“Jim Chalmers could reduce the deficit to zero within three years by increasing the ratio of tax to GDP from…
“Jim Chalmers could reduce the deficit to zero within three years by increasing the ratio of tax to GDP from the 22.4 it is now to 24.4 per cent – still among the lowest in the western world.” (Alan Kohler.)
Alone that’s wow. But it also means something else. /1
It means less than a quarter of society’s official wealth is held collectively. More than three-quarters is in private hands. We accept that because we’ve been conditioned to accept it. But we’re the ‘Commonweath’ of Australia. Not the ‘Privatewealth’ of Australia. /2
Decades of conservatism have created a really bonkers idea that the government is somehow not-us. It’s some other thing, that steals from us. Even though we invented it, because we wanted and needed it. And every person in it is one of us, doing a job for the rest of us. /3
It’s all us. We invented government to give economies of scale to social life. We can do so much more collectively than we could achieve individually. We should never see debates around tax as a tug of war between ‘our’ money and government money. Government is us. We made it. /4
If we want to invest more in collective things, by paying more tax, we should describe it as just that, an investment choice, with huge returns for us. And as Kohler says, we have to pay only a pittance more to erase a trillion dollar deficit. /5
That deficit is a starving of the Australian community of collective investment, by zealots and ideologues. Government had to borrow and print money to do necessary things, because these idiots held the country to ransom with their us vs government loon fantasies. /6
As I always say, the Economy is a fiction. It literally doesn’t exist. It’s these ideologues’ substitute for society, designed to funnel collective wealth into a minority of hands, of themselves and their mates. So much is held back by that nonsense, it’s time to end it. /end
One small correction here. The deficit spoken about is the annual budget deficit, not the overall debt, which would fall though with the deficit removed. All the same principles apply, artificially keeping tax to GDP low starves the country of collective investment.