En Passant

Tax the rich and slash defence spending? The Liberals – ha ha ha. Labor – ha ha ha.

Australia is a low tax, low spending country. It’s time we started taxing the rich and the big business tax avoiders more, not less.

Given the widespread opposition to the 2014 Budget, the one percent have drawn an important lesson from that debacle – consult with the intended victims before launching attacks on poor people and workers. That is what the tax discussion paper is about. This Damascene conversion to talking to people begs the question – is a tax shit sandwich no longer a shit sandwich if it has consultation sprinkles on top? To ask the question is to answer it. The solution to the tax and budgetary dilemmas seems pretty clear. Tax the rich.

The one percent has captured not only Parliament and tax policy but tax administration now too. If that is true, the conclusion we might then reach is that the slaughter of Tax Office jobs currently under way is actually an attempt to administratively reduce taxes on capital by weakening the capacity of the ATO to tax the rich and powerful. Certainly that fits in neatly with the neoliberal cut taxes mantra of most politicians and the Treasury.

Over to you Commissioner of Taxation.

This may be the logic. Trickle down will increase revenue. The less tax we collect today from companies will magically produce more economic activity in the future. So having people in charge of the Australian Tax Office who ‘understand’ business and the realities they face is just what capital needs. To business, tax is just another cost and the lower the costs the higher the profit and the better off all of us will be

I believe in Santa Claus too.

As a tax man I have been thinking about Kevin Rudd’s idea to cut company tax in the Northern Territory to 20%.

Let me tell you a story about profit shifting, or transfer pricing as it is known in tax circles.

The Treasurer has today been telling us the Minerals Resource Rent Tax is working precisely as it should – not raising any tax. The hospital in Yes Minister worked perfectly too – it didn’t have any patients.

There are 2 important aspects of tax havens – low or no tax and bank secrecy. Henry is about less imposition by the state on the other hostile brothers and in keeping the accumulation process which creates surplus value ticking over and running smoothly it has to reduce its taxes on capital to do so. This is the logic of tax competition – and tax havens are its ultimate expression.

There is a thread that runs through the Henry Tax Review and the thinking of O’Dwyer and perhaps Bartos. It is that the state should take less out of the earnings of capital, earnings created by the labour of workers.

It may be this ‘tax capital less’ mantra is a response to a systemic problem, the tendency under capitalism of the rate of profit to fall. Cutting tax rates won’t address that threat to capitalism. Paradoxically it might increase it in the long term.

A return to the big strike levels of the late 60s and early 70s over wages, jobs and taxes can reverse the wealth shift to capital from labour and the increasing inequality arising from that shift.