Encouraging senior Australians to downsize their homes is one of the more popular ideas to make housing more affordable. The trouble is, incentives for downsizing would hit the budget, but make little difference to housing affordability.
It sounds good: new incentives would encourage seniors to move to housing that better suits their needs, while freeing up equity for their retirement and larger homes for younger families.
But the reality is different. Research shows most seniors are emotionally attached to their home and neighbourhood and don’t want to downsize.
When people do downsize, financial incentives are generally not the big things on their minds. And so most of the budget’s financial incentives will go to those who were going to downsize anyway.
Financial barriers to downsizing
There are three financial hurdles to downsizing. Downsizers risk losing some or all of their Age Pension, because the family home is exempt from the pension assets test, but any home equity unlocked by downsizing is not.
Downsizers also have to stump up the stamp duty on any new home they buy. For a senior purchasing the median-priced home in Sydney that’s now A$32,000. Finally earnings from the cash released are taxed, whereas capital gains on the home are not.
The Turnbull government has flagged the possibility of financial incentives in next week’s federal budget for superannuants and pensioners to downsize their home.
One proposal would exempt downsizers from the A$1.6 million cap on super balances eligible for tax-free earnings in retirement, or from the A$100,000 annual cap on post-tax contributions. But this would benefit only the very wealthiest retirees – just 60,000 retirees have super fund balances exceeding A$1.6 million.
More seniors would benefit from a proposal to exempt them from stamp duty when purchasing a smaller home. And many would benefit from a Property Council proposal to quarantine some portion of the proceeds from the pension assets test for up to a decade.
The trouble with all these proposals is that they would hit the budget – because everyone who downsized would get the benefits – but they would not encourage many more seniors to downsize.
Staying – or downsizing – is seldom about the money
Research shows that for two-thirds of older Australians, the desire to “age in place” is the most important reason for not selling the family home. Often they stay put because they can’t find suitable housing in the same local area.
In established suburbs where many seniors live, there are relatively few smaller dwellings because planning laws restrict subdivision. And even if the new house is next door, there’s an emotional cost to leaving a long-standing home, and to packing and moving.
And so, few older Australians downsize their home. According to the Productivity Commission, about 20% aged 60 or over have sold their home and purchased a less expensive one since turning 50. Another 15% have “strong intentions” to do so in the future.
When older Australians do downsize, their decision is dominated by non-financial considerations, such as a preference for a different style of house and living, a concern that it is getting too hard to maintain the house and garden, or the loss of a partner.
These emotional factors typically dwarf financial considerations. According to surveys, no more than 15% of downsizers are motivated by financial gain. Stamp duty costs were a barrier for only about 5% of those thinking of downsizing. Only 1% of seniors listed the impact on their pension as their main reason for not downsizing.
There are better and cheaper ways to encourage seniors to downsize
If governments do want to use financial incentives to encourage downsizing, budget sticks would be cheaper and fairer than budget carrots. Even if they have little effect on downsizing rates, at least they would contribute to much-needed budget repair and economic growth.
The federal government should include the value of the family home above some threshold – such as A$500,000 – in the Age Pension assets test. This would encourage a few more seniors to downsize. More importantly, it would make pension arrangements fairer, and contribute up to A$7 billion a year to the budget.
Asset-rich, income-poor retirees could continue to receive a full pension by borrowing against the value of the home until the house is sold. The federal government would then recover the cost from the proceeds of the sale. If well designed, this scheme would have almost no effect on retirees – instead it would primarily reduce inheritances.
State governments should abolish stamp duties on property, and replace them with a general property tax, as the ACT Government is doing. This would encourage downsizing, although only at the margins.
Treasurer Scott Morrison wants to use the May budget to ease growing community anxiety about housing affordability. Lots of ideas are being thrown about: the test for the Treasurer is to sort the good from the bad. Reports that the government was again considering using superannuation to help first homebuyers won’t inspire confidence.
It’s not the first time a policy like this has been floated within government. While these latest ideas to use super to help first homebuyers are marginally less bad than proposals from 2015, our research shows they still wouldn’t make much difference to housing affordability.
A seductive idea with a long history
Allowing first homebuyers to cash out their super to buy a home is a seductive idea with a long history. Both sides of politics took proposals to the 1993 election, before Prime Minister Paul Keating scrapped it upon his re-election.
Former Treasurer Joe Hockey last raised the idea in 2015 and was roundly criticised, including by then Coalition frontbencher Malcolm Turnbull.
Politicians are understandably attracted to any policy that appears to help first homebuyers build a deposit. Unlike the various first homebuyers’ grants that cost billions each year, letting first homebuyers cash out their super would not hurt the budget bottom line – at least, not in the short term. But as we wrote in 2015, that change would push up house prices, leave many people with less to retire on, and cost taxpayers in the long run.
Having learned from that that experience, the government has instead flagged two different ways to use super to help first homebuyers. Neither proposal would make the mistake of giving first homebuyers complete freedom to access to their super. But nor would they make much difference to housing affordability.
Using voluntary super savings for deposits
The first proposal reportedly supported by some in the Coalition, but now denied by the Treasurer, would allow first homebuyers to withdraw any voluntary super contributions they make to help purchase a home. Any compulsory Super Guarantee contributions, the bulk of Australians’ super savings, could not be touched.
Using super tax breaks to help first homebuyers build their deposit would level the playing field between the tax treatment of the savings of first homebuyers and existing property owners.
First homebuyers’ savings typically sit in bank term deposits, where both the initial amount saved and any interest earned is taxed at full marginal rates of personal income tax. In contrast, the nest eggs of existing property owners are taxed very lightly. For owner occupiers, any capital gain is tax free. For investors, capital gains are taxed at a 50% discount, and they get the benefit of negative gearing.
But even if there’s some merit in allowing first homebuyers to use super tax breaks to save for a home, it’s unlikely to make much difference. Few people are likely to take advantage of the scheme. Households are reluctant to give up access to their savings, especially when they’re already saving 9.5% of their income via compulsory super.
In fact the proposal works out to be very similar to the former Rudd government’s First Home Saver Accounts, and is likely to be just as ineffective. First Home Saver Accounts provided similar financial incentives to help first homebuyers build a deposit. Treasury expected A$6.5 billion to be held in First Home Saver Accounts by 2012. Instead only A$500 million had been saved by 2014, when Joe Hockey abolished the scheme, citing a lack of take up.
A “shared equity” scheme for super funds
The Turnbull government is reportedly also considering a “shared equity scheme” where workers’ super funds would own a portion of the property investment, and money would presumably be returned to the super fund when the property was sold.
Details are scarce, but the proposal raises several questions.
First, would the super fund use only the super savings of the co-investor to help buy the home, or would they add capital from the broader super fund pool?
Second, how would the super fund generate a return on the investment? A super fund that invests in rental housing gets the benefit of a rental income stream. A super fund co-investing in owner-occupied housing would not. The super fund could take a disproportionate share of any capital gains to compensate, but that hardly seems attractive for the funds in a world where interest rates are already at record lows.
Third, why involve super funds in a shared equity scheme in the first place? Australia’s super sector is already notoriously inefficient – total super fund fees equate to more than 1% of Australia’s GDP each year. A shared-equity scheme would inevitably add to super funds’ administration costs.
If the federal government is serious about super funds investing in housing, it needs to encourage wholesale reform of state land taxes, which levy a higher rate of land tax the more investment property a person owns. This discourages institutional investors such as super funds from owning large numbers of residential properties, because they pay much higher rates of land tax on any given property than a mum-and-dad investor.
Focus on what matters
If Scott Morrison really wants to tackle housing affordability, he can no longer ignore those policies that would make the biggest difference. That means addressing both the demand and the supply side of housing markets.
On the demand side, that means reducing government subsidies for housing investment which have simply added fuel to the fire. Abolishing negative gearing and cutting the capital gains tax discount to 25% would save the budget about A$5.3 billion a year, and reduce house prices a little – we estimate they would be about 2% lower than otherwise.
The government should also include the value of the family home above some threshold – such as A$500,000 – in the Age Pension assets test. This would encourage senior Australians to downsize to more appropriate housing, while helping improve the budget bottom line.
The federal government has little control over planning rules, which are administered by state and local governments. But it can provide incentives to those tiers of government, if it is looking to do something that would really improve home ownership.
While there are plenty of ideas to improve affordability, only a few will make a real difference, and these are politically hard. In the meantime, the latest thought bubbles about using super savings for housing might be less bad than in the past, but they would be just as ineffective.
Authors: John Daley, Chief Executive Officer, Grattan Institute; Brendan Coates, Fellow, Grattan Institute
Eight years after the global financial crisis (GFC), economic growth remains weak in many rich nations. Australia has been an exception to the malaise, but growth has slowed as the mining boom winds down.
Business investment is vital to economic growth and to lifting living standards, but a new Grattan report explores why Australian business investment is plummeting. Australia is now experiencing its biggest ever 5-year fall in mining investment, as a share of GDP. Non-mining business investment fell from 12% to 9% of GDP after 2009 and remains unusually low. Why is it low, and what should we do?
The shift to services has reduced investment
Most of the gap in investment between today’s non-mining investment rate and that of the early 1990s is due to long-term structural changes in the economy.
The non-mining market sector slowly became less capital intense, it shifted towards capital-light services, and it shrank as a share of GDP. Together, these factors have reduced non-mining business investment by almost 2% of GDP since the early 1990s. In the chart below, the decline in investment needed to offset “capital consumption” reflects declining capital intensity across the non-mining economy.
These declines are benign. Many non-mining industries now require less capital per dollar of output than they did in the past, because equipment is better and cheaper, in part thanks to the rise of China as a manufacturer. The shift to capital-light services largely reflects households choosing to spend more of their income on these services as their incomes grow.
The role of output growth
A less benign factor, slow output growth, has cut non-mining investment by about a percentage point of GDP compared to 1990, and about two percentage points since the boom years of the mid-2000s, when above-trend growth and buoyant financial conditions drove very strong investment. The role of growth can be seen in the chart above.
In turn, output has grown more slowly for two reasons: slower potential output growth, and a widening gap between actual and potential output.
The potential growth rate of the economy has declined in recent years. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that potential GDP is now growing at just over 2.5% a year, about a percentage point below its pace between 1995 and 2004.
Potential growth (the rate of output if all resources are being used efficiently) has declined mainly because productivity growth has slowed and the working-age population is growing more slowly. Productivity growth was exceptionally weak between 2004 and 2010. It recovered in recent years, but remains weaker than it was in the 1990s and early 2000s. The working-age population is growing more slowly, mainly because of a decline in net migration since its peak in about 2012 and, in part, because the population is ageing.
In addition, actual growth has been a bit slower than potential in recent years. The IMF estimates the gap between actual and potential output to be about 1.7% of GDP, though it is difficult to estimate with much precision. Several pieces of evidence suggest that actual output is below potential. Inflation is relatively weak and there is some spare capacity in the labour market. The capital stock is ample given the current level of output: office vacancy rates are high, while business capacity utilisation is close to its long-term average.
Transition from the mining boom may have made it difficult for the economy to operate at potential. As mining investment falls, demand for construction, in particular, weakens. In theory, as the terms of trade and mining investment decline, the real exchange rate and other prices can change to maintain full employment. But in practice, slow output growth is common after mining booms, perhaps because businesses and workers take some time to reassess their opportunities.
What next?
Looking ahead, if output growth remains subdued, the current level of non-mining business investment may be the “new normal”. If the economy continues to rebalance, non-mining investment is likely to increase. There are encouraging signs that non-mining investment responds to the exchange rate and other aspects of the business environment in the medium term: it has begun to pick up in NSW and Victoria. Output could even grow above potential for a few years, as the IMF and RBA both forecast. But investment is not likely to return to the levels of the mid-2000s.
Is a company tax cut the answer?
The government has proposed cutting the company tax rate from 30% to 25%, largely on the basis that the competition for mobile capital has intensified (see chart below). That would attract more foreign investment and could increase total business investment by up to half a percent a year. But such a cut would also reduce national income for years and would hit the budget. Committing to a tax cut before the budget is on a clear path to recovery risks reducing future living standards.
Other company tax changes could help. An allowance for corporate equity would make currently marginal investment projects more attractive, though highly profitable firms would pay more tax.
Accelerated depreciation would encourage investment, as would moving from today’s model to a cash flow tax. Both of them help firms to reduce tax paid at the time they make investments. But they would hit the budget hard in the early years, and would have to be phased in slowly.
An allowance for investment (for example, permitting firms to claim over 100% of depreciation) would support new investment without giving tax breaks on existing assets, but may be costly to administer, as firms could be tempted to relabel some operating expenditure as capital expenditure.
Government should ensure any company tax changes are offset by other tax increases or spending cuts.
What else should policymakers do?
Government stimulus and interest rate cuts can encourage business investment if there is spare capacity in the economy. Australia does have some spare economic capacity. But there are constraints on both arms of macroeconomic policy. The RBA is reluctant to cut interest rates from their already low levels, as it is concerned about risky lending. Public debt has grown (though it is still not high by international standards), though bank balance sheets remain large compared to GDP, limiting the scope to expand public sector debt.
Monetary policy should remain supportive, and tough prudential standards can help limit risky lending. There may be modest scope to build more public infrastructure, if governments can improve the quality of what they build.
Broader policies to support economic growth would also lead to more and better private investment. They include reducing tax distortions, boosting labour participation, encouraging competition, improving the efficiency of infrastructure and urban land use, tightening regulatory frameworks, and more reliable climate policy.
No single policy is a silver bullet, but together, they can help make better use of Australia’s existing assets and make new investment more attractive.
Author: Jim Minifie, Productivity Growth Program Director, Grattan Institute
The federal government could save about A$1 billion a year by winding back three tax breaks for older Australians that are unduly generous and have no sensible policy rationale, according to our new Grattan Institute report.
The tax-free thresholds for seniors and for younger people have diverged over the last 20 years. Seniors do not pay tax until they earn A$32,279 a year, whereas younger households have an effective tax-free threshold of A$20,542.
These outcomes are hard to justify. A retired couple pay about A$4000 a year in tax on earnings of A$70,000 a year from their assets (assuming assets outside of super worth A$1.4 million). Any extra income they draw from a super account is tax free.
By contrast a working couple with both people earning the minimum wage would have the same income of $70,000 a year but pay tax of about A$7000. Unlike the retired couple, they probably don’t own their own home and have little chance of accumulating $1.4 million in assets, or much super savings, or owning their home before they retire.
These age-based tax breaks help to explain why the proportion of seniors paying tax has almost halved in the last 20 years. Those over 65 pay less tax per household in real terms than seniors did 20 years ago, despite their rising incomes and workforce participation rates.
Age-based tax breaks are badly designed to any justifiable purposes such as increasing workforce participation or preserving adequate retirement incomes for poorer Australians. Tapers that withdraw the offsets for those with higher incomes lead to the tax breaks effectively increase marginal tax rates for many people. And of seniors who lodge a tax return, none of the benefits go to the bottom 40%.
Some may argue that the tax breaks are a fair reward for a lifetime of paying tax. But large tax breaks for seniors are in fact a relatively new invention not provided to previous generations.
And the current generation of seniors also receive much more than their predecessors from government spending, particularly on health. Senior households on average receive A$32,000 a year from government more than they contribute in income and sales taxes. In 2004 they only took out about A$22,000 a year. For now, federal budget deficits are funding the difference.
Very little justification was provided for these tax breaks when they were introduced. But they correlate with electoral dynamics shifting decisively in favour of older voters. From 1995 to 2015, the proportion of eligible voters aged 55 and over grew from 27% to 34%. Because younger Australians enrol less, those aged 55 and over are now 38% of enrolled voters.
These tax breaks might have been affordable when they were introduced 15 years ago, and budgets moved into surplus. But the federal government has been running large budget deficits for 8 years in a row. It must make tough saving and spending decisions to avoid handing an unsustainable bill to future generations.
Our report proposes winding back SAPTO and the higher Medicare levy threshold. Self-funded retirees should not qualify for SAPTO. Seniors with enough private income that they do not qualify for a full Age Pension should pay some income tax.
The proposed changes are fair. Seniors would pay either the same or less tax than younger Australians. They would have little effect on the 40% of seniors who receive a full Age Pension. They would mostly affect seniors who are wealthy enough to receive no pension or just a part pension.
These changes would save the federal budget about A$700 million a year. Reducing the private health insurance rebate so that seniors get the same rebate as younger Australians would save another A$250 million.
To put that A$1 billion of budget repair in context, the government’s recent omnibus bill improved the bottom line by A$2 billion a year, and the super package by less than A$1 billion. With deficits running at about A$40 billion a year, there is a long way to go, and reforming age-based tax breaks would help.
Author: John Daley, Chief Executive Officer, Grattan Institute; Brendan Coates, Fellow, Grattan Institute; William Young, Associate, Grattan Institute
The Gratton Institute says compulsory superannuation payments help many middle-income earners to save more for retirement, but super is simply the wrong tool to provide an adequate support for low-income earners. Their analysis shows top-up measures targeted at helping this group save for retirement are poorly targeted and an expensive way to do so.
Australia’s superannuation lobby wants the government to define in law that the purpose of Australia’s A$2 trillion super system is to provide an adequate retirement income for all Australians. The government disagrees: it confirmed instead that the purpose of super is to supplement or substitute for the Age Pension.
The government is right: super can’t do everything. Income from the superannuation of low-income earners will inevitably be small relative to the value of the Age Pension. The government boost to super aimed at low income earners is not tightly targeted. And fees will eat up a material portion of government support provided through superannuation.
With the Age Pension and Rent Assistance, government already has the right tools for assisting lower income Australians.
Government provides two super top-ups for low income earners
The Low Income Superannuation Contribution (LISC), introduced by the Labor government in 2013, puts extra money in the accounts of low-income earners who make pre-tax super contributions. Under the LISC, those earning less than A$37,000 receive a government co-contribution of 15% of their pre-tax super contributions, up to a maximum of A$500 a year.
The Abbott government was set to abolish the LISC, but the Turnbull government now plans to retain it, renaming it the Low Income Superannuation Tax Offset (LISTO), at a budgetary cost of A$800 million a year.
The super co-contribution, introduced by the former Howard government in 2003, puts extra money in the accounts of low-incomes earners who make post-tax super contributions. It boosts voluntary super contributions made by low-income earners out of their post-tax income by up to A$500 a year, at a budgetary cost of A$160 million a year.
Super can’t help many low income earners
Superannuation is a contributory system: you only get out what you put in. And low-income earners don’t put much in.
Their wages, and resulting super guarantee contributions, are small and their means to make large voluntary contributions are even smaller. Their super nest egg will inevitably be small compared to Australia’s relatively generous Age Pension.
For example, a person who works full time at the minimum wage for their entire working life and contributes 9.5% of their income to super would accumulate super of about A$153,000 in today’s money (wage deflated), making standard assumptions about returns and fees. If the balance were drawn down at the minimum rates, this would provide a retirement income of about A$6,500 a year in today’s money.
By contrast, an Age Pension provides a single person with A$22,800 a year. For someone who worked part time on the minimum wage for some or all of their working life, super would be even less, but the Age Pension would be pretty much the same.
Top-ups are not tightly targeted to those that need them
The LISC and the super co-contribution aim to top up the super and thus the retirement incomes of those with low incomes. But our research shows about a quarter of the government’s support leaks out to support the top half of households.
Whereas eligibility for the pension is based on the income and assets of the whole household, including those of a spouse, eligibility for superannuation top ups depends only on the income of the individual making contributions. That means the top ups also benefit low-income earners in high-income households. A far better way to help low-income earners is to increase income support payments such as the Age Pension.
Super top ups provide some help to households in the second to fourth deciles of taxpayers. But they do very little for the bottom 10% of those who file a tax return.
These households, many of which earn little if any income, only receive about 7% of the benefits of top ups. A further set of households file no tax returns – typically because welfare benefits provide most of their income. Very few of them receive any material super top up.
Super fees erode super top ups
Super fees will erode a sizeable share of the funds in the super accounts of low-income households, as a result of super top ups. Our research shows that super fees levied on most workers receiving the LISC erode between 20 and 25% of the value of the extra funds at retirement. This finding is consistent with previous Grattan work on super fees.
But super fees do not usually erode super top ups as much as they erode contributions to super in general. Fees eat up a higher proportion of the super savings of people with low balances because most fees have a fixed component that’s the same whatever the account balance. In effect the personal super contributions of low-income earners absorb that fixed component, which is typically the same whether or not government tops up the account.
However for those with very low super savings and sporadic employment, fixed fees can erode the value of their super top ups. That’s because at some point in their lives, their super balances can drop close enough to zero and fixed administration fees eat into the value generated by the top up.
Many Australians face low incomes and irregular work. They may not be able to contribute enough to their super to make up for fixed fees.Lucy Nicholson/Reuters
Some top up is still needed for low income earners
Superannuation compels people to lock up some of their earnings as savings until retirement. High-income earners are compensated for this delayed access because their contributions are only taxed at 15%, rather than their marginal rate of personal income tax.
Without the LISC, which reduces the tax rate on their compulsory super contributions to zero, those earning between A$20,542 and A$37,000 would receive relatively little compensation for locking up their money in superannuation. The 15% tax on contributions would be only slightly less than their 19% marginal tax rate.
And for those earning less than A$20,542, the absence of a LISC would take them backwards when they made super contributions taxed at 15% rather than keeping the money in their pocket tax free.
Better ways to provide adequate retirement incomes for low-income earners
However super top ups should not be expanded. It is too hard to target them tightly at those most in need, and super fees can eat up their value.
Instead, a targeted boost to the Age Pension would do far more to ensure all Australians have an adequate retirement. But there is an even better way to improve the retirement incomes of those most in need.
As previous Grattan research shows, retirees who do not own their own homes are the group at most risk of being poor in retirement. A A$500 a year boost to rent assistance for eligible seniors would be the most efficient way to boost retirement incomes of the lowest paid, at a cost of A$200 million a year. Only 2% of it would flow to the top half of households, with net wealth of more than A$500,000.
By contrast, a wholesale A$500 boost to all Age Pension recipients would cost A$1.3 billion, with half the benefit going to households with net wealth of more than A$500,000, mainly because the home is exempt from the Age Pension means test.
In defining an objective for Australia’s superannuation system, the government is right that super is not a universal pocket knife. Super top ups are a costly way to ensure that every Australian enjoys an adequate retirement.
Authors: John Daley, Chief Executive Officer, Grattan Institute; Brendan Coates, Fellow, Grattan Institute; William Young, Associate, Grattan Institute
The Federal Government’s plan to wind back superannuation tax breaks would create a fairer superannuation system more aligned to its purpose of providing income to supplement the Age Pension, according to new Grattan Institute analysis. It would also contribute to budget repair.
The analysis shows how either of the reform packages proposed by both major parties would be a big step in the right direction. It explores how the current system provides much larger benefits to those with such ample resources that they will never qualify for an Age Pension. And it shows how the proposed changes would affect them – and pretty much nobody else.
As they debate the Coalition government’s proposals to wind back tax breaks on superannuation, politicians on all sides can do three big things: create a better and fairer superannuation scheme; take an important step towards repairing the Commonwealth budget; and show that our political system still works.
Both main parties have laid out their preferred reforms to super tax concessions. While they agree on all but the details, they are yet to strike a deal. Our new research shows what is at stake.
A better, fairer, super system
First and foremost, the proposed reforms to superannuation announced in the 2016 budget are about making super better, and fairer.
Tax breaks should only be available when they serve a policy aim. The purpose of super identified in the budget and due to be defined in legislation is to provide income in retirement to substitute or supplement the Age Pension. Super tax breaks don’t fulfil this purpose when they benefit those who were never going to qualify for an Age Pension in the first place.
The plans of both the government and the ALP would be big steps towards aligning super tax breaks more closely with their purpose. They would trim the generous super tax breaks enjoyed by the top 20% of income earners – people wealthy enough to be comfortable in retirement and unlikely to qualify for the Age Pension.
Retirees with large superannuation balances will start paying some tax on their superannuation savings, but still pay much less tax than wage earners on lower incomes. For a small proportion of women with higher incomes later in life, the changes will reduce their catch-up contributions. Yet the changes will reduce the tax breaks far more for wealthier old men.
Claims that the budget changes will affect many low and middle-income earners are wrong. Our research shows the changes will affect about 4% of superannuants, nearly all of them high-income earners who are unlikely to access the Age Pension. Nor are the proposed changes retrospective. Many reforms affect investments made in the past, and no-one suggests they are retrospective. Rather, the changes will affect taxes paid on future super earnings, and entitlements to make future contributions to super.
Any plausible combination of the packages on offer would make the super system fairer. At present, someone in the top 1% of income earners can expect to receive nearly three times as much in welfare and tax breaks from super in their lifetime as an average income earner. The government’s changes would trim some of these excesses: the top 1% would instead receive just twice as much as low or average income earners. And by targeting tax breaks that go to the top 20% of income earners, neither side’s plan would see much of an offsetting increase in Age Pension spending.
An unsustainable tax system for seniors
Decisions by the former Coalition Government to abolish taxes on superannuation withdrawals in 2007 and radically increase the amount senior Australians could earn before paying income tax have dramatically reduced the tax bills of older Australians.
These changes are one of the main reasons why households over the age of 65 (unlike households aged between 25 and 64) now pay less income tax in real terms today than they did 20 years ago. At the same time, the workforce participation rates and incomes of seniors have jumped. Generous super tax breaks have been funded by deficits. The accumulating debt burden will disproportionately fall on younger households.
Tax breaks to older Australians are also a major cause of the increase in the “taxed nots” identified by Treasurer Scott Morrison. The number of older Australians not paying any income tax has increased from three in four in 2000 to five in six today. The rise of these “taxed nots” coincides with the introduction of the Senior Australian Tax Offset in 2000, and tax-free super withdrawals in 2007.
Repairing the budget
The increased cost of services and reduced taxes per older household explain in large part why the Commonwealth budget is in trouble. For eight years, budget deficits have persisted at about 2 to 3% of GDP, and the future looks little better. The returned Turnbull government is putting a priority on budget repair, now described as a “massive moral challenge” by the Prime Minister. Winding back some of the tax breaks given to older Australians during the happier times of the mining boom is an obvious step.
The government’s super package would save the budget at least A$800 million a year. Alternative proposals by the ALP, which broadly supports the Coalition’s reforms, and then goes further, would save more than A$2 billion a year. Should Treasurer Morrison seek a deal with the ALP or the Greens, any “concessions” will mostly improve the budget position.
Nor is the Turnbull government likely to find more attractive opportunities for budget savings. Unlike most of the government’s savings measures, changes to super tax breaks are broadly popular. Electorates more likely to be adversely affected by the super changes – that is, those with more old and wealthy voters – tended to swing less to the ALP at the last election than other electorates. And a survey before the election showed that the proposals had more support amongst those most likely to be adversely affected.
A test for our political system
Even after the reforms, super tax breaks will still mostly flow to high-income earners who do not need them, and the budgetary costs of super tax breaks will remain unsustainable in the long term. Further changes to super tax breaks will be needed in future. But agreeing to the super package now before the Parliament would be progress in the right direction. And there is a broader issue at stake.
Super is only the first of a number of difficult choices that will come before the Parliament as government seeks to promote economic growth in a sluggish global economy, and bring the budget back under control. There is no easy road to these ends that will keep everyone happy all the time. Pragmatic compromise will be critical.
The proposed changes to super tax breaks are built on principle, supported by the electorate and largely supported by the three largest political parties. If we cannot get reform in this situation, then our political system is in deep trouble. In coming weeks, our MPs have the chance to show how government in Australia can still change the nation for the better.
Authors: John Daley, Chief Executive Officer, Grattan Institute; Brendan Coates, Fellow, Grattan Institute; William Young, Associate, Grattan Institute
In the past week, both major parties have made welcome, albeit tentative, commitments to tackle much-needed budget repair. The Turnbull government has moved quickly to lock in budget savings that Labor supported in the federal election campaign. Now Labor has signalled its support for the bulk of the government’s proposed changes to superannuation tax breaks, while proposing some extra budgetary savings of its own.
The ALP has endorsed the main elements of the government’s package of reforms to super tax breaks. It has accepted the government’s moves to tighten the annual cap on pre-tax super contributions to A$25,000 a year, and to put a A$1.6-million cap on tax-free super earnings in retirement.
These changes will better align superannuation tax breaks with their policy purpose, as a substitute for the Age Pension, by reducing breaks for those who don’t need them.
Going further
The ALP proposes to tighten superannuation more than the government, contributing more overall to budget repair, without substantially reducing income in retirement that would substitute or supplement the Age Pension. Over four years, the ALP’s proposals would raise up to A$1.7 billion more than the government’s plan.
The ALP proposes to tax super contributions at 30% instead of 15%, if a taxpayer’s income is more than A$200,000. In the federal budget, the Coalition set this threshold for the higher tax rate at A$250,000.
Labor’s proposed change is worthwhile. The threshold is calculated by adding taxable income and pre-tax super contributions. So it would be close to the threshold for paying the top marginal rate of personal income tax – A$180,000 – added to compulsory super contributions of A$17,100.
The ALP also sensibly rejects parts of the Coalition’s super package that would increase the generosity of super tax breaks to high-income earners.
For instance, allowing people to contribute more to their super when they have not reached their pre-tax contributions cap in previous years, as the government proposes, will do little to help women and carers to catch up. The evidence shows that few middle-income earners, and even fewer women, make large catch-up contributions to their super funds. Most people who contribute more than A$25,000 to super from pre-tax income have high incomes, and probably have continuous work history.
Similarly, the ALP is right to oppose government moves to abolish the work test that prevents older Australians from contributing to super unless they are working. This change would risk making the system even more generous to high-income earners by enabling them to funnel existing savings into super, while doing little to boost genuine retirement savings.
Lifetime cap on post-tax contributions
While it supports much of the package, the ALP’s rejection of the proposed A$500,000 lifetime cap on pre-tax contributions is disappointing.
This cap is not retrospective, as it does not affect post-tax contributions made before budget night, even where they exceed A$500,000. From a legal perspective, a measure is only “retrospective” if it means that actions in the past make a person liable for criminal penalties, additional tax, or the like. That is not the case here.
Those who have already put in more than A$500,000 before the cap was introduced would simply be prevented from putting in any more. Given the size of the superannuation savings these people have already accumulated, they are unlikely to qualify for an Age Pension even if they make no further contributions.
The ALP’s counter-proposal to only count post-tax contributions made from budget night towards the A$500,000 cap may only cost A$500 million in foregone revenue over the next four years. But younger generations, on the wrong side of the drawbridge after the policies change, will lose again when they pay for benefits for older generations that they will not receive themselves.
A worthwhile increase to super tax breaks
The government plans to make it easier for people to make voluntary pre-tax contributions directly to their superannuation fund. The ALP is wrong to oppose this.
The government wants to enable all taxpayers to contribute directly to their super funds and claim a tax deduction on their personal income tax return. At present, only people who earn most of their income from non-employment activities, or those who are self-employed, can contribute directly. Employees can only make pre-tax voluntary contributions if their employer provides a facility for salary sacrifice payments. If pre-tax voluntary contributions are allowed at all, there is no rational basis for limiting this to employees with more sophisticated employers
A test of political maturity
Reforms to super tax breaks represent a rare opportunity to make much-needed progress on budget repair, while better aligning super tax breaks with their policy purpose. They would trim the generous super tax breaks received by the top 20% of income earners – people wealthy enough to be saving for retirement anyway and unlikely to be eligible for the Age Pension. Both major parties have made substantial proposals in this direction. They agree on many measures.
The parties disagree over some of the details. The danger is that these disagreements derail reform. But good politics is always the art of compromise. If a sensible deal cannot be done when the parties are so close together, then our political system really is in trouble.
Author: John Daley, Chief Executive Officer, Grattan Institute; Brendan Coates, Fellow, Grattan Institute
The Coalition has scraped into a second term. How credible is its economic growth program, and what else should it do to strengthen growth?
The good news is that the transition from the mining boom is proceeding about as well as should have been expected. It is true that national income per person is lower than five years ago (see figure below) and that wages are also stagnating. But these changes are mostly due to falling resource prices. GDP growth, while subdued in recent years, has been fast enough to keep unemployment in check (though average hours per worker have declined), and it even shows signs of picking up. And while non-mining investment has remained flat despite record low interest rates, it’s not unrealistic to hope that Australia will, for the first time in our history, complete a mining cycle without ending in recession.
But deeper economic challenges persist. Global growth remains weak, with China’s economy likely to slow, and the European Union more fragile since the UK’s Brexit vote. Slow growth and rising inequality helped drive the populist anger and political instability we now see in the EU and US.
The coalition campaigned on jobs and growth, but in reality its growth program is patchy. The signature policy – phased cuts in the company tax rate – would ultimately increase national income by about 0.6%. But business tax cuts could drag on national income for up to a decade, as foreign investors pay less tax from the beginning, while benefits from greater investment take time.
Other parts of the coalition plan are far from being fleshed out. The government will seek to implement its already announced innovation and competition policy agendas. It plans to ratify the TPP, though the TPP itself may now be doomed to fail, as neither of the likely US presidential candidates supports it.
The Turnbull government also plans to pursue further trade agreements with the European Union, India, and Indonesia. On the downside, its Smart Cities Plan, which aims to finance improvements in urban transport and housing, lacks detail. And its plan to slowly reduce the budget deficit relies mostly on revenue increases that may not materialise.
Overall, the plan for jobs and growth is far from complete. The government should consider five further options to increase economic growth.
Taxes and work
First, the government should shift the tax base towards taxes that do less to discourage investment and work. For example, cutting the capital gains discount to 25%, and limiting negative gearing, would create space to reduce other more distorting taxes. So would broadening the GST base and/or increasing the GST rate (while cutting income tax and adjusting welfare payments), though benefits may be modest.
General property taxes should replace stamp duties, which deter people from moving to a home that suits their current needs. A 0.5% levy on unimproved land values could raise enough to replace stamp duties nationwide, would provide a more stable tax base for states, spread the tax burden more fairly, and add up to $9 billion a year to GDP. While these are state matters, the Commonwealth could consider providing incentive payments to states to make the switch, since its revenues will ultimately rise as the reforms increase incomes.
Second, government should help people stay in work, or get back to work. Female labour force participation in Australia is below that of many high-income economies. Low rates of take-home pay deter some women from joining the labour force or working full-time. The system of family payments and childcare support needs an overhaul to encourage greater female labour force participation.
Older Australians, too, are less likely to work than in many comparable economies. The age at which people can access superannuation or the age pension affects when some workers decide to retire. Australia is already increasing the pension eligibility age from 65 to 67, and phasing up from 55 to 60 the age at which people can begin to draw down their superannuation. Government should further increase pension and superannuation access ages.
Fourth, government should remove barriers to innovation, while only funding programs that are supported by evidence that they actually help innovators at a reasonable cost. The National Innovation and Science Agenda will cut barriers to new business creation and improve research-business collaboration.
The vast majority of innovations used in Australia are produced elsewhere. Government should remove barriers to the local spread of global innovations such as cloud computing and peer-to-peer business models such as Uber and Airbnb. States are responsible for barriers such as taxi regulation, while labour regulation and tax are largely Commonwealth responsibilities. Intellectual property rules can also impede the spread of productive ideas.
Finally, investment in high quality infrastructure (along with rules such as user charging to encourage efficient use) promotes growth. Yet governments have already spent large amounts of money, not always wisely, on new public infrastructure over the past decade.
Political realities
To enact any of these policies, the coalition will likely first seek support in the Senate from Labor or the Greens, rather than from the 10 or so independent and small party senators. Some policies are very unlikely to pass the Senate: for example, the proposed broad corporate tax cut is probably dead (though an alternative like an investment allowance might get up).
But some policies have a fighting chance, such as the City Deals, borrowed from the UK and new initiatives to cut superannuation costs. If many other policies (including family payments reform and the flexibility initiatives) are to have a chance of making it into law, the Coalition will first have to make a case for them and win public support.
The Coalition campaigned on its ability to provide jobs and growth. But its campaign platform for jobs and growth was far too narrow. To turn talk into action, it will need to win support for a much more expansive and ambitious agenda.
Author: Jim Minifie, Productivity Growth Program Director, Grattan Institute
A number of politicians have struggled this week to explain the Turnbull Government’s proposed changes to superannuation. Given the complexity of the area, that’s not surprising. And this complexity explains why intergenerational “theft” through superannuation has continued for so long.
Transition to retirement (TTR) provisions, introduced by the Howard Government in 2005, were supposed to encourage people to keep working part-time rather than stopping work entirely. Yet most people using a TTR pension have continued to work full time. In practice the provisions have simply been a gift enabling older people to pay less tax than younger people on similar incomes.
No-one has ever explained why we should have an age-based tax system, beyond the politically cynical observation that these provisions were introduced when demographics produced an unusually large number of voters aged 55 to 64. Some of these voters are now objecting vociferously to losing their privileges – but they were never justified in the first place.
The tax breaks of TTR pensions
Transition-to-retirement (TTR) pensions, as they stand today, have three features. They allow people to withdraw money from superannuation from the age of 60 without tax penalties. They allow older people to continue to contribute to superannuation while they withdraw funds. And they bring forward the age at which earnings on accumulated superannuation balances cease to be taxed (the superannuation earnings of younger people are taxed at 15%).
These provisions are a boon to older taxpayers. One benefit is the opportunity for “super recycling”, in which a person continues to work full-time and to consume their wage income, but pays around $5000 a year less income tax. People over 60 can put the maximum amount into superannuation from their pre-tax income, and then withdraw the money immediately. They pay much less income tax because their contributions to super are only taxed at 15%, whereas ordinary earnings are taxed at their marginal tax rate.
The precise benefit of super recycling varies depending on income, as our recent Super Tax Targeting report shows. For workers aged between 60 and 64 who earn between $65,000 and $150,000, super recycling reduces the amount of tax paid by about $5000 a year. To put this in context, a 60-year old earning $75,000 then pays as much income tax as a 40-year old earning $57,000.
There are also big benefits for an older worker who takes a TTR pension and stops paying tax on the earnings of their superannuation well before they retire. Take someone with a superannuation balance of $500,000 – a larger balance than seven in eight Australian taxpayers of that age – and earning a 6% return. A TTR pension reduces the annual tax paid by around $4,500. If they take a TTR pension at age 56, they will save around $40,000 in tax by the time they stop working at 65. If their superannuation balance is higher, the tax benefit is proportionately larger.
Not a transition to retirement scheme at all
All the evidence suggests the TTR pensions are mainly used by high-wealth individuals to reduce their tax bills while they continue to work full-time. In a study published last year the Productivity Commission concluded that:
…the tax concessions embodied in transition to retirement pensions — designed to ease workers to part-time work prior to retirement — appear to be used almost exclusively by people working full-time and as a means to reduce tax liabilities among wealthier Australians.
The misuse of TTR pensions is reflected in the confusion about how many people will be affected by the Government’s changes. The Government estimates that some 115,000 people will be affected by the change.
Critics counter that the changes could affect more than 500,000 super accounts classified as TTR pensions. But many of these almost certainly belong to people who have in fact fully retired, but haven’t bothered to tell their super fund to change the classification of their pension. They have little incentive to get their paperwork up to date, because the TTR pension already provides all the benefits of tax-free super earnings to which retirees are entitled.
However many people are affected, these arrangements bear little resemblance to the now explicit objective for superannuation – “to provide income in retirement to substitute or supplement the Age Pension”. They don’t encourage additional saving. They do little in practice to delay retirement. Instead they are part of an age-based tax system that allows older Australians to pay less income tax than younger Australians with similar incomes.
Reducing the rorts
So the Government’s announcement in the May Budget that it would reduce the extent of these benefits should be no surprise.
The Government proposed to reduce the amount that can be contributed to super from pre-tax income from $35,000 to $25,000. As a result, a 60-year old earning a wage of $75,000 a year would only save $3,700 per year through super recycling rather than $5,800 per year.
However, there may be little change in practice because the Government also proposed yet another complexity that future politicians will also struggle to explain. People will be able to make additional pre-tax contributions if they contributed less than the limit of $25,000 in the previous five years. Although this is supposed to help women with broken work histories catch up on building their super funds, past practice shows that such provisions are primarily used by older men to minimise their tax.
The government also proposed to tax super earnings at 15% unless a person retires (and so forfeits the ability to make additional contributions to superannuation). Those withdrawing money from their superannuation, but also working and contributing to superannuation, will then pay 15% tax on the earnings of their super fund, just like everyone else still working.
Why the Government should stick to its guns
The Government has been attacked over the last week as it emerges that these changes will affect some people “only” earning $80,000 a year, who might be in the top 20% of income earners, but are not in the top 4%. Coalition backbenchers are reportedly concerned that some of their supporters will pay more tax. Financial planners are nervous that they will have less tax planning to offer.
But the outrage misses the vital question: why do such generous tax breaks exist at all? They lead to individuals with above average incomes paying less tax than younger Australians on similar incomes. They do almost nothing to contribute to the ostensible purpose of superannuation.
For more than a decade, superannuation tax concessions have been absurdly generous to older people on high incomes. They are one of the major reasons why older households pay less income tax in real terms today than they did 20 years ago, even though their workforce participation rates and real wages have jumped.
Superannuation tax breaks cost more than $25 billion in foregone revenue, or well over 10% of income tax collections, and the cost is growing fast. Lower-income earners and younger people have to pay more in other taxes – now and in the future – to pay for the tax-lite status of so many older Australians. The proposed changes are just the beginning of much needed reforms to superannuation to end intergenerational theft from the young.
Authors: Brendan Coates, Fellow, Grattan Institute; John Daley, Chief Executive Officer, Grattan Institute
A long-term plan to cut the company tax rate from 30% to 25% is the centrepiece of the Coalition’s economic plan for jobs and growth. The Coalition maintains the change will boost GDP by more than 1% in the long-term, at a budgetary cost of $48.2 billion over the next 10 years.
But the very Treasury research papers relied on by the Coalition tell a more modest story than the headlines. Using these papers, we show that the net benefit to Australians in the real world will be only about half of the headline benefit, and it will be a long time before we are any better off at all.
The short story
The Government has made two claims about the economic impacts of its plan to cut the company tax rate.
On Budget night Treasurer Scott Morrison said that the tax cuts would:
“… mean higher living standards for Australians and an expected permanent increase in the size of the economy of just over one percent in the long term.”
Later last week, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said:
“The Treasury estimated last year…that for every dollar of company tax cut, there was four dollars of additional value created in the overall economy.”
Sound in theory, but there’s a back story
In theory, cutting the company tax rate boosts the economy in the long term. All taxes distort choices, and thereby drag on economic activity. Taxes on capital often have especially large economic costs because they discourage investment, which is mobile across borders. By some estimates, roughly half of the economic costs of Australian company tax ultimately fall on workers, as lower company profitability leads to lower investment, and therefore lower wages and higher unemployment.
But while the theoretical argument for company tax cuts is straightforward, the real story is more complicated.
The twist: a tax cut for foreign investors
The twist in the tale comes from Australia’s system of dividend imputation, or franking credits. The effect of this system is to make the company tax rate for Australian resident shareholders effectively close to zero. In nearly every other country, company profits are taxed twice: companies pay tax, and then individuals also pay income tax on the dividends, albeit often at a discount to full rates of personal income tax.
But in Australia, the shares of Australian residents in company profits are effectively only taxed once. Investors get franking credits for whatever tax a company has paid, and these credits reduce their personal income tax. Consequently, for Australian investors, the company tax rate doesn’t matter much: they effectively pay tax on corporate profits at their personal rate of income tax.
As a result, although Australia has a relatively high headline corporate tax rate compared to our peers, in practice the comparable tax rate is lower – at least for local investors. As a result, many of the international studies about the impact of cutting corporate tax rates are not readily applicable to Australia.
Local shareholders do get one small benefit from cutting corporate tax rates. If companies pay less tax, then they have more to reinvest, so long as the profits are not paid out to shareholders. Yet in practice, most profits are paid out. Therefore a company tax cut will generate little change in domestic investment.
By contrast, foreign investors do not benefit from franking credits. They pay tax on corporate profits twice: first at the company tax rate, and then as income tax on the dividends. This means that a cut to the company tax rate provides big benefits to them.
This week The Australia Institute pointed out that foreign investors from the United States and other countries that have tax treaties with Australia may not benefit from the company tax cut, because their home governments will collect the gains from any cut to Australia company tax as additional company tax. Yet this would only occur when foreign firms repatriate profits earned in Australia to the home country.
The big reductions in net tax revenue – and therefore the large benefits to companies – are expected when the corporate tax rate is cut from 30% to 25% between 2022 and 2027 for larger companies, including the bulk of businesses that are foreign-owned.
The headline from the Treasury modelling for the 2016-17 Budget is that this cut will ultimately increase GDP by up to 1.2% meaning larger foreign companies are attracted to invest more in Australia. The finding is based on work contained in a Treasury research paper that modelled the long-term impact of a company tax cut.
Activity is not income
However, it is a mistake to assume that all the increase in economic activity will make Australians better off. We often use Gross Domestic Product – the sum of all economic activity – as a short-hand measure for prosperity. But when the benefits disproportionately flow to non-residents, GDP can be misleading. It’s much better to look at Gross National Income (GNI), which measures the increase in the resources available to resident Australians.
Treasury expects that cutting corporate tax rates to 25% will only increase the incomes of Australians – GNI – by 0.8%. In other words, about a third of the increase in GDP flows out of the country to foreigners as they pay less tax in Australia. And because most of the additional economic activity is financed by foreigners, the profits on much of the additional activity will also tend to flow out of Australia.
You don’t get something for nothing
Yet even this increase in GNI of 0.8% is not the best estimate of the improvement in living standards Australians can expect from the Government’s company tax plan. If company taxes are lower, other taxes have to be higher, all other things being equal. In the modelling discussed so far, Treasury first assumes that these revenues can be collected by a fantasy tax that imposes no costs on the economy.
But that’s not what happens in the real world. So the Treasury research paper also models the scenario in which personal income taxes rise to offset the reduced company tax revenue. On this more realistic assumption, Treasury estimates that GNI will increase by just 0.6% in the long term, or roughly $10 billion a year in today’s dollars.
Other wrinkles in the story
Even this more modest Treasury figure may well over-estimate the long-term boost to GNI. In the real world, progressive income taxes impose higher costs than the hike to a hypothetical flat-rate personal income tax that Treasury modelled. Companies may also not increase investment as much as Treasury expects, and those firms that are part of oligopolies in Australia may not increase wages by as much as Treasury assumes.
While these are reasons to expect that the Treasury modelling overestimates the economic benefits of a company tax cut, they are offset by some more conservative assumptions. Treasury believes that tax cuts modestly change how much firms shift profits overseas; it may overstate how much tax cuts flow into additional profits rather than higher wages in those industries that it does recognise as oligopolies; and it may discount the benefits of investors making less distorted choices between debt and equity funding.
The verdict on the first claim
The bottom line is that, on Treasury’s own modelling, a corporate tax cut will increase Australian incomes in the long term by up to 0.6%. The Treasury research paper doesn’t commit itself to a timeframe, but it cites other work that expects the economic benefits of company tax cuts to take 20 years to bear fruit, with half the benefit in 10 years. Given that the important (and expensive) part of the corporate tax cuts only starts to take effect from 2022, Australia will be waiting 25 years for a 0.6% increase in incomes.
This economic benefit needs to be seen in context. If Australian per capita GDP and GNI increase at 1.5% a year (as the budget papers routinely assume), then over 25 years, incomes will rise by 45.1%. Corporate tax cuts mean that instead, incomes will rise by 45.7% – or perhaps a bit less. It may still be worth doing, but it’s not a plot twist that dramatically changes Australia’s story.
Others claim that in the past, company tax cuts have had no measurable effect on the economy. This is disputed – there may well be a link between corporate tax cuts and economic growth. But it’s inevitably hard to see in practice because on Treasury’s own modelling the economic effect of company tax cuts is small relative to other changes.
Not four-to-one, more like dollar for dollar
This brings us to the Government’s second claim. Late last week, Mr. Turnbull said that each dollar in company tax revenue cut would deliver an extra four dollars in GDP.
His claim appears to be drawn from an earlier 2015 Treasury research paper that modelled the economic impact of major Australian taxes, including company tax. The more recent Treasury working paper, released in Budget week, implies a slightly larger $4.30 increase to GDP from each $1 in revenue cut.
But again this misses a big part of the story.
First, this claim is about GDP, and therefore includes the disproportionate increase in the income of foreigners. Our analysis of the Treasury modelling shows that the increase to Australian incomes, or GNI, is only $2.80 per dollar of revenue lost from a corporate tax cut.
Second, when corporate tax is replaced by a still hypothetical but marginally more realistic flat rate income tax – rather than a complete fantasy tax that has no impact on the economy – the increase to Australian incomes is less again: only $1.80 per dollar of revenue lost.
Third, the Prime Minister has framed the boost to the economy in terms of the long-term increase to GDP per dollar of company tax cut. Treasury calculates the revenue “dollar” lost after considering the additional tax revenue that the government hopes to collect from all taxes in twenty years time as incomes rise because of greater investment.
Many people would interpret the Prime Minister’s statement to compare the ultimate benefit per dollar of tax revenue given up in the shorter term. On this basis, the increase to Australian incomes in the long term is only $1.20 for every dollar given up in the short term as a result of corporate tax cuts.
This story ends the same way. Corporate tax cuts may be worth doing, but the outcome is unlikely to set pulses racing.
The journey matters
So far, as the Treasury research paper does, we’ve focused on the long-term economic boost from a company tax cut once the economy has fully adjusted. But the journey to get there also matters.
For a decade, a cut to corporate taxes will reduce national income. Foreigners will pay less tax on the profits from their existing investments in Australia, reducing Australian incomes. Foreigners own about 20% of all capital in the economy, so it’s a big windfall gain for them. We estimate that when a 5 percentage point tax cut for big business is first implemented, national incomes will be reduced by about 0.5%, as a result of the immediate loss in company tax revenues formerly paid by foreign investors.
The benefits to Australians from a corporate tax cut only accumulate slowly as foreigners make additional investments. Treasury cites a paper that estimates that the benefits of corporate tax cuts take 20 years to flow through. Assuming that these benefits increase at a constant rate, Australian income will only be larger than otherwise after about 10 years.
Of course, the upfront costs of a company tax cut over the first decade must be offset against the long-term gains. On our estimates, the loss of income incurred over the first decade will only be offset by higher incomes after about 19 years. If Australians want the modest economic benefits of a corporate tax cut, they will be waiting a long time.
The moral of the story
Company tax cuts are not a knight in shining armour to save the Australian economy. On the basis of the modelling that the government uses to support its case, corporate tax cuts can make a modest contribution, and then over the very long term. That story won’t sell as many copies. Truth, on this occasion, is duller than fiction.
Authors: John Daley, Chief Executive Officer, Grattan Institute; Brendan Coates, Fellow, Grattan Institute
