A few pieces this week seem to have lingered with our readers — Liberal Democrats senator David Leyonhjelm gave us his thoughts on Alan Austin’s company tax cuts piece from Monday, while our readers are still mulling over the rights and wrongs of attacking share bikes. No one came out of the Mirabella/Ensign saga unscathed, our readers agree. And in a rare occurence, Bernard Keane is told he hasn’t been quite hard enough on the conservatives and big banks. 

Re. Alan Austin’s “Crikey answers the question the Business Council won’t“

David Leyonhjelm, Senator for the Liberal Democrats writes: Austin claims that of the nine OECD countries that have cut corporate taxes since the end of the global recession, only corrupt Hungary has shown significant wage growth.

Austin’s analysis makes no comparison between countries that did and didn’t cut company tax and fails to factor in other wage-influencing variables. He also fails to take into account typical wage growth following an economic crisis, and the time lags between tax cuts and wage rises. Austin could have gone down the statistical path, which leads to the following conclusion (from page 78 of the Treasury’s ‘Rethink’ Tax White Paper from 2015):

“Empirical studies show that, in the long run, over half of the economic burden of corporate tax is likely to be shifted away from shareholders through lower wages for employees and higher prices for consumers.”

Treasury’s conclusion was based on multiple reputable sources, including Hassett and Mathur’s work for the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research that drew on data from 72 countries across 22 years. Austin ignores data from dozens of countries collected over decades, instead opting for a weak form of evidence favouring anecdote over statistics.

Re. Charlie Lewis’s “Only clowns in the Mirabella circus“

Crakeka writes: No one covered themselves in glory in this. Our defamation laws should not award damages to politicians, merely apologies on the front page if reports prove to be incorrect. If politicians had to defend their statements as being substantially true, that would be a breakthrough, and infinitely more important for the survival of democracy.

Re. Bernard Keane’s “Is there a moral and economic imperative to vandalise share bikes?”

Jocelyn Penington writes: The bike-share scheme is potentially gathering data (which many people is an acceptable swap for a convenient service), but I suspect not actually. The owners are very plainly not fulfilling their end of the offered deal. Bikes are NOT collected nightly and returned to convenient places. The public is guilty of littering when the bikes are thrown in the river or up a tree, but most stay for weeks where a rider left them – plainly littering by the company. 

In fact, are they still operating? The website doesn’t seem to have updated since 2017, and the FAQ: Area of Operation shows Singapore only The real money seems likely to be made from the deposit scheme, where you can only get a refund once, so no joining in summer and getting your money back for winter. Re. Bernard Keane’s:

Re. Bernard Keane’s “How the government helped the Commonwealth keep its breach secret“

Roger Payne writes: I think Bernard Keane should go harder on the governments culpability over the banks behaviour over the last twenty years at least.

The government’s protection of the banks and the mediocre self- serving part of financial planners was the major enabling factor that has created the unethical and poisonous culture now being exposed. Good banking (the core business) was lost in the shuffle. Note how many times the banks went overseas and failed because they didn’t have the protection of the home market practice.

It was organised and maintained for twenty years.  It is no wonder the banks persisted in chasing short term profits at any cost with blatant smugness. It is a bit rich and gullible for the media to swallow the game of blaming the regulators and accepting them as the stalking horse for the government’s problem. The regulators where intentionally “ nobbled” by cutting budgets, intentionally limited legislation, subliminal messages sent the CEO’s and off course the choice of CEO actually appointed. All of course now being “fixed” with much hand ringing by government.

Presumably the Liberal’s motive was short sighted self-serving political advantage and to hell with the Australian economy. All of this is in common with crony capitalism and privatisation whereby poor commercial deals are done that overly advantage the “carpet bagger” opportunists. All they have to do is “snow” the commercial gullible and largely incompetent politicians, desperate for trendy sounding political advantage.

The devious and incompetent economic management needs to be properly exposed to the electorate. Otherwise we are doomed to have it continue in some new form.