Prosper Australia

Arab cities lack even the basic facilities we take for granted in the West. The royals live alongside. Their giant palaces nestle in irrigated manicured gardens surrounded by high walls and efficient security.

The reform challenge for our beloved country is to discard the taxes that weigh on effort and creativity, and to put them instead on economic rents, like land and mining.

A soundly-based Land Value Tax to reduce the taxes on labor and enterprise would restore the rewards to effort and propel the economy forward like a rocket.

photo credit: Travis S. The US housing market is a living hell.  Homeowners are being boiled alive. The price of land was bid up to staggering multiples of incomes, until it no longer made sense to buy a house. And then the trend turned, hard and fast. One in five US mortgages is ‘underwater’: the [...]

Melbourne City Council is selling lanes to developers, according to The Age today. It makes a pretty penny, too, having pocketed $1.2 million from the sale of part of three lanes in the last 12 months alone. The article sparked an intense debate on the newspaper’s blog.  Sales are energetically supported by citizens disgusted by [...]

photo credit: Lucia. . . A secret map of Melbourne’s transport plans for the next 30 years was published in The Age yesterday. Doubts were raised about its authenticity (weakly, unconvincingly) by the Victorian government. Average householders may shrug, but this is a treasure map for property pirates speculators. “Here be Gold, mateys! Arrgh!” Knowing [...]

photo credit: RR and Camera At the peak of his career Elvis Presley was so popular audiences would sit and clap at the end of the night, demanding encore after encore.  They couldn’t get enough.  The only way to end the demands and disperse the crowd was for him to leave and to announce: “Mr [...]

i photo credit: Susanica The credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s overnight reaffirmed Australia’s AAA rating. Donald Horne’s 1964 label ‘The Lucky Country’ was ironic, yet fits our unique position as the western world endures its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930’s. S&P says the risks to Australia include its dependence [...]

    photo credit: Schaffner Sometimes the ignorance of experts makes my blood boil.  Why can’t they do the arithmetic, the sums plainly before them? The Victorian Transport Plan will cost $38 billion and produce benefits of $180 billion, according to a state-commissioned report by Ernst and Young.  If these numbers are right, the Plan [...]

photo credit: funadium Yesterday’s ABS release of a 14.8% fall in seasonally adjusted building approvals shows that property insiders understand that a crash is coming. If not them, then the banks curtailing credit for housing is another signal that housing is over-priced and well overdue for a major correction. Last weekend’s housing auction figures showed [...]