Continuing on the multimedia theme, I did a video presentation for the TAFE section of the Australian Education Union a few weeks ago. I’ve always been keen on this as an alternative to air travel, and I got great help from the multimedia people in our faculty, but I’m still not sure how best to make use of this.
The videofile is here, but it’s 640 Mb, so I don’t suppose many people will want to download it. What’s the best way to distribute it so that lots of people can get access?
Update: Thanks to reader Peter Bayley a 58Mb version is now up on YouTube
John Quiggin 
Hi John,
I think you might want to post it on the SoundCloud so everyone could easily watch it.
Youtube or Vimeo
Hi John,
Youtube would be the best.
I’ve compressed it more efficiently for you so now it’s 58Mb not 640Mb.
[video src="http://www.peterbayley.com/John_Q_720.mp4" /]
Also a version with slightly louder audio
[video src="http://www.peterbayley.com/John_Q_720a.mp4" /]
@Peter Bayley
Thanks!
Hi John
Speaking as a sometime user of Microsoft, Linux and Apple products, YouTube wins hands down
for nearly universal access. I haven’t quite worked out whether it has some sort of captioning system for the visually challenged, though. (Presumably you are more than a talking head!)
@Lesley de Voil
The video has me talking, graphics and slides
@Lesley de Voil
Youtube does have captioning – but be aware that they’re automatic captioning will have mistakes. You can upload a transcript and Youtube will create the captions out of that.
That was a good discussion. I don’t think I learned anything other than Judith Sloan talks differently to how she writes. To test that I googled her and the first article in macrobusiness was slamming her for proposing the elimination of negative gearing on investment properties. Thinking about the negative gearing, which is really just a fancy term for how industry manages investments in capital (lease financed productive machinery) this mechanism is uniform throughout the economy, the real issue is the 50 capital gains discount at the other end. I don’t believe that I get a capital gains discount if I sell my machinery or sell my business, so why should one privileged group get an advantage on property whose investment mechanism is really only possible for those with high incomes. That fact is demonstrated in the participation statistics 10% for the general public and 50% for politicians, ie negative gearing is a fat cat feast frenzi funded by everyone else (and then the politicians have the gall to argue that deficits are pushing debt onto future generations).
Let’s face it the dual mechanism of negative gearing and a capital gains discount is purely a tax dodge for those with surplus incomes in a high tax bracket. The anyone can do it is false in the long term, it is only true while property values are rising at a rate that supports rapid turnover of property holdings where profit exceeds the losses in a very short time frame ie a ponzi boom. I now understand why I had to fend off nearly daily invitations to negative gearing seminars, the “boom” was largely artificially manufactured.
So whereas I applaud Judith Sloan’s rationale to solve the budget deficit by culling negative gearing, I think she was grabbing the beast from the wrong end. I think the approach should be to tax capital gains on non personally occupied properties both private and business. The so doing would cause a measured release of properties without causing a crash, IMHO.
@BilB
Another useful thing might be to remove the land tax exemption. At least in NSW there is already a land tax, but your primary place of residence is exempt. Take that away and suddenly all the land-owners are paying tax to the state government. I am tempted to say all the exemptions should be removed, but the effect on farms would need some interesting modeling (the tax is slightly progressive, but farms have significant economies of scale which we probably want to preserve).
And yes, YouTube.
Moz, why would you consider crippling the average family path that every one must travel? The aim here is to reduce excesses and abuses, increasing government revenue, and bring some fairness to the younger contingent of our population.
I don’t know whether you noticed that I suggest dropping capital gains on the primary business residence to encourage entrepreneurship at the personal owner operator new start up level. Everyone gets one free kick.
Sorry, I didn’t realise that it was compulsory to buy a home, so obviously I need to do more reading. Can you suggest some links?
There are many arguments for land tax over transaction taxes, they’re a subset of wealth taxes. Prof Quiggin has written on the subject but I don’t see any recent posts here – this from 2007: https://johnquiggin.com/2007/07/15/land-and-house-prices/ Or this long piece on US lan taxes, with a good summary under “case against land tax” and “case for”: http://www.ipspr.sc.edu/grs/SCCEP/Articles/Proptax.htm