The Budget – The Consequence

Last week, Joe Hockey stood up in front of Parliament and on behalf of the Abbott administration, announced;

''The age of entitlement is over. It has to be replaced, not with the age of austerity, but with an age of opportunity!''

The former multi millionaire banking and finance lawyer, husband to an investment banker, and owner of several premium land holdings, (including a 200-hectare cattle farm in Malanda and mansions in Sydney.) Whose own ‘entitlements’ and that of his colleagues, remain largely untouched, went on to address

• The single mother set to lose more than $3000 per year,

• The newly unemployed university graduate and retrenched worker, who must live with no income for 6 months (poverty) before claiming Newstart (forgone benefits of more than $7000) – yet still have to service their rent or mortgage.

• The low wage family with kids, who will lose $6000 a year once all changes are factored in,

• The Hospitals and Schools – vital pillars of our society - who lose their projected funding (on the rationale that they are state responsibilities, forcing an increase to GST – a regressive tax.)

• The bottom one-fifth of earners who will lose around 5% of their disposable income, compared to the top one-fifth, who will lose only 0.3% (modelling undertaken by NATSEM who point out the burden of this budget, overwhelmingly falls upon people in the most precarious position;)

..by telling Australian public, that they are not “to be alarmed,” because - it’s all;

“In the national interest.”

“The National Interest” what an outrageous statement.

The “national interest” is an interesting term to use for a budget, that has set about ‘plucking the feathers’ of the poor - the low and middle-income earners, the numerous small businesses, the main productive sectors of our economy - whist avoiding any direct action to the assessed $484bn total increase over 12 months in unearned capital gains (more correctly termed “economic rent”) stored in land holdings (ABS.

Or laying a finger on the licensed resource monopolies, the mineral wealth of which increased by $56bn in 2012-13 alone.

Does this sound fair to you?

The country we want..

 “It’s about the sort of country that we want to be, in the years and decades ahead. It's about the value we impart.''

Continued Hockey – who has requested that all complaints be directed to ‘the former government’– adopting the age-old habit of passing the buck. Yet, warnings were given well in advance of this “budget emergency,” and the sensible and equitable reforms needed, laid our in the Henry tax review – which they ignored - all of them.

The ‘sort of country we want to live in the years and decades ahead’ – is an apt question to ask – albeit, it should be directed at our children.

After all, it’s our children who are set to inherit this land and it’s their future the Government is shaping. More importantly, it’s not one the Liberal administration should be dictating on our behalf, following the usual stream of failed ‘promises’ we are familiar with on all sides of politics.

No doubt, job security and housing affordability would come top of the list – both are interdependent and serve our most basic needs.

Without land, or the ability to use it, rent it, or buy it, we’re unable to do, or produce anything.  We are by definition “poor.” 

The accumulation of all our ‘stuff’ is due to the natural resources land bestows.

It is therefore no coincidence that in both religious and ancient mythology, the first job of man was to ‘tend’ the land.

Our relationship with land is truly unique.

The quality of its location and care of its produce is foundational to our most basic human and consumer needs.

Destroy the land, or prevent ready and affordable access to it, and you destroy a population.

The consequence is as black and white as that - “Pay the rent or leave.”

And it is no surprise, that this budget ignored the role of land in its economic modelling – they have been ignoring it for years.

It’s not included in the Consumer Price Index for example - the tool the RBA use to measure inflation and reflect the cost of living, despite land prices and the size of the loans needed to service them, having an uncanny consistency of exceeding wage growth through the course of each cycle – at least for that of the average household and income earner.

And it’s easy to lay the blame of inequality or the reduction of it, on income distribution alone, either that, or confuse it with other items of ‘wealth’ – as is the case in Thomas Piketty’s book “Capital in the 21st Century”

(a subject I explored in part last week.)

These are items that are easy to ‘hide’ in tax havens. You can’t do that with land.

But importantly, whilst the politicians who delivered the budget and the other “twenty percenters,” will only feel a modest loss to their disposable income with the newly imposed ‘wage levy.’ They will claw far more back in the increased value of their land holdings – particularly as we progress through the next phase of our cycle.

The Cause of Wealth inequality – the extreme of which is “poverty”

This is the cause of wealth inequality – a lopsided economy, built on a $5.1 trillion housing market (over $4.1 trillion of which is land.)

(Source)

It’s a subject overwhelmingly ignored, and yet shapes every other area of housing policy – due in part to the vested interests of wealthy property tycoons who lobby our politicians to maintain the status quo. As well as politicians who don’t want to see their “investments” affected in anyway.

The “corruption of economics,” however, is not unique to Australia. It began soon after Henry George, in 1879, took the world by storm, when he successfully communicated the root and leading indicator of the massive boom/bust cycles (although he was not the first to do so,) – that being land.

His farsighted solution, whilst understanding the importance of private ownership, clearly demonstrated that recessions/depressions on a large scale, could be avoided (not by banking reform alone) but if the natural revenue from the economic rent was recycled, to provide and fund community facilities – along with the other government services we require.

This is because, it removes excessive and unwanted speculation from the market, assists home buyers, utilises land effectively, improves productivity with lower land prices, and can assist in increasing wages – which would help the workers – not the land hoarders.

He influenced the likes of;

• David Lloyd George in England,

• Leo Tolstoy,

• Billy Hughes in Australia,

• Rolland O'Regan in New Zealand,

• Chaim Weizmann in Israel,

• Francisco Madero in Mexico, and many others including,

• Winston Churchill,

• Milton Friedman and

• Albert Einstein (to name but a very few.)

He quite simply took the political world by storm.

The people it didn’t impress however, were the large landowners and financiers, the political lobbyists, who set about a on a well-constructed and amply funded mission, to change the course of economic education - to one that moved away from the classical models which recognised the role of land and were advocating Henry George’s policies.

“The Corruption of Economics”

Mason Gaffney and Fred Harrison chart the full story in their book; “The Corruption of Economics.”

They show how the three elements of production—land (and the resources it bestows,) labour, and capital (that of the ‘industrial’ kind) were gradually reduced to two. Labour and Capital – land being “lumped in” with the latter

Capital was now no longer ‘man made’ the result of hard work and genuine innovation.

Instead, it included the stuff of nature – the very elements we need to live – allowing the increasing gains from any natural appreciation of land value (the expected result of every collective improvement we make to society) to be ‘pocketed,’ rather than shared through a proportional system of ‘land rent’ on the unimproved value alone.

It simply implied that the home-owner pay directly for the facilities they use – the amenities that give their land its value – which in the main, removes the need for other taxes which are easy to avoid – like income tax for example.

That sounds fair doesn’t it?

'All taxation is at the expense of Rent’

As the classical economists David Ricardo and Adam Smith proved, 'all taxation is at the expense of Rent.’

(Source)

In other words, any tax withholdings or exemptions given to land holders, result in an increase of “economic rent” available to be capitalised (at the current interest rate) into the price.

This raises the cost of land – yet does little to address the needs of our children, who must take on an every greater proportion of private debt to ‘join in.’

Consequences

The consequence results in what the current budget suggests. Collecting taxes to offset the items we require from other areas – wages, and productivity - the burden of which falls overwhelmingly on the poor – yet advantages those at the top, who see their landholdings increase, way in excess of any taxation.

Is this fair?

Well this is what the current (and previous) administrations have been enforcing and advocating for years.

Promoted widely by our nice ‘balanced’ property commentators – who teach how to get rich on ‘capital gains’ (as if it’s hard) – without stressing the consequence and burden to society and the economy as a whole.

Think about that when you’re browsing the ‘property investment’ isle in your local bookshop.

Think about it.

Who benefits??

The progress of genuine innovation

Thankfully with the birth of genuine innovation – the internet - we finally have the beginnings of a global revolt against mainstream economic teachings which cannot identify boom/bust cycles and crashes, because they refuses to see ‘land.

Not to mention their completely false understanding of money creation and debt and its role in banking - highlighted consistently by Steve Keen who is about to head the first “progressive” department of economic teaching at Kingston University in London. Our loss.

Importantly, economic students are starting to recognise their degrees are hardly worth the paper they’re written on – as the various protests show.

(Something else to ponder when you read the many “market updates” from our mainstream economists.)

Change

Changing the system is not easy when we have built a society dependent on housing wealth to fund retirement.

It requires a slow transition (such as that set out in the Henry Tax review) to gradually phase out tax subsidies such as negative gearing – offset by the supply reforms Leith Van Onselen, Hugh Pavletich, Senator Bob Day and many others have been advocating for years.

But if you want a “fair go” country, one that avoids volatile boom/bust cycles, and instead of promoting wealth inequality, provides economic prosperity along with the best we can leave to our children. Then change we must.

And it starts with ‘us.’

Catherine Cashmore