Nick's Collingwood Bulletin Board Forum Index
 The RulesThe Rules FAQFAQ
   MemberlistMemberlist   UsergroupsUsergroups   CalendarCalendar   SearchSearch 
Log inLog in RegisterRegister
 
Abbott's Economy: Wages Down, Now Investment and Growth Down

Users browsing this topic:0 Registered, 0 Hidden and 0 Guests
Registered Users: None

Post new topic   Reply to topic    Nick's Collingwood Bulletin Board Forum Index -> Victoria Park Tavern
 
Goto page Previous  1, 2, 3, 4
View previous topic :: View next topic  
Author Message
stui magpie Gemini

Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.


Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto

PostPosted: Thu Mar 05, 2015 8:44 pm
Post subject: Reply with quote

^

Were either of those Gillards idea?

_________________
Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down.
Back to top  
View user's profile Send private message  
David Libra

I dare you to try


Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda

PostPosted: Thu Mar 05, 2015 8:47 pm
Post subject: Reply with quote

Does it matter? The point is, her government successfully pushed those (mild) reforms through, and those taxes would still be here today if it hadn't been for the current lot in power.
_________________
All watched over by machines of loving grace
Back to top  
View user's profile Send private message Send e-mail MSN Messenger  
Tannin Capricorn

Can't remember


Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania

PostPosted: Thu Mar 05, 2015 9:21 pm
Post subject: Reply with quote

stui magpie wrote:
She had 3 years and a compliant senate


Bullshit. Two different ways.

First, her Senate was not "compliant". In case you hadn't noticed yet, the Greens and Labor are very, very different. Far more different than the Liberals and Nationals are, for example. Everything had to be negoiated.

Second, and far more important, she was in a minority in the House. Her lack of a Senate majority was the least of her worries, she had the House to worry about - which is far more dangerous - and there she had to negotiate every single thing with the Greens and with two different independents, both of them right-wingers from the National Party and with another different independent with quite unclassifiable views . She did an amazing job of that, absolutely brilliant.

Compare with Abbott's piss-easy task: huge majority in the House (where it really matters - one single vote in the House can break a government and/or force an election without the option; the Senate can only annoy a Prime Minister, it can never destroy his very office the way the House can), and the Senate controlled by right-wingers from his own side of politics. Independents yes, but vastly easier to deal with fellow right-wingers than it would be to be in Gillard's position where she had to cross the left-right divide every single time.

Despite having a task a good three pay grades easier, Abbott has failed miserably. What a dud.

_________________
�Let's eat Grandma.� Commas save lives!
Back to top  
View user's profile Send private message  
stui magpie Gemini

Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.


Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto

PostPosted: Thu Mar 05, 2015 10:01 pm
Post subject: Reply with quote

Pretty sure that Whitlam would disagree about the house of reps being more important than the senate.

And you bring Abbott into because you think I care? Seriously can't you lefties ever have a political discussion without doing the "ours might suck but yours sucks worse" routine?

Abbott sucks. No argument. He's had 18 months in the chair as opposed to Gillards 3 years. So in the fullness of time he might suck way more than her, or not.

I actually had high hopes for Gillard, but she was a glove puppet of a PM and I find it ironic when she gets lauded for her achievements when she was an out and out dud. memories of Joan Kirner.

_________________
Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down.
Back to top  
View user's profile Send private message  
Tannin Capricorn

Can't remember


Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania

PostPosted: Thu Mar 05, 2015 10:29 pm
Post subject: Reply with quote

stui magpie wrote:
Pretty sure that Whitlam would disagree about the house of reps being more important than the senate.


Rubbish. Whitlam's position was that the Member with the confidence of the House is Prime Minister. And everybody agrees with that. It was naked, dishonest opportunism on the part of the Liberal Party of the day and everybody knows that too. It rocked Australia and the bitterness at the dirty dealing remains alive to this day. In the 40 years since, no-one, repeat no-one, has attempted to pull the same dirty trick despite the fact that the various governments have almost never had a Senate majority. (Howard did for a short while only; I can't remember the last government Senate majority before that.)

But even if that were not true, you are still talking horseshit because it takes months of sustained and repeated action by the Senate to block supply, and even if it was blocked, that does not cause the automatic fall of the government (although it certainly makes life difficult). Whitlam's fall was caused by partisan action by an alcoholic Governor General who was roundly condemned by all for his gross breech of his duty to act fairly and without personal prejudice. The coincidence of blocked supply and a bent Governor General is very unlikely to occur again, and if it did it would take several months to bring down a government.

Contrast all that with the power of the House: it takes the House 10 minutes to pass a vote of no confidence, and that is the end of the matter.

_________________
�Let's eat Grandma.� Commas save lives!
Back to top  
View user's profile Send private message  
Tannin Capricorn

Can't remember


Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania

PostPosted: Thu Mar 05, 2015 10:32 pm
Post subject: Reply with quote

stui magpie wrote:
And you bring Abbott into because you think I care? Seriously can't you lefties ever have a political discussion without doing the "ours might suck but yours sucks worse" routine?


Nonsense. And I didn't. That was in fact the topic in the first place: the relative contributions of the various recent governments to our revenue shortfall. As you'd see for yourself if you bothered reading the post you quoted a tiny part of to start this side-issue.

Here, I'll save you the trouble and quote it myself, with the relevant part bolded:

Tannin wrote:
Mugwump wrote:
^ I can buy some of that. tannin, by your analysis smacks of the idea that the economy is entirely an artifact of government.


That was certainly not my intention. I regard that as a given. Nevertheless, governments can make things worse (as Howard and Costello did and as Abbott and Hockey are doing now) or with decent luck less worse (as Rudd & Swan did with the GFC, as Hawke and Keating did in their day, and as Fraser did with the second oil shock).

Mugwump wrote:
In reality the forces of international trade and mobile capital are probably more influential than anything Howard and Costello did. How they might have managed the pace of mining growth while China was roaring is rather obscure, to me.


It's not rocket science. They should have required mining companies to pay the same tax as all other companies pay - i.e., 30% rather than the 15% they actually get away with. That alone would have winnowed out many of the less sustainable projects. Additionally, they should have looked very hard at our absurdly low royalties on the miners raw materials - few other countries are so determined to give stuff away the way that we are.

Would that have stopped the changes in commodity prices? Of course not, but it would have provided a moderating influence on supply, and Australia is a big enough global player in several commodity markets for that to have a real effect.

Our current revenue shortfalls are not caused by lack of mining receipts. They are caused by three main factors:

  • (1) the unsustainable tax cuts brought in by Howard and Costello (and to a much lesser extent, Rudd).

  • (2) the massive erosion of the tax base by successive governments, Howard and Costello in particular but also Hawke and Keating before them and now Abbott as well. In aggregate, these have blown our revenue right out of the water. Key policies which have led to this slow-motion trainwreck include negative gearing; huge super concessions which massively favour the rich and cost more than the pensions they were ostensibly designed to save on; the ongoing disgrace of discretional family trusts tax evasion; the 50% discount for unearned income via capital gain; and dividend imputation. (I'm not suggesting that all of these are bad: I can see value in dividend imputation, for example, but the really expensive ones like the triple-dip super lurk are a transparent scam to transfer responsibility for paying tax from the rich to the ordinary battler, and they have done exactly that.)

  • (3) Failure to adjust tax rules for the new global marketplace. We lose truly massive amounts of GST because we let companies like Google and Adobe (among many others) artificially structure transactions such that a purely local business item - an ad to sell a used car, let's say - between an Australian buyer and an Australian seller for an Australian product is somehow deemed to have taken place in Singapore or Taxhavenstein. GST directly impacts the state governments, but it's the feds who have to make up the shortfall. (Or else let essential services go to the wall, which is what they mostly do.) We have also utterly failed to deal with the epidemic of transparent cheating by the likes of Google, Apple, Ikea, and most of the others via ever more complicated transfer pricing schemes.


Most of these train-wreck policies have been in place for years, some of them go right back to Keating and most of the damage was done by Howard and Costello with only a tiny, tiny bit of repair since then thanks to Swan and Gillard - much of that immediately reverted by Abbott and Hockey.

So why are we hurting only now? If these things were so bad, wouldn't they have impacted us years ago? There are two reasons. First, some of them take a long time to start doing damage. The super lurks, for example, cost bugger-all in the first year. They only started to hammer revenue as the tax-free funds built up and up. Secondly, the huge once-in-a-century windfall of the commodities boom provided enough short-term income to disguise the problems for a whole decade. We didn't miss the fortune we threw away because we had another fortune coming in - but that second fortune did not and could not last. Now we are in the shit: the one-off inheritance money is already spent, and we are suddenly realising that it was a big mistake to give up our steady job.

_________________
�Let's eat Grandma.� Commas save lives!
Back to top  
View user's profile Send private message  
3.14159 Taurus



Joined: 12 Sep 2009


PostPosted: Thu Mar 05, 2015 11:07 pm
Post subject: Reply with quote

stui magpie wrote:
Pretty sure that Whitlam would disagree about the house of reps being more important than the senate.


It was a member of the house of the Reps who repeatedly played the fear card and then lent on the arm of an alcoholic Anglophile Governor General that brought down Gough Whitlam's government!
The senate were just the chorus line!
Back to top  
View user's profile Send private message  
Mugwump 



Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne

PostPosted: Thu Mar 05, 2015 11:25 pm
Post subject: Reply with quote

pietillidie wrote:
If it were a real science you wouldn't accept that degree of error or efforts to force outcomes, and you certainly wouldn't accept regular misvaluations which accord with no known expectation. For goodness' sake, you've just lived through an horrific misvaluation.

No, I didn't say more unskilled workers will expand the need for more unskilled workers, I said under conditions of growth, productivity, and mobility, those unskilled workers will easily be absorbed. That is plainly orthodox and a very different claim from some trivial equilibrium theory. Please, show me an example on earth where there is a steady-state economy in which population growth leads to unemployment.


It's not a real science, of course, but things do respond to supply and demand, even at the macro level. Try printing money and let me know if it doesn't. I should add, to be correct, that importing low-skill labour will tend to either depress wages or raise unemployment.

"Under conditions of growth, productivity and mobility unskilled labour will be absorbed" is comparable to saying that with the right level of rainfall, central Australia might rival the Amazon. The point is that unskilled labour, by definition, does not tend to add greatly to productivity and growth because in a steady state economy it will struggle to find jobs, unless wage rates fall so that the average joe and Jill can suddenly afford a cleaner/lawn mower/driver, etc. Growth and productivity come from innovation and efficiency and the addition of skills, not from adding low-skill labour to a slow-growing economy which is displacing these types of jobs through technology and imports. Given your persistent and right advocacy of education (something which we do share, even if we might go a different way about it) i think you probably secretly believe that too.

You want countries that demonstrate it ? I'd argue that the pressure on wages and the rising share of national income accruing to capital ever since the 1970s has much to do with mass migration since the 1960s right across Western countries. The correlation shows fairly well. You may argue it's that wicked Reagan and Thatcher and all, but one thing we owe Marx is an understanding that politics is the surface, and the large economic forces underneath make certain political movements possible.

Am I opposed to migration ? Hell no. In conditions of labour shortage it makes good sense, skilled migration is clearly beneficial, and it has other benefits in terms of making societies more interesting. And actually, a little competitive pressure on the labour force at all levels is no bad thing as a spur to efficiency. But it's wise to look at it through a proper economic lens so that you have weighed the costs with the benefits. The big winners from low-skilled migration over the last 60 years have largely been the wealthy and capital. It probably explains much of Piketty's famous formula.

_________________
Two more flags before I die!


Last edited by Mugwump on Thu Mar 05, 2015 11:35 pm; edited 1 time in total
Back to top  
View user's profile Send private message  
HAL 

Please don't shout at me - I can't help it.


Joined: 17 Mar 2003


PostPosted: Thu Mar 05, 2015 11:27 pm
Post subject: Reply with quote

7
Back to top  
View user's profile Send private message Visit poster's website  
pietillidie 



Joined: 07 Jan 2005


PostPosted: Fri Mar 06, 2015 12:16 am
Post subject: Reply with quote

Mugwump wrote:
pietillidie wrote:
If it were a real science you wouldn't accept that degree of error or efforts to force outcomes, and you certainly wouldn't accept regular misvaluations which accord with no known expectation. For goodness' sake, you've just lived through an horrific misvaluation.

No, I didn't say more unskilled workers will expand the need for more unskilled workers, I said under conditions of growth, productivity, and mobility, those unskilled workers will easily be absorbed. That is plainly orthodox and a very different claim from some trivial equilibrium theory. Please, show me an example on earth where there is a steady-state economy in which population growth leads to unemployment.


It's not a real science, of course, but things do respond to supply and demand, even at the macro level. Try printing money and let me know if it doesn't. I should add, to be correct, that importing low-skill labour will tend to either depress wages or raise unemployment.

"Under conditions of growth, productivity and mobility unskilled labour will be absorbed" is comparable to saying that with the right level of rainfall, central Australia might rival the Amazon. The point is that unskilled labour, by definition, does not tend to add greatly to productivity and growth because in a steady state economy it will struggle to find jobs, unless wage rates fall so that the average joe and Jill can suddenly afford a cleaner/lawn mower/driver, etc. Growth and productivity come from innovation and efficiency and the addition of skills, not from adding low-skill labour to a slow-growing economy which is displacing these types of jobs through technology and imports. Given your persistent and right advocacy of education (something which we do share, even if we might go a different way about it) i think you probably secretly believe that too.

You want countries that demonstrate it ? I'd argue that the pressure on wages and the rising share of national income accruing to capital ever sonce the 1970s has much to do with mass migration since the 1960s right across Western countries. The correlation shows fairly well. You'll probably argue it's that wicked Regagan and Thatcher and all, but one thing we owe Marx is an understanding that politics is the surface, amd the large economic forces underneath make certain political movements possible.

Am I opposed to migration ? Hell no. In conditions of labour shortage it makes good sense, skilled migration is clearly beneficial, and it has other benefits in terms of making societies more interesting. And actually, a little competitive pressure on the labour force at all levels is no bad thing as a spur to efficiency. But it's wise to look at it through a proper economic lens so that you have weighed the costs with the benefits. The big winners from low-skilled migration over the last 60 years have largely been the wealthy and capital. It probably explains much of Piketty's famous formula.

You're just defending silly cliches about economics. The point is not that low-skilled labour adds greatly to productivity, but that returns to innovation over time exceed the initial costs of immigration.

Mugwump wrote:
The point is that unskilled labour, by definition, does not tend to add greatly to productivity and growth because in a steady state economy it will struggle to find jobs, unless wage rates fall so that the average joe and Jill can suddenly afford a cleaner/lawn mower/driver, etc.

"A steady state economy" was a sarcastic phrase I used to refer to your bizarre static economy, alluding to the old "steady state theory" of the universe; i.e., something which doesn't actually exist! There is no steady state because returns to capital are mercifully moving upwards and all sorts of things are in flux, frequently rendering supply-and-demand mechanics useless because you have no idea half the time what scale of phenomenon you're looking at.

Do you think that surplus evaporates into the ether? When new workers move into the productivity pipeline at the lower-end of the wage table, someone else is moving towards the higher end due to formal and informal education, and training into higher-productivity technology and methods of production.

Even worse for your claim, immigration has been shown repeatedly to be cost-neutral because the children of immigrants become higher-educated and pay more than enough tax to fund any initial costs, meaning you don't even believe the pop economics you're drawing from because you're playing a game with no time axis. And if something is cost-neutral—and as I say immigration is due to generational effects—it can't be producing devaluation anywhere in the economy, including through unemployment.

Conversely, by the way, you can test your claims by looking at countries with low immigration. Once again, there is no relationship, and certainly not one running in the opposite direction as your claim implies! This is why it is the greying of the economy which is the problem and not, as wishful thinking racists would have it, the blackening of the economy with immigrants which is the problem.

Moreover, have you seen the glut of new jobs at the low-end of the service sector? Do you think locals and second-generation immigrants really aspire to those jobs? Or, for that matter, do you think older locals with families are clamouring for them over university students whose birth at some point also added to the population in this closed system of yours?

Have you ever wondered how people movement anywhere is absorbed? This really silly "correlation" between declining economic growth, declining real wages, and increasing immigration you hope you see (i.e., need desperately to exist if you are to avoid challenging your world view), is actually declining returns to competitive advantage as first Germany, Japan, the Asian Tigers developed, and now China and India et al., have arisen. Ever heard of that thing called competition? It tends to pull down your returns, especially in a steady-state mental model of economics!

So, you're making no sense within the context of any known economic theory; instead, you're merely justifying the political economy of the status quo. Beyond that, part of your problem is once again needing to believe that nice folks in suits and bow ties must be right, when in fact the role of economists is not to be right but to manage, reconstruct and influence in return for high salaries and kind words of approval, hence the lack of accountable predictions and complete lack of resemblance to science.

Don't take that as a dismissal of the effort to understand economies or a dark commentary on humanity nature, it's just a comment on the actual, verifiable degree of understanding, the shifting goal posts of adaptive systems, and the extent of delusion we are all prone to, especially when we're not held accountable to concrete, exact, duplicable, empirical predictions, as with the unethical fools who invaded Iraq. (And if you think those same kind of folk don't inhabit the world of that other vague, accountability-free, easily-manipulated, special-pleading-prone, fear-inducing discipline known as economics, then they're not the only fools).

On a different matter, Picketty is about the long-run returns to capital exceeding the long-run returns to labour, and thus blowing out the wealth gap. This happens with or without immigration in his framework, though you would assume it accelerates under conditions of the financialisation of the economy, or the deferential taxation treatment of financial returns.

Edit: Expanded

_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm
Back to top  
View user's profile Send private message  
pietillidie 



Joined: 07 Jan 2005


PostPosted: Thu May 28, 2015 9:56 pm
Post subject: Reply with quote

Latest Economic Update

LOL, what strategic economic geniuses the man and his party are:

The Aged wrote:
Capital investment: Economic outlook slips "from bleak to recessionary"

Two weeks after the budget, Australia's economic outlook is bleak.

Mining as well as non-mining firms are planning to slash investment in the year ahead, cutting total investment spending by 21 per cent.

The Bureau of Statistics survey conducted in April and May is at odds with the budget forecast of a lift in non-mining investment.


The survey of chief financial officers shows mining firms expect to cut investment 34 per cent, manufacturing firms 24 per cent, and other firms 6.1 per cent.

"The rotation away from mining investment that seemed to be progressing over the past year is no longer advancing," said JP Morgan economist Stephen Walters. "Firms outside resources actually have downgraded their spending intentions after adjustment for the usual estimation errors. They are in no position to offset the even steeper fall by mining firms."

UBS economist George Tharenou told clients the outlook had switched "from bleak to recessionary".

"The capital expenditure cliff has arrived early," he said. "This data is so bad it would worry the Reserve Bank and raises the risk they will cut rates again ahead."

In Parliament, Treasurer Joe Hockey said the data was "disappointing" but the $20,000 instant asset write-off in the budget would make a difference for small businesses.

Victoria was partly to blame for its "calamitous" decision to knock back an offer of Commonwealth money for the East West Link, a project that "would have involved probably around $12 billion of private-sector capital expenditure". Queensland had turned its back on an offer of Commonwealth money for asset recycling.

Federal Labor spokesman Chris Bowen said the Treasurer had no one to blame but himself.

"Private capital expenditure is now down 11 per cent since the last election and the result is the worst since the global financial crisis," he said.

"Before the election, the Prime Minister promised 'an instantaneous adrenalin charge'. The Treasurer has been speaking about real momentum.

"The fact is that the Abbott government has presided over an underperforming economy, with growth downgraded and unemployment forecast to go higher in the recent budget."

The budget forecast economic growth of 2.75 per cent in the year ahead and 3.25 per cent in 2016-17. Mr Tharenou said his already-low forecasts of 2.2 per cent and 2.8 per cent now looked difficult to achieve.

The $54 billion Gorgon natural gas project off northwest Australia is expected to wind up this year, as is Gina Rinehart's $10 billion Roy Hill iron ore project. The $30 billion Wheatstone gas project in Western Australia is 60 per cent complete and the Curtis Island project near Gladstone in Queensland finishes next year.

"We had expected to see glimmers of hope for an economy struggling to adjust to sliding mining investment," said Mr Walters. "Instead, this news all but snuffs out the candle that has been burning at the end of the tunnel. Firms actually downgraded their spending intentions for the next financial year, as well as having slashed spending by twice as much as expected in the most recent quarter."

The bureau said actual capital spending fell 4.4 per cent in the first quarter of the year.

Mr Hockey told Parliament the reaction to his budget had been "fantastic".

"Small businesses have greater opportunities than ever before to access the global market and we're opening up new trade agreements with China, Korea and Japan and opening new agreements potentially with India, even as we speak. We've removed 50,000 pages of regulation, we're opening the doors to a fairer employee share scheme arrangement."

The Australian dollar slid to its lowest point since mid April on the news, slipping almost a cent to US76.75 cents. The futures market lifted the implied probability of a further rate cut this year from about 50 per cent to about 75 per cent.


http://www.theage.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/capital-investment-economic-outlook-slips-from-bleak-to-recessionary-20150528-ghbxls.html

_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm
Back to top  
View user's profile Send private message  
pietillidie 



Joined: 07 Jan 2005


PostPosted: Thu May 28, 2015 10:05 pm
Post subject: Reply with quote

[David, would that latest post is better in a new thread to free it from old debate??]
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm
Back to top  
View user's profile Send private message  
Dave The Man Scorpio



Joined: 01 Apr 2005
Location: Someville, Victoria, Australia

PostPosted: Thu May 28, 2015 10:07 pm
Post subject: Reply with quote

and Abbott wants to take as much money away from Welfare as he can Evil or Very Mad
_________________
I am Da Man
Back to top  
View user's profile Send private message Visit poster's website Warnings : 1 
Display posts from previous:   
Post new topic   Reply to topic    Nick's Collingwood Bulletin Board Forum Index -> Victoria Park Tavern All times are GMT + 11 Hours

Goto page Previous  1, 2, 3, 4
Page 4 of 4   

 
Jump to:  
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
You cannot attach files in this forum
You cannot download files in this forum



Privacy Policy

Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group