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My budget piece in tomorrow’s Financial Review. In the next financial year, the govt will spend an astonishing 98% of the windfall it’s received. But I like the tax cuts, taking the marginal tax rate for a quarter of taxpayers down from 19% to 14% in one term. Link in next tweet.

Matt is now on Twitter. You should definitely follow him -- everything he says will be well considered (and usually counter consensus). I have for many years enjoyed being mistaken for him.

On the big question would abolishing negative gearing make housing more affordable our conclusion was it would not. Jurisdictions like the UK which do not allow negative gearing still have affordability problems. It is all a matter of supply - we need to build more dwellings.

Our government’s unwillingness to do the right thing on this issue is a disgrace.

As a wise man reminded me recently, years of life lost (YLLs) from Covid were equal to a few years worth of car crash YLLs. We could cut car deaths to ~0 by limiting all cars to 30 kph, a reduction in liberty which pales compared to Covid policy. Yet we do not, infer accordingly.

From Matt on the welfare costs of inelastic housing supply with population growth.

Makes me feel better that even Antony Green can't stop himself from replying to lost causes on the twitter

You can read my piece in today's Financial Review here, in which I lay out some basic economics of capital taxation, explain the trade-offs involved with the government's proposal to tax unrealised gains, and propose comprehensive reform of our capital income tax system.

My latest ⁦Financial Review⁩ column. The proposed new tax on unrealized capital gains is terrible on economic grounds. But it’s also a political landmine for the Treasurer. afr.com/politics/feder…

Kind of funny that this through the _department of education_ with nobody catching on that it doesn't matter.

Productivity growth is our number one priority.

A year ago this article did the rounds on the number of superannuation accounts with balances over certain ranges. google.com/amp/s/amp.abc.… But the 2020-21 tax data doesn't seem to have any finer bucket than "over 2million". data.gov.au/data/dataset/t… Anyone know the true source?

Given up on finding the data, a simulation seems to be just as good gist.github.com/andrewlilley/6…

You can read my column in today's Financial Review here. The greatest error of the Albanese government’s first term was failing to take economics seriously. In order for anything to get better, there is going to need to be a major change in mindset.