Prosper Australia welcomes the opportunity to contribute to the 2018- 2019 Victorian budget. This submission focuses on the role of State Land Tax (SLT) in the design of an effective policy response to the housing affordability crisis. Prosper welcomes the Victorian...
By Akhil Patel It has become popular to suggest a Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a solution to growing inequity. But in its current form UBI will be a total failure. Not because the idea is a bad one, but because it ignores the law of economic rent. The idea of a UBI...
Like most 30 somethings with a substantial HECS debt and an addiction to avocado on toast, I am an aspiring first home buyer. I’d love to buy the home I currently rent: a daggy 1960’s ‘six-pack’ flat on a main road in Footscray. It’s currently valued around $360,000....
3 January 2018 International Co-operation and Tax Administration Division OECD/CTPA Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, Circumvention of Common Reporting Standards (CRS) May I respectfully suggest that the OECD has set itself an impossible task in...
The Productivity Commission’s recent five year review, “Shifting the Dial”, brings the welcome recommendation of a shift from stamp duties to a broad-based land tax. Stamp duty is a dud tax from the economist’s point of view; it doesn’t achieve an obvious...
Taxes on wages in Australia were fairly minimal until WWII, since which time they’ve been ratcheted up significantly. Federal taxes before the war consisted mainly of customs and excise charges and the federal land tax, introduced in 1910. The States and...
Amid recent GST distribution cuts of $400m p.a. (about 12% of revenue) and a flagging property market, the Northern Territory Government is facing severe fiscal challenges. The NT is the most stamp duty reliant government in the federation, and has been hard hit an...
In his paper American Government Finance in the Long Run: 1790 to 1990 (Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol 14, Number 1) John Joseph Wallis demonstrates that US government finance experienced three separate phases:- Asset Finance Phase 1790 to 1842, where...
by Jesse Hermans In an AFR op-ed this week , the Federal Member for Banks, David Coleman asks, “What Australian really wants lower house prices?” Australian’s are obsessed with housing, he writes. Everyone is piling into bricks and mortar. The value of property is...
All the great social philosophers have held that land must be rented, not sold, if communities aren’t to implode. One of them put it into a formula, saying that if we were to capture the social surplus, then labour and profits will receive their full and...