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Australian Tax Reform

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Debt, Death & Taxes
16th October 2002 Robert Camilleri

The Conservative government doctrine is essentially defined as the party of tax relief. But now conservatives have converted themselves into the party of debt retirement. The conservative government has lost interest in tax cutting and instead wants to devote the surplus tax payments and asset sales over the next 3 years to paying down the national debt. The Howard-Costello government, seen as militant debt hawks, has announced their goal is to retire the entire national debt by 2005.

Has this government forgotten all of the economic and political lessons of the past 20 years? Take the American experience of the Reagan Government, they used surpluses to cut marginal tax rates, …show more content…

Parliament will spend the money, because it is in their nature. The debt hawks say, stash the surplus money away so it 's available for a rainy day. The truth is, for parliament; every day is a rainy day. The Howard government real concern is that if they are sitting on this cash the public will be screaming out for tax cuts, so repaying debt is a quick an easy way to take the focus off this get rid of the cash.

Tax reform is the smarter strategy rather than reducing the debt burden and it will grow the GDP faster. A dollar devoted to reducing marginal tax rates or to reducing the tax penalty against saving and investment will yield a higher return to the Australian economy, and thus to future generations, than a dollar used for retiring debt

But even if we suspend our disbelief and assume that every surplus penny was used to buy down debt, the economic benefit would be trivial. The primary argument in favour of debt reduction is that it will relieve the burden from our children of having to pay off the debt in the future. But as long as we don 't add to the debt over the next decade through a return to deficit spending, the debt burden on the next generation will fall automatically. It already is happening. Even without a penny of actual debt retirement, the debt as a share of GDP will fall from 15% of GDP in the early 1990s, using the current debt levels, to about 8% of GDP now. In

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