Morrison plan shows who he thinks most deserves a tax cut

Scott Morrison wants this election to be all about his redoubled plan for lower taxes. But Treasurer Josh Frydenberg doesn’t want anyone saying it will stop income tax being “progressive”. He’s right. But his claim that the tax system will remain highly progressive is debatable.

In last year’s budget, Morrison announced a three-stage tax cut, spread over seven years. It had a cumulative cost to the government’s revenue of a massive $144 billion over 10 years, with most of that cost coming in the later years.

In the budget Frydenberg produced last week, he doubled down on last year’s plan. He doubled the early part and greatly increased the later parts, at an additional cost of $158 billion over 10 years, taking the total cost to more than $300 billion – an incredible sum in several senses.

I’ll explain the grand plan in a sec, but first let’s be clear on the meaning of three words you hear bandied about whenever tax changes are debated: progressive, regressive and (less commonly) proportional.

A tax is said to be progressive when it takes a progressively higher proportion of people’s income as incomes rise.

The key word here is proportion. You judge “progressivity” not by the dollar amount people pay, or the amount of the cut they get, but by how that amount compares with their income. When a tax takes a higher proportion of a higher income than it does of a lower income, it’s progressive.

Conversely, a tax that takes a higher proportion of lower incomes than it does of higher incomes is said to be regressive.

A tax that takes the same proportion of all incomes, whether high or low, is said to be (you won’t believe this) proportional. It marks the borderline between progressivity and regressivity.

The main progressive tax is personal income tax. The example of a regressive tax people always quote is the goods and services tax.

But, in fact, almost all other taxes are regressive – with the notable exception of tax on the value of land (such as council rates), which is progressive because people with high incomes tend to own more land and more valuable land.

What makes income tax progressive is that your income is taxed in slices, with each extra slice being taxed at a higher rate.

Under the present tax scale – which Morrison’s plan would change in coming years – the first $18,200 of your income goes untaxed, the next $18,800 is taxed at 19¢ in the dollar, the next $53,000 at 32.5¢, the next $90,000 at 37¢, and anything above that at 45¢ in the dollar. (All of which is before you add 2¢ in the dollar for the Medicare levy.)

The slice (or tax bracket) into which the last part of your income falls determines your “marginal” tax rate – the rate you pay on any increase in your income.

Your average tax rate is determined by adding up all the tax you pay on each slice, then dividing that total by your income. Your average tax rate will always be a lot lower than your marginal rate.

For an income tax to be proportional it must have only one rate and no first, tax-free slice. So any income tax scale with a tax-free threshold must be progressive, even if only mildly so.

Now the details of Morrison and Frydenberg’s grand plan. As I said, it cuts tax in three stages over seven years.

The first is an immediate, reasonably generous tax cut (equivalent to about $20 a week) to people on middle incomes, earning between $48,000 and $90,000 a year. Those below that range get a lot less, as do those above it.

The second stage, which comes in three years’ time, July 2022, offers nothing much for people earning below $90,000 a year. For those earning more, there’d be a new tax cut ranging from nothing to $26 a week for those on $120,000 and above.

The third stage, coming a further two years later, in July 2024, offers tax cuts for everyone earning over $45,000 a year, ranging from nothing to about $65 a week for those on incomes up to $180,000 a year – plus another saving of up to $58 a week for those earning up to $200,000 and above.

But here’s a tip. You can think of the first, immediate stage as almost certain to be received because, though it has been only partially legislated, Labor has pledged to put it through.

It’s uncertain, however, whether we’ll ever see the other two stages. It’s not just that they’re so far into the future. It’s also that, though last year’s stages two and three are legislated, Labor says it would repeal them. As for this year’s enhancements of stages two and three, they're not yet legislated, and Labor won’t have a bar of ’em.

But, assuming stages two and three actually come to pass, how would the plan change the tax scale’s progressivity?

Well, with marginal tax rates varying from zero on income up to $18,200 a year, to 45¢ in the dollar on income over $200,000 a year, there can be no doubt that income tax would remain progressive.

But Frydenberg’s claim it would remain “highly progressive” is debatable. Presumably, he bases this on the estimate that the top 6 per cent of taxpayers, those earning more than $200,000 a year, would still be paying 36 per cent of total income tax collections in 2024-25.

Given the (no doubt optimistic) assumptions about how fast wages grow between now and then, this may be arithmetically correct. But it ignores the way the introduction of a massive 30¢-in-the dollar tax bracket running from $45,000 a year to $200,000 would put a big kink in the tax scale, making it significantly less progressive than it was.

The proof: whereas people on incomes between $45,000 and $90,000 would have their average tax rate cut by about 2.5 percentage points, this then rises to a cut of 4.8 percentage points for those on $180,000, before jumping to a maximum cut of 5.8 points for those on $200,000 and above. It’s tough at the top.

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Why politicians only pretend to care about low income earners

It must be the Salvo still hidden inside me that makes my blood boil when Treasurer Josh Frydenberg claims to be delivering a tax cut worth $1080 a year to “low and middle income earners” and his claim is mindlessly repeated by journalists as though it’s a fact that doesn’t need checking.

I was brought up to care about people at the bottom. So, since we’re bound to spend most of the election campaign debating the complaints of the whingeing well-off, let’s spend just a moment thinking about “those less fortunate than ourselves”.

The $1080 – which Labor has promised to match should it win the election – will go to people earning between $48,000 and $90,000 a year, or about $920 to $1730 a week.

Does that sound like low and middle to you? It’s not hard to convince yourself it does. After all, the average earnings of adults working full-time are $93,300 a year.

Trouble is, the average (or mean) income is far from being typical. That’s because it’s pushed up by a relatively small number of people on very high incomes - the 1 per cent, if you like.

The typical income isn’t the mean, it’s the median – the one that, if you arranged all the incomes by size, is exactly in the middle, with 50 per cent of incomes above and 50 per cent below.

The median adult full-time worker is on $78,300 – 16 per cent lower than the mean. What makes the median “typical” is that a high proportion of all full-time workers will be clustered around it, a bit above or a bit below.

But about a third of all workers are part-time, two-thirds of whom are women. Shouldn’t they be included in any assessment of what’s “low and middle”?

When you do include them, the typical income of all workers drops to $57,900. That’s 21 per cent above $48,000 and 36 per cent below $90,000. So the government’s range does a better job of covering those above the middle than those below.

But how low is low? It’s hardly true that there are no workers on incomes below $48,000. Not even full-time workers. The federal minimum full-time wage is $37,400. How can anything called a “low and medium income” tax cut fail to include the many full-timers on the minimum wage?

It’s true, of course, that not everyone earning less than $48,000 a year misses out on a tax cut (known technically as a tax offset). Those earning $37,000 get not $1080 a year, but $255 – about a quarter of the full cut.

Why? Presumably, because their incomes are too low to qualify as officially low. Or maybe because, when your income’s that low, your need for a bit more money to spend is even lower. They might go crazy if you gave them as much as a thou.

For incomes between $37,000 and $48,000, the tax cut starts at $255 and rises at the rate of 7.5¢ in the dollar until it reaches $1080. This means those on the minimum full-time wage get a princely $285.

For incomes below $37,000, the tax cut will be up to $255 – though, for such an insignificant group, a mere 2.3 million people, the budget papers don’t bother saying how this will work.

Is that the bottom of those with low income incomes? Not really. About a third of households have incomes too low to pay income tax. Some of these people are the comfortably off alleged “self-funded retirees”, whose income from superannuation is exempt from income tax, but the rest are people dependent on some form of government welfare payment.

What do they get? Those on some form of pension get a one-off payment of $75 (or $125 for couples), which will be a huge help with their power bills.

What gets me is how we can claim to be worried about those with low incomes while excluding those whose income is low because they can’t find a job. They were ineligible for help because the lower taxes were only for, to quote the measure's official name, “hard-working Australians”.

Longing to be a hard worker doesn’t qualify, apparently. Frydenberg went to great length to justify the decision to exclude those on the dole even from the $75 payment – before the government belatedly included them, for fear the measure might be blocked in the Senate.

But if anyone really cared about the lowest of low incomes, they’d end the 25-year freeze on increasing the dole beyond the rise in consumer prices. It’s unconscionable for a nation as rich as we are to the give the jobless so little to live on it actually makes it harder for them to find work.

And that’s before you remember all the many instances where this government has sought to stigmatise and punish the unemployed for being jobless. For the jobless, it's all stick, no carrot.

Don’t kid yourself Labor would be much better, however. It’s seeking plaudits (and product differentiation) by raising the Liberals’ $255 cut to $350 – which will make all the difference.

And Labor is just as unwilling to increase the dole as the Coalition is. Why? Not because Labor thinks it possible to live decently on $40 a day, nor even because it would cost too much (which it wouldn’t).

No, as Labor shadow social services minister Linda Burney had the honesty to admit, it’s because too many voters – including Labor voters, no doubt – would disapprove. And we wouldn’t want that.

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Frydenberg's budget: if it looks too good to be true . . .

What a wonderful world we live in now our politicians have discovered the cure for opportunity cost. In his first budget, Josh Frydenberg is doing a Gladys: he wants us to believe “we can have it all”.

Over the next 10 years, he can give us: tax cuts worth $302 billion, new infrastructure worth $100 billion, sundry other goodies, and a budget that’s back in the black and stays there, so that the net debt falls to zero. Yeah? How?

But first, a flashback. Labor’s Wayne Swan ended up a laughing stock after he began his 2012 budget speech with the immortal words: “The four years of surpluses I announce tonight . . . this budget delivers a surplus this coming year, on time, as promised, and surpluses each year after that, strengthening over time.”

Here's what Frydenberg said seven years later: “Tonight, I am pleased to announce a budget surplus of $7.1 billion . . . In 2020-21, a surplus of $11 billion. In 2021-22, a surplus of $17.8 billion. In 2012-23, a surplus of $9.2 billion. A total of $45 billion of surpluses over the next four years.”

Oh dear. This year even the media knew not to fall into their usual trap of treating the government’s estimate of next year’s budget balance as an already accomplished fact. Actually, we won’t know the “actual” for another 18 months.

But, as usual, the media took little notice of the expected budget balance for the year just ending – a truth the Finance Department’s creative accountants have long exploited to improve the new year’s expected balance at the expense of the old year’s.

Some have questioned why Frydenberg didn’t try harder to turn the old year’s small deficit into a small surplus so that, should the Coalition lose the election, it would have avoided going into the history books as a government that was in power for six years without ever recording a surplus.

Short answer: it couldn’t afford to. Reading the budget papers’ fine print makes it clear the creative department had to put in much furniture shifting to come up with the predicted surplus of $7.1 billion – an amount Frydenberg has been able to assert is “substantial” rather than “wafer thin”.

Think about this: in the old year, government spending is expected to leap by 4.9 per cent in real terms, whereas in the new year it will grow by just 0.1 per cent real. Do you reckon that discontinuity happened by chance?

My colleague Shane Wright has noted the government’s decision to bring forward to the old year $1.3 billion in grants to local councils due to be made in the new year. He could have added that two new one-off cash grants, one to help recipients of residential aged care and another to help pensioners with their energy bills, with a total cost approaching $700 million, will be paid in the old year rather than the new.

The government’s been promising to have the budget “back in the black” by 2019-20 since Joe Hockey’s time. And for some years has been “reprofiling” the timing of payments and receipts to ensure this target is met.

Wright reminds us that a change in the timing of tobacco excise collections announced in last year’s budget will, purely by chance, yield a one-off boost of several billions in the new financial year.

Why are we so anxious to get the budget back in black? Because we want to start reducing the government’s debt. Trouble is, since Peter Costello’s day, successive treasurers have drawn our attention to the underlying cash deficit and away from the ironically named “headline” cash deficit.

That’s a problem because it’s actually the higher headline deficit that has to be funded by borrowing – or, if it’s in surplus, can be used to pay off debt. Guess what? The budget estimates that we’ll still be in headline deficit of $4.4 billion in the coming year, and won’t be in surplus until 2021-22.

The discrepancy is explained mainly by successive governments using an accounting loophole to exclude their spending on the NBN, the second Sydney airport, the inland railway and other projects from the underlying deficit.

Even so, Frydenberg assures us the government’s net debt will have been fully repaid by June 2030 – and he has a lovely graph that proves it. How is our path to a debtless Nirvana achieved?

By assuming that government spending grows with almost unprecedented slowness despite the ageing of the population, that the economy grows strongly for another 10 years without missing a beat and with productivity improving each year at a rate faster than we’ve achieved in decades, and – get this – that the government’s financial assets will grow by almost 3 percentage points to 12.8 per cent of gross domestic product.

When it comes to creativity, Australia’s politicians are second to none.

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Budget makes Frydenberg an unwitting Keynesian stimulator

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg doesn’t want anyone saying the budget he unveiled this week involves applying some “fiscal stimulus” to get the economy moving faster. He’d prefer to say his budget is “pro-growth”.

But what is fiscal stimulus? And does that label apply to this year’s budget? Only if you’re prepared to be called a “Keynesian” economist. Which Frydenberg isn’t.

Why not? Because in the hard right circles in which many Liberals move, the name of John Maynard Keynes (rhymes with Brains) has become a swearword. (That’s because their penchant for dividing people into political friends and foes exceeds their understanding of economics.)

The K-word isn’t one used a lot by the Reserve Bank. My guess is it would be quite pleased with what Frydenberg has done in coming up with his own version of what, when Kevin Rudd did it after the global financial crisis in 2008, was dubbed a “cash splash”.

But the Reserve would limit itself to saying Frydenberg has made the budget “less contractionary” than it would have been.

The “fiscal” in fiscal stimulus is just a flash word for anything to do with the budget. The managers of the macro economy often do things intended to stimulate it to grow faster, create more jobs and make us more prosperous.

In last year’s budget, Scott Morrison introduced a new “low and middle income tax offset” (known to aficionados as the lamington) worth $530 a year, to be received by workers earning between $48,000 and $90,000 a year, with those on lower or higher incomes getting lesser amounts, starting from last July.

The offset was equivalent to about $10 a week but, because it’s a “tax offset”, they don’t get it until they’ve submitted their annual tax return at the end of the financial year and received their tax refund cheque. That cheque (these days actually a transfer to their bank account) will include the offset.

So workers should receive their first offset payment as a lump sum sometime in the September quarter of this year.

But this week the government decided to increase the amount of the offset by $550 and to backdate it to last July. So about 4.5 million taxpayers will be given a cash grant of $1080 in a few months’ time. When they spend that money, it should give the economy a kick along.

First point to understand, however, is that though the motive for the policy changes politicians announce in budgets is usually political – they just want to buy our votes, for instance - that doesn’t stop those measures having an effect on the economy.

Economists ignore the political motivations and focus on the likely economic effects.

Second point, while it’s easy to see that something as sexy as a tax cut could, when it’s spent, add to economic activity, that’s just as true of the government's spending to build new infrastructure, or add new medicines to the pharmaceutical benefits scheme, or spend more on education.

So what will stimulate the economy is all the new programs the government decides to spend on, less any cuts in government spending or new tax increases it makes.

The budget papers show that, since the midyear budget update in December, the government’s decisions to change tax and spending programs total $5.7 billion, spread over the present financial year and the coming year.

That total stimulus is equivalent to about 0.3 per cent of gross domestic product – meaning that, despite all the excitement, it’s not exactly huge.

Third point, while most people see immediately that the things governments do with their budgets affect the economy, it takes them longer to realise that, particularly because the economy (GDP) is about four times bigger than the budget, the things the economy does also affect the budget.

That is, there’s a two-way relationship between the budget and the economy.

As the economy grows during the upswing of the business cycle, this should improve the budget balance, as the progressivity of the income tax scale (aka bracket creep) causes income tax collections to grow faster than income itself, and government spending on dole payments falls as more people find jobs.

Alternatively, as the economy slows during the downswing of the business cycle, tax collections also slow down and dole payments grow as people lose their jobs.

Keynesian economists refer to this source of improvement or deterioration in the budget balance as the “cyclical” component.

In contrast, they refer to the improvement or deterioration in the budget balance caused by the explicit decisions of the government to change taxes and government spending as the “structural” component.

Keynesians judge the “stance of policy” adopted in the budget by the change in this structural component. And, as we’ve seen, they’d judge the stance this year to be mildly stimulatory.

The Reserve – which needs to know what effect changes in the budget are having on the strength of demand in the economy so it can decide what it needs to do about interest rates – makes no distinction between the cyclical and structural components of the budget balance.

It simply looks at the direction and size of the expected change in the overall budget balance, which it calls the “fiscal impact”.

As well as seeing that the balance was expected to swing from deficit to surplus, it would note from the budget papers that, since the midyear budget update in December, tax collections and spending underruns were expected to improve the budget balance by $9.7 billion over the present and coming financial years.

In other words, the budget was now expected to take a further $9.7 billion more out of the economy than it put back in. Such a fiscal impact would be contractionary, not stimulatory.

But Frydenberg’s new spending and tax cut, costing $5.7 billion, will make the budget a bit less contractionary than it could have been. Good.

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Budget does the right thing for the wrong reason

Set aside the politics, focus on the economy's immediate needs, and this is a good budget – though, with less politics and more economics, it could have been better.

Viewed through a political lens, this is the classic budget of a government that knows it has only a slim chance of winning the looming election but also knows it has little to lose by abandoning its stated policies and promising more government spending and yet more tax cuts.

Add an economic perspective, however, and it's a budget that does the right thing for the wrong reason.

The Coalition won office almost six years ago promising to make eliminating "Labor's debt and deficit" its highest priority.

It's taken all this time to get to the point of being able to budget for a surplus next financial year, during which time the debt has doubled.

The rules it set itself said there were to be no tax cuts until the surplus was much higher than the one it's expecting. Any unexpected improvement in tax collections should be "banked" not spent. Only by running the biggest surpluses possible could the debt be paid off quickly.

All that is now out the window. But, whatever the government's ulterior motive, that's a good thing.

Why? Because, despite the decade that's passed since the global financial crisis – and the Treasurer's repetition of the mantra "a stronger economy" – the economy is still surprisingly weak. A year ago, it looked like it might be moving into top gear, but since then we have seen it fall back to grinding along in second.

That being so, now is not the time to have the budget taking a lot more money out of the economy than it's putting back in.

Although employment has been growing more strongly than you would expect, the economy's growth has remained below-par. It's being held back mainly by weak consumer spending, which is weak mainly because wages aren't increasing much – a phenomenon both sides of politics prefer to call "cost of living pressures".

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg predicts that wages will grow by 2.75 per cent in the coming financial year and by 3.25 per cent the following year. That's likely to prove over-optimistic, as such forecasts have been throughout the Coalition's term.

The tax cuts he is promising are a poor substitute for a decent pay rise, but they will help consumers keep spending and turning the wheels of the economy.

People earning between $925 and $1730 a week will get a tax cut equivalent to about $20 a week, backdated to July last year. But it will come in the form of an annual tax refund cheque after submitting their return in a few months time, that is $1080 higher than otherwise.

People earning less that $925 a week, or more than $1730 a week, will get much lower refunds.

Likewise, the one-off cash grants to pensioners are a poor substitute for a lasting solution to the problems in the electricity market, but they're better than nothing.

And the planned big increase in the government's spending on infrastructure will also help.

One little-noticed reason for us to be less impatient to pay off government debt is that the interest rate on long-term government bonds has fallen below 2 per cent. That's less than the rate of inflation.

The problem with Frydenberg's tax cuts is that though he keeps saying (and the media dutifully keep repeating) they are aimed at "low and middle income-earners", in truth, most of the money will go to people whose incomes are way above the middle.

By far the most expensive change to last year's seven-year tax cut plan – the change that does most to double the cost of the cuts to a staggering $302 billion over 10 years – is the decision to cut the middle tax rate from 32.5¢ in every dollar to 30¢ from July 2024.

The consequent saving will range from zero for those earning less than $925 a week to $75 a week for those earning $3845 a week and above.

These top earners don't have a pressing problem with the cost of living and are likely to save rather than recirculate a lot of their tax cut.

Had Frydenberg done more to direct his generosity to the really hard-pressed – including the unemployed, living it up on $40 a day – it would all have gone straight to retailers, big and small.

But the size and shape of the tax cuts we'll end up with are far from decided. The bidding war between the parties isn't over.

When the government announced the first stage of its tax cuts last year, it took Labor two days to up the ante by 75 per cent. The Treasurer has now doubled the government's original offer. In two days' time we will hear if Bill Shorten intends to see Frydenberg – or raise him.

The difference between the two sides is that whereas the Coalition's tax cuts come at the expense of slower progress in paying off the debt, Labor's plans involve cutting tax breaks in a way that takes from high-saving, higher income-earners and gives to low-saving, lower income-earners.

With an election coming in six weeks, you choose.

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