Huge public debt isn’t the worry, it’s continuing budget deficits

There’s an easy way to tell how much someone understands economics: those at panic stations about the huge level of our government debt just don’t get it. But that’s not to say we don’t have a problem with the budget deficit.

Australia’s public debt isn’t high by international standards. It doesn’t have to be repaid by us, our children or anyone else. Since budget surpluses – which do reduce debt – have always been the exception rather than the rule, government debt is invariably “rolled over” (when bonds become due for redemption, they’re simply replaced with new ones).

The time-honoured way governments get on top of their debts is simply to outgrow them. So Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s plan to reduce the relative importance of the debt by striving for strong economic growth is neither new nor radical.

If the debt panickers took more notice of what’s actually happening, they’d see that this approach is already bearing fruit. The remarkable strength of the economy’s rebound from the coronacession – much of which is owed to the success of the much-criticised JobKeeper scheme – is helping in two ways.

First, it’s causing the budget deficit to fall much quicker than expected, thus reducing the amount we’re adding to the debt in dollar terms. Second, the faster growth in the economy is slowing the growth of the debt in relative terms – that is, relative to the size of the economy that services the debt.

Most of the unexpected improvement in the budget balance has been allowed to stand, with only a small proportion of it used for further stimulus. That’s particularly true of last week’s budget, notwithstanding its blatant vote-buying.

The media have given us an exaggerated impression of the cost of those measures (particularly when you take account of the decision to discontinue the $8 billion-a-year low and middle income tax offset, which most of them failed to notice because there was no press release).

So the biggest burden present and future generations bear from the debt is the interest bill on it. But with interest rates at an unprecedented low, there’s never been a better time to borrow. And though it’s true long-term rates have started rising, they’ll still be unusually low for at least the rest of this decade.

What’s more, the average interest rate payable on the debt rises even more slowly because the higher rate applies only to the small part of the debt that’s being newly borrowed or reborrowed each year.

The budget’s gross interest payments are projected to stay below 1 per cent of gross domestic product until at least 2026. Which, as the independent economist Saul Eslake reminds us, means they’ll stay far lower than they were at any time in the 30 years to 2000. Frightening, eh.

Yet another point to remember is that the Reserve Bank’s resort to “quantitative easing” (buying second-hand bonds with created money) meant that, in effect, more than all the stimulus spending of the past two years was borrowed not from the public, but from another part of government, the central bank. It’s just a book entry.

But though there’s no reason to worry about either the level of the public debt or the interest bill on it, that’s not to say we can go on running budget deficits for another decade at least – which is what the budget papers project will happen “on unchanged policies”.

We had good reason to borrow heavily to protect ourselves from the global financial crisis and the Great Recession of 2008-09, and good reason to borrow heavily to save life and limb during the pandemic.

(The reason the debt continued growing between the two crises, was partly because we kept cutting income tax despite our continuing deficits, but also because economic growth was unusually weak.)

But what we shouldn’t be doing is continuing to run budget deficits after the effect of the temporary stimulus measures has ended. That is, we shouldn’t be running a “structural” deficit because we haven’t been raising enough tax revenue to cover the ordinary (but growing) business of government.

Some economists estimate the structural deficit is roughly $40 billion a year. Treasury’s projections show it falling steadily as a proportion of gross domestic product over the 10 years to 2032-33, but that’s owing to continued growth in the economy plus the no-policy-change assumption that the big tax cut in 2024-25 will be followed by eight years of bracket creep without further tax cuts.

One thing we should have learnt by now is to expect further unexpected major shocks to the economy that require further heavy borrowing. It would be imprudent to add to our debt, and use up borrowing capacity, merely because we didn’t feel like paying our way during the intervals between crises.

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Despite all the hoopla, budget's extra economic stimulus isn't huge

Sensible economists accept that, because they’re determined by politicians, budgets are more about politics than economics. Pre-election budgets are more political than other budgets. And budgets coming before an election a government fears it may lose are wholly politically driven.

Welcome to this week’s budget. But here’s the point: whatever the motivation driving the decisions announced in the budget to increase this or reduce that, all the decisions have an effect on the economy nonetheless.

It’s a budget’s overall effect on the economy that macro-economists care about, not so much the politicians’ motives. So good economic analysis involves leaving the politics to one side while you focus on determining the economic consequences.

A glance at this week’s budget says that, with all its vote-buying giveaways, the budget will impart a huge further stimulus to an economy that was already growing strongly, with unusually low unemployment, but rising inflation.

What on earth are these guys up to, ramping an economy that doesn’t need ramping just to try to buy their re-election? But glances are often misleading, and the story’s more complicated than that.

You can’t judge the “stance” of fiscal (budgetary) policy adopted in a particular budget – whether it will work to expand aggregate (total) demand (spending) in the economy or to contract demand – just by looking at the few of its many “measures” (policy changes) that hit the headlines, while ignoring the other hundred measures it contained.

And, as with many concepts in economics, there are different ways you can measure them, with the different ways giving you somewhat different answers.

The simplest way to judge the stance of policy adopted in a budget – it’s expansionary, contractionary or neither (neutral) – is the way the Reserve Bank does it. You just look at the direction and size of the expected change in the budget balance from the present financial year to the coming year.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg expects the budget deficit for the year that will end in three months’ time to be $79.8 billion, and the deficit for the coming year, 2022-23, to be slightly smaller at $78 billion.

In an economy as big as ours, that decrease of $1.8 billion is too small to notice. The difference between how much money the budget is expected to take out of the economy in taxes and how much it puts back via government spending is expected to be virtually unchanged.

So, judging it the Reserve’s way, the budget will neither add to aggregate demand (total private plus public spending) nor subtract from it. The stance is neutral.

However, there’s a two-way relationship between the budget and the economy. The budget affects the economy but, by the same token, the economy affects the budget.

The size of the budget’s deficit or surplus is affected by where the economy is in the business cycle. When the economy’s booming, tax collections will be growing strongly, whereas government spending on unemployment benefits will be falling, thus causing a budget deficit to reduce (or a surplus to increase).

On the other hand, when the economy’s dipping into recession, tax collections will be falling and the cost of benefit payments will be rising, thus increasing a deficit (or reducing a surplus).

The Keynesian approach to deciding the stance of policy adopted in a budget is to distinguish between this “cyclical” effect on the budget balance – what the economy’s doing to the budget – and the “structural” effect caused by the government’s explicit decisions.

So, many economists believe that when assessing the stance of a new budget, you should ignore the cyclical component and focus on the change in the structural component – what the government has decided to do to the economy.

You can determine this by looking at what the great budget-expert Chris Richardson, of Deloitte Access Economics, calls “the table of truth”, table 3.3 of budget statement 3 in budget paper 1, page 18 in the PDF (page 86 in the printed version).

The table shows that in the few months since the mid-year budget update last December, the economy has strengthened more than expected - mainly because of the growth in consumer spending and employment but, to a lesser extent, because of the rise in the prices we get for our exports of coal and iron ore.

This means the cyclical component of the budget deficit (what Treasury calls “parameter and other variations”) is now expected to be $28 billion less in the present financial year, and $38 billion less in the budget year, 2022-23.

Adding in the “forward estimates” for three further years to 2025-26, gives a total expected improvement of $143 billion – all of which comes from higher-than-expected tax collections.

So, had the government done nothing in the budget, that’s by how much the string of five budget deficits would have been reduced, relative to what was expected last December.

However, the table also shows that the new policy decisions announced in the budget (and in the few months leading up to it) are expected to reduce that cyclical improvement by $9 billion in the financial year just ending, and $17 billion in the coming year.

These are additions to the expected “structural deficit”. Over the full five years, they should total $39 billion, with more than three-quarters of that total coming from increased government spending.

So, relative to where we expected to be in December, the government’s spending in the budget won’t stop the next five budget deficits – and the government’s debt – being more than $100 billion less.

Even so, judged in Keynesian terms, the government has added to the structural deficit, so the budget is expansionary.

The independent economist Saul Eslake calculates that the budget involves net stimulus equivalent to 0.4 per cent of gross domestic product in the present financial year, and 0.7 per cent in the coming year.

So, he concludes, “the budget does put some additional upward pressure on inflation...but it’s fairly small”.

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Sleight of hand: Frydenberg's disappearing cash trick

If you think this is a going-for-broke, pre-election vote-buying budget aimed squarely at the hip pocket of people worried about the rising cost of living, let me pass on Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s grateful thanks. That’s just the impression he’s hoping you get.

But it isn’t true. When you read the fine print, you discover that, for most people, most of the cost of the extra help they will soon be getting will later be recouped by an increase in the income tax they pay.

True, low- and middle-income earners will get a one-off increase of $420 in their annual tax offset when they submit their tax return for this financial year (costing the budget more than $4 billion) and pensioners and other welfare recipients will benefit from the one-off $250 payment (costing $1.4 billion) that Mr Frydenberg will ensure hits their bank account before election day.

And every driver will save, thanks to the 22 cents a litre cut in the excise on petrol during the six months to the end of September. Coming at a net cost to the budget of $2.9 billion, it’s not to be sneezed at, even if the usual ups and downs of petrol prices will make it hard for many people to see the saving they’re making.

All this follows the old rule for politicians who put their political survival ahead of the public interest: make sure you look like you’re doing something about whatever is exercising voters’ minds at the minute, even if what you do makes little real difference to the problem.

But Mr Frydenberg has been trickier than that. Without needing to announce it – and hoping no one would notice – he has omitted to continue the low- and middle-income tax offset in the coming financial year.

This is his way of avoiding saying that the 10 million-plus taxpayers earning up to $126,000 a year will have their income tax increased by up to $1080 a year, from July 1. But they won’t feel it for at least a further 12 months, when they discover their tax refund is much smaller than they are used to.

Discontinuing this tax offset will increase tax collections by about $8 billion a year, thereby covering almost all the cost of the three temporary cost-of-living measures announced in the budget.

It’s a point worth remembering when next you hear Scott Morrison repeating his line that the Liberals are the party of lower taxes, whereas his opponents are the party of “tax and spend”.

So this budget is more about moving the budgetary deckchairs between years than significantly changing the government’s finances.

When you go beyond temporary handouts, the budget’s greatest weakness is Mr Frydenberg’s assurance that wage growth in the coming financial year will more than keep up with rising living costs. It is based on nothing more than optimistic forecasts.

The rise in consumer prices will slow from 4.25 per cent in the present financial year to 3 per cent in the coming year. Wages, on the other hand, will grow faster, from 2.75 per cent this year to 3.25 per cent next year.

Should this come to pass – and this government’s record on forecasting wage growth is woeful – it would mean that “real” wages grow by 0.25 per cent in the coming year, which would hardly make up for their expected fall of 1.5 per cent in the present year to the end of June.

If I were deciding my vote based on which side was promising to do more about the cost of living, I wouldn’t be greatly impressed. Whereas Labor is full of plans to speed up wage growth, the budget says nothing about changing wage-fixing arrangements.

The people most disapproving of the temporary cost-of-living relief are those sticking with the Coalition’s now-abandoned fatwa against debt and deficit. To them, reducing the debt must override all other objectives.

This was always based on the misconception that a national government’s finances work the same way a family’s do.

Mr Frydenberg is right in telling us that the best way to get on top of the government’s debt is to outgrow it.

Even so, he should be doing more to reduce the budget deficit in coming years – not because the government’s debt is dangerously high, but to give us greater safety should another global setback come along that yet again requires the government to buy our way out of trouble.

If Liberals were the great economic managers they claim to be, this budget would have included a plan to get started on largely eliminating the budget deficit. That means reducing the deficit by about $40 billion a year.

It didn’t. Which leaves us to wonder whether, should the Coalition be re-elected, its plans to cut government spending and increase taxes will be announced in its next budget, or whether it will continue avoiding unpopular measures and kicking our economic problems down the road.

Labor, on the other hand, is warning that, should it win the election, it will use a second budget to make improvements to this one. Of course, what counts as an improvement changes with the eye of the beholder.

The budget’s increased spending on the training and skills of apprentices and other young workers earns a big tick in my book.

One reason some may see the budget as profligate is its long list of $18 billion-worth of new infrastructure projects – big and small – being added to its much-mentioned record $120 billion infrastructure pipeline.

Many of these projects seem chosen to improve the Coalition’s vote in marginal electorates and few have been checked out and approved by the public service infrastructure experts.

Maybe this is an area where Labor would want to “improve” the list of lucky marginal seats.

But worriers should remember that, after the electioneering  is over, not every project that goes into the massive “pipeline” emerges from the other end. And many take much longer to emerge than the campaigning politician suggested they would.

This budget is not as fiscally responsible as the government would like you to believe when it’s claiming to be the party of good economic management. But nor is it as fiscally irresponsible as it would like you to believe when it is claiming to have fixed your problem with the cost of living.

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The plague hasn’t wounded the economy, but the boom won’t last

The pandemic has caused much pain – physical, financial and psychological – to many people. But what it hasn’t done is any lasting damage to the economy and its ability to support people wanting to earn a living.

That’s clear from this week’s “national accounts” for the three months to the end of December, with the Australian Bureau of Statistics revealing the economy’s production of goods and services – real gross domestic product – rebounding by 3.4 per cent, following the previous quarter’s contraction of 1.9 per cent, caused by the lockdowns in NSW, Victoria and the ACT.

Despite those downs and ups, the economy ended up growing by 4.2 per cent over the course of last year. It was a similar story the previous year, 2020, when despite the nationwide lockdown causing the economy to contract by a massive 6.8 per cent in the June quarter, it began bouncing back the following quarter.

Over the two years of the pandemic, the economy’s ended up 3.4 per cent bigger than it was before the trouble started.

Be under no illusion, however. The economy would not have been able to bounce back so strongly had the federal government not spent such huge sums topping up the incomes of workers and businesses with the JobKeeper wage subsidy, the temporary increase in JobSeeker benefits, special tax breaks for business (including to encourage them to invest in plant and equipment) special incentives for new home-building, and much else. The state governments also spent a lot.

The Reserve Bank also cut interest rates – from next-to-nothing to nothing – and bought a lot of government bonds, but I find it hard to believe this made a big difference, except to house prices and home building.

It’s true that these figures for GDP and its components don’t include the effects of the Omicron wave, which came mainly in the first half of January. But by now it’s pretty clear its effect on the economy was fairly small. Of course, we may not be finished with the Greek alphabet.

None of this is to deny that the pandemic has done lasting damage to some individual workers, businesses and industries. Overall, however, the economy’s in surprisingly good shape. And this is confirmed by turning from the national accounts to the jobs market.

We have 270,000 more people in jobs than we did before the pandemic, and both unemployment and underemployment are at 13-year lows, while the number of job vacancies is at a record high.

This remarkable achievement is partly the consequence of shortages of young, less-skilled workers, caused by our closed border, however. Those shortages will gradually go away now the border’s been reopened.

Unsurprisingly, the detailed figures show that most of the growth during the quarter came from a rebound in the two unlocked states, NSW and Victoria, plus the ACT.

More surprisingly, most of the growth came from a rebound in consumer spending in former lockdown area, which rose by 9.6 per cent, compared with 1.6 per cent in the rest of the country.

The only other positive contribution to growth in the quarter was a rise in the level of business inventories – meaning the rest of the economy was holding it back.

Spending on new housing and alterations fell by 2.2 per cent in the quarter, mainly because of temporary shortages of workers and materials.

The government’s stimulus program has ended, but the industry still has many new houses in the pipeline. However, Thursday’s news of a 28 per cent collapse in the number of new residential building approvals in January makes you wonder how long the housing industry will keep contributing to growth.

Business investment in new equipment and construction also fell during the quarter. Businesses say they’re expecting to increase their spending significantly this year but, as Kieran Davies, of Coolabah Capital, has noted, “companies find it hard to forecast their own investment expenditure”. And the government’s tax incentives won’t last forever.

The jump in consumer spending came despite a fall in households’ disposable income, caused by a decline in assistance from government. Thus, to cover the increased spending, households had to cut their rate of saving during the quarter from almost 20 per cent of their disposable income to 13.6 per cent.

What’s been happening is that households save a huge proportion of their income during lockdowns (because they can’t get out of the house to spend it), but cut their rate of saving when the lockdown ends and spend much more than usual as they catch up on things and services they’ve been waiting to buy.

Even so, a saving rate of 13.6 per cent is about twice the normal rate - meaning households still have a lot of money stashed in bank accounts – more than $200 billion – that they’ll be able to spend in coming months.

Most of this is money they’ve earnt in the normal way, but much of it is also money that’s come to them in special assistance from the government.

It’s mainly because of all this extra money waiting to be spent that the Reserve Bank is forecasting that, after contracting by about 1 per cent in 2020 and growing by 4 per cent in 2021, the economy will grow by a bit more than 4 per cent this year.

Remember, however, that the economy usually grows by only about 2.5 per cent a year. So what looks like booming growth last year and this, is really just catch-up from the temporary effects of lockdowns.

We simply can’t – and won’t – keep growing at the rate of 4 per cent a year. That’s why the Reserve is expecting growth to slow sharply to a more-normal 2 per cent next year, 2023.

Most of the extra money households are holding may have been spent by the end of this year. And the forecast for 2023 assumes we’ll be back to wages growing a bit faster than the cost of living – which has yet to happen.

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Unlike the media, econocrats in no great hurry to raise interest rates

The financial markets and financial press may have convinced themselves we have a serious inflation problem and must hit the interest-rate brakes early and often, but the clear message from our top econocrats is that they aren’t in such a hurry. Their eyes haven’t moved from the prize: seizing this chance to achieve genuine full employment.

Nothing in Treasury secretary Dr Steven Kennedy’s remarks to a Senate committee this week suggested he was anxious about our recent rise in prices, nor hinted that a rise in the official interest rate was imminent.

Indeed, “interest rates are still close to zero and expected to remain historically low for some time,” he said.

What little he said about inflation was that “the effects of COVID on inflation, often characterised as a combination of increased demand for goods [at the expense of demand for services] and supply-side shocks, are still passing through the economy.

“Fortunately, these impacts have been much less pronounced in Australia than in other countries. Nevertheless, the impacts have been felt and headline inflation is currently at an 11-year high.” (Not hard when inflation has been so low for so long.)

It’s true Kennedy also said that “it will not be until we see interest rates rise back to more usual levels that the risks associated with very low interest rates abate”.

But it’s clear he meant it would take years before the Reserve had rates back up to “more usual levels” - such as an official rate of 3, 4 or 5 per cent – not to give a big hint that Commonwealth Bank economists were right in predicting this week that the Reserve would start whacking up the official rate at its first board meeting after the May election.

And he was also making a quite different point. Settle back. Usually, he said, monetary policy (the manipulation of interest rates) is the primary tool with which to manage economic cycles, with fiscal policy (the manipulation of government spending and taxes in the budget) focusing on economic growth and budget stability.

Of course, in this conventional approach fiscal was complementary to monetary policy primarily through the workings of the budget’s “automatic stabilisers” (which cut tax collections and increase the number of dole payments when private sector demand is weak, but do the reverse when private demand is strong).

However, when major shocks to the economy come along, fiscal policy plays a more active role. And shocks to the economy don’t come bigger than the pandemic.

In any case, lockdowns cut the supply of goods and services, whereas monetary policy works to encourage demand – provided there’s plenty of scope to cut interest rates, which there wasn’t because rates were already close to zero.

So fiscal became the dominant policy instrument, with huge increases in government spending – including on the JobKeeper wage subsidy scheme – leading to huge increases in the budget deficit and public debt.

Got that? Now for Kennedy’s big announcement: “This unusual episode of macro-economic policy is now coming to an end.”

From here on, the dominant role will revert to monetary policy, with fiscal policy taking a step back.

Why? Well, partly because monetary policy will be busy for years getting interest rates back to “more usual levels”.

In which case, Kennedy says, “it is important that the withdrawal of fiscal policy support is tapered, as it currently is, to ensure that monetary policy has an opportunity to normalise”. (In the lingo of econocrats, “tapered” means something reduces slowly and steadily, not sharply and suddenly.)

As Kennedy says, the tapered withdrawal of fiscal policy support has already been arranged. That’s because all the government’s stimulus measures were designed to be temporary. So, as those programs wind up, the level of government spending – and the size of the budget deficit – will fall noticeably over the next few financial years.

Which means that what he’s really saying is there should be no additional, discretionary moves to hasten the return to a lower budget deficit. Why not? So monetary policy has an opportunity to “normalise”.

Get it? Over coming years, the Reserve will have to move interest rates up a long way to get them back where they should be – that is, to a level where borrowers have to compensate savers both for the loss of their money’s purchasing-power (that is, for inflation) and for being given the (temporary) use of the savers’ money.

But the Reserve’s scope to do this will be constrained if, while it’s trying to tighten monetary policy, the government’s rapidly tightening fiscal policy.

And Kennedy says there’s “an even more compelling reason” for fiscal policy support for demand not to be withdrawn too abruptly. Which is? “The opportunity to achieve full employment”. The “important opportunity to achieve and sustain full employment.”

No one knows how far unemployment can fall before shortages of labour cause wages to grow at rates that worsen inflation. Which, Kennedy says, suggests we need to exercise “a degree of caution” in tightening both fiscal policy and monetary policy.

All this fits with the remarks Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe made to a House of Reps committee the week before.

Lowe made it clear most of our inflation problem was temporary, not lasting. Although underlying inflation was 2.6 per cent, for the first time in years, “it is too early to conclude that inflation is sustainably in the target range”.

The Reserve has “scope to wait and see how the data develop and how some of the uncertainties are resolved” – one of which is whether “the stronger labour market [is] going to translate to higher wages”.

“I think it’s worth taking the time to have the uncertainties resolved and trying to secure this low rate of unemployment, which we have not had for 50 years.”

The financial types may be in panic mode over inflation, but it doesn’t sound to me like our top econocrats are in any mood to join them.

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Can we believe the great news on unemployment? Yes and no

Scott Morrison has a great re-election pitch: forget the problems with the pandemic, just look at how well the economy’s going. The rate of unemployment is already down to 4.2 per cent, and his goal is to get it below 4 per cent, the lowest it’s been in 50 years. Wow. What fabulous economic managers the Libs must be. But can you believe unemployment’s that low? Didn’t they fiddle with the figures some time back?

It’s good to be sceptical about the claims politicians make on the economy. Government politicians tend to tell us about the good bits and fail to mention the not-so-good parts of the story. Opposition politicians tend to do the opposite.

But not everything we think we know about the tricks politicians play is true. For instance, many people think they remember that, some years ago, a government changed the definition of unemployment to make the figures look better. They made it so that someone who worked just one hour a week was classed as employed.

This week I’ve had people asking me about this. In my experience, when a Labor government’s boasting about good unemployment figures, Liberal supporters remember Labor fiddled the figures. When, as now, it’s a Liberal government doing the boasting, it’s Labor supporters who remember a Liberal government doing the fiddling.

Which hints at the truth: actually, no government has changed the definition of unemployment. It’s an urban myth which, I suspect, has arisen because people get confused between who’s getting unemployment benefits and who’s unemployed.

The two are related, obviously, but they’re not the same. For instance, you can be unemployed and not get the dole because your spouse is working. On the other hand, single people working a few hours a week wouldn’t be earning enough to make them ineligible for the dole.

Governments can, and do, change the rules about who does or doesn’t get unemployment benefits. But who’s unemployed is measured by a huge monthly sample survey conducted by the independent Australian Bureau of Statistics.

It doesn’t let politicians decide who’s counted as unemployed and who ain’t. Rather, its definitions come from international conventions set by the UN’s International Labour Organisation in Geneva.

So it was the ILO that decided, decades ago, to define anyone doing as little as an hour’s work a week as employed. (I remember talking to an official of the Australian Council of Trade Unions who was an Australian delegate on the sub-committee that, a few years ago, decided to leave that definition unchanged. He vigorously defended the decision.)

Remember, you have to draw the line between being employed or unemployed somewhere – where would you draw it? Five hours work a week? Fifteen? Thirty-five? – and it was set so low ages ago when part-time work was much less common than it is today.

What’s true is not that the unemployment figures have been fudged, but that classing everyone working an hour or more as employed defines unemployment too narrowly. So narrowly as to understate the extent of the problem.

In fact, few people work as little an hour a week. But, though it’s wrong to imagine the only satisfactory jobs are full-time – it suits many students, parents of young children and retirees to work only a few days a week – it’s also true that many people working part-time would prefer more hours.

So for several decades, the bureau has supplemented the official unemployment figures by also publishing the number of people underemployed – those part-timers who’d prefer working work more hours. The latest figures show an unemployment rate of 4.2 per cent, plus an underemployment rate of 6.6 per cent.

Thus it is true the official unemployment rate of 4.2 per cent isn’t as good as it looks. It does understate the proportion of people who aren’t able to find as much work as they want.

And, since we know the proportion of underemployed workers is much higher today that it was 50 years ago, it’s also true that getting back to the lowest unemployment rate in 50 years isn’t likely to be as good as it was 50 years ago.

Even so, it’s quite realistic to expect that, since unemployment is already down to 4.2 per cent, and regardless of who wins the federal election, it won’t be too hard to get the rate down below 4 per cent sometime this year or next.

And whether you hate Morrison – or hate Anthony Albanese – don’t let any smarty pants tell you that will be anything other than a great achievement. If it’s not the best we’ve had the jobs market in 50 years, add in underemployment and it would be the best in maybe 40 years. Unemployment isn’t something you should wish on anyone.

No, the main reason for having reservations is the uncertainty about how long we’ll be able to keep unemployment that low.

We’ve had great success in creating extra jobs in the past year – most of which have been full-time – mainly because the government has responded to the pandemic with massively increased government spending. But the economy may slow if, as all that “fiscal stimulus” runs out, the private sector doesn’t take up the running.

The jobs market has also had a lot of help from an unprecedented (and temporary) source: for two years our borders have been closed to incoming workers. Skilled workers on temporary visas, and overseas students and backpackers doing unskilled and casual jobs.

You’ve heard employers complaining they can’t get workers and that job vacancies are at a far higher level than usual. The consequence is that many older workers who might have been pensioned off, haven’t been. And some of the jobs that haven’t been filled by overseas students and backpackers have gone to local young people.

But now our borders are re-opening to immigrant labour, we’ll see how tight the jobs market stays. I reckon it’ll be a fair while before we get back to the high levels of immigration pre-pandemic.

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Frydenberg right to put full employment ahead of budget repair

It’s hard to feel sympathy for a government that used ignorant scaremongering about the public debt to get elected in 2013, but now doesn’t want to mention the D-word and is being attacked by its own deluded conservatives (plus point-scoring Laborites). Even so, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has his priorities right in leaving budget repair for later.

It’s noteworthy that the governments’ critics have turned their guns on the likelihood that Scott Morrison will use next year’s pre-election budget to announce yet another one-year extension of the low and middle-income tax offset at a one-off cost to the budget of $8 billion, while studiously ignoring the stronger case for abandoning the stage three tax cut legislated for July 2024, with an ongoing cost of double that.

Stage three is aimed at benefiting higher income-earners. Could this be mere coincidence? Trouble is, as Frydenberg has explained, “we have been working to a clear fiscal [budgetary] strategy to drive the unemployment rate to historically low levels” as we emerge from this great economic shock.

This being so, the only justification for a country with so much debt awarding itself another unfunded tax cut is that most of it will be spent rather than saved and thus hasten our achievement of very low unemployment.

But since households’ rate of saving tends to rise with their income, that makes the cheaper temporary low-and-middle tax cut likely to help much more than the dearer and long-lasting tax cut aimed at higher income-earners.

The belief that cutting tax rates helps by giving people greater incentive to work is an article of (self-interested) faith among high income-earners. And for the Liberal Party. Indeed, Frydenberg repeats this supposed self-evident truth many times a week.

But it’s not based on economic theory, nor supported by empirical evidence. The evidence is that a person’s marginal tax rate (the tax on any extra income they earn) doesn’t greatly affect the work effort of primary earners (mainly, men with full-time jobs) but does affect the work effort of secondary earners – particularly those with young children.

This is why the government’s decision in this year’s budget to greatly reduce the cost of childcare for second and subsequent children should do far more to raise workforce participation than the stage three tax cut ever could. Money well spent.

This, however, doesn’t fit the biases of many of those who profess to be so worried about our high public debt. Their real motive is just to pay less tax, which explains why they think all tax cuts and tax concessions are good, but all government spending is bad. This is economic nonsense.

Leaving aside the self-interest of high income-earners, many conservatives’ concern about our high level of debt is just instinctive. They have a gut feeling that it must be dangerous. They really ought to give the matter more study.

But here’s something even many well well-versed people don’t realise, mainly because it hasn’t suited the politicians and econocrats to tell them: effectively, all the bonds the government has had to issue to cover the huge budget deficits since the pandemic are now held by . . . the Reserve Bank of Australia - which, of course, is owned by the federal government.

So most of the extra interest the feds are paying will find its way back to the budget in the form of higher dividends from the Reserve.

This is not because the Reserve bought the new bonds directly from the government, but because its extensive program of “quantitative easing” – buying second-hand government bonds and paying for them by creating money out of thin air – has amounted to a sum roughly equal to the new bonds sold to the public (mainly to superannuation funds).

But the most important thing to understand is Frydenberg’s repeated statement that the government’s strategy is to “repair the budget by repairing the economy”. This is not just another meaning-free slogan, it’s a statement of fundamental economic truth and political reality.

Governments rarely pay off the debt they incur. Rather, they reborrow to cover their bonds as they fall due, and concentrate on ensuring the economy grows faster than the debt’s growing, thus reducing the debt relative to the size of the economy – and the taxes being paid by the people in the economy.

Which brings us back to where we started: Frydenberg’s strategy of forcing the pace of economic growth to get the rate of unemployment sustainably down to the low 4s or even lower.

This strategy – to keep pushing unemployment down until it’s clear the inflationary pips are squeaking – was first suggested by Professor Ross Garnaut in his book, Reset, and taken up by Peter Martin, of The Conversation website.

It was inspired by the example of the United States which, before the pandemic, got unemployment down to near 3 per cent before wages got moving.

The first point is that there’s nothing better you could do to make the economy bigger (and bigger relative to the public debt) than to ensure more of those who want to work actually get jobs, earning incomes and paying taxes.

Labour lying idle is the worst kind of economic inefficiency.

But the strategy has a deeper objective: to make the market for labour so tight that employers have no option but to increase wages to retain the people they need.

Like all sensible economic managers, Frydenberg’s unspoken concern is the risk that, once the economy has rebounded from the coronacession - with considerable help from temporary fiscal stimulus - it falls back into the “secular stagnation” low-growth trap that the rich countries have been caught in since the global financial crisis.

Our wage growth has stagnated since this government came to power. It’s the most important single cause and consequence of our low growth. Labor will be making hay with this in the election campaign.

Ending wage stagnation is the key to a sustainable return to a healthy rate of economic growth. And given the Coalition’s tribal objection to using regulatory reform to get wages moving, getting unemployment down and tightening the labour market is the right solution to the problem.

Once it has been solved, the budget balance will be improved and the public debt will be less worrying to the unversed. If Frydenberg can get us back to the lowest unemployment since the 1970s, he’ll be up there with Paul Keating as one of our greatest treasurers.

In this column last Monday I overstated the regressiveness of the stage three tax cut. I quoted a summary of the findings of analysis by the Parliamentary Budget Office, but should have checked it. The office’s actual findings are that about two-thirds of the tax cut will go to taxpayers earning $120,000 or more. The highest-earning 20 per cent of taxpayers will receive more than three-quarters of the money. My statement that only a third will go to women remains correct.

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Stop kidding: the 2024 tax cut will be economically irresponsible

It’s a safe bet that, once we’ve seen the mid-year budget update on Thursday, we’ll hear lots of economists and others saying the government should be getting on with budget repair: spending cuts and tax increases.

That’s despite the update being likely to show that the outlook for the budget deficit in the present financial year and the following three years is much better than expected in the budget last May.

It’s also true even though the case for “repairing the budget by repairing the economy” is sound and sensible. The federal public debt may be huge and getting huger, but, measured as a proportion of gross domestic product, the present record low-interest rates on government bonds mean the interest burden on the debt is likely to be lower than we’ve carried in earlier decades.

It’s true, too, that recent extensive stress-testing by the independent Parliamentary Budget Office has confirmed that the present and prospective public debt is sustainable.

It remains the case, however, that both this year’s Intergenerational report and the budget office project no return to budget surplus in the coming decade, or even the next 40 years – “on present policies”.

So, it’s not hard to agree with former Treasury secretary Dr Ken Henry that doing nothing to improve the budget balance is more risky than it should be, too complacent. It leaves us too little room to move when the next recession threatens.

And, indeed, the Morrison government’s revised “medium-term fiscal strategy” requires it to engage in budget repair as soon as the economy’s fully recovered.

But there’s no way Scott Morrison wants to talk about spending cuts and tax increases this side of a close federal election. Nor any way Anthony Albanese wants to say he should be.

Of course, that won’t stop Morrison & Co waxing on about how “economically responsible” the government is – especially compared to that terrible spendthrift Labor rabble. Nor stop Labor pointing to all the taxpayers’ money Morrison has squandered on pork barrelling, and promising an Albanese government would be more “economically responsible”.

But here’s my point. There’s a simple and obvious way both sides could, with one stroke, significantly improve prospective budget balances, and because it would be front-end loaded, disproportionately reduce our prospective public debt over years and decades to come.

There’s no way such a heavily indebted government should go ahead with the already-legislated third stage of tax cuts from July 2024, with a cost to the budget of more than $16 billion a year.

Those tax cuts were announced in the budget of May 2018 and justified on the basis of a mere projection that, in six years’ time, tax collections would exceed the government’s self-imposed ceiling of 23.9 per cent of GDP. That is, the government would be rolling in it.

It was said at the time that it was reckless for the government to commit itself to such an expensive measure so far ahead of time. It was holding the budget a hostage to fortune.

But so certain were Morrison and Josh Frydenberg that the budget was Back in Black that, soon after winning the 2019 election, they doubled down on their bet and insisted the third-stage tax cuts be legislated. Desperately afraid of being “wedged”, Labor went weak-kneed and supported the legislation.

If, at the time, a sceptic had warned that anything could happen between now and 2024 – a once-in-a-century pandemic, even – they’d have been laughed at. But they’d have been right.

Just last week, Finance minister Simon Birmingham righteously attacked his opponents for making election promises that were “wasteful and unfunded” – by which he meant that they would add to the budget deficit.

But the tax cut both sides support is now also “unfunded”. We’ll be borrowing money to give ourselves a tax cut. That’s economically responsible?

It might be different if you could argue that the tax cut would do much to support the recovery, but it wasn’t designed to do that, and it won’t. Stage three is about redistribution, not stimulus and not (genuinely) improved incentives.

The budget office has found that about two-thirds of the money will go to the top 10 per cent of taxpayers, on $150,000 or more. Only a third will go to women. So, the lion’s share will go to those most likely to save it rather than spend it. Higher saving is the last thing we need.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Get real. There’s no way either side would want to repeal a tax cut, especially just before an election.

Regrettably, that’s true. But, this being so, let’s tolerate no hypocrisy from politicians – or economist urgers on the sidelines – making speeches about “economic responsibility” without being willing to call out this irresponsible tax cut.

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Panicking financial markets could stuff up another global recovery

In economics, there’s not much new under the sun. When I became a journalist in the mid-1970s, the big debate was about which mattered more: inflation or unemployment. You may not realise it, but that’s the great cause of contention today.

With prices having risen surprisingly rapidly this year in the US and Britain – but few other advanced economies – we’re witnessing a battle between people in the financial markets, who fear inflation is back with a vengeance and want interest rates up to get it back under control, and the central banks.

The central bankers see the higher prices as a transitory consequence of the supply and energy disruptions arising from the pandemic. They fear that, once their economies have rebounded from the government-ordered lockdowns and fear-induced reluctance to venture forth, their economies will soon fall back to into the “secular stagnation” or weak-growth trap that gripped the advanced economies for more than a decade following the 2008 global financial crisis until the arrival of the pandemic early last year.

The decade of weak growth involved high rates of saving but low rates of business investment, record low interest rates, weak rates of improvement in the productivity of labour, low wage growth and, not surprisingly, inflation running below the central banks’ target rates. All that spelt adequate supply capacity, but chronically weak demand.

In the months before the arrival of the pandemic, central banks grappled with the puzzle of why economic growth had been so weak for so long – and what they could do about it.

In particular, our Reserve Bank had to ask itself why it had gone year after year forecasting an imminent rise in wage growth, without it ever happening. With such weak growth in real wages – the economy’s chief source of income – it was hardly surprising that consumer spending and growth generally were weak, and that inflation remained well below the Reserve’s target.

Earlier this year, with the economy rebounding so strongly from last year’s nationwide lockdown – but before the Delta setback – the econocrats in the Reserve and Treasury realised that recovering from the coronacession wouldn’t be a problem.

But once all the fiscal stimulus and pent-up consumer spending had been exhausted and the economy returned to its pre-pandemic state, where would the impetus for further growth come from? Certainly not, it seemed, from healthy growth in real wages.

What explained the way we’d finally joined the Americans in their decades-long wage stagnation? And what could central banks do about it? The obvious answer seemed to be to run a much tighter labour market and see if that got wages moving.

Perhaps, as a hangover from the 1970s and ’80s, when the world really did have an inflation problem, we’d continued worrying too much about inflation and not enough about getting the economy back to full employment.

For years we’d been making these fancy theoretical estimates of the NAIRU – the non-accelerating-inflation rate of unemployment; the point to which unemployment could fall before labour shortages caused inflation to take off – but unemployment rates had fallen quite low without the remotest sign of excessive wage growth.

Perhaps we should be less pre-emptive. Stop relying on theoretical estimates and just keep allowing the economy to grow until we had proof that wages really were taking off before we applied the interest-rate brakes.

And perhaps we should base decisions to raise rates on actual evidence of a problem with inflation – including, particularly, evidence of excessive growth in real wages – rather than on mere forecasts of rising inflation.

Our Reserve’s thinking was matched by the US Federal Reserve’s. Chairman Jerome Powell told Congress in July 2019 “we have learned that the economy can sustain much lower unemployment than we thought without troubling levels of inflation.”

Which brings us to this year’s budget, back in May. Although the economy seemed clearly to be rebounding from the coronacession, and debt and deficit were high, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg swore off the disastrous policy of “austerity” (government spending cuts and tax increases) that panicking financial markets had conned the big advanced economies into after the Great Recession, thus crippling their recoveries.

While allowing the assistance measures for the initial lockdown to terminate as planned, the budget announced big spending on childcare and aged care, following a strategy of “repairing the budget by repairing the economy”.

Treasury secretary Dr Steven Kennedy and Reserve governor Dr Philip Lowe made it clear they wanted to keep the economy growing strongly until the unemployment rate was down to the low 4s – something we hadn’t seen for decades – as the best hope of getting some decent growth in real wages.

This is still what the central banks want to see: a new era of much lower unemployment and, as a consequence, much healthier rises in real wages to power a move to stronger economic growth than we saw in the decade before the pandemic.

But now Wall Street is panicking over the surprisingly big price rises caused by the pandemic’s disruption, and has convinced itself inflation’s taking off like a rocket. If the Fed doesn’t act quickly to jack up interest rates, high and rising inflation will become entrenched.

Despite our marked lack of worrying price rises, our financial markets – not known for their independent thinking – have joined the inflation panic, betting that, despite all Lowe says to the contrary, our Reserve will be putting up rates continuously through the second half of next year.

So convinced of this are the market dealers that the (better educated) market economists who service them have begun thinking up more plausible arguments as so why rates may need to move earlier than the Reserve expects. ANZ Bank’s Richard Yetsenga, for instance, fears that if everyone tries to spend all the money they’ve saved during the lockdowns, “rates will need to rise to crimp spending intentions”.

See what’s happening? According to the financial markets, the pandemic has not merely cured a decade of secular stagnation, it’s transported us back to the 1970s and out-of-control inflation. That’s the big threat, and unemployment will have to wait.

Apparently, this dramatic reversal in the economy’s fortunes has occurred without workers getting even one decent pay rise.

There are three obvious weaknesses in this logic. First, globalisation has not made our economy a carbon copy of America’s. Second, there’s a big difference between a lot of one-off price rises and ongoing inflation. If the price rises don’t lead to higher wages, no inflation spiral.

Third, even if the central banks did get a bit worried, they’d start by ending and then reversing “quantitative easing” – creating money from thin air – before they got to raising the official interest rate.

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Morrison's budget report card: could do a hell of a lot better

When it comes to the relative strengths and weaknesses of the two main parties, polling shows voters’ views are highly stereotyped. For instance, the Liberals, being the party of business, are always better than Labor at handling money, including the budget. But this hardly seems to fit the performance of Scott Morrison and his Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg.

Dr Mike Keating, former top econocrat and a former secretary of the Department of Finance, has delivered a two-part report card in John Menadue’s online public policy journal.

His overall assessment is that the Morrison government is guilty of underfunding essential government services on the one hand, and, on the other, wasting billions on politically high-profile projects.

Keating traces these failures to two sources. First, the government’s undying commitment to Smaller Government, but unwillingness to bring this about by making big cuts in major spending programs, such as defence, age pensions or Medicare.

This is a tacit admission that Smaller Government is an impossible dream. Why? Because it’s simply not acceptable to voters. But this hasn’t stopped Morrison and Frydenberg persisting with the other side of the Smaller Government equation: lower taxes.

The consequence is that they underfund major spending programs, while engaging in penny-pinching where they think they can get away with it. Too often, this ends up as false economy, costing more than it saves.

For instance, Keating says, the Coalition has reimposed staff ceilings. By 2018, this had cut the number of permanent public servants by more the 17,000. But departments now make extensive use of contract labour hire and consultants to get around their staff ceilings, even though it costs more.

Second, Morrison’s determination to win elections exceeds his commitment to businesslike management of taxpayers’ money. He’s secretive, reluctant to be held accountable and unwilling to let public servants insist that legislated procedures be followed.

Apparently, being elected to office means you can ignore unelected officials saying “it’s contrary to the Act, minister”.

Let’s start with Keating’s list of underfunded spending programs. The government has increased aged care funding following the embarrassment of the aged care royal commission, but spent significantly less that all the experts insist is needed to fix the problems.

On childcare, this year’s budget increased funding by $1.7 billion over three years, but this is insufficient to ensure that all those parents – mainly mothers – who’d like to work more have the incentive to do so. This is despite the greater boost to gross domestic product it would cause.

The National Disability Insurance Scheme is clearly underfunded – which is why we have a royal commission that’s likely to recommend additional funds. (I’d add, however, that it’s perfectly possible for underfunding to exist beside wasteful spending on private service-providers costing far more than the state public servants they’ve replaced.)

On universities, the government has recognised the need to provide more student places, but failed to provide sufficient funding. On vocational education and training, the extra funds in this year’s budget were too little, too late. They won’t make up for the 75,000 fall in annual completions of government-funded apprenticeships and traineeships over the four years to 2019.

While housing affordability has worsened dramatically, the government’s done nothing to help. Its modest new assistance to first-home buyers will actually add upward pressure to house prices. What it should be doing is increasing the supply of social housing.

Turning to wasteful highly political, high-profile spending, Keating’s list is headed by the JobKeeper wage subsidy scheme. He acknowledges, as he should, that the scheme was hugely successful in maintaining the link between businesses and their workers, so that the fall in unemployment after last year’s lockdowns ended was truly amazing.

Keating also acknowledges that the scheme was, unavoidably, put together in a hurry. At the start of recessions there’s always a trade-off between getting the money out and spent quickly and making sure it’s well-spent. The longer you spend perfecting the scheme, the less effective your spending is in stopping the economy unravelling. The stitch that wasn’t in time.

Remember, too, that since the objective is to get the money spent and protecting employment, it doesn’t matter much if some people get more than their strict entitlement. In these emergency exercises, it’s too easy to be wise after the event. And the more successful the scheme is in averting disaster, the more smarties there’ll be taking this to mean there was never a problem in the first place, so the money was a complete waste.

But it’s now clear many businesses – small as well as big – ended up getting more assistance than the blow to their profits justified, and many haven’t voluntarily refunded it. Keating criticises the failure to include a clawback mechanism in the scheme and rejects Frydenberg’s claim that including one would have inhibited employers from applying for assistance.

Next, he cites the contract with the French to build 12 conventional submarines. The process that led to the selection of the French sub was “completely flawed”. There was no proper tender, with the contract awarded on the basis only of a concept, not a full design.

Five years later we still didn’t have a full design, but the cost had almost doubled. The government was right to cancel the contract, but the cost to taxpayers will be between $2.5 billion and $4 billion.

Finally, spending on road and rail infrastructure projects, which was booming long before the pandemic. Keating quotes Grattan Institute research as finding that overall investment has been “poorly directed”.

More than half of federal spending has gone on projects with no published evaluation by Infrastructure Australia, suggesting many are unlikely to be economically justified.

“In short,” Keating concludes, “there is an enormous management problem with the government’s infrastructure program. The projects are much bigger, but often poorly chosen, and poorly planned with massive cost overruns.

“The key reason is that the government announces projects chosen for political reasons.”

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Smaller Government turns out to be penny wise, pound foolish

Our problems responding to the pandemic are just the latest, most acute demonstration of the failure of the decades-long pursuit of Smaller Government. It was intended to leave us better off by rooting out waste and inefficiency, so we’d get government services of unchanged – maybe better – quality at less cost to taxpayers.

You’d have to say the project has limited the rise in government spending – after allowing for inflation and population growth – despite politicians on both sides being willing to increase the services provided. The Libs on defence and security; Labor on the Gonski school education funding reforms and the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

There’s little reason to believe we’ve seen much improvement in the efficiency with which government services have been delivered. Rather, there are numerous examples of reductions in the quality of services and a decline in the policy capability of public service – evident in the need to bring in military generals and the small fortune being spent on management consultants from the big four accounting firms.

This failure isn’t surprising when you remember the Smaller Government project is based on prejudice rather than evidence – the public sector is always inefficient; the private sector is always efficient – and on using the crudest measures to achieve greater efficiency.

For economists, the private good/public bad mentality is implicit in the neo-classical model of how the economy works. For business people and politicians, it comes from tribalism: the private good guys versus the public bad guys.

The Smaller Government push has been hijacked by conservative politicians wanting to transfer taxpayers’ money, workers and (they hope) votes from the public Labor column to the private Liberal column.

To the nation’s business people, privatisation spells access to the state’s monopoly pricing powers. Outsourcing gives them easier access to the vast profit-making opportunities of that Aladdin’s cave that is the government’s coffers.

Leaving aside this hijacking of the Smaller Government push for PPP – party-political purposes – it’s done more harm than good for two reasons: because of the failure to think through the objects of the exercise and because of the crude methods used to limit government spending.

One reason government spending has continued to grow is that governments have continued to promise voters new and better services. This is no bad thing, and is inevitable as we get richer and our wants shift from more goods (which are usually best produced by the private sector) to more services, many of which – such as education and healthcare, childcare, disability care and aged care – are better funded (and often, provided) by the public sector.

Once you accept that, in terms of government spending, literally Smaller Government is never going to happen, you realise the object of the exercise should be not smaller government, but better government: government that achieves its objectives efficiently and effectively. Government that gives value for money.

A big part of the problem is that, within the bureaucracy, the Smaller Government push has been led by the accountants in the Finance Department, with little thought applied by the economists in Treasury.

Lacking an appreciation of the broader economic issues involved in government budgeting, Finance has taken a Good Housekeeping approach: a tidy budget is a balanced budget. It’s been a short-sighted, budget-to-budget affair: “next month’s budget’s deficit is looking on the high side, so what quick cuts can we make to stop it looking so bad?”

This mentality is what breeds the crudeness of the measures used to limit spending – notably, the annual “efficiency dividend”, which each year imposes an arbitrary, top-down percentage cut in the total administrative costs of a department or agency. “We have no idea where the waste is, but there must be plenty of it, so you find it.”

After a couple of decades of saying “there must be plenty of waste” every year, the waste is long gone. Departments are left to find their own cuts, and what they cut is anything that won’t bring howls of protest from the lobbyists representing the powerful industries the department is supposed to be regulating in the public interest.

You end up cutting things where the true cost won’t be apparent until sometime in the future – such as the people doing the department’s policy development, the preparations you’re making for a pandemic that may never happen, and anything that involves cost now in return for cost-savings later.

This, however, is just the opposite to what you should be doing to make government better – more cost-effective. You should be seeking out, initiating and protecting spending that’s an investment in future cost-saving.

What we’ve ended up with isn’t Smaller Government, it’s just penny-pinching. It’s being penny wise and pound foolish.

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When judging recessions, depth matters more than length

With the publication this week of the latest “national accounts”, our situation is now clear: we’re not in recession, yet we are – but, in a sense, not really.

Confused? It’s simple when you know. One thing we do know is that the economy – as measured by real gross domestic product – will have contracted significantly in the present quarter, covering the three months to the end of September.

At this stage, the smart money is predicting a contraction – a fall in the production and purchase of goods and services – of “two-point-something” per cent, although there are business economists who think the fall could be as much as 4 per cent.

Recessions are periods when people cut their spending sharply, causing businesses to cut their production of goods and services and lay off workers. It’s mainly because so many people lose their jobs that recessions are something to be feared. But also, a lot of businesses go broke.

This means no one should need economists to tell them if we are or aren’t in recession. If you can’t tell it from all the newly closed shops as you walk down the main street, you should know from what’s happening to the employment of yourself, your family and friends. Failing that, you should know it from all the gloomy stories you see and hear on the media.

Have you heard, by chance, that NSW, Victoria and now Canberra are back in lockdown, leaving some workers with no work to do, and the rest of us unable to spend nearly as much as usual because we’re confined to our homes? You have? Then you know we’re in recession.

When the first, national lockdown began in late March last year, real GDP contracted by 7 per cent in the June quarter. That was the deepest recession we’ve had since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

But it was also the shortest recession we’ve had because, once the lockdown was lifted, the economy – both consumer spending and employment - immediately began bouncing back. As the Australian Bureau of Statistics revealed this week, the bounce-back continued in the June quarter of this year, which saw real GDP growing by a strong 0.7 per cent, leaving the level of GDP up 1.6 per cent on its pre-pandemic level.

All clear so far? The confusion arises only in the minds of those people silly enough to let the media convince them that, despite all the walking and looking and quacking they see before their eyes, a recession’s not a recession unless you have two consecutive quarters of contraction in GDP.

The size of the contraction is of no consequence, apparently, nor would be two or more quarters of contraction that weren’t consecutive. This is nonsense.

As my colleague Jessica Irvine has explained, this “rule” is repeated ad nauseam by the media, but has no status in economics. It’s a crude rule of thumb that’s frequently misleading. It’s in no way the “official” definition of recession.

But the consecutive-quarter rule is so deeply ingrained that it causes needless debate and uncertainty. Some business economists convinced themselves that this week’s figure for growth in the June quarter could be a small negative.

Oh, gosh! Since we know the present quarter will be a negative, that means we could be in another recession. Quick, get out the R-word posters.

But no. June quarter growth proved stronger than expected. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg couldn’t resist the temptation to declare there’d been no “double-dip recession”. Thank God!

But wait. The lockdowns could easily continue beyond the end of this month and into the December quarter. So we could have a second negative quarter on the way. Quick, bring back the posters and start writing the double-dip speech.

Sorry, this is not only silly, it’s got the arithmetic wrong. When the economy goes from growth to lockdown, you get a negative. But when, in the follow quarter, the economy merely stays in lockdown you get zero growth, not another fall.

The present lockdowns apply to a bit over half the economy. So, if the other half continues to grow, we will get a positive change in GDP during the quarter.

What’s more, if the lockdowns end sometime before the end of December, we’ll get a bounce-back in growth in that half of the economy, as everyone rushes out to start buying the things they were prevented from buying during the lockdown.

That’s what happened last time the lockdown ended; it’s safe to happen this time too. So it’s hard to see how we could get a second quarter of “negative growth” in the three months to New Year’s Eve.

We’ll learn what the figure was in early March, in good time for the federal election. Stand by for Frydenberg’s triumphant declaration that we’ve avoided a double-dip recession for a second time. He’ll turn the media’s consecutive-quarters bulldust back on them, and spin a story of great success.

But this will literally be non-sense. He’ll take a contraction in the September quarter of, say, 2 to 4 per cent – as big as the contractions that caused the recessions of the mid-1970s, the early 1980s and the early 1990s – and pretend it doesn’t count, simply because that massive contraction was concentrated in one quarter rather than spread over two.

He’ll con us into accepting that the depth of a slump doesn’t matter, just its length. More nonsense.

But there remains a respect in which, like the first dip, the second isn’t really a recession. What we had last year and are in the middle of right now aren’t recessions in the normal sense.

They’re artificial recessions deliberately brought about by governments to minimise the loss of life from the pandemic. They thus involve a degree of monetary assistance to workers and businesses unknown to normal recessions. This means they don’t take years to go away, but disappear in six months or so because of the speed with which the economy bounces back when the lockdown ends.

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The economy’s job is to serve our good health

What a tough, tricky world we live in. There we were, starting to think the pandemic – for us, at least – was pretty much over bar the jabbing, when along came a new and more contagious variant and knocked our confident complacency for six. It’s now clearer that getting free of the virus will be messier, more expensive and take longer than we’d hoped.

It’s natural to be impatient to see the end of this terrible episode in the nation’s life, but no one’s been more impatient to see the end of restrictions than Scott Morrison and the business lobby groups.

We should worry less about any continuing small risks and more about getting the economy working normally again, we were told. Why do those appalling premiers keep closing state borders? Don’t they understand how it disrupts businesses?

One theory that’s been blown away is the tribal notion that continuing problems keeping a lid on the virus were limited to dictatorial Labor states, not “gold standard” Liberal states. We’ve been reminded of what pride so often causes us to forget: success is invariably a combination of competence and luck.

Luck was running against Victoria, now it’s NSW’s turn. NSW did do better on contact tracing, but along came a variant that could spread faster than the best contact-tracing system could keep up with.

The nation’s macro-economists learnt some years ago that the best response to a recession is to “go early, go hard”. That’s something the exponential spread of viruses means epidemiologists have long understood.

The sad truth is, no matter how long NSW’s present lockdown needs to last before the virus is back under control, Premier Gladys Berejiklian’s critics are certain to say she waited too long and didn’t go hard enough.

And they’ll be right. If there’s ever a possibility of starting even a day earlier, it’s always right.

Is it a bad thing to want to limit the economic disruption caused by our fight against the virus? Of course not. But it’s a tricky choice. You don’t want to act unnecessarily, but the longer you take to realise you must act, the more disruption you end up causing.

Berejiklian’s problem is that she was being held up as the national pin-up girl of governments’ ability to cope with the crisis while minimising economic disruption.

The economy is merely a means – a vital means – to the end of human wellbeing. Health is also a means to achieving human wellbeing. But good health is so big a part of wellbeing it’s almost an end in itself. And prosperity isn’t much good to you if you’re dead.

So, as surveys show, most economists get what it seems many business people (and certainly, their lobby groups and media cheer squad) don’t get: in any seeming conflict, health trumps economics.

It’s also a matter of solving problems in the best order. Just as a war takes priority over material living standards, so does a major threat to our health. Fix the health problem, then get back to worrying about the economy.

To put it yet another way, “the economy” exists to serve the interests of the people who make it up; we don’t exist to serve the economy.

The people who want to exalt “the economy” tend to be those using “the economy” to disguise their pursuit of their own immediate interests, not the interests of everyone. “Keep my business going; if that means a few people die, well, I’m pretty sure I won’t be among ’em.”

Some economists estimate that the NSW lockdown will cost the economy (gross domestic product) about $1 billion a week. But don’t take that back-of-an-envelope figure too seriously. For a start, it’s not huge in a national economy producing goods and services worth about $2000 billion a year.

In any case, it’s misleading for two reasons. First, can you imagine what would be happening in the economy had St Gladys (or, before her, Dictator Dan) done nothing while the virus raged about us, getting ever worse?

Most of us would be in what Professor Richard Holden of the University of NSW calls “self-lockdown”. Which would itself be a great cost to the economy – not to mention the angst over the lack of leadership.

So don’t confuse the cost of the virus with the cost of the government’s efforts to limit its spread by doing the lockdown properly.

Second, remember that the economy rebounded remarkably quickly and strongly after the earlier lockdowns, making up much of the lost ground. Of course, the exceptional degree of income support for workers and businesses provided by the federal government does much to account for the strength of the rebound.

Which is why it’s good to see the federal-state assistance package announced on Tuesday, even though its cut-price version of JobKeeper, while being better than was provided to Victoria recently, isn’t as generous as it should have been.

Like Berejiklian, Morrison is still adjusting to his newly reduced circumstances.

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Smaller Government is dogging our efforts to beat the pandemic

It surprises me that, though the nation’s been watching anxiously for more than a year as our politicians struggle with the repeated failures of hotel quarantine and the consequent lockdowns, big and small, and now the delay in rolling out the vaccine, so few of us have managed to join the dots.

Some have been tempted to explain it in terms of Labor getting it wrong and the Libs getting it right – or vice versa – but that doesn’t work. Nor does thinking the states always get it right and the feds get it wrong – or vice versa.

The media love conflict, so we’ve been given an overdose of Labor versus Liberal and premiers versus Morrison & Co. But though we can use this to gratify our tribal allegiances, it doesn’t explain why both parties and both levels of government have had their failures.

No, to me what stands out as the underlying cause of our difficulties – apart from human fallibility – is the way both sides of politics at both levels of government have spent the past few decades following the fashion for Smaller Government.

Both sides of politics have been pursuing the quest for smaller government ever since we let Ronald Reagan convince us that “government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem”.

The smaller government project has had much success. We’ve privatised almost every formerly federal and state government-owned business. We’ve also managed to “outsource” the delivery of many government services formerly performed by public sector workers.

But the smaller government project has been less successful in reducing government spending. The best the pollies have done is contain the growth in spending by unceasing behind-the-scenes penny-pinching.

And here’s the thing: pandemics and smaller government are a bad fit.

The urgent threat to life and limb presented by a pandemic isn’t something you can leave market forces to fix. The response must come from government, using all the powers we have conferred on it – to lead, spend vast sums and, if necessary, compel our co-operation.

In a pandemic, governments aren’t the problem, they’re the answer. Pretty much the only answer. Only governments can close borders, insist people go into quarantine, order businesses to close and specify the limited circumstances in which we may leave our homes.

Only governments can afford to mobilise the health system, massively assist businesses and workers to keep alive while the economy’s in lockdown, pay for mass testing and tracing, and flash so much money that the world’s drug companies do what seemed impossible and come up with several safe and effective vaccines in just months.

But when you examine the glitches – the repeated failures of hotel quarantine, the need for more lockdowns, the delay in stopping community spread, and now the slowness of the rollout of vaccines – what you see is governments, federal and state, with a now deeply entrenched culture of doing everything on the cheap, of sacrificing quality, not quite able to rise to the occasion.

As we’ve learnt, a pandemic demands quick and effective action. But when you’ve spent years running down the capabilities of the public service – telling bureaucrats you don’t need their advice on policy, just their obedience – quick and effective is what you don’t get.

The feds have lost what little capacity they ever had to deliver programs on the ground. They have primary responsibility for quarantine and vaccination, but must rely on the states for execution. Then, since both sides are obsessed by cost-cutting, they argue about who’ll pay – and end up not spending enough to do the job properly.

It took the feds far too long to realise that hotel quarantine was cheap but leaky. Every leak had the states closing borders against each other. The feds didn’t spend enough securing supplies of vaccines, then took too long to realise a rapid rollout wasn’t possible without help from the states.

Without thinking, Victoria initially staffed its hotel quarantine the usual way, with untrained, low-paid casual staff. It had run down its contact-tracing capacity and took too long to build it up – still without a decent QR code app. NSW let a host of infected people get off a cruise ship and spread the virus all over Australia.

The report of the royal commission laid much of blame for the aged care scandals on the feds’ efforts to limit their spending on aged care. They couldn’t demand providers meet decent standards because they weren’t paying enough to make decent standards possible.

One of the main ways providers make do is by employing too few, unskilled, casual, part-time staff, who often need to do shifts at multiple sites. Do you think this has no connection with the sad truth that the great majority of deaths during Victoria’s second lockdown occurred in aged care?

And now we discover the feds have failed to get the vaccine rollout well advanced even to aged care residents and staff.

Spend enough time denigrating and minimising government and you discover it isn’t working properly when you really need it.

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Top economists think much further ahead than Morrison & Co

If Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg are looking for ideas about what more they could be doing to secure our economic future – after all, they’ll be seeking re-election soon enough – they could do worse than study the views of the 56 leading economists asked by the Economic Society of Australia to comment on this month’s budget.

Two points stand out. First, almost all the economists were happy to support the budget’s strategy of applying more fiscal stimulus to get unemployment below 5 per cent. They were pleased to see the government abandon its preoccupation with surpluses and debt.

As Professor Fabrizio Carmignani, of Griffith University, said, “the good thing about this budget is that it was not about repairing the deficit and debt accumulated in 2020”. Professor Sue Richardson, of Flinders University, said: “the debt and deficit mantra was never justified”.

Second, with one notable exception, the economists were critical of the government’s choice of things to spend on. The exception was its big spending on the “care economy” – aged care, childcare, disability care and mental health care – which most respondents welcomed. Indeed, quite a few thought there should have been more of it.

After that, the economists had plenty of constructive criticism of the government’s priorities. For instance, quite a number were happy to see big spending on “infrastructure”, but critical of the government’s narrow conception of what constitutes infrastructure.

Carmignani said: “there is in this budget – as in the past – an almost blind confidence in the power of investment in physical infrastructure to drive future growth and development. In fact, the future prosperity of Australia depends on innovation that requires social rather than physical infrastructures”.

Professor Gigi Foster, of the University of NSW, said: “childcare should be viewed as the social infrastructure that it is, and invested in as such. Instead, when we heard ‘infrastructure’, it was mainly code for transportation”.

So even in the area of physical infrastructure, the budget shows a lack of imagination. Professor Michael Keane, also of the University of NSW, said very little of the infrastructure money was “allocated to such urgent needs as renewable energy, climate change adaptation, environmental sustainability, water resources, etcetera. This shows a real lack of ambition.”

Richardson agrees. “The future is one of zero net greenhouse gas emissions,” she said. “The transformation of the energy, agricultural, transport and manufacturing systems that this requires is enormous, will require unprecedented levels of investment and needs to start now.“

Now that’s interesting. Historically, treasurers and their advisers have regarded the budget as the place for discussion on finances and economics, not the state of the natural environment nor the challenge of climate change.

The economy in one box, the environment in some other box. The natural environment has been seen as of such little relevance to topics such at the budget and the economy that it has barely rated a mention in the five-yearly supposed “intergenerational report”.

But that’s not how our leading economists see it. At least a dozen of them have criticised the budget’s failure to respond to the challenge of climate change. Professor Warwick McKibbin, of the Australian National University, warned that “the world is likely to be taking significant action on climate change which will substantially impact Australia’s fossil fuel exports and the future structure of the Australian economy”.

Another topic barely mentioned in the budget – one of the industries much damaged by the pandemic – was universities. Unsurprisingly, more than a dozen respondents noticed the omission. They’re self-interested, of course, but they make a good case.

Dr Leonora Risse, of RMIT University, said succinctly: “investment in the university sector [is a] generator of productivity-enhancing skills, knowledge and research”. Meanwhile, McKibbin added that “a key ingredient is an investment in human capital”.

But the academics’ concern is wider than their own patch. Risse has called for more attention to the long-running drivers of growth, such as “investment in the workforce capabilities, resourcing, wages and working conditions of high-need, high-growth sectors” such as the care economy.

Dr Michael Keating, a former top econocrat, said restoring past rates of economic growth won’t be possible without addressing the structural problems in the labour market. “This will involve much more investment in education, training and research” but “the extra money in this budget for apprentices and trainees only makes up for past cuts.”

Notice a theme emerging? Budgets should be about investment – spending money now, for payoffs to the economy later – but investment needs to be in people, not just in physical and traditional things such as roads and railways.

It’s easy to accuse academics of pontificating atop their ivory towers, but they seem able see much further into the economy’s future needs than our down-to-earth politicians.

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Key reform needed to fix debt and deficit: ditch stage 3 tax cut

Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg won’t admit it. But most economists agree that at the right time, the government should take measures to hasten the budget’s return to balance, even – to use a newly unspeakable word – “surplus”.

Economists may differ on what they consider to be the right time. But, if we’re to avoid repeating the error the major economies made in 2010 by jamming on the fiscal (budgetary) policy brakes well before the recovery was strong enough for the economy to take the contraction in its stride, the right time will be when the economy has returned to full employment, with no spare production capacity.

At that point, the inflation rate’s likely to be back within the Reserve Bank’s 2 to 3 per cent target range, with wage growth of 3 per cent or more. Any further fiscal stimulus from a continuing budget deficit would risk pushing inflation above the target, and could induce a “monetary policy reaction function” where the independent Reserve countered that risk by raising interest rates.

So, better for the government to act before the Reserve acts for it. And if you take the econocrats’ best guess at the level of full employment – when unemployment is down to between 5 and 4.5 per cent – and take the budget’s forecasts at face value (itself a risky thing to do) the right time will be in the middle of 2023.

But the growth in wages and prices has been so weak for so long, that I wouldn’t be acting until it was certain wage and price inflation was taking off.

Even so, since its own forecasts say that point will come towards the end of the next term of government, Morrison and Frydenberg should be readying to give us a clear idea of the steps they’ll take to cut government spending or increase taxes when it becomes necessary.

And, in an ideal world, they would. But, thanks to the bad behaviour of both sides of politics, our world is far from ideal. Former Labor leader Bill Shorten is only the latest to be reminded of the awful, anti-democratic truth that parties which telegraph their punches expose themselves to dishonest scare campaigns.

But that’s just the most obvious reason Morrison and Frydenberg will avoid any discussion of the nasty moves that will be necessary to make the “stance” of fiscal policy less expansionary and, when needed, mildly restrictive, thus slowing the government’s accumulation of debt in the process.

The less obvious reason is that no pollie wants to talk about the policy instrument that’s played a leading part in all previous successful attempts at “fiscal consolidation” and will be needed this time.

It’s what Malcolm Fraser dubbed “the secret tax of inflation”, but the punters call “bracket creep” and economists call “fiscal drag”.

Because our income-tax scales tax income in slices, at progressively higher rates – ranging from zero to 45c in the dollar – but the brackets for the slices are fixed in dollar terms, any and every increase in wages (or other income) increases the proportion of income that’s taxed at the individual’s highest “marginal” tax rate, thus increasing the average rate of tax paid on the whole of their income.

A person’s average tax rate will rise faster if the increase in their income takes them up into a higher-taxed bracket but, because what really matters in increasing their overall average tax rate is the higher proportion of their total income taxed at their highest marginal tax rate, it’s not true that people who aren’t pushed into a higher tax bracket don’t suffer from what we misleadingly label “bracket creep”.

I give you this technical explanation to make two points highly relevant to the prospects of getting the budget deficit down. Both concern the third stage of the government’s tax cuts, already legislated to take effect from July 2024, at a cost of $17 billion a year.

Although this tax cut is, in the words of former Treasury econocrat John Hawkins and others, “extraordinarily highly skewed towards high income earners”, Frydenberg justifies it with the claim that, because it would put everyone earning between $45,000 and $200,000 a year on the same 30 per cent marginal tax rate, it would end bracket creep for 90 per cent of taxpayers.

First, this claim is simply untrue. For Frydenberg to keep repeating it shows he either doesn’t understand how the misnamed bracket creep works, or he’s happy to mislead all those voters who don’t.

What’s true is that the stage three tax cut would greatly diminish the extent to which a given percentage rise in wages leads to a greater percentage increase in income-tax collections, thereby sabotaging the progressive tax system’s effectiveness as the budget’s main “automatic stabiliser”. Its ability to act as a “drag” on private-sector demand when it’s in danger of growing too strongly.

In an ideal world, income-tax brackets would be indexed to consumer prices annually, thus requiring all tax increases to be announced and legislated. But in the real world of cowardly and deceptive politicians – and self-deluding voters – the stage three tax cut is bad policy on three counts.

One, it’s unfair to all taxpayers except the relative handful earning more than $180,000 a year (like me). Two, the biggest tax savings go to the people most likely to save rather than spend them. Three, by knackering the single most important device used to achieve fiscal consolidation, it’d be an act of macro management vandalism.

Think of it: by repealing stage three you improve the budget balance by $17 billion in 1024-25 and all subsequent years. Better than that, you leave intact the only device that works automatically to improve the budget balance year in and year out until you decide to override it.

Without the pollies’ little helper, fiscal consolidation depends on a government that’s still smarting from its voter-repudiated attempt in the 2014 budget, having another go at making big cuts in government spending, and a government that seeks to differentiate itself as the party of low taxes now deciding to put them up.

Good luck with that.

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Treasury boss confident big government debt is manageable

Whether they realise it or not – probably not – the people up in arms about the size of the federal public debt and criticising Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg for not doing more to get it down in last week’s budget are saying they should have made the same error the major economies made early in their recovery from the Great Recession.

If you’ve heard Frydenberg saying he won’t “pivot to austerity policies”, you’ve heard him vowing not to make the mistake the Americans, and particularly the Brits and Europeans, made in 2010.

After they’d borrowed heavily in response to the global financial crisis, their recoveries had hardly begun before they looked back at their mountainous debt and panicked, slashing government spending and whacking up taxes.

This policy of “austerity”, as critics dubbed it, proved disastrous. It stunted their recoveries and meant they didn’t reduce their deficits and debts much at all.

This is why, to prevent the budget’s support for the still-recovering private sector falling precipitately over the coming four financial years to June 2025, Morrison and Frydenberg decided to use most, but not all, of an unexpected improvement in forecast budget deficits to increase spending and cut taxes.

Even so, the net debt in June 2024 is now estimated to be $46 billion lower than expected in last October’s budget, as independent economist Saul Eslake has pointed out.

In a speech to the Australian Business Economists this week, Treasury secretary Dr Steven Kennedy defended the government’s two-phase economic strategy.

According to the budget papers, phase one is to promote economic growth through “discretionary fiscal [budgetary] policy and the operation of [the budget’s] automatic stabilisers” so as to “ensure a strong and sustained recovery to drive down the unemployment rate”.

We will remain in the first phase of the strategy “until the recovery is secured” and growth has driven unemployment “down to pre-pandemic levels or lower”.

“Only once the economic recovery is secured will the government transition towards [phase two and] the medium-term objective of stabilising and then reducing debt as a share of gross domestic product,” the budget papers say.

But some economists – the most well-credentialled of whom is former Treasury secretary Dr Ken Henry – are concerned this willingness to live with unusually high levels of deficit and debt for many years, and without mention of any effort to return the budget to surplus – which would reduce the debt in dollar terms, not just relative to GDP - is complacent and risky.

But, with one proviso, Kennedy argues strongly that the presently projected paths of our budget deficit, our debt and the interest bill on the debt aren’t particularly risky.

When I get to that proviso you’ll see that Kennedy and his old boss aren’t so far apart. And remember this: Henry is now free to give the government advice in public, whereas the Westminster system requires Kennedy to give all his frank advice in private, not in speeches to economists.

Starting with the budget deficit, Kennedy says it grew hugely in 2020, partly because the lockdown caused tax collections to collapse and the number of people getting the dole to leap (this being the operation of the budget’s “automatic stabilisers”), but also because of the unprecedented degree of “emergency support” provided to businesses and workers.

The deficit’s expected to peak at $161 billion (equivalent to 7.8 per cent of GDP) in the financial year soon to end, then fall to $57 billion (2.4 per cent of GDP) in 2024-25. This “relatively quick” fall happens mainly because all the emergency support was temporary.

“At this stage, [a hint that policies could change, and probably will] the deficit is expected to persist through the medium term,” Kennedy says, by which he means that, seven years later in 2031-32 (the “medium term”), the projected deficit is still 1.3 per cent.

Budget statement 3 (page 100) shows that’s about the projected size of the“structural” budget deficit – the deficit that’s left after taking account of the cyclical factors affecting the budget – by then.

Kennedy explains this as representing the government’s structural (lasting) increases in spending on what it calls “essential services” – particularly aged care, disability care and the tiny permanent increase in the rate of the dole – in this year’s budget.

Such a structural deficit isn’t huge, but its existence is a tacit admission that, if government spending isn’t going to be cut, taxes should be increased.

Turning to the projected path of the net debt, Kennedy says the budget projections suggest the government is on track to stabilise and begin reducing the debt as a share of GDP in the medium term (the next 10 years), given the present economic outlook “and policy settings” (hint, hint).

The net debt is expected to be 34 per cent of GDP at June 2022, rising to almost 41 per cent at June 2025, before improving to 37 per cent at June 2032. (Eslake reminds us all this is less than half the average for the advanced economies.)

Finally, “debt servicing costs” - fancy talk for the interest payments on the debt. As a proportion of GDP – that is, comparing the interest payments with the size of the nation’s income – net interest payments are projected to “remain low by historical standards at around 1 per cent over the medium term”.

Two eye-opening graphs in Eslake’s first-rate budget analysis show 1 per cent is much lower than we were paying throughout the last quarter of the 20th century (in the late 1980s it was above 2.5 per cent). And, in inflation-adjusted dollars per head of population, it’s much lower than we were paying in both the late ’80s and the late ’90s.

Responding to Henry’s concerns, Kennedy says “there remains fiscal space [room] to respond again with fiscal policy if the need arose”. But here’s the proviso Kennedy adds: “there will come a time where it is prudent to accelerate the rebuilding of our fiscal buffers”.

That’s as frank as Treasury secretaries get in public.

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