There’s been more great tax argy-bargy in the papers this week. Ross Gittins kicked it off in the Sydney Morning Herald
yesterday with his “no-bulldust case for cutting top tax rate” – with
suggestions like aligning the corporate, personal and capital gains tax
rates, eliminating negative gearing and removing work related tax
deduction. He referred extensively to ANZ chief economist Saul Eslake’s
tax paper presented to the Royal Society of Tasmania last week and
available on the Tasmanian Timeswebsite.

Tim Colebatch weighs in in The Age
today with a piece asking if tax cuts are what Australia needs most.
“Is our economic future so secure that we can pay ourselves a bigger
dividend from our recent growth, rather than invest it in improving our
prospects?”

Then there’s Josh Gordon‘s item, also in The Age,
claiming that “more than $30 billion a year is being leached out of the
revenue system by a tangle of Federal Government tax loopholes,
exemptions and concessions.”

All this has inspired an email to Crikey from Democrats tax spokesman, Andrew Murray. He writes:

As you know I and the Dems have been long campaigners for
structural tax reform (ie a real plan). That includes broadening the
base, or getting rid of tax concessions for the wealthy. (Yes
Treasurer, that does mean the wealthy will pay more tax than the
average 24% or so the wealthy are currently estimated to pay on their
income, unless you make other adjustments for them).

The
Democrats say there are five parts to a structural income tax reform
plan: raising the tax-free threshold significantly; indexing the rates;
broadening the base; reforming the tax-welfare intersects; and only
after that is done should the top tax threshold be addressed.

We
have also long railed against the very negative effects of our
excessively liberal negative gearing regime, and opposed the capital
gains discount. Which brings me full circle to Eslake, Gordon and
Colebatch. I went back and had a look at what I said in 1999 when
reviewing the capital gains tax cut proposal.

If you look at
that Minority Report six years ago, and the debates on the Bill, and
also see my and our long campaign against the twin problems of our
capital gains regime and negative gearing, if all these problems were
so obvious to me and us, why were they not obvious to the Coalition and
Labor?

Yesterday in Question Time they again refused to grasp the nettle and the challenge.

Costing Mr Turnbull’s ideas is all very well, but what the country needs is that white paper.

No plan is a bad plan.