Shock Tax Hike To Slug People Who Respond To Clickbait!!

If you’re reading this, you probably already know how this works. The cycle goes something like this:

1. Headline About Shocking State Of Government Debt DEBT TO HIT $3 TRILLION BY 2098
2. Government tinker with some tax in a small attempt to balance the budget which is then headlined as a shocking tax slug on some poor group or other. BELUGA CAVIAR TO BE PRICED OUT OF THE REACH OF ORDINARY AUSSIES WITH PROPOSED HIKE!
3. Government cuts some services in an attempt to balance budget and the headline then becomes about the shocking delivery of the government and how it would be much better if the whole thing were privatised or cut altogether. STREET LIGHTS ONLY TO BE TURNED ON AT NIGHT! 

I probably should have made this in the form of a circle where the snake is eating its own tail but that would suggest that it goes on forever… which it sort of does. The only difference is that when the Coalition is in power, the headlines are less hysterical and the circle takes a few months instead of a new complaint every second day. And, if the Coalition is the government, there’s generally some explanation about how the whole situation is partly the fault of Labor/the unions/The Greens, but it’s time the Liberals did something about it!

The other staple of what appears in the media is the obscure report from someone somewhere suggesting something that the government has looked at/should look at/will have to deny ever considering. Whether it’s from one of the regulars – IPA, Centre For Independent Studies, a leaked document – or whether it’s from some unknown group who have no direct access to anyone except a journalist who thinks it’ll make a good story… And I use the word “story” because a story is often something made up rather than the word “news” which suggests something that’s actually alleged to have happened.

I particularly liked the recent outrage about proposed changes to the way the family home might be taxed. This resembles the corpse flower in that when it blooms it leaves an incredibly nasty odour, but unlike the plant which only blooms every seven or eight years, the capital gains idea blooms every time the government has more than a couple of economic good news stories. The idea of making it subject to capital gains is the obvious one and the Catch-22 for a government is: If they ignore it, it’ll be repeated but if they deny that they’re going to do it, it’ll be reported as though they were considering it.

Not content with suggestions of capital gains tax on people’s main residence, we were treated to a report on the paper by two economists, Professors Peter Siminski and Roger Wilkins, about “the untaxed income” people get from living in their own home…

I’d like to state here that I’m no economist so maybe I’m missing something but doesn’t this seem like suggesting that one is getting untaxed income from doing one’s own housework or “babysitting” one’s own kids?

Anyway, the central idea was that, because people get this income benefit from owning their own home, they invest too much money into their homes and this pushes up the prices and locks first home buyers out. Maybe there’s something in that and I’d have to think about it in more detail before dismissing it entirely… However, I am a private citizen and not in government so I can afford to do that; I’m pretty sure that any Treasurer or PM will be able to dismiss the idea without thinking about it because to say, Mm, that’s an interesting idea, would be political suicide.

Whatever the merits of the idea, it’s time to return to my central theme of: Don’t you have actual things that might be happening like Robodebt and the NACC to write about? And in relation to that, I would like to quote from the article about taxing the “income” from the family home:

“No-one really seems to be willing to discuss it in current debates about tax reform and our standard studies of income inequality don’t really do justice to the role of owner-occupied housing.”

So, there you have it. An article about a paper that nobody “seems willing to discuss”. I mean, maybe we should have more articles about things that nobody’s willing to to discuss, including Uncle Harry’s flatulence, but it seems to me that once you’ve written an article for the mainstream media, then it is being discussed. I find this more an oxymoron than a paradox.

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