? In a narrow, immediate sense, yes.

Particularly at a time when the growth in wages is so weak, low and middle income-earners are likely to spend much of any tax cut that comes their way.

Since the tax cut will be unfunded – that is, it will cause the budget deficit to be higher than otherwise – this increase in consumer spending is likely to add to employment.

But that’s not saying much. If the same increase in the deficit was caused by an increase in government spending, that too would create jobs somewhere in the economy.

So it’s a higher deficit, not lower taxes, that does the trick. It does so at the cost of higher government debt and interest payments, which will have to be paid for later.

As a solution to weak growth in wages, it’s a Band-Aid.

But Morrison’s on about more than just giving the economy a temporary kick-along. He’s arguing that lower taxes make the economy grow better, whereas higher taxes slow it down and cause it to malfunction.

Because, as well as its version of a tax cut, Labor has plans to reduce various tax concessions and so increase tax collections overall, Morrison is arguing that whereas his tax plan would improve the economy’s functioning, Labor’s plan would worsen it.

Now, can you believe that? Well, it makes perfect sense to many big taxpayers. Surely higher taxes discourage people from working as much and from saving as much.

But though it seems obvious, the empirical evidence in support of the theory is surprisingly limited, as the former senior econocrat, Dr Michael Keating, and Professor Stephen Bell, argue in their new book, Fair Share.

They say it’s reasonable to suppose that if taxation is increased beyond a certain limit, it could reduce the rate of economic growth and thereby reduce the government’s capacity to pay for its present activities.

However, they say, “there is little evidence to suggest that most countries are close to the limit after which tax increases would impact negatively on economic growth and be counterproductive”.

If you compare all the developed countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development over the last 25 years, you find no simple relationship between the level of taxation and their rate of improvement in productivity.

Despite very big differences in levels of taxation as a percentage of the economy, rates of productivity improvement are similar – suggesting worldwide advances in technology are far more influential that tax levels.

As well, the authors say, taxation’s effect on economic growth depends not just its level, but on the “mix” of different taxes (some are better than others) and also on what you spend the tax revenue on. Spending on education and training, innovation and productive infrastructure could be expected to increase productivity.

Next, if we look more directly at the impact of rates of income tax on willingness to work, the evidence of an adverse effect isn’t strong, they say.

Simple observation reminds us that, in Australia and many other countries, where the top “marginal” tax rate has been cut markedly over the past three or four decades (I used to pay 60¢ in the dollar in the early 1980s), there’s been no noticeable effect on participation in the workforce, nor on the number of hours worked by top people.

Formal economic studies reach similar conclusions. Much US research has found that tax has a weak effect on hours worked by those already in jobs, though the effect on decisions to work is a little stronger.

The US research shows male rates of participation and hours worked are especially insensitive to tax rates, with the strongest effects on married women. This is generally supported by the limited Australian research.

And whereas everyone assumes it's people on the highest marginal tax rate who’ll be most affected, research shows the impact is small. The biggest effect is on mothers deciding when to return to work, or whether to move from part-time to full-time.

Why? Because "secondary earners" (including Mr Mums) have more choice than "primary earners".

As for the effect of tax rates on the desire to save, it too is small. Since different ways of saving are taxed differently (a bank account versus superannuation versus geared investments), the main effect of a tax change is on people’s choice of those different ways.

The main reason popular opinion differs so much from empirical reality is that changes in tax rates have two effects, which work in opposite directions.

Economists call the one everyone focuses on the “substitution effect”. Raising the tax on doing an hour of work makes it less attractive relative to an hour of not working (“leisure”). This creates a monetary incentive to work less (or save less, for that matter).

What people forget is the “income effect”. Raising the tax on a given amount of work means it now yields less income. This creates a monetary incentive to work more so as to stop your income falling. (Or save more to stop your savings growing more slowly.)

Whether the substitution effect is stronger than the income effect is an empirical question – it can’t be answered from theory. The income effect is strong when people have targets for how much they want to earn or to save (for their retirement, say).

We’ll spend coming weeks hearing a lot about the disincentive effects of higher taxes. Much of it will be hot air.

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Now for a budget in cloud cuckoo land

Did you hear the news? It’s a budget miracle. Remember all the worry about debt and deficit? Gone. Not a problem. Disappeared. Or, better word – evaporated.

In recent months, revenue has started pouring into the government’s coffers.

According to Chris Richardson, a leading economist from Deloitte Access Economics, the budget’s “rivers of gold” are flowing again. The improvement in the budget has been “humungous”.

And though this year’s budget is still a week away, Treasurer Scott Morrison isn’t denying it.

This time last year, he was telling us another 0.5 percentage-point increase in the Medicare levy – costing about $425 a year to someone on average earnings – was vital to cover the ever-growing cost of the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

Now, however – and thanks to the unexpected miracle – Morrison tells us it won’t be needed.

And far from putting taxes up, he’s discovered there’s room to put them down. The budget will deliver “tax relief to put more money back in the pockets of middle to lower income Australians to deal with their own household and family budget pressures”.

But please don’t think of ScoMo as Santa. Apparently, these tax cuts won’t be humongous. They’ll be quite modest, but they’ll build up over 10 years.

Whether the next election is held this year or in the first half of next year, next week’s budget is safe to be the last before that election.

And there’s little doubt about the ground on which Malcolm Turnbull hopes to fight it: which would you prefer, the tax-cutting, low-taxing Coalition, or tax-raising, high-taxing Labor?

It’s true – sort of. Labor has announced plans to increase tax collections by clamping down on negative gearing and reducing the discount on capital gains tax, by taxing family trusts as companies, by abolishing cash refunds for unused dividend imputation tax credits and by restoring the Coalition’s budget repair levy of 2 per cent of income exceeding $180,000 a year.

As well, Labor wouldn’t proceed with the Coalition’s plan to cut the rate of company tax for big business.

Gosh. But it’s not that simple. Labor does have plans to raise government spending, but these tax measures leave it plenty of scope to offer its own tax cuts to low and middle income-earners. So it plans to raise the taxes mainly of better-off taxpayers, while cutting tax for everyone else.

The main question is whether Labor will content itself with matching Turnbull’s tax cuts, or up the ante.

If all this is sounding too good to be true, it is. Our problem with deficit and debt hasn’t suddenly gone away. What’s departed is the government’s worry about it.

So we seem about to conduct an election in cloud cuckoo land. Let’s forget our financial troubles and have a tax-cut bidding war. Won’t that be a nice change. (And not to worry, we’ll come back to earth after  the election. Mind the bump.)

It’s true there’s been a significant unexpected improvement in tax collections, but much of that’s likely to be a one-off.

It still leaves the budget in deficit this financial year and the coming one, plus the year after, so we return to a paper-thin surplus in 2020-21, as long promised. We still face the prospect of 12 budget deficits in a row, with the net public debt peaking at a bit less than $365 billion, and an annual interest bill of up to $15 billion.

And don’t get the idea that once we finally get back to surplus we’ll be right, with annual surpluses gradually paying down the debt. In his book, Fair Share, written with Professor Stephen Bell, the former top econocrat Dr Michael Keating reminds us that, on the government’s own projections, the budget is likely to stay in surplus for only a few years before falling back into ever-widening deficit.

Although the present deficit is equivalent to less than 1 per cent of gross domestic product, the projections from the Intergenerational report of 2015 see it rising inexorably to 6 per cent – about $108 billion in today’s dollars - over the following 40 years.

Why? Because government spending is almost certain to continue growing strongly, for several reasons. Because of the ageing of the population – the number of retirees is growing much faster than people of working age. Because our demand for more spending on health and education is unlikely to abate. And because, with all its additional benefits, new medical technology gets ever more costly.

To be sure, the projections assume that, within a few years, total federal tax collections are capped at 23.9 per cent of GDP. Take away that cap and the growth in the deficit would be much more manageable.

But that’s the point. With the public’s unquenchable demand for more health and education – and our refusal to countenance major cuts in spending being the sorry story of the Abbott-Turnbull government – taxes must continue to rise. Unless we want to stay in a world of ever-rising public debt.

Remember that in the weeks ahead. The tax-cut bidding war the two sides are about to stage will be for their benefit, not ours. A terrific party, with a bad hangover, intended to distract us from the harsh truth that what we want has to be paid for, one way or another.

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LAUNCH OF RED SHIELD APPEAL

Orange, NSW, May 2018

If you’re wondering why an economic journalist from the Sydney Morning Herald comes to Orange to help launch its Red Shield appeal, the answer’s in two parts. First is that my parents were officers in the Salvos – my father was the Army officer in Bathurst in the early 60s – so I find it hard to say no to them. Second is that, tho these days I hold the rank of backslider, I come from an extended family of Salvationists. My father was one of 14, and he had three brothers and three sisters who also became Army officers. He had an aunt and an uncle who were officers, and six of my cousins are officers, plus a couple of my cousins’ kids – one of whom is David. David’s grandmother Joyce was my father’s youngest sister, which makes David’s father one of my 60 or 70 first cousins, so David is my first cousin once removed. So that’s the second reason I’m here: I couldn’t say no to a cousin.

I want to say a bit about the budget – which has been obsessing me for the past week – and will go on obsessing me until the end of the month – long after all normal people have lost interest.

The next federal election could be held as soon as August or as late as May, it’s not clear which. What is clear, however, is that last week’s budget is the last before the election. And it had all the hallmarks of a pre-election budget.

There was very little bad news in the budget, very little sign of cuts in govt spending, but a range of increases in spending.

Health – increased grants to the states for public hospitals

• Added a handful of new drugs to Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme – expensive

• Mediscare

Aged care – 14,000 new places for in-home care

• Do more to encourage employers to hire older workers and encourage the retireds to do some part-time work

• Making the reverse-mortgage scheme for pensioners more attractive

• Half a billion dollars to protect the Barrier Reef

• The same on Aboriginal housing in the Norther Territory

• The same for the Medical Research Future Fund

• A few special deals for regional areas – increase in uni places

• About $25 billion on infrastructure projects to relieve traffic congestion in state caps

Tax  - big is the income-tax cuts, which we’ll get on to, but first note a few other tax measures. One is the extension of the $20k instant asset write-off for small business.

Another is the decision not to proceed with the decision to guarantee the funding of the national disability insurance scheme by increasing the Medicare levy from 2 pc to 2½ pc in July next year, announced only this time last year. This comes at great cost to the budget – over the next four financial years - $13 bil - almost as much as the cost of the income-tax cuts. Politicians can expect zero thanks from voters for deciding not to go ahead with a tax increase that hasn’t happened. But there is a price – funding of the NDIS is not as guaranteed as it would have been. Pollies not working to any grand plan.

But the budget does contain not increases in tax, but measures that will raise the amount of tax collections. Crackdowns on the black economy, including untaxed cigarettes, abuse of the R&D tax concession, and excessive deductions for personal contributions to super. All this effort to improve the “integrity” of the tax system will raise about $10 billion over four years – compared with the cost of the tax cuts of a bit over $13 bil.

The income-tax cut – in three steps over seven years – is very peculiar. Fascinating. ScoMo has admitted it will cost $140 bil over 10 years – absolutely huge – but only about 10 pc of that will be spent in the first four years, leaving 90pc over the remaining six.

One of the things that’s strange is the resurrection of the low-income tax offset. But the main thing to note is that the main measure – worth a flat $530 a year – or $10 a week – to people earning between $40k and $100k a year – starts in six weeks, and will happen. The second step four years later in July 2022, gives people on $120k and above a saving of about $2k a year ($40 a week), while the third step in July 2024 – six years from now – will increase the tax cuts of everyone earning above $120k and leave those earning $200k or more with tax cuts worth more than $7k a year, or almost $140 a week.

It’s the second and third steps that account for most of the cost of the package. They are so far into an uncertain future that I think they’re irresponsible commitments to make when the budget is still in deficit and the government’s debt is still rising. They’re unlikely to be legislated before the election and unlikely ever to happen, even if the Coalition is re-elected.

The budget’s forecasts for the economy is that it will soon be growing quite a bit faster than it has been, mainly because wages – which for the past four years have been very weak, growing by only about 2 per cent a year, the same as the rate of inflation – have already started to recover. And in just a couple of years’ time will be back to growing at 3½ pc a year. I really hope this comes to pass, but it sounds pretty optimistic to me.

But that’s enough about the budget – or, at least, enough from the perspective from which we usually view budgets: what’s in it for me and mine. If I’ll be better off, whether others would be worse off is no concern of mine. I’ll vote for the party that best represents my interests.

This is a budget with immediate tax cuts aimed at middle and upper middle income-earners. The median full-time wage is about $70k; median income for all workers – full time and part-time - is about $50k, and the full-time minimum wage is just under $700 a week, or $36k. As we’ve seen, the big payoff is for people earning more than $100k and. Particularly, more than $200k – if it ever happens.

What this budget isn’t about is low income earners, including people, partic mothers, with part-time jobs, the unemployed and others.

Punishment – ScoMo said in his budget speech “you must not punish people for working hard and doing well”.

But there is punishment in this budget. Dole                           

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Bank inquiry will change the course of politics and policy

The misbehaviour by banks and other big financial players revealed by the royal commission is so extensive and so shocking it’s likely to do lasting damage to the public credibility and political influence of the whole of big business and its lobby groups.

That’s particularly likely should the Coalition lose the looming federal election. If it does, that will have been for many reasons. But it’s a safe bet that pollies on both sides will attribute much of the blame to the weeks of appalling revelations by the commission.

With Labor busy reminding voters of how much effort during its time in office the Coalition spent trying to water down the consumer protections in Julia Gillard’s Future of Financial Advice legislation and then staving off a royal commission – while forgetting to mention the tough bank tax in last year’s budget – the Coalition will surely be regretting the closeness of their relationship.

Some Liberals may see themselves as having been used by the banks, notwithstanding the latter’s generous donations to party coffers. So, even if the Coalition retains office, it’s likely to be a lot more reluctant to be seen as a protector of big business.

A new Labor government is likely to be a lot less inhibited in adding to the regulation of business, and tightening the policing of that regulation, than it was in earlier times.

Should Malcolm Turnbull succeed in getting the big-company tax cut through the Senate, an incoming Labor is likely to reverse it (just as Tony Abbott didn’t hesitate to abolish Labor’s carbon tax and mining tax).

Many punters are convinced both sides of politics have been bought by big business, leaving the little guy with no hope of getting a fair shake from governments.

But that view’s likely to recede as both sides see the downside as well as the upside of keeping in with generous donors. This may be the best hope we’ll see of both sides agreeing to curb the election-funding arms race.

I’m expecting more customers for my argument that, in a democracy, the pollies care most about votes, not money. If they can use donations to buy advertising that attracts votes, fine. But when their association with donors starts to cost them votes, they re-do their calculus.

The abuse of union power during the 1960s and ‘70s – when daily life was regularly disrupted by strikes, and having to walk to work was all too common – left a distaste in voters’ mouths that lingered for decades after strike activity fell to negligible levels.

This gave the Libs a powerful stick to beat over Labor’s head. Linking Labor with the unions was always a vote winner. Every incoming Coalition government – Fraser, Howard, Abbott – has established royal commissions into union misbehaviour in the hope of smearing Labor.

But the anti-union card has lost much of its power as the era of union disruption recedes into history. The concerted efforts to discredit Julia Gillard didn’t amount to much electorally, nor this government’s attempt to bring down Bill Shorten.

From here on, however, the boot will be on the other foot. It’s big business that’s on the nose – being seen to have abused its power – and it is being linked with big business that’s now likely to cost votes.

All this change in the political and policy ground rules just from one royal commission, which may or may not lead to prosecutions of bank wrongdoers?

No, not just that. This inquiry’s revelations come on top of the banks’ longstanding unpopularity with the public and the long stream of highly publicised banking misbehaviour running back a decade to the aftermath of the global financial crisis.

And the bad story for banks, fund managers and investment advisers piles on top of continuing sagas over the mistreatment of franchisees and a seeming epidemic of illegal underpayment of wages to young people and those on temporary visas.

That’s not to mention the way fly-by-operators rorted the Vocational Education and Training experiment, ripping off taxpayers and naive young people alike, nor the mysterious way the profits of the three companies dominating the national electricity market at every level have blossomed at the same time retail electricity prices have doubled.

Times have become a lot more hostile for business, and only a Pollyanna would expect them to start getting better rather continue getting worse. Should weak wage growth continue, that will be another factor contributing to voter disaffection.

Why has even the Turnbull government slapped a big new tax on the banks, tried to dictate to the private owner of Liddell power station and now, we’re told, plans to greatly increase the petroleum and gas resource rent tax?

Take a wild guess.

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Both sides of politics play along with costly con trick

Since there’s probably more madness to come, it’s too soon to tell how much Donald Trump’s uncomprehending machinations on trade will do to make America’s economy less great, let alone the rest of us. But it’s safe to predict damage to our economy – much of it self-inflicted.

Yes, self-inflicted. It won’t just be what Trump and others do to us, but also the damage we do to ourselves by hitting back in ways that hurt us more than they hurt the other guys.

By reacting emotionally rather than intelligently. By playing to the peanut gallery.

It’s true that our economy loses when other countries try to reduce their spending on our exports by imposing a tariff (import duty) on their citizens’ purchases of those exports.

But for us to retaliate by whacking a tariff on our imports from them – as is the instinctive reaction of almost everyone – just makes matters worse by requiring our citizens (and businesses) to pay more for those imports.

This gut reaction is prompted by people’s unthinking assumption that exports are good, but imports are bad. When you think it through, however, you realise imports are just as good as exports – why would we be so keen to buy them if they weren’t?

And exports are good mainly because we can use the money we make from them to buy imports.

International trade is an exercise in mutual and reciprocal benefits. They gain from buying our exports; we gain from buying their exports.

The gains are greater the more each side concentrates on exporting the things they’re good at and importing the things they aren’t much good at. That is, from specialising in their strengths, then exchanging with others with different specialisations.

Trying to maximise your exports while minimising your imports is like not wanting to take your turn in a playground game. The others will object and exclude you from the game if you won’t play fair.

But there’s more to it than just fairness to others. By trying to reduce your imports you’re seeking to divert your own resources – land, labour and capital - from producing stuff you’re good at to producing stuff you aren’t good at.

A great way to make yourself poorer rather than richer.

But to get back to where we started, how can I be so sure our politicians would be stupid enough to respond to the folly of others by doing something that would merely increase the cost to us?

Because of the knee-jerk reaction of both the Coalition and Labor when Trump first announced his intention to impose a tariff of 25 per cent on America’s imports of steel.

As Peter Harris, boss of the Productivity Commission, reminded us in a speech this week, “politicians on both sides, along with steel company executives, competed to sound alarms and promote the concept of even bigger price imposts on steel users in this country, all in the name of supposedly saving jobs”.

Apart from asking our best mate Don to exempt our steel from the new tariff (which is what eventually happened), the government trumpeted its willingness to ramp up our “anti-dumping assistance”.

It didn’t mention that this would have been the third ramp-up in decade. A ramp-up of a ramped-up ramp-up.

Not to be outdone, the opposition not only pledged support for tougher anti-dumping measures, it also said it was willing to shift responsibility for reviewing applications for “safeguards” tariff increases from the hard-headed Productivity Commission to some other, soft-headed outfit.

Both the anti-dumping and the safeguards provisions are backdoor ways of using excuses to sneak back-up tariffs you’d earlier reduced.

They’re ways of giving special treatment to our tiny and inefficient steel industry. And, as always, at the expense not just of all Australian consumers of steel products, but all the other Australian industries that use steel as an input to whatever it is they’re producing, possibly for export.

The popular delusion is that higher protection against imports hurts only the countries whose exports we’re trying to keep out. The truth we’re never told about is that the cost of protecting our industry is actually picked up by all our other industries.

Protection doesn’t save jobs, it just attempts to save jobs in the favoured industry by reducing jobs in all other industries. It’s a form of income redistribution from the efficient to the inefficient which, in the process, makes our economy less efficient overall.

Great idea. So why do politicians do it? In Trump’s case, because he’s a fool, and takes no advice from people who are smarter. In the case of our politicians, because they’re knaves: they know (if only because our econocrats keep telling them) that protection is a costly con trick, but prefer to humour popular incomprehension.

In its Trade and Assistance Review for 2016-17, published this week, the Productivity Commission models several “scenarios” that could emerge from Trump’s trouble-making, depending on how we and others respond to his provocation.

It finds that, should no country respond to Trump significantly increasing tariffs on imports from Mexico and China, Australia would be little affected.

On the other hand, should an all-out trade war leave all countries (including us) with tariffs 15 percentage points higher than at present, real gross world product would fall by 2.9 per cent. The fall in our GDP would be less than half that.

Should we hold out from the general increase in tariffs, our gross domestic product would actually be a bit higher than otherwise, though our real national income would be a little worse.

Now get this: should we join with the other members of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership – China, Japan, South Korea, India, New Zealand and the ASEAN countries – in refusing to increase tariffs while everyone else was, the effects of a not-so-global trade war on us would be tiny.

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What motivates decent bankers to rip off their customers

Amid all the reluctant truth-telling at the banking royal commission, one big lie has yet to be apprehended: shame-faced witnesses keep admitting they put their shareholders’ interests ahead of their customers’. Don’t believe it.

From the chief executives and company directors to those middling managers who seem to be the main ones being sent into the firing line, it’s not the shareholders’ pockets they’ve been so keen to line, it’s their own.

They’ve been jumping whatever hurdles they’ve had to clear to get the bonuses they were promised. Why would you rip off old people’s life savings for any lesser reason?

It’s a safe bet that everyone from the very top to well down has been “incentivised” with performance targets and bonuses. I reckon only the lowly would be lumbered with key performance indicators unattached to extra moolah.

It’s hard to imagine how so many seemingly ordinary, decent Australians were led to do so many unethical, dishonest, even illegal things for so many years without them convincing themselves it was normal bankerly behaviour – “everyone’s doing it; I don’t want to miss out” – and that by achieving the targets their bosses had set them, they were being diligent and loyal employees, worthy of reward.

But though the financial services industry must surely be the most egregious instance of the misuse of performance indicators and performance pay, let’s not forget “metrics” is one of the great curses of modern times.

It’s about computers, of course. They’ve made it much easier and cheaper to measure, record and look up the various dimensions of a big organisation’s performance, as well as generating far more measurable data about many aspects of that performance.

Which gave someone the bright idea that all this measurement could be used as an easy and simple way to manage big organisations and motivate people to improve their performance.

Setting people targets for particular aspects of their performance does that. And attaching the achievement of those targets to monetary rewards hyper-charges them.

Hence all the slogans about “what gets measured gets done” and “anything that can be measured can be improved”.

Thus have metrics been used to attempt to improve the performance of almost all the major institutions in our lives: not just big businesses, but primary, secondary and higher education, medicine and hospitals, policing, the public service – the Tax Office and Centrelink, for instance.

Trouble is, whenever we discover new and exciting ways of minimising mental effort, we run a great risk that, while we’re giving our brains a breather, the show will run off the rails in some unexpected way.

It took a while for someone to come up with the slogan antidote: “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted”. Not everything that’s important is measurable, and much that is measurable is unimportant.

Trust, which the bankers had a lot of, is hugely valuable but hard to measure. They failed to notice the way their sharp practice – their attempt to “monetise” that trust – was eroding it.

And now they are reaping a whirlwind no KPI warned them was coming. If you work in financial services, don’t try measuring “esteem” or “reputation” any time soon.

I’ve long harboured doubts about the metric mania, but it’s all laid out in a new book, The Tyranny of Metrics, by Jerry Muller, a history professor at the Catholic University of America, in Washington DC.

Muller says we’ve been gripped by “metric fixation” which is “the seemingly irresistible pressure to measure performance, to publicise it, and to reward it, often in the face of evidence that this just doesn’t work very well”.

The glaring weakness of metrics and KPIs is how easily they can be fudged. Since most jobs are multifaceted, and you can’t slap a KPI on every facet, the simplest and least dishonest way to fudge is concentrate on those aspects of the job covered by a KPI, at the expense of those that aren’t.

Everyone from the chief executive to the lowliest clerk understands this. So why does the practice persist? Because bosses are just as busy fudging their targets as their underlings are. So long as your fudging helps your boss with their fudge, what’s the problem?

Schools fudge their performance on standardised tests by “teaching to the test” or even inviting poor performers to stay home on test day. Police services improve their serious crime clear-up rates by classing more crimes as less serious, or failing to record every crime reported to them.

Hospitals improve their performance by declining to admit people with complicated problems; surgeons improve their performance rates by refusing to treat tricky cases. Sometimes this means patients with big problems suffer delays in treatment, and maybe die. But this doesn’t show in the indicator.

Muller notes the obsession with measurement can get everyone focused on unimportant things that seem easy to measure and away from important things that can’t be measured. It can divert resources away from frontline producers towards managers, administrators and data handlers.

Worse, using money to motivate people tends to crowd out intrinsic motivation: taking a pride in doing your job well and giving customers or taxpayers value for money. It can distort an organisation’s goals and stifle creativity.

Measurement’s fine, so long as it’s used as an aid to human judgment, not a substitute for it.

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What would Jesus do about tax and government spending?

It’s Easter, so let me ask you an odd question: have you noticed how arguments about governments’ intervention in the economy – should they, or shouldn’t they – often rely on an appeal to Christ’s parable of the Good Samaritan?

No, me neither. Until I read a little book called, The Political Samaritan: How Power Hijacked a Parable, by Nick Spencer, of the British religion-and-society think tank, Theos.

This is my take on what I read.

Polling in 2015 by the British Bible Society found that 70 per cent of respondents claimed to have read or heard the parable, but in case you missed that day at Sunday school, I’ll summarise.

One day a lawyer trying to trap Jesus quoted the Old Testament law to “love your neighbour as yourself”, but asked, who is my neighbour?

Jesus replied with a story. A man was travelling down a road when he was attacked by robbers and left half-dead. A priest came down the road and saw the man, but passed by on the other side. So did a religious functionary.

But next came a Samaritan who took pity on the man, bound his wounds and took him to an inn, where he looked after him. Next day the Samaritan paid the innkeeper to look after the man until he was well.

Then Jesus asked the lawyer which of the three was a neighbour to the man who’d been robbed. “The one who had mercy on him,” the lawyer replied. Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise”.

Politicians have been using this parable to support their arguments at least since British evangelicals were campaigning for the abolition of slavery in the early 1800s. Martin Luther King spoke about the parable at length in his last sermon before he was assassinated in 1968.

George W Bush spoke about it, as did Hillary Clinton. But it’s been a particular favourite of the British Labour Party.

Early in his establishment of New Labour, Tony Blair said: “I am worth no more than anyone else, I am my brother’s keeper [an allusion to Cain and Abel in the Book of Genesis], I will not walk by on the other side. We are not simply people set in isolation from one another . . . but members of the same family, same community, same human race. This is my socialism.”

Blair’s successor as British prime minister, Gordon Brown, son of a Presbyterian minister, said “we are prepared to spend money to help the unemployed; we are not going to walk by on the other side, we are going to help them.’’

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, Brown said: “In a crisis what the British people want to know is that their government will not pass by on the other side, but will be on their side.”

So, to politicians on the left, the Good Samaritan is the all-purpose justification for state intervention to help anyone anywhere with a problem. It’s about collective responsibility and collective action.

To a politician like Margaret Thatcher, however, it’s about precisely the opposite. The Good Samaritan was an individual; he saw someone with a problem and he acted to help them. He didn’t tell the government to do something about it.

People shouldn’t hand over to the state all their personal responsibility. Point one.

Point two: the Samaritan needed money to be able to help the half-dead man, and he had it. But the more we’re taxed, the less we have to discharge our personal responsibility to others.

So what was Jesus really saying? First, according to Spencer, he was reacting against the lawyer’s legalism.

Jesus was concerned with following the spirit of the law, not exploiting its letter. And he was saying the law of neighbourly love is the key commandment which, in cases of conflict, overrides other commandments.

The Samaritan was from an ethnic group the other people in the story despised. So neighbours aren’t just the people in our street, our friends, our fellow Australians, they’re everyone, including those we don’t know or don’t like. The parable is relevant to our treatment of other races and asylum seekers.

The world has changed a lot in the 2000 years since the parable was spoken, so I think we should be wary of assuming it speaks definitively about every modern practice. It doesn’t explicitly authorise compulsory state redistribution of income from rich to poor, nor is it condemned. It doesn’t even give the tick to organised charities.

Conservatives are right to emphasise that our personal responsibility for others is fundamental. But I think supporters of collective action may claim that it’s consistent with the spirit of the parable.

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Competition isn't always as good as we're told

The banking royal commission has many sub-plots. Did you notice the one where a couple of the banks blamed their decisions to keep doing things they knew were dodgy on the pressure of competition?

A chap from Westpac didn’t argue when one of the inquiry’s barristers criticised it for paying “flex commissions” to car dealers arranging loans for people buying cars. The higher the interest rate the dealers could get their customers to accept, the higher the (undisclosed) commission Westpac paid them.

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission has decided to prohibit this practice from November. So why was Westpac persisting with it until then? Because, if it simply stopped doing it off its own bat, it would lose most of its business to competitors.

Another chap, from the Commonwealth Bank, gave a similar explanation for it continuing to base its commissions to mortgage brokers on the size of the loans they organised. If it stopped doing the wrong thing, he said, its brokers would switch to dealing with other banks.

But since it’s a relaxing long weekend, let’s not persist with such a blood-pressure raising subject as the behaviour of our lovely banks. No, let’s just have a calming philosophical discussion about the complications of competition in markets.

Economists like to give us the impression competition is a fabulous thing in any market, all upside and no downside. Competition is something you can never have enough of, they imply.

Don’t believe it. It’s certainly true that a market with no competition – a monopoly – isn’t a great place. Prices are high, service is bad, and when you complain to the company, no one gives a rat’s.

But it doesn’t follow that all competition is wonderful, nor that more is always better. Far from it.

The simple “neo-classical” model of markets assumes a large number of small sellers. The competition between them is so fierce that none of them dares charge a price that’s a cent more than the minimum needed to cover their costs (including the cost of the capital invested in the business, aka profit).

All sellers charge the same price, and if you try selling for a bit more, you sell nothing and go bankrupt.

In the real world, it ain’t so simple. There are various reasons for this, but a big one is the presence of economies of scale – the more you produce, the lower the average cost of what you’re producing.

This allows you to lower your price – which is good for buyers – but, as a consequence, sell a lot more, which is also good for you.

It’s scale economies that explain why so many of our real-world markets are the opposite of what textbooks assume: a small number of large sellers – known as oligopoly. The big four banks are a good example.

When you look at the behaviour of oligopolies you see competition isn’t as wonderful as it’s cracked up to be. Oligopolists compete fiercely against each other, but they compete mainly for market share, and try to avoid competing on price.

According to the economists’ basic model, however, low prices are the key benefit competition brings us. In reality, oligopolists prefer to keep prices and profit margins high by competing via marketing and advertising, including by “differentiating” their products.

Occasionally a firm tries to steal a march on its competitors by innovation – coming up with a product that’s clearly better than the others. Mainly, however, product differentiation involves superficial differences.

Economists preach the virtues of competition because they assume it gives consumers a wider range of products to choose from, which must be a good thing.

But with only a few sellers, competition tends to do the reverse, limiting the choice available. Each firm will have a product range remarkably similar to the others.

This is because the few big firms focus on each other, not the customers. Their goal is not so much to find the magic product the punters will love, as to make sure their competitors don’t get ahead of them. So product ranges tend to be the same.

But how do we explain those two bankers claiming competition prevented them from ceasing dodgy practices? Why wouldn’t a bank want to get itself a reputation for being square with its customers?

Because of another weakness in the economists’ basic model: its assumption that both buyers and sellers know all they need to know about market conditions - an implicit assumption that gaining the knowledge you need to make good choices is easy and costless.

In reality, it costs time and money to be well-informed, which gives sellers (who tend always to be in the market) an inbuilt advantage over buyers, who tend to buy a new car, or change houses, only occasionally.

The first economists to starting thinking such thoughts just a few decades ago ended up winning Nobel prizes for realising that information is “asymmetric”, with sellers usually knowing a lot more than buyers.

In the two cases from the royal commission, the banks and their car dealers and mortgage brokers know about the conflicts of interest caused by their commission arrangements, but customers don’t.

Should one bank decide to stop playing that game, many of its dealers or brokers would have taken their business elsewhere long before the nation’s customers realised it was more trustworthy than its competitors.

Up-to-date economists see this as a class of “market failure” called a “collective action problem”: all the firms in a market realise they’re doing something wrong, or even profit-reducing, but no one’s game to be the first to stop.

The obvious solution is for the government to intervene and ban the practice, letting everyone off the hook at the same time - just as ASIC has decided to do in the case of flex commissions for car dealers. Sometimes competition needs help from a visible hand.

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Cheating cricketers symptomatic of our declining standards

I can’t see why people are so shocked to discover our cricketers have been cheating. Surely that’s only to be expected in a nation that’s drifted so far from our earlier commitment to decency, mateship and the fair go.

Such behaviour is unAustralian? We do, or condone, many things that used to be thought of as unAustralian.

There was a time when it would have been unthinkable for Australians to stand by while an elected government physically and psychologically mistreated people whose only crime was to arrive by boat without an invite.

Many of them are fleeing persecution in their own country, but that makes no difference. We even mistreat their children, causing them to have mental illnesses and then refusing them medical treatment.

Last week a government led by Mr Harbourside Mansion dished out another round of punishment to fellow Australians whose crime was to be unemployed or to have split with their partner while having dependent children, making it hard for them to do paid work.

The money to be saved will go just the tiniest way towards paying for tax cuts for big business. Did the rest of us care? Not really.

But let’s not kid ourselves. If governments thought mistreating asylum seekers and being unreasonable to welfare recipients would lose them votes, they wouldn’t do it.

They do it because they believe most voters want them to punish boat people and supposed dole bludgers. Which also explains why both sides of politics are guilty of it.

Lovely people, Australians. (And don’t imagine the rest of the world isn’t realising how unlovely we are.)

But stoop to tampering with a cricket ball? We’d never do something so utterly despicable. A player could have been injured.

Don’t forget that cricketers have money at stake when they decide whether to ease the path to victory with the help of a little sticky tape.

Nor should we imagine they’re the only Aussies yielding to the temptation to bend the rules in pursuit of a bigger bonus. What do you think the royal commission into banking misconduct is about?

I fear we hear about only a fraction of the national franchises that screw their franchisees, who then screw the kids working for them; the many employers paying less than award wages, including those ripping off people on temporary work visas who’re afraid to complain.

They do so because they’ve lost any sense of fairness towards their workers – and because they’re (rightly) confident their chances of being caught are low.

Governments – Coalition and Labor - have been cutting the number of inspectors and auditors in the name of greater public service efficiency.

We’ve become less Godfearing, more individualistic, more materialistic and more self-centred. We’ve become less community-minded, less committed to “solidarity” – where the strong go easy so as to help the weak do better – and less sympathetic to the battling of the battlers (except when we kid ourselves that we are battlers).

We’ve changed the meaning of “professional” to being highly competent in your occupation, whereas it used to mean putting your clients’ interests ahead of your own.

Politics has degenerated into an unending battle between interest groups, in which each seeks advantage at the expense of the rest. Much of the fighting is conducted by a thriving industry of lobbyists.

Even the churches fight like Kilkenny cats for a bigger share of the government handouts to private schools – just so they can afford to teach their children Christian values, of course.

But don’t imagine the greed is limited to businesses and institutions. Almost all of us have a mercenary attitude towards the government, paying as little tax as possible while demanding free public hospitals, subsidised pharmaceuticals, bulk-billed GP visits and much else.

How does all that add up? Not my problem. My problem is paying an investment adviser to tell me the somersaults I have to turn to get the pension and avoid paying tax on my investments.

What I’ve found most surprising in recent days is not money-hungry cricketers but the views of a leading businessman, Harold Mitchell, expressed in this very organ: “I’m an Australian and I pay tax for the good of the country.”

Mitchell tells of being visited by representatives of the Singapore government, who invited him to move his head office there. Their advertised company tax rate was 15 per cent, but he’d get a special offer of 7 per cent.

He declined. “I believe in the Australian system that creates the sort of society that enabled me to build a successful business. Avoiding tax, even if it seems legal, is a very shortsighted ambition,” he wrote.

What’s wrong with the man? What a corporate dinosaur. He claims to have found at least one other rich person who thinks similarly – the Scottish children’s author, JK Rowling.

“I pay a lot of tax, and I feel one of the reasons I stay and pay and why I’m not based in Monaco ... is I think my country helped me,” she's said.

Mitchell even quoted the American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes’ dictum that “taxes are what we pay for a civilised society”.

Perhaps the problem is it also works the other way: more money-grubbing, rule-bending and tax avoiding are part of a society that’s becoming less civilised.

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We have a bad case of misdirected compassion

Why do so many of us – and the media, which so often merely reflect back the opinions of their audience – feel sorrier for those who profess to be poor than for those who really are?

Last week, on the day after the single dole was increased by 50¢ to a luxurious $273 a week ($14,190 a year), Malcolm Turnbull’s henchmen succeeded in persuading Pauline Hanson’s One Nation to let him give the down-and-out part of our one nation another kicking. (Sorry, my Salvo upbringing is showing again.)

You’ve heard the news that homelessness is much more prevalent than we thought. According to the Australian Council of Social Service, the Senate’s passing of the Orwellian Welfare "Reform" Bill will, in its first year, add to homelessness by cutting off payments to more than 80,000 people.

The bill contains 17 measures that will adversely affect the lives of thousands of the unemployed, single parents and women and children escaping violence.

You’ve never seen such a list of pettifogging nastiness, yielding tiny savings to the budget.

The unemployed will no longer be back-paid to the day they lodged their claim, meaning the longer Centrelink takes to process that claim, the longer the jobless go without (or have to go cap-in-hand to outfits like the Salvos) and the more pennies the government saves.

Let’s hope it doesn’t make lengthening processing times a KPI.

Until now, the legislation has protected people who can’t complete and lodge their claim because they’re in hospital, are homeless, are escaping domestic violence, or are victims of natural disaster or fire. Sorry, such pathetic excuses will no longer be accepted.

Fortunately, Hanson was shamed into reneging on a commitment to remove a small, one-off “bereavement allowance”.

So, were the media up in arms over this gratuitous attack on people who are already below the poverty line – this “cash grab”?

No, they hardly seemed to notice. Perhaps they were distracted by the bitter tears they were shedding over the plight of all those poor self-funded retirees whose unused dividend imputation refunds the evil Labor Party is threatening to steal.

I’m sure there must be a few retireds with genuine cause for complaint, but I didn’t see any among those whose cries of pain were taken up by a righteously outraged media.

Perhaps the problem is that most political reporters are too young to know how retirement income works. Let’s look at Australia’s most self-pitying and grasping group, the self-proclaimed “self-funded retirees”.

What they mean by this term is that they don’t get the age pension. What they fail to mention to naive reporters is that they don’t get it because they’re too well-off to meet the means test – notwithstanding the best efforts of their investment advisers to rearrange their affairs so they do.

What’s the main reason they’re too well-off to get the age pension? Too much superannuation savings. That’s why I see red every time I hear them claiming to be “self-funded”.

They’ve convinced themselves they’re fiscal heroes who are saving the government a fortune by not getting the pension. Rather, they’ve scrimped and sacrificed for decades to amass the super savings they have.

But they’re deluding themselves on both counts. They conveniently forget that their contributions to super were taxed at 15 per cent rather than their much higher marginal tax rate, as were the annual earnings on those tax-concession-enhanced contributions.

And, since 2007, thanks to Peter Costello (who spent his time as treasurer planting time-bombs in the budget), they’ve paid no tax on their super withdrawals.

As a result, a proportion of their super balance is attributable not to their frugality, but to decades of annual tax concessions, plus compound interest on those concessions.

The higher the payout, the higher the proportion of it attributable to tax breaks rather than actual saving. For most of those with super balances high enough to exclude them from the pension, those accumulated tax breaks would greatly exceed the budgetary cost of that pension, sometimes several times over (as in my case).

That’s being “self-funded”?

Another thing the media’s bleeding hearts (middle-class division) don’t know is that since withdrawals from super are tax-exempt, the money that allegedly self-funded retirees have to live on far exceeds the modest “taxable income” they tell you about.

When they cry poor, these comfortably-off people with their hand out don’t tell you their goal is to get sufficient assistance from the taxpayer to allow them to avoid dipping into the capital value of the shares and property they want to hand on intact to their offspring – who are, no doubt, just as deserving as they are.

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Economic case for cutting company tax rate is weak

Most people don't realise it, but we're on the verge of letting foreign multinationals pay less tax on the profits they earn in Australia because we locals don't mind paying higher tax to make up the difference.

Our almost unique system of "imputing" to Australian shareholders the company tax already paid on their dividends means they have little to gain from Malcolm Turnbull's pressure on the Senate to phase the rate of company tax down from 30 per cent to 25 per cent, over about 10 years, at a cumulative cost to the budget of $65 billion.

So what can we hope to obtain in return for our generosity to foreign businesses? Economic theory (which may or may not prove realistic) assumes it would induce them to increase their investment in Australia which, in turn, would increase the demand for Australian workers relative to their supply, thus bidding up their price (otherwise known as wages).

Note that, contrary to all Turnbull's said about his "plan for jobs and growth", the theory does not promise a significant increase in employment – mainly because the theory assumes the economy is already at full employment before the company tax rate is cut.

As my colleague Peter Martin has written, Treasury's updating of its modelling of the theory finds that, after 10 to 20 years, consumer welfare (arising mainly from higher wages) would be $150 per person higher than it otherwise would be.

Doesn't seem a lot.

Apart from the initial benefits of the company tax cut going pretty much only to foreigners, another reason Treasury's modelling has always shown the ultimate benefits to us as being surprisingly small is Treasury's further assumption that the budgetary cost of the cut would have to be covered by some means.

Treasury's consultant modelled several possibilities: by cutting government spending (don't hold your breath), imposing a lump-sum tax (a textbook fav), increasing the goods and services tax, or by letting bracket creep quietly increase income tax (the most likely).

Trouble is, the model's assumption that increased taxes would harm the economy's performance diminishes the good the lower company tax is assumed to do. As Milton Friedman liked to say, there are no free lunches (you'll end up having to pay, one way or another).

So the impression the government and big business are trying to give us (and naive crossbench senators), that only an economic wrecker would oppose a lower company tax rate, is just spin.

As always, every possible economic policy change has costs as well as benefits, which should be debated. I think the case for cutting company tax is weak.

With the government taking such a propagandist line, the most dispassionate advice we've received has come from evidence Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe, and an assistant governor, Dr Luci Ellis, gave to a parliamentary committee last year.

Lowe pointed out something no other official has mentioned: the main countries are engaged in a bidding war, in which each moves to a lower company tax rate than the others, hoping to pick up a bigger share of the world's foreign investment - before some other country cuts to an even lower rate.

You can imagine how much the world's chief executives love this game and are urging their own government to put in the lowest, supposedly winning, bid.

But the longer everyone keeps playing, the closer we'll come to the point where no country has any company tax to speak of – and no country has any competitive advantage over the others. All we'll be left with is a distorted tax system.

Lowe's point was that we should think twice before we join this mutually destructive game. Why would a tax war be good, whereas a trade war would be terrible?

The proponents' latest argument is that, now the US is cutting its company tax rate to 21 per cent, we'll get little foreign investment if we don't cut our rate from 30 per cent.

What no one seems to have noticed is that the case for a company tax cut has now turned from positive to negative. It's not that we'll gain anything by cutting, but just that we'll avoid losing if we don't.

But you don't have to accept that argument if you don't want to. Behavioural economics reminds us that the proponents have "framed" our choices in a way that favours their case.

They want us to accept without thinking that foreign companies make their decisions about whether or not to invest in Oz solely by comparing the rate of our company tax with other countries' rates.

That is, foreigners take no account of how our special tax breaks compare with other countries' tax breaks, nor any non-tax factors that make investing in Oz attractive (say, we've got better iron ore than everyone else) nor even that they don't have to worry about our taxes because their lawyers know how to avoid paying them.

As Lowe and Ellis explained to the parliamentary committee, the notion that multinationals focus solely on the rate of our tax is highly implausible.

I think all those other factors mean we're unlikely to attract insufficient foreign investment, even though the US has cut to 21 per cent.

But Treasury's been a great worrier about us attracting enough foreign investment for as long as I've been in the game, without there ever being much sign of a problem.

So, what's eating Treasury? My theory is that it hasn't adjusted its thinking since we moved from a fixed to a floating exchange rate in 1983.

What the proponents of a lower company tax rate don't tell you is that, with a floating dollar (and all else remaining equal), the more successful we are in attracting foreign investment – as we were in the resources boom - the higher our exchange rate will be. Is that what we want?

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How Labor is taking on the greedy elderly

Talk about missing the point. The media spent all last week working themselves into a lather over Labor's newly announced policy to abolish cash refunds for unused dividend imputation credits. (If you have no idea what that means, it probably wouldn't affect you.)

This promise would be terribly unfair to dirt-poor self-funded retirees, we were told. And it was utter stupidity for Bill Shorten to drop such a monumentally unpopular proposal in the last week of the Batman byelection, which he was now safe to lose.

Except, of course, that Labor won comfortably, with little sign the policy had much effect.

The media smarties' greater failure was their inability to see the bigger picture: the next federal election is shaping as a battle between the generations, with Labor championing the put-upon young and the Coalition defending the privileged old.

According to Canberra conventional wisdom, this too is crazy-brave territory for Labor. The ageing of the population means Grey Power is our fastest growing political force.

Those of retirement age (which includes me) have little more pressing to do than to worry incessantly about their finances, and have developed an unshakable sense of entitlement ("I've paid taxes all my life ..."). Any concession they've been granted, no matter how unjustified or unaffordable, can't be taken back, we're assured.

Well, I'm not so sure.

As a political force, Grey Power has one huge weakness: of all the age groups, the over-65s are those least likely to change their vote. The great majority vote for the Coalition, so Labor doesn't have a lot to lose.

It's among the non-aged (sorry) that most swinging voters are found, and it's by picking up enough swingers that a party wins.

Haven't you noticed how, since 2013, the Coalition has been reacting to Labor's pro-younger policies by flying to the defence of the better-off old? The conservatives are allowing themselves to be "wedged" – separated from the majority of voters.

The Canberra smarties also used to believe negative gearing was politically untouchable. But Labor went to the 2016 election promising to curtail it – while the Libs predicted it would send house prices crashing – and came within a whisker of winning. Labor's persisting with the policy.

Labor went to that election with another pro-younger policy: cutting the tax breaks going to exceptionally well-off superannuants (including me). This time, Malcolm Turnbull, needing help to pay for his company tax cuts, produced his own, Treasury-crafted version of Labor's idea.

The issue didn't feature greatly in the election campaign, but after the Coalition had won, the exceptionally well-off superannuants in the Liberal heartland turned on Turnbull. This advantaged Labor by adding to the disunity in the Coalition's ranks. Turnbull modified his super changes, but not greatly.

And now Labor is planning to remove another super tax concession that goes overwhelmingly, but not exclusively, to superannuants with large share portfolios. The Coalition hasn't resisted the temptation to side with its well-off elderly heartland, nor have the media resisted the temptation to promote its (and the super industry's) misrepresentation of the policy as an attack on struggling retirees (who just happen to own a lot of shares).

How is this another of Labor's pro-younger policies? That will be easier seen if, as seems likely, Labor uses the saving to pay for a promise of income tax cuts for people earning less than $87,000 a year – few of which would go to the retired rather than to the workers who pay for the retired's largely income tax-free status.

If you think an election campaign based on conflict between the generations is not a good thing, I agree. Unless what you mean by that is that the better-off aged should be allowed to retain their relatively recently conferred tax advantages, and the taxpaying non-old should continue to lump it.

It's a pity John Howard and Peter Costello (the chap who kept issuing reports warning that population ageing would play merry hell with the budget) didn't worry more about future generational conflict when they spent most of their 11 years in office slipping new benefits for the aged, particularly self-funded retirees, into the budget.

They started with the private health insurance tax rebate (the biggest users of private health insurance services are 60 to 79-year olds) and moved on to giving the alleged self-funded retirees the "seniors and pensioners tax offset", also making it easier for them to get health cards and pay the pensioners' rate for pharmaceuticals.

In 1999, they gave negative gearing a huge boost by introducing a 50 per cent discount on capital gains tax. And they decided that anyone who paid so little income tax they couldn't take full advantage of their dividend imputation credits should be sent a refund for the balance.

On the younger side of the ledger, while they didn't invent HECS debts for university students, they greatly increased them.

Then, in 2007, Costello introduced sweeping super changes, making super payouts completely tax-free for people over 60. He also made a lot of supposedly self-funded people eligible for a part pension.

Since this largesse was quite unaffordable, Labor and Coalition governments have been chipping it back ever since.

Even so, we retain an income tax system where how much you pay sometimes depends on the size of your income, but other times on how old you are. And that's not going to lead to intergenerational conflict?

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Immigration the cheap and nasty way to grow the economy

The ABC's temerity in hosting a debate about the merits of high population growth has drawn predictable repostes from the economic establishment. Shades of the legendary note in the margin of a politician's speech: "shout here - argument weak".

There are at least four counts against the advocates of high immigration. First, their refusal to engage with the academic environmentalists arguing that we've exceeded the "carrying capacity" of our old and fragile land. Scientists? What would they know?

Second, they keep asserting high immigration's great economic benefits, blithely ignoring the lack of evidence. Whenever the Productivity Commission has examined the issue carefully it's found only small net effects, one way or the other. Its latest modelling found only a "negligible" overall impact.

Third, the advocates not only decline to admit the high social and economic costs that go with high rates of immigration, they decline to accept their share of the tab, doing all they can to shift it to the young, the poor and those on the geographic outer, including many of the migrants.

You rarely hear pro-immigration economists acknowledging the clearest message economic theory gives us on the topic: more population requires more spending on additional public and private infrastructure if material living conditions aren't to deteriorate.

The more we invest in such "capital widening" to stop the ratio of capital to labour declining, the less scope for investment in "capital deepening" to keep the ratio increasing, and so improving the productivity of our labour.

When we fail to invest sufficiently in capital widening – which we have – the decline in living conditions is manifest in overcrowding, traffic congestion and long commuting times.

Why have we failed to invest sufficiently? Partly because a high proportion of the promoters of high immigration are also promoters of Smaller Government, never acknowledging the two are incompatible.

A bigger population requires a bigger government, with more debt, not less. When you persist with high population growth, but put the clamps on government, you end up with overcrowding, congestion and the rest.

Another truth the high immigration advocates refuse to acknowledge is that a much bigger population must lead to much bigger cities and higher-density living in those cities.

The Reserve Bank's estimates of the huge addition to Melbourne and Sydney house prices caused by state governments' acquiescence to resistance to higher density in inner and middle-ring suburbs, are partly a consequence of successful attempts to shift the spatial cost of high immigration onto the less well-placed.

The fourth criticism of high immigration is that it's the cheapest and nastiest way to pursue economic growth. You get a bigger economy, but not the promised benefits. The studies repeatedly fail to show high immigration leads to a significant increase in real income per person.

Of course, the business lobby has no reason to care whether high immigration yields economy-wide benefits. All they're after is a bigger domestic market, allowing them to sell more widgets, make a higher profit and justify a bigger salary package.

Few economists can see this is a cop-out. An escape hatch. As a way of achieving corporate growth, it's even easier than taking over your competitors. And it sure beats the hard graft of trying to increase profits by being more efficient and contributing to national productivity improvement.

As we've seen, high immigration probably comes at the expense of productivity-enhancing (capital-deepening) business investment and public infrastructure. To the extent that inadequate capital-widening leads to overcrowding and congestion, it worsens productivity.

In principle, one productivity-enhancing effect of high immigration is that you get greater human capital on the cheap by pinching it from other (mainly poor) countries.

After foreign students have come here and paid full freight for Australian qualifications, you let them stay and work. You select permanent immigrants on the basis of their skills, or you let skilled workers on temporary visas stay on.

But as Dr Bob Birrell, of the Australian Population Research Institute, has shown, there's a big gap between the claims made for our skilled migration program and the reality. We let in people whose skills aren't in high demand, and plenty of them end up driving taxis because the local professions' gatekeepers refuse to recognise their qualifications.

So it's not clear the benefits of our skill-pinching program exceed the cost of discouraging businesses from incurring bother and cost training enough of our own young people, when you can always get the government to let you bring in someone ready-trained.

High immigration may suit our rent-seeking business people, but it's a hell of a way to pursue the professed benefits of economic growth.

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Why protection from imports isn't smart

With The Donald now busy playing poker with Little Rocket Man, the threat of a trade war has receded. Good. Gives us time to get our thinking straight before the threat returns.

Everyone knows a trade war would be a terrible thing, but most people's reason for thinking so is wrong. This misunderstanding means such a war could happen, even though everyone knows it would be bad.

It seems common sense for a country to want to protect its industry by imposing a tax – known as a tariff or import duty – on imports competing with locally-produced goods. After all, we win and foreigners lose.

The problem arises only if the foreigners retaliate and slap a tariff on our exporters. That's bad for us because it may lead to job losses among those of our workers who earn their living making goods for export.

Is that the way you figure it? Sorry, it may be common sense, but it's wrong. You need to have learnt a bit of economics to see why, because the case against protection is "counterintuitive" – it doesn't seem right, but it is.

The reason people can't see what's wrong with protection is that every baby is born with a disease called mercantilism.

Mercantilism is the belief that exports are good, but imports are bad. Why? Because we – Australia – make money selling exports to foreigners, whereas it costs us money to buy imports, the foreigners' exports.

So mercantilists see Australia as like a company, and our balance of trade as like a company's profit and loss statement. The more you can export and the less you can import – the higher your trade surplus - the richer you become.

What's wrong with that way of thinking? Plenty. For a start, it's the mentality of a miser – someone who loves money for its own sake, not for what it will buy.

Money is just a means to an end, not an end in itself. The economic game is about producing goods and services so we can consume them. Production is the means; consumption is the end. Focus on one at the expense of the other and you've actually done badly in the game.

Similarly, jobs are just a means to an end. Why do people want jobs? So they can earn money and then spend it.

Exports are production, imports are consumption (although much of our imports are of machines we use in the production process). Production without consumption makes sense only to a miser.

Get this: 80 per cent of the way Australia makes its living is by all the workers and businesses and governments producing goods and services and selling them to other Australian workers, businesses and governments, so they can be consumed.

In principle, we could raise the 80 per cent to 100 per cent by only selling to and buying from ourselves. So why do we sell about 20 per cent of the things we produce to foreigners?

Not because it makes us richer, nor because it creates more jobs. It's solely so we can afford to buy some of the goods and services produced by businesses and workers in other countries, when we judge them to be better or cheaper than the stuff made locally.

Exports are good solely because we can use the proceeds to pay for imports – and imports are also good because they raise our material standard of living by giving all of us (workers, would-be workers and dependents) access to goods and services that are better or cheaper than those made in Australia.

If we weren't willing to use the proceeds from our exports to pay for imports from other countries, those countries would refuse to buy our exports.

Refusing to buy our exports would leave those countries worse off (because they'd lose their ability to buy the things we can produce better or cheaper than they can), as well as leaving us worse off because we lost our ability to use our export income to buy their exports.

This, BTW, is why trade wars are mutually self-harming. A group exercise in cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Why wouldn't it be better to be 100 per cent self-sufficient? Because this would limit the benefits to us from "specialisation and exchange". Our domestic economy is organised on the basis that we're all better off if each of us specialises in producing what we're good at, then uses money to exchange what we've produced with what other specialists have produced.

Opening our economy to trade with other countries merely extends this principle, on which we've always run our domestic economy, beyond our borders.

This is why the mercantilists' assumption that trade is a zero-sum game – if you win, I lose – is wrong. Both sides win because both benefit from the "mutual gains from trade".

It follows that the mercantilist notion that foreigners are the only people who lose when we decide to protect some of our industries is wrong. The biggest losers are every other industry and every Australian who loses their access to cheaper or better imported goods and has to pay more for the local version.

That is, tariffs are a tax, not on foreigners, but on Australian producers and consumers. A way of favouring some Australian industries at the expense of all the others. A redistribution of income to favoured industries from those that aren't favoured, and from Australian consumers generally. A form of rent-seeking.

And thus, an attempt to protect some jobs at the expense of all other jobs. Great idea.

Trade wars are destructive not primarily because it's crazy for other countries to retaliate – which it is – but because the country that provokes the retaliation by protecting some favoured industries is damaging itself.

Better to let it stew in its own juice than punish it by harming yourself.

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