Since the Howard government gained control of the Senate, we have been hearing numerous proposals for reducing the top marginal rate of income tax. The excuse is that high marginal rates reduce the incentive for wealth creation and encourage tax…
SPIN: The Family Home is exempt from land tax. (And all the people shall say: Amen.) FACT: If home buyers don’t have to pay land tax, they can afford higher mortgage repayments, hence higher prices. While the price of a…
The Howard government’s industrial relations agenda attacks the wages and conditions of workers as if this were the only way to reduce the cost of hiring. What about the administrative costs imposed by government? For example: If you become an…
A rental property is said to be negatively geared if the owner’s expenses (including mortgage interest and maintenance) exceed the rental income, so that the property makes an annual loss. If the tax system allows negative gearing deductibility, that loss…
Who are the real winners and losers under the Howard government’s industrial relations reforms? We think you can work it out for yourselves. Here are some hints: 1. If workers in firms with less than 100 employees have lost their…
The Howard government’s industrial relations agenda is supposedly about job-creation, as if the cost of labour — including wages and salaries, penalty rates and other perks, and the difficulty of reversing bad hiring decisions — were the last remaining barrier…
In every marginal electorate, politicians promise to take revenue raised by nationwide or statewide taxes and spend it on projects that confer purely local economic benefits. This practice is corrupt and unnecessary — corrupt because a minority of taxpayers are…
The Mitcham-Frankston tollway, also known as EastLink, will reduce commuting times in suburbs serviced by the tollway and in suburbs serviced by alternative routes, such as the untolled Springvale and Stud roads, whose congestion levels will be reduced by EastLink.…
In this age of internationally mobile capital, we are repeatedly told that if we want to attract and retain investment, we must make our tax system more “competitive”. Very conveniently for the investors, competitive taxes are taken to mean low…
The flat tax fanatics are back. They say that if there were only one rate of income tax, the system would be simpler, and the rich couldn’t reduce their tax by converting one kind of income into another kind taxed…