Month: August 2012

Disruption

Jacques ChesterLeave a comment

Hello all, your friendly Ozblogistan Tyrant here.

This weekend I will be performing one of the biggest changes made to Ozblogistan in several years.

I am moving the site from its current home to a new one.

The new service is a company specialising in WordPress hosting. They will be taking responsibility for all the scut-work of making the site go.

Once the move is finalised, I expect that Ozblogistan will be snappier than it is now. I also won’t have to worry about fixing security problems, doing backups, finding out why plugin X has stopped working, working out why the site has suddenly died and so on. These will now be responsibilities I can delegate to the providers.

This has been in the works for some time. While I was a student I could afford the time it takes to keep Ozblogistan working relatively smoothly. As a professional I no longer have that time. So it makes sense to hire other professionals to do it for me.

The security problem we had a few weeks ago (and which is still causing false positives) was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Moving providers is never pretty. Things are going to break this weekend. And various things will probably appear broken into the new week. It’s all for the good. Ozblogistan will shine out ever brighter.

Update Saturday 2:17PM WST: Failure. I will probably have to try again on Monday night. I’ve re-enabled comments.

How feasible is a guaranteed minimum income (crosspost from CT)

John Quiggin19 Comments

We were talking at CT not long ago about universal basic income policy, and there were a variety of opinions about the desirability, political sustainability and implications of such a policy. But, before arguing about those issues, it’s useful to consider whether a basic income is feasible at all and, if so, what kinds of tax policies, and adjustments to other welfare policies, would be required to support it. I’ve considered the relatively easy case of a guaranteed minimum income, rather than a universal basic income paid to everyone, as advocated by Philippe von Parijs and others.

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Spoke too soon

John Quiggin22 Comments

Having just given a relatively optimistic view of US policy on climate change, I’ve seen a string of signals that the Obama Administration is set to sell out on this vital issue, presumably on the advice of the same political experts who persuaded him to ignore the unemployment problem for most of his first term in office. The bad news

* An Obama ad attacking Romney for saying (correctly) in 2003, that dirty coal-fired power plants kill people.

* Partial approval of the Keystone pipeline

and, worst of all, the apparent abandonment of the 2 degree target announced by U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern

The radio is deplorable, but not significant in the greater scheme of things. Whatever the ad might say, the EPA regulations introduced under Obama are closing down lots of the worst coal-fired power stations. As regards the other two points, the best we can say is that nothing is locked in yet. Still, it’s more depressing stuff from someone who once promised Hope.

Must try harder, Part 2

John Quiggin32 Comments

According to standard economic theory, the least distorting of all taxes is a land tax. This point can be pushed too far – for example, most land is improved to some extent, and that may be capitalized into land values. Nevertheless, given the financial difficulties of state governments, their failure to make use of this revenue source is an indictment, especially since they impose much more distortionary taxes on transactions involving land, such as transfer duties. All states exempt owner-occupied homes and primary producers from land tax, while taxing land sales and purchases across the board. The effect is to benefit existing landowners (except owners of rental housing) at the expense of new home-buyers and tenants.

It appears to be beyond the realm of political possibility to change this, but a government facing a supposed financial crisis, and looking for luxury items to cut, could start with land tax exemptions. As you might expect, Queensland has both a high threshold ($600 000) and a low rate (1 per cent increasing gradually).

None of the usual justifications for Queensland’s low tax effort apply here. Land tax exemptions do nothing to attract business to Queensland. They are a straightforward handout to landowners, mostly wealthy households with investment properties.

Unsurprisingly, this handout attracts zero critical attention from the Commission of Audit which states “Queensland has historically maintained a competitive taxation environment compared to other states.” This is entirely wrong as it applies to land tax. Since land is immobile, there is nothing competitive about low rates of land tax.

US climate change policy: not a hopeless case

John Quiggin24 Comments

I’ve let my Monthly subscription lapse (will resubscribe as soon as I get a moment), so I can’t read the latest piece by Robert Manne, only the summary by John van Tiggelen, but the basic argument is simple, and widely shared. Climate change policy in the US has gone nowhere thanks to the intransigent opposition of the Republicans. I have a couple of comments

First, the policy situation isn’t nearly as bad as might be supposed, given the failure of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, and the absence of any real push from the Administration. The fact is, that, in the current US situation, achieving coherent outcomes from legislation is just about impossible. Increasingly, the Obama Administration relies on executive and regulatory actions. In the case of climate change, the important ones are fuel economy standards for cars (CAFE), and EPA regulation of CO2 emissions and other pollution from power stations. Obama has pushed through rules requiring a near doubling of fuel efficiency by 2025. The EPA regulations effectively make new coal-fired power stations uneconomic and require the shutdown of many old stations previously exempted from the Clean Air Act. Reliance on executive action has all sorts of problems, and regulation is an inefficient way of reducing emissions. Still, if Obama is re-elected, the US can expect to see continued reductions in emissions over the rest of the decade. It’s important to observe that, even with the current limited policies, US emissions have already peaked and begun to decline. If Obama wins, the EPA and CAFE regulations will be locked in, and there’s the potential to go further, particularly in the context of an agreement with China.

Second, while its unfortunate that climate change has been entangled in the general craziness of the modern Republican party, this process hasn’t been costless for the Repubs. Given the state of the economy, they ought to be looking forward to a whitewash in November. Instead, Romney is expected to lose, and any Repub Congressional majority will be narrow and fragile. That’s not specifically because of climate change, but a result of the entire political approach taken by the Repubs for the last 20 years, of which delusional claims about climate science are just one example. Whereas until the 1990s, there was a steady drift of disillusioned leftists/liberals (both intellectuals and ordinary voters) to the right, the process is now going in reverse.

Horses vs Nurses

John Quiggin42 Comments

Among the many cuts introduced by the LNP government (which promised, pre-election to improve services), some of the sharpest are in the area of hospitals. According to this report[1], Royal Brisbane&Womens and Metro North face cuts of $130 million a year between them, with much more to come elsewhere. But, according to the Premier, we are on the verge of the abyss, and everyone must make sacrifices.

Well, not quite everyone. Despite the emergency situation, Campbell Newman has managed to find $110 million to upgrade the racing industry statewide, including more than $30 million for the Gold Coast turf club, to build “a slick new bar and upgraded foyer and lobby entry”. I’m sure that if RBWH had an extra $33 million to spend, they could find a better use for it than a slick new bar and foyer.

(Hat tip @BigBadWolf1950 on Twitter)

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Must try harder

John Quiggin39 Comments

The most important single point in the Queensland Commission of Audit report (not a new one) is that Queensland is attempting to deliver the same services as the other states with a lower “tax effort”. To see what this means, let’s look at payroll tax which is both the biggest and (at least in principle, and with the exception of land tax) the least distorting tax available to state governments. The states were given the right to collect payroll tax back in the 1970s, in the hope that it would provide them with a tax base growing in line with the economy, and free them from dependence on the Commonwealth. It was never going to be enough, but the states made things worse by competing to provide exemptions, higher thresholds and so on, with the result that the tax collects less, and distorts more than it should. Unsurprisingly, Queensland has been the leader in this field. We have a payroll tax threshold of $1.0 million, about twice the level prevailing in other states, and a rate of 4.75 which is the lowest of any state. The LNP has promised a further increase in the threshold to $1.6 million.

The tax currently raises a bit under $4 billion, so raising the rate to 5 per cent would yield around $200 million a year. No one likes paying more tax, and a payroll tax is a tax on jobs[1], so raising the rate isn’t a step that should be taken lightly. Still, it seems clear that any job losses from a higher tax rate would be far less than those now under way. There are currently about 20 000 Queensland firms liable for payroll tax, and the average bill would increase by $10 000 a year. Perhaps some firms might respond by laying off an employee or not filling a vacancy, but surely most would not (and hardly any would lay off more than one. Cutting the threshold to $800 000, still much more generous than other states, would also raise $200 million a year.

If Newman took his hyperbolic rhetoric about a debt crisis seriously, the least he could do is ask his own supporters in medium-sized and big business to share some of the burden of fixing the problem, while still getting a better deal than anywhere else in Australia. Disregarding this rhetoric, we ought to have a serious discussion of whether the benefits of payroll tax concessions are sufficient to justify the lower standard of health, education, police services and so on now being imposed upon us.

fn1. The theory of tax incidence shows that, in equilibrium, a payroll tax is the same as a consumption tax, since both fall, in the end, on labour income. I’ve never been sure how much weight I should place on this result.