John Humphreys & the 30/30
There’s been a bit of to and fro over the LDP’s 30/30 policy at Catallaxy, Skepticlawyer and Club Troppo. Ken Parish has now written the mother of all critiques over at Troppo. I think he’s underestimated some of the research that John put into developing the policy, but not being John, I don’t have all that info at my fingertips. Moral of the story: get over there and discuss the policy, people – what do you make of Ken’s arguments?
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I don’t accept a number of Ken Parish’s key criticisms but it is worth noting that the policy is under review. It’s now fairly old and circumstances have changed.
Mark Hill and Tim Quilty have been doing the LDP proud.
By and large it’s turned into quite a productive chat, actually.
Does anyone else find the automatically generated ‘possibly related posts’ a hilarious choice?
Perhaps he should talk to Nicholas.
Libertarians are getting a mention over at John Quiggins blog also:-
http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2008/06/15/libertarians-and-global-warming/
Quiggin’s blog is not worth the trouble. It’s just smug straw arguments about what libertarians supposedly believe. Worse than Ken Parish assuming he knows what the LDP is about.
I had a long winded effort there. If they want to keep their prejudices they will ignore it or bring up strawmen.
I wouldn’t call it the mother of all critiques just because it is long winded.
Its lacking in substance, its full of emotive and subjective discussion about the poor, inequality and who is better off and worse off.
Which part of 30/30 is under review? The principle of NIT and flat tax, or the numbers?
Sinclair — there has been some discussion that we need to be more radical in our tax policy. This is especially true in light of our policy of competitive federalism & decentralisation… which would mean the federal government has less policy responsibility.
Ultimately, I would like us to have a policy that works towards zero income/company tax in the medium term.
If you have ideas/suggestions or just want to chat about the options — please e-mail me.
Index the tax free threshhold such that total federal revenue per capita (including GST) is frozen in real terms. It works to elliminate income tax. It makes the tax system more progressive. It does not involve any spending cuts. It imposes budget discipline.
John – sent you a longish email – hope the address is unchanged.
Terje, when you say ‘index’ I assume you mean slowly increase the threshold over time until it covers all income levels? What do you propose to do to the rest of the progressive tax levels above the threshold whilst this indexing process is underway? ie, do you move them up proportionally too or is it only the threshold level that moves? Either way wouldn’t there be the situation at some point in the future where the entire budget would be funded by a tiny group of rich people? I guess that’s probably how the income tax started though, at least I’m pretty sure it started that way in the US.
Also any tax scheme that we propose must go hand in hand with spending cuts IMO. I don’t really like the idea of endorsing a system that’s still going to bring in the same amount of revenue. From a theoretical perspective, enforcing a frozen budget (as opposed to an ever reducing one) would almost make one wish for monetary inflation to to have the effect over time of a reduction in the size of government (which is the real goal) – and wanting inflation is not very ‘Austrian’ or very sensible.
Agree about Quiggin. The commentators fall back on “ask PrQ” if they don’t know what they are talking about to prove you wrong.
Someone at Quiggin’s complained about capitalism because JD Rockerfeller “put his opponents out of business at gunpoint”. I drew their attention to some work of Jared Diamond that showed Standard Oil’s success was for the benefit of mankind.