Strong economy? No, but maybe it will be eighth time lucky

Scott Morrison wants the Coalition re-elected because of its superior management of the economy. In Josh Frydenberg’s budget speech he referred to our “strong economy” 14 times. Why? He had to keep saying it because it ain’t true.

But get this: it’s not the government’s fault. It’s happening for reasons far beyond the government’s control. Growth is weak in Australia and throughout the developed world for deep reasons economists don’t yet fully understand.

It’s taken a while to realise this because the econocrats – mainly Treasury, but with the acquiescence of the Reserve Bank - either can’t or won’t accept its truth. They’ve gone for eight budgets in a row forecasting an early return to strong growth.

And for seven years in a row they’ve been way off. But so great is their certainty that nothing fundamental has changed, they’ve fronted up with yet another forecast that this year will be different. This year we'll reach lift-off.

It may not be entirely coincidental that, the longer Treasury dwells in the land of hope-springs-eternal, the more it gives its political masters the budget numbers they crave: ones showing the budget deficit soon returning to surplus and staying in surplus as the net debt falls to zero.

In what follows, I’ll ignore Treasury’s cute distinction between “forecasts” and “projections”. Sorry, guys, you’ve played that card too many times.

It’s a key part of the way you’ve misled the public, your political masters, economists and probably even yourselves, that everything’s going fine and will soon be back to normal. It’s part of the reason the net debt’s been allowed to double under this government – we kept being told it wasn’t happening.

When laughing-stock Wayne Swan began his 2012 budget speech promising four budget surpluses in a row, this was based on Treasury’s forecast that real gross domestic product would grow by 3.25 per cent in 2012-13, and then by 3 per cent in each of the three following years.

The 3.25 per cent turned out to be 2.6 per cent, then another 2.6 per cent, 2.3 per cent and 2.8 per cent.

After such an embarrassing stuff-up, you’d think Treasury might have had a rethink. Not a bit of it. Just two budgets later – this government’s first - it had the economy’s growth accelerating over the forward estimates not to 3 per cent, but 3.5 per cent. The first of these turned out to be 2.3 per cent and the next one, 2.8 per cent.

In the 2016 budget, Treasury took a bit of a pull and reverted to forecasting recoveries to no more than 3 per cent growth.

In this month’s budget, Treasury has us growing by only 2.25 per cent in the year just ending. But not to worry. In the coming year it will strengthen to 2.75 per cent, and be back to 3 per cent in the second last year of the forward estimates, where it will stay in 2022-23.

It’s a similar story with what’s become the key problem component of GDP, wages. In Swan’s ill-fated budget, the wage price index was forecast to grow by 3.75 per cent in the budget year and the year following. Turned out to be 2.9 per cent and 2.5 per cent.

The following year’s budget – Swan’s last – put expected wage growth in 2014-15 at 3.5 per cent. Turned out to be 2.3 per cent. Treasury’s first guess for 2017-18 was 3 per cent. Came in at 2.1 per cent.

Treasury’s response to its repeated over-forecasting is just to push the ETA of the return to strong growth out another year. Nothing fundamental in the economy has changed, nothing’s wrong with the forecasting method, it’s just taking a bit longer than we thought. This time we’ll be right.

But, you may object, if the economy’s remained so weak for so long, how come growth in employment has been strong since early 2017 and unemployment has slowly fallen to 5 per cent?

Because of high levels of immigration – high even by our standards, and unmatched by the other rich countries – and because the under-employment rate was worsening until recently.

Much of the jobs growth has come from federal government spending on rolling out the National Disability Insurance Scheme, and state government spending on infrastructure. After all, public sector consumption and investment spending accounted for more than half the surprisingly weak GDP growth of 2.3 per cent over calendar 2018.

Remember this: a strong, healthy economy is one where demand is always threatening to push inflation above the target zone. Our inflation rate's been below the target for three years.

And this amazing fact: the world real long-term interest rate has been falling for years and is now at zero or below. That’s a sign of strong growth?

It’s time Treasury and the Reserve stopped kidding themselves – and us.

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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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The budget's getting better, but the economy's getting worse

Why would a government that boasts of its superior economic management be entering an election campaign with a budget warning of harder economic times ahead? Because it has no choice.

It will turn this admission of a bleaker economic outlook – with a slowdown in the global economy and, domestically, the risk that falling house prices could further weaken consumer spending – into a warning that now is just the wrong time to turn the economy over to those bunglers in the Labor Party, but this will be making the best of a bad deal.

There’s nothing new about a big give-away pre-election budget, but the budget we’ll see on Tuesday night will be different in several respects. For one thing, it’s not often you get a full budget that’s timed to be the kick-off of a six-week election campaign.

It will be more like an election policy speech than a budget, since none of its measures will have been legislated, let alone put into effect. Unless the Coalition wins, it’s a budget we’ll never hear of again.

For another thing, it’s reasonable to expect that strong economies and strong budgets go together, as do weak economies and weak budgets. The state of economy determines the state of the budget balance.

Not this time. As Deloitte Access Economics’ Chris Richardson has observed, “the economy is getting worse, but the budget is getting better”. Let’s start with the budget.

Politically, this budget is built on a fiction: that its centrepiece, a further round of tax cuts (and possibly one-off cash grants to pensioners) on top of last year’s three-stage, seven-year tax cuts costing $144 billion over 10 years, is the fruit of the government’s success in returning the budget to surplus, not a sign of its political desperation.

In truth, the government’s budgetary record is hardly anything to boast about, particularly when you remember the confident promises it made while in opposition about how quickly and easily it could eliminate “debt and deficit”.

The deficit may be gone, but there's still a lot of debt - which the Coalition seems in no hurry to pay back.

We know the government will budget for a decent surplus in the coming financial year, but it’s so close to balance in the present year that it would take only minor creative accounting to produce a “surprise” surplus a year earlier than promised.

When you remember how close to balance Labor’s Wayne Swan got in 2012-13, however, it’s surprising it’s taken the Coalition all of two terms to get us to where we now are.

You can blame this on lack of political will, but it’s now more apparent than it has been that the delay is a product of the economy’s slowness to recover from the Great Recession we supposedly didn’t have.

Even since Swan’s day, the econocrats – including the Reserve Bank – have each year been forecasting an early return to strong economic growth and a greatly improved budget balance.

And, each year, their forecasts have proved way too optimistic, particularly for a return to strong wage growth. A return to economic business as usual has repeatedly eluded us.

It’s not the econocrats’ fault, it’s the slowness of all of us to realise that the “secular stagnation” that’s dogged the United States and the other advanced economies is also dogging us. But with the economy’s unexpected slowing to growth of just 2.3 per cent over 2018 – or 0.7 per cent when you subtract population growth – it’s now a lot harder not to realise.

Few remember that Tony Abbott’s ill-fated first budget in 2014 was carefully designed to do little to reduce the budget deficit for the first three years because the economy was still too weak withstand a move to contractionary fiscal policy.

The surprising fact is, little has changed in all the years since then. This is the macro-economic justification for Tuesday’s purely politically motivated announcement of further tax cuts. The economy’s still too weak to withstand contractionary fiscal policy as the budget heads into surplusland.

But, in that case, how have we finally got back to surplus? Partly, through surprisingly limited real growth in government spending. But, mainly, through years of bracket creep, the exhaustion of companies’ prior tax losses, more effective anti-avoidance measures and, above all, the good luck of a (probably temporary) recovery in coal and iron ore prices and, thus, mining company profits.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg will be hoping to convince us the budget improvement is lasting, but the weak economy is temporary. It’s more likely to be the other way round.

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High immigration hiding the economy's long-running weakness

How’s our economy been doing in the five or six years since the Coalition returned to office? In the United States and other advanced economies there’s much talk of “secular stagnation”, but that doesn’t apply to us, surely?

After all, we’re now into our record-setting 28th year of continuous economic growth since the severe recession of the early 1990s. This means that, unlike the others, we escaped the Great Recession that followed the global financial crisis in 2008.

Recent years have seen employment growing strongly and the unemployment rate falling slowly to 5 per cent. And, of course, as Treasurer Josh Frydenberg never fails to remind us when we see the quarterly national accounts, our economy is among the fastest growing of all the rich economies.

So the talk of secular (meaning long-lasting, rather than worldly) stagnation can’t be our problem, can it? Don’t be so sure.

The argument that, since the global crisis, the developed world has fallen into a period of weak growth that looks likely to last quite a few years was first advanced by one of America’s leading economists, Professor Laurence Summers, of Harvard, a former secretary of the US Treasury in the Clinton administration.

He took the term from its earlier use during the Depression of the 1930s, using it to mean “a prolonged period in which satisfactory growth can only be achieved by unsustainable financial conditions”.

The Economist magazine explains that secular stagnation means “the chronically weak growth that comes from having too few investment opportunities to absorb available savings”.

Let me tell you about some comparisons of our performance by decade, calculated by independent economist Saul Eslake in a chapter he contributed to the book, The Wages Crisis in Australia.

In the first eight years of the present decade, consumer spending – which typically accounts for just under 60 per cent of gross domestic product – has been slower than in any decade in the past 60 years.

The major reason for this is that the present decade has seen household disposable income grow at an average real rate of just 2.2 per cent a year, which is less than in any of the previous five decades.

The biggest component of household income is income from wages. Its real growth in the present decade has been slower than in any of the five preceding decades.

So, as I may have mentioned once or twice before, weaker growth in wages seems to be at the heart of weaker consumer spending growth and growth in the economy overall.

But the growth in consumer spending would have been even slower had households not reduced the proportion of their income that they saved rather than spent by 4 percentage points – to its lowest level since before the financial crisis.

The slow growth in wages in the present decade has meant a decline in the share of national income going to wages, which (along with higher mineral commodity prices) has contributed to the higher share of income going to the profits of corporations.

This “gross operating surplus” (which, Eslake says, is roughly equivalent to the sharemarket’s EBITDA – earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) has averaged 26.7 per cent of GDP since 2000 – which is 3.5 percentage points more than it did in the 1980s and 1990s.

But this isn’t as good for business as it sounds. Eslake points out that, “while the share of the national-income pie going to corporate profits has increased, the pie itself has been growing at a much slower rate – so much so that the growth rate of corporate profits [as measured by gross operating surplus] has thus far during the current decade been slower than in any decade since the 1970s”.

Since it’s the rate of growth that share investors and business managers focus on, this says even business profits haven’t been doing wonderfully.

Which brings us to the national accounts’ bottom line – growth in real GDP. It’s averaged 2.7 per cent a year so far in this decade, which is less than in any decade since the 1930s.

And get this. More than half the real GDP growth so far this decade is directly attributable to growth in the population. Growth in real GDP per person has averaged 1.1 per cent a year – equal to its performance during the 1930s, and slower that anything we’ve had in between.

Get it? Allow for population growth – so you’re focusing on whether economic growth is actually leaving us better off on average – and our weak growth since the financial crisis becomes even weaker.

If our economic performance seems better than the other advanced economies’, that’s just because our population is growing much faster than theirs.

The symptoms of secular stagnation that other rich countries complain of are: weak growth in consumption and business investment, slow improvement in productivity, only small increases in wages and prices, and interest rates that are low not just because inflation is low, but also because real interest rates are low.

(The long-running slide in real long-term interest rates around the world demonstrates The Economist’s point that, globally, we’re saving more than households, businesses and governments want to borrow.)

We tick all those boxes. Unsurprisingly in our ever-more-connected world, we too are locked into secular stagnation of a seriousness not seen since the 1930s. It’s just that our rapid population growth – plus the ups and downs of the resources boom – has hidden it from us.

I remind you of all this today because it’s highly relevant to Tuesday’s federal budget: what it should be aiming to do, and how we should judge what it does do.

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Generational conflict comes to a polling place near you

The most memorable news photo I’ve seen in ages is one from the first School Strike 4 Climate late last year. It shows a young woman holding a sign: MESS WITH OUR CLIMATE & WE’LL MESS WITH YOUR PENSION.

One minute we oldies are berating the younger generation for their seeming lack of interest in politics (although, having arrived on the scene at a time when our politicians are behaving so badly, who could blame them?), the next we’re criticising them for missing a day of school.

When you remember how many days of uni the baby boomers missed with all their marches against the Vietnam war, the odd day off school hardly signifies. (Not that I’d want to discourage the ageing climate-change deniers from criticising the school-dodgers. When you’re growing up, defying adult authority is a big part of the motivation.)

Whenever I get the chance, I have a simple message for youngsters: you’d better start taking an interest in politics because it’s the people who aren’t watching that the pollies end up screwing.

The truth is our young people are interested in political issues, but that interest is unfashionably idealistic. They really care about fairness to the LGBTI community, climate change and the environment more broadly.

They’re not yet sufficiently old and cynical to have realised that politics has devolved into a self-centred free-for-all, where you jump into the ring to advance and protect your own interests at the expense of those with less muscle.

When last my colleague Jessica Irvine expressed support for Labor’s plan to end the refunding of unused dividend imputation credits to all except those receiving an age pension or part-pension, an angry reader accused her of “continuing to fuel the fire of inter-generational envy”.

Sorry, that argument doesn’t wash. It’s one the well-off and their champions have used for ages. What it’s really saying is, “it’s a sin for you to envy the fruits of my greed”.

When people accuse others of “the politics of envy” or inciting “class warfare”, their true message is: I’m winning, you’re losing, so why won’t you just accept it? Just be nice and stop trying to make things fairer.

(Speaking of sin, when last I supported the reform of imputation credits, a reader accused me of “preaching”. Sorry, when your father spent his life preaching two sermons a Sunday, it’s only to be expected. And I’m old enough to regard being likened to my father as a compliment, not an insult.)

Stripping away the religious overtones, there is, always has been and probably always will be plenty of scope for conflict between the generations. The solution is for the generation presently in power
to put its children’s interests ahead of its own (see climate change above).

Almost all of us do this in our private lives (it’s clear a lot of the well-off retired fighting to retain imputation credits are motivated by maximising their kids’ inheritance, and we’re happy for the bank of mum and dad to help our children into home-ownership), but when it comes to public policy we’re easily seduced by politicians seeking our votes with promises of short-term gain for long-term pain.

Not enough people realise that our system of taxes and benefits is explicitly designed to move money between the generations.

People – mainly younger people - with jobs and no kids pay a lot more in taxes (all taxes) than they get back in benefits (whether in cash or kind, such as education and healthcare), whereas families with kids get back a lot more than they pay. Couples whose kids have grown up but who are still working pay more than they get back, and then the retired get back a lot more than they pay.

Since almost all of us will progress through each of these stages, this money-shifting should pretty much even out over our lives. So, until relatively recently, it’s been seen as fair. It’s the basis for the oldies’ eternal sense of entitlement: “I’ve paid taxes all my life . . .”

But this has changed. As our leading independent think tank, the Grattan Institute, has demonstrated, tax changes over the past two decades have been “hugely generous” to older Australians.

“Older households pay $7500 [a year] less in income tax in real terms today than older households 20 years ago, despite high increases in average incomes,” it found. “Taxes on working-age households have risen over the same period.”

Most of this is explained by changes made by John Howard to benefit the alleged “self-funded retirees” (including making unused imputation credits refundable) and similar changes to superannuation tax breaks made by Peter Costello.

Add in Howard’s more favourable tax treatment of negatively geared property investments, and the young are dead right to believe the tax system has been biased against them and in favour of the better-off old (including me).

They’d also be right to see the looming federal election campaign as a battle between one side seeking to reduce the system’s bias against the young and the other fighting to protect the recently conferred perks of the well-off aged.

But a note to outraged Millennials: Howard is no baby boomer and the intended beneficiaries of his munificence were his own and earlier generations. Only some of the world’s evils were installed by my privileged generation.

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Economists: lonely, misunderstood angels in shining armour

If you’re tempted by the shocking thought that economists end up as handmaidens to the rich and powerful – as I’m tempted – Dr Martin Parkinson wishes to remind us that’s not how it’s supposed to be. The first mission of economists is to make this world a better world, he says. But don’t expect it to make you popular.

Let me tell you about a talk he gave on Friday night. It was a pep talk to the first of what’s hoped to be a regular social gathering for young economists come to Canberra to study, teach or work in government or consulting.

Apparently, working in Canberra can be a tough gig if you don’t know many economist mates to be assortative with.

Parkinson’s own career has had its downs and ups. He was sacked as Treasury secretary by Tony Abbott – who feared he actually believed in the climate change policy the Rudd government had him designing – then resurrected by Malcolm Turnbull as secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, the Treasury secretary’s bureaucratic boss.

He began the pep talk with a story about the woman with only six months to live, who’s advised by her doctor to marry an economist so as to make it seem like a lifetime.

That may be because, as Parko says, economists are trained to be analytical. To be rigorously logical and rational in their thinking. (I define an economist as someone who thinks their partner is the only irrational person in the economy.)

“Economics gives you insights into the way the world works that other professions cannot,” he says. Economists see things that others can’t. Sometimes that’s because the others have incentives not to see them.

As Upton Sinclair famously put it, it’s difficult to get someone to understand something when their salary depends on them not understanding it.

Ain’t that the truth. The endless bickering between our politicians explained in a single quote. And the economists’ limited success in persuading people to take their advice.

Economists are trained to see “opportunity cost” which, according to Parko, is “the core tenet of the profession”. “This under underlies everything we do.

“This leads us to positions that are often counter-intuitive [the opposite of common sense] and unpopular – but are right.”

True. It may amaze you that so much of what economists bang on about boils down to no more than yet another application of opportunity cost: be careful how you spend your money, because you can only spend it once.

It’s a pathetically obvious insight, but it’s part of the human condition to always be forgetting it. So it’s the economist’s role to be the one who keeps reminding us of the obvious. If economists do no more than that, they’ll have made an invaluable contribution to society – to making this world a better world - and earned their keep.

But here’s the bit I found most inspiring in Parko’s pep talk. “Economists are not ‘for capital’ or ‘for labour’ . . . We do not see the world through constructs of power or identity, even though we see the importance of them.

“We are ‘for’ individual wellbeing regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation or capabilities. Because of this, we are often against entrenched interests and for those without a seat at the decision table.

“Economists view the past as ‘sunk’ [there’s nothing you can do to change it] and argue for decisions about the future to be made free of sentiment and in opposition to special interests. Now, this is in sharp contrast to the incentives in our political system, which favour producer interests over that of consumers.”

Ah, that’s the point. The ethic of neo-classical economics is that the customer is king (or queen). Consumer interests come first, whereas “producer interests” (which include unions as well as business) matter only because they are a means to the ultimate end of the consumers’ greater good.

Economists believe in exposing business to intense competition, to keep prices no higher than costs (including a reasonable rate of return on capital) and profits no higher than necessary. Competition should spur innovation and technological advance, while ensuring the benefits flow through to customers rather staying with business.

Business doesn’t see it that way, of course. Unlike some, my policy is to tell business what it needs to know, not what it wants to hear. Some people – suffering from a touch of the Upton Sinclairs – tell themselves this makes me anti-business. No, it makes me pro-consumer. That’s the ethic we so often fall short of.

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