why no protests against #UBI bureaucratic job losses but #TPPANoWay protests aplenty about jobs?

The universal basic income is a rare bird for the left. It is the only time the usual suspects on the left are happy to cut government bureaucracy.

Furthermore, the left makes no inquiries as to how these redundant bureaucrats who administered the welfare state will find jobs. The market is left to work its magic for once. How convenient.

When a tariff cut is proposed, a trade deal signed, or job reduction in a bureaucracy suggested perhaps as the result of a privatisation, left-wing activists chain themselves to factory gates or government offices in solidarity. The social upheaval from the job losses among existing workers and their dim prospects of reemployment are paramount in their minds.

Why in the case of a universal basic income is the left so relaxed about job losses. Indeed, it celebrates as an advantage of a universal basic income that “Most of the bureaucracy of the welfare system [is] swept away” .

The universal basic income is the only time the left welcomes a reduction in bureaucracy and the role in the state. This switch from welfare payments to a universal basic income does not make those on the benefit any better off. Normally they are worse off under a universal basic income.

None of the the less well groups which of the concern of the left gain from a universal basic income. Despite this, they sell the jobs of their comrades in the public sector down the river.

I cannot believe the explanation is job losses are OK as long as they are the result of left-wing policies. Unless the labour market is liberalised, its ability to find new jobs for workers, for example, made redundant in the public sector after the introduction of a universal basic income is not any under greater than under a right-wing policy that costs jobs.

Homeless means living rough or in a car @DavidReiMiller @greencatherine @secondzeit

Statistics New Zealand spent 21 pages trying to define the term homeless. How Orwellian.

When I first moved to Canberra and when I moved back, I stayed with friends. Some regard that as being homeless under the Statistics New Zealand definition, much to my own surprise.

I qualify because I shared accommodation . Having shared or short-term accommodation is not homeless. The descriptions shared and short-term accommodation quite adequate to the task.

People living in temporary accommodation including with friends are not homeless. Their situation is unsatisfactory but describing it does not justify butchering the English language by conflating their inconveniences with the few hundred people who live rough each night.

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Source: New Zealand Parliament – Homelessness in New Zealand.

Those that conflate having a roof over your head tonight with living rough take advantage of the great sympathy people have for those living rough for people in far less dire situations.

#MiltonFriedman v. @berniesanders

#MorganFoundation wants frontal attack on NIMBYs

Morgan Foundation wants the National party-led government to take on NIMBYs not only with more high-rises and urban intensification but congestion charges too!  There is only so much courage you can expect in one term of government. Relaxing the Auckland urban limit, which will hopefully cause housing prices to stop rising in Auckland was not enough.

No softly softly catchy monkey here. No concept of winning the battles you can win.

The effects of cutting the Australian company tax by one percentage point

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Source: The incidence of company tax in Australia | The Treasury.

Alfred Marshall says it all on evidence-based policy

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Gap in GDP per Australian, Canadian, French, German, Japanese, New Zealander and British hour worked with the USA

This data tells more of a story than I expected. Firstly, New Zealand has not been catching up with the USA. Japan stopped catching up with the USA in 1990. Canada has been drifting away from the USA for a good 30 years now in labour productivity.image

Data extracted on 28 May 2016 05:15 UTC (GMT) from OECD.Stat from OECD Compendium of Productivity Indicators 2016 – en – OECD.

Australia has not been catching up with the USA much at all since 1970. It has maintained a pretty consistent gap with New Zealand despite all the talk of a resource boom in the Australia; you cannot spot it in this date are here.

Germany and France caught up pretty much with the USA by 1990. Oddly, Eurosclerosis applied from then on terms of growth in income per capita.

European labour productivity data is hard to assess because their high taxes lead to a smaller services sector where the services can be do-it-yourself. This pumps up European labour productivity because of smaller sectors with low productivity growth.

@PikettyLeMonde pension fund socialism has finished taking over #capitalism #Piketty

Peter Drucker first pointed out in the 70s that the retirement savings of ordinary workers will end up opening the majority of public listed companies. That day has come much to the disappointment of the Leftover Left ranging from Thomas Piketty to Max Rashbrooke.image 

Source: CONVERSABLE ECONOMIST: US Corporate Stock: The Transition in Who Owns It.

Any call for higher taxes on investment incomes and capital and even tax havens is an attack on the retirement savings of ordinary workers.

Tax bracket creep in Australia

Money makes people right-wing and inegalitarian

Figure 1. Evidence on switchers: The percentage of people who switched right (conservative), and previously did not vote conservative, after a lottery win

Source: Money makes people right-wing and inegalitarian | VOX, CEPR’s Policy Portal.

The sharemarket speaks: The Value of Offshore Secrets – Evidence from the #PanamaPapers

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Where are the world’s #taxhavens?

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Don’t let Mal and Bill get their grubby paws on your Super boy Bill well they got that smallest of the bill coming up your super

@TheAusInstitute has not heard of Ireland’s 12.5% company tax and European tax harmonisation

The Australia Institute has been running the line that cutting the Australian company tax rate just means more tax revenue for offshore tax departments. They will tax the larger after-tax Australian dividends in the home country of the foreign investor if Australia were to cut its company tax rate.

image

Source: David Richardson, Company tax cuts: An Australian gift to the US Internal Revenue Service How a cut to the Australian company tax rate would result in a windfall for the United States Treasury. Australia Institute (May 2015).

The Australia Institute obviously has not picked up on the relentless bullying that Ireland was subject to by the rest of the European Union over its 12.5% company tax.

The Irish company tax rate of 12.5% was initially on export profits. To finesse European Union member state complaints about that 12.5% company tax rate on discrimination grounds, the Irish government extended that low rate to all companies in 1995.

I am yet to see  a minister of finance welcoming a company tax cut in a competing jurisdiction, rubbing his hands in anticipation of greater tax revenues on the foreign profits of companies headquartered in his country.

If there is no race to the bottom in company tax rates, you must wonder why there is substantial efforts within the European Union on tax harmonisation regarding company tax?

France and Germany are pushing plans to introduce a minimum corporation tax rate across the continent, it was reported today, in a move that could result in higher taxes on British companies.

European officials will debate plans to set a EU-wide floor on corporation tax in order to crack down on tax havens such as Ireland and Luxembourg, it emerged.

If there is an ounce of sense in what the Australia Institute said about foreign taxmen benefiting from low company taxes in Australia, high corporate tax rate countries such as Germany, France and the USA should welcome low company tax rates in destination countries for foreign investment originating in those countries but they do not. Rather than seek tax harmonisation, high tax country should welcome low company taxes in competing investment destinations but they do not.

About $2 trillion in profits is held offshore by American businesses because they do not pay company tax in the USA until they actually repatriate the profits to the USA. This is common. You wonder what the purpose of tax havens is if a company tax rate cut in Australia is so easily captured by the IRS?

Studies of the company tax in the USA suggest that a cut in that company tax would lead to large inflows of foreign investment into the USA boosting wages significantly.

How big are @JohnKeyPM’s $3 billion in tax cuts & threshold changes in 2017 going to be?

On morning radio on Monday, Prime Minister John Key said "We are not ruling that out for 2017 or campaigning on it for a fourth term in 2017, but having a bigger one, to be blunt, than $1 billion." Asked how much was needed to deliver meaningful tax cuts, he said: "$3 billion, I reckon."

The table below uses the Treasury scoring of how much tax cuts can be delivered through $3 billion if they include changes in the income tax thresholds as well. That scoring is static. That is, no behavioural changes are assumed as the result of the tax cuts on labour supply, investment or entrepreneurship.

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Source: computed from Revenue Effect of Changes to Key Tax Rates, Bases & Thresholds for 2015/16 — The Treasury – New Zealand.

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