The Heist.
“A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money.”
- Everett Dirksen, maybe. US Senate Minority Leader. January 3, 1959 – September 7, 1969
How about two hundred and forty-three billion dollarydoos, Ev? Does that count as real money? Because you could pay cash up front for three or four failed French submarine projects with that sorta cheddar. It’s roughly how much the millionaire grifters of the Morrison government backhanded themselves and their donor class in the so-called Stage Three tax cuts. ‘Roughly’ because the actual cost is two forty-three point five billion dollars, but the fucktonnages of folding stuff these guys are heisting from the treasury vaults are so gigantinormous that a lousy five hundred million is hardly worth noting. It’s not a scandal. No, perish the thought. It’s a rounding error.
It also speaks to the Labor Party’s collective PTSD that, having been curb-stomped so many times as ‘the party of high taxes’, they can’t quite bring themselves to face reality now, with a trillion dollar debt tsunami about to crash down on top of us. Hilariously, in the bleak, existentially grimdark sense of the word ‘hilarious’, they keep getting mugged like this by the genuine party of high taxes.
But I guess a beatdown doesn’t hurt any less if you didn’t deserve it.
It will, however, hurt like a howling motherfucker when those hundreds of billions of dollars suddenly disappear out of the budget allocations for hospitals, schools and pensions, only to reappear in the Swiss bank accounts, family trust funds and Singaporean post office boxes of a minimal number of very wealthy Liberal voters. And if that does happen, Labor will deserve whatever beatdown they got coming.
Adam Bandt has already given them a touch-up, routinely calling this millionaire welfare program ‘Labour’s Stage Three tax cuts’, which undoubtedly stings. But it’ll burn like a chilli pepper on a septic hemmeroid at the next election, when Gina Reinhart, James Packer and Rich Uncle Pennybags have trousered their handouts, but Joe Sixpack and Wendy Working-48-Hours-a-Week-in-a-Shitty-Service-Economy-Gig get nothing but a lecture on the need to tighten their belts.
The hell of it is, it shouldn’t be that hard a sell.
I mean, who’s gonna mug them this time?
Millionaire Shadow Treasurer Angus Taylor? Net worth $7m? I could do my dough cold, but I’d wager there’s a small, non-zero chance Angus might have to block out his calendar to help FICAC clear up some confusion over water rights allocations and grassland poisoning.
Multi-millionaire Opposition Leader Peter Dutton? Net worth $300m? Again, just a guess, but I’ve got one cashless welfare card says that Dutts is all kinds of vulnerable to a terribly unfair allegation that as one of the wealthiest men in Australia, he’s Scrooge McDuckin’ it in his infinity pool full of gold doubloons while the rest of us are eating dog food in a collapsing bog hole.
What’s his payday look like when Stage 3 kicks in?
These guys are not well placed to argue in favour of another handout to the super-rich. Not these guys and certainly not the cohort of sixty millionaires identified by the ATO as paying one-tenth of one per cent of zero fucking dollarydoos in income tax last year. Probs not the hired goons from the OpEd Octagon at Newscorp either, given that the Tax Office has long identified Rupe’s sheltered workshop for angry white males as an exuberant tax-dodging operation.
It is these one-percenters who’ll make bank from Stage Three. That’s how the scam was designed. Toss a couple of pesos to the poors in stages one and two, and hide the quarter trillion dollar payday for the private jet set down the arse end of the legislation a couple of years later. It was such a brilliant design. I can’t help thinking someone smarter than Morrison came up with it.
Of course, as penitent Liberal Russell Broadbent points out, this was all cooked up in the phat daze before Covid, recession and open hostility with China. Pressing on with Stage Three is like insisting your exclusive pool party can go on even as a force ten cyclone full of flying sharks and giant alien horror squid with laser tentacles is bearing down on your six-star beach resort.
But press on we do, until Albo tells us the party is over.
Desperately hoping that since the cuts don't show up for a while the growing pressure will give the ALP enough backbone to resist the conservative mouthbreathers at the Murdock press who will decry 'broken election promises' (why the ALP can't simply claim them as non-core I have no idea) and dump the cuts. But I have to agree these cuts are one of the most bone headed ideas ever. And why is it no matter how many times the graph and figures about are displayed the right wing conservatives on media get to say the ALP are the big taxing party and not be called on this BS.
Please don't read this as support for the stage-3 tax cuts: they're an awful idea produced by idiots for their craven mates, as you say. But I do have issues with the beat-up (it's not entirely you: I know that the Graun and others have been using a recent report with that figure in it).
Where does it get to be a good idea to extrapolate an annual tax effect out to ten years, just to get a bigger number? I used to get annoyed when people extrapolated to four years of the "forward estimates" to get their bigger number, but this is just more, because more is more. It's a 16B effect in the first year, and inflation takes care of the rest. There's no plan to stop after ten years. (Perhaps it won't even last that long: they could take a policy to change it to the next election and then change it without being vulnerable to the "Liar" slur that did in Gilliard.) Australia is a 1.3T/yr economy, or there-abouts. This is not an especially large chunk of it. Large, yes, stupid, yes, but not in a way that anyone will notice.
It's also not such that the super-wealthy will notice, much. The cut does not remove the top marginal tax rate, or even change the threshold by very much: that's still going to be 47% (counting the medicare levy, and why wouldn't you?) So this is a cut that starts at about $110k, which yes is above average, but is still in the realm of a very significant number of middle-class incomes. Those people vote too. To Gina and Twiggy, the fixed-dollar savings (a nine thousand dollar cut to their tax bill) will not be noticed.
And while I'm on a roll: read up about MMT regarding the "trillion dollar covid debt". Those are Australian dollars, that the Australian government is free to print. It's not owed to anyone but the RBA, and they're owned by the government. Of course inflation is the result, and taking money out of circulation is the expected response to that, and that will look a bit like "paying back the debt", but it isn't, and the end-point isn't zero, it's whatever the current working capacity of the economy is at the time.
If you want something to get really grumpy about, how about those vast (100+ M) self-managed super funds paying 15% on income and nothing on retirement outgoings. Or the foreign miners who have been paying zero dollars tax forever.
Happy now. Thanks for the opportunity to rant back!