Are Labor’s stage 3 tax cut changes good economic policy, good politics, or both?

This may not be Labor’s last roll of the dice, but it’s certainly the most important.

The Albanese government is now more than halfway through its first term, hurtling towards an election that has to be held before the end of May next year.

Its honeymoon period is well and truly over, and many polls now have it neck and neck with the opposition, even though it’s led by one of the least popular leaders in recent history.

So Labor has taken a punt on something a lot of people have been calling on it to do since before it promised not to in the 2022 election campaign — change the stage 3 tax cuts, passed by the Coalition in 2018 and 2019 with Labor’s reluctant support.

ANU economist Ben Phillips ran the government’s proposed stage 3 tweaks through his PolicyMod simulator to weigh up the winners and losers.

He finds about 6.2 million households will benefit from the Albanese government’s changes, while just 1.1 million households will lose out compared to the tax laws passed under the Coalition.

The government’s gamble is that nearly six-to-one winners to losers presents pretty good odds for the widespread financial benefits to outweigh the cost of a broken promise.

(Not to mention that, judging from a large volume of comments on the ABC’s blog yesterday, a lot of those losing out financially still support the changes).

But so much of the Press Gallery’s focus is directed to the politics of policy, rather than its merits.

Surely some of that politics should be determined by whether a change is good policy — or at least an improvement on the status quo.

There are three well established criteria for judging the merits of tax policy: equity, efficiency and simplicity.

So, how do the stage 3 tax changes put forward by Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers stack up?

Jim Chalmers and Anthony Albanese now stand accused of breaking promises not to change super tax rules or the stage 3 tax cuts.(ABC News: Nicholas Haggarty)

No contest on equity

Sorry to mix gambling metaphors, but on equity it’s a lay down misere.

“The overall reform package is sound and means that, when taken together with stages 1 and 2, it returns bracket creep roughly in proportion to income rather than mostly benefiting only higher income persons and households,” Ben Phillips says.

Associate professor Ben Phillips is an economist at ANU who specialises in modelling household finances and economic policies.(ABC News: Ian Cutmore)

The Grattan Institute’s Brendan Coates describes them as “broadly sensible changes”.

“The original stage 3 tax cuts overcompensated higher income earners for the cost of bracket creep, and under-compensated low-income earners.”

From the personal tax accounting firm H&R Block.

“The heavy weighting of the original package towards those on the highest incomes is difficult to justify in the current economic climate and, with the cost of living disproportionately impacting those low- and middle-income taxpayers, this will provide some much needed extra cash in the pockets of hard working families to pay mortgages, food and fuel bills,” noted its director of tax communications, Mark Chapman.

It’s very hard to find anyone, other than some of those losing part of their tax cuts, who disagrees.

Loading…’Workforce participation boost’ expected

What about efficiency? Aside from returning some of the extra revenue generated by bracket creep, one of the arguments for the stage 3 tax cuts in the first place was that they’d boost incentives to work, and therefore productivity and economic growth.

Earlier this week, before the detail of Labor’s policy was revealed, the nation’s biggest business groups — Ai Group, the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Business Council of Australia and the Minerals Council of Australia — issued a rare joint statement in support of stage 3 as it stood.

“Most middle-income earners will pay no more than 30 cents of personal income tax for an extra dollar earned,” they noted.

“That is a plus for workforce participation, work incentives, investment by businesses large and small, and it will raise national saving.

“Improving these incentives is positive for productivity, growing the tax base and helping finance our public services.”

But most economists have a very different view.

Steven Hamilton says two-thirds of stage 3 make sense, but one change is “difficult to rationalise”.(Owen Jacques, ABC News.)

Tax economist Steven Hamilton from George Washington University was scathing of a key element of the original plan, and full of praise for Labor’s decision to roll it back.

“Eliminating entirely the 37 per cent tax bracket between $120,000 and $180,000 never made sense,” he wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald.

“That component would see us spend $8 billion a year to improve work incentives for a tiny fraction of the population.

“Combined with the other two components, stage 3 would have seen more than $9,000 a year go to every person earning more than $200,000 a year without raising their incentive to work one iota.”

He told me earlier this week that “it is very difficult to rationalise having a flat rate all the way from $45k through to $200k”.

“I can’t think of any leading public finance experts who would agree this is a good idea,” he added.

In contrast, all three economists above think the tax rate cut from 19 to 16 per cent for the $18,201-$45,000 bracket does meet the efficiency test.

“Reallocating some of the tax cuts from high-income earners (whose work choices are less sensitive to tax rates as they work full time) to low-income earners (who tend to work part time and can more easily pick up an extra day) means we should see a workforce participation boost from the changes,” argues Coates.

Phillips notes that these same workers often face higher financial barriers to taking on extra work than their more heavily taxed high-income counterparts, due to the lose of welfare benefits as they earn more.

“These are the same workers who are most likely to have high effective marginal tax rates as their pay interacts with family payments and childcare payments,” he explains.

So on efficiency, another general tick for the government’s proposal.

What about simplicity?

This is a more balanced debate. On one level, taking out a tax bracket makes the tax system inherently simpler.

There’s also been arguments raised that higher income earners will refocus their efforts on tax minimisation now that they’ve seen their tax cut halved from more than $9,000 to just over $4,500.

The business groups noted that taxing all income up to $200,000 a year at 30 per cent or less would bring it closer to company and trust tax rates.

“This is particularly important for small and family-owned businesses where effort will be redirected towards business (and employment) expansion rather than on navigating between different rates of tax applying to income flowing from different forms of business organisation,” they noted.

Reading between the lines, that’s basically arguing small and medium business people will waste less time and money on creating (legal) tax minimisation structures to take advantage of lower company and trust tax rates.

Loading…

No doubt there’s some merit in that argument.

However, the current tax plan would also have opened up a yawning chasm between the 45 per cent rate applying to income above $200,000 and the 30 per cent rate on all earnings between $45,000-200,000.

How many people do you think the tax office would suddenly find earning taxable incomes of $199,000? Quite a few, one suspects, as the benefits of tax minimisation increased.

Will the tax changes fire inflation and delay rate cuts?

To the normal tax criteria, one can also add one for the economics of the changes, particularly at a time when inflation is yet to come under control.

Brendan Coates believes the changes will put a bit of upward pressure on inflation.

Brendan Coates is the economic policy program director at the Grattan Institute think tank.(Supplied: Grattan Institute )

“Ideally the total cost of the revised package would have been somewhat smaller than the original stage 3 tax cuts, to reduce the inflationary impact of redistributing money from high income earners (who are less likely to spend it) to low income earners (who probably will),” he says.

But the general consensus is that they will have a “marginal” effect on inflation at most.

How marginal? Barrenjoey’s Jo Masters reckons Labor’s changes will add about 0.03 percentage points to the consumer price index. Ben Phillips likewise describes the effect as “very small and barely measurable”.

Perhaps the best person to sum up the Reserve Bank’s likely view on these tax changes, given she was one of its most senior officials until October 2023, is Westpac’s new chief economist Luci Ellis.

Luci Ellis, Westpac Group chief economist, was until late last year assistant governor economic at the Reserve Bank.( ABC News: John Gunn )

“The original package was already factored into our forecasts, and everyone else’s,” she notes.

“While the changes this week alter the distribution of the benefits, the macroeconomic impact of this – relative to the package as originally announced – is marginal.

“We do not expect that this will affect the RBA’s view of the inflation outlook or the future path of the cash rate.”

Is there a major weakness to the changes?

“What’s now missing from the government’s package is cost-of-living relief for those genuinely struggling the most, and who don’t benefit from these tax cuts,” notes Brendan Coates.

Remember, ANU’s model shows nearly a third of households neither benefit nor lose from these changes because they don’t pay tax at all.

The Grattan Institute is calling for a 40 per cent increase in rent assistance, worth around $1,000 a year to tenants, and costing the budget $1.2 billion, along with a further $55 a week increase in JobSeeker and other working-age welfare payments at a $3.5 billion cost.

But, while that may be good social policy, and even sound economic policy, the politics of increased welfare support aren’t as safe a bet as a tax cut for “everyone”.

In the end, politics always trumps policy to some extent.