Taxes are up, spending is up, debt is growing – as John Roskam said, “this is a Labor budget delivered by a Coalition government“. This graph shows Commonwealth tax will reach 23.7% of GDP by 2021:
And this graph shows interest payments on Commonwealth government debt will reach $1.7bn per month by 2021:
Minutes after the budget lock-up broke on Tuesday, the IPA’s Daniel Wild told the Sydney Morning Herald that the budget doesn’t “fix the deep structural problems with our national economy and finances“. Also on Tuesday night, the IPA’s Simon Breheny gave his analysis in this Facebook Live video:
For more budget analysis, we’ll be chatting with Daniel on The Young IPA Podcast tomorrow, subscribe here.
In Spiked on Monday Brendan O’Neill wrote that “old politics is on life support” as a result of Emmanuel Macron’s victory in the French election, and that those who think the result represented the political class re-asserting itself are “delusional”.
Remember in March when the BBC reported that vanishing Arctic ice was causing smog in Beijing? This week, Christopher Booker pointed out in The Sunday Telegraph that for April, Arctic ice was as far advanced as at any point in the last 13 years. I wonder if the BBC will report this with as much enthusiasm?
If you wanted to know why political elites still don’t get Brexit, look no further. For $6,000 you can book a spot on the New York Times’ ‘Brexit means Brexit‘ UK tour which promises to answer, “did voters really know what they were voting for?” Unfortunately, the tour only visits locations in London…which voted to Remain.
No, this is not from The Conversation – an academic from the University of Auckland studying the effect of “neoliberalism” on urban planning has found that increased supply of land and houses reduces property affordability. I guess the laws of supply and demand must be wrong.
Article of the week:
“Progressives claim to love science, but what they truly love is power” wrote Kevin D. Williamson in National Review on Saturday on the tension between the left’s two professed loves of science and postmodern identity politics.
IPA Staff Pick:
Each week an IPA staff member shares what they have enjoyed recently. Today: Darcy Allen
The great American economist William J. Baumol passed away last week at the age of 95. You can read the obituary published by the Mises Institute here. His 1990 article ‘Entrepreneurship: Productive, Unproductive, and Destructive‘ in the Journal of Political Economy basically explains the whole world.
Here’s what else the IPA said this week:
- Andrew Shearer, Turnbull and Trump showed we were allies, now to work together on China – The Australian Financial Review
- Brett Hogan, Let’s put people in charge of their own super – The Spectator Australia
- Vern Hughes, How to fix the NDIS – IPA Review
- James Bolt & Peter Gregory, Episode 9 – The Young IPA Podcast
