GST is again being promoted as tax ‘reform’. See this. The GST was going to do away with tax avoidance: remember? It is a profoundly regressive tax, having nothing at all to recommend it.

GST is part of the simplistic rotation between emphasis on income taxes to sales taxes and back to income taxes again that pointedly ignores the ongoing speculative real estate bubbles we’ve been experiencing.

You’re having a job done on you, Australians!

Harvard graduate and tax experty, Dr Terry Dwyer, exposes GST nonsense here:

There are not many saying we can hold out until 2026, Mase.

Following the peak of the Kondratieff Wave in 1972/73, there has been a gradual decline in the growth of gross domestic product . It is not coincidental that this has been accompanied by increasing levels of real estate speculation. It happens all the time. However, government authorities and political parties turn a deaf ear to warnings about the upcoming financial depression.

They won’t be warned, because the study of economics was rigged to ignore the damaging role of land prices, taxation, money and private debt. Tax regimes have been structured in such a way as to treat property speculation simply as another form of capital investment. [!]

Therefore, the incredibly destructive boom-bust phenomenon must be painted as being ‘unavoidable’: “It’s the natural business cycle”.

And we’re stupid enough to believe it!

C’mon Treasury: lift your game! Tell it like it is!

Neoclassical economics lends itself to ‘academese’ more than any other discipline. Amidst its sophisticated jargon and often mindless economic modelling, the study has grown to hide fundamental considerations; not the least the reciprocal relationship between general prosperity and rising land prices.

It has acted to bury human rights such as access to cheap accommodation and the abolition of servility and poverty. However, these are normative measures and, of course, “Economics must not be values-based”.

So much for taxing land values (carrying no deadweight losses) instead of wages, profits and goods and services (which inject extensive deadweight losses)!

Thusly, has neoclassical economics come to accommodate the 0.1% and its fellow-travelling financial speculators at great cost to all others.

“Values-laden!”

Accordingly, we daily witness the study’s misbegotten results as world economies head relentlessly into the financial depression of 2026.

Believe it or not, I’m a fundamentally positive and happy person. It’s just that I’m able to see things the way they are.

Question 1: If rising oil and gas prices are examples of cost-push inflation, why aren’t rapidy escalating land prices considered to be even moreso?

Question 2: Why are rising wages considered to be another example of cost-push inflation when rising profits aren’t – because Henry George demonstrated that wages and profits actually rise and fall together; inversely to land prices?

Question 3: The invisible hand will meet demand-pull inflation, but why do we simply ignore that (a) land prices–land having no cost of production–and (b) the deadweight losses generated by the taxing of labour and capital–passed on into the price of goods and services–are responsible for cost-push inflation? Neither are included in the Consumer Price Index.

Question 4: Maybe we need fresh thinking on the main causes of cost-push inflation?

I disagree with Mosler only on the point that “inflation results from prices that governments pay above the margin” – although I suppose even that definition could be taken as a veiled description of governments having us unnecessarily paying for land prices that needn’t exist, and for taxes levied upon labour and capital?

And, hey Greens! If you really want to attack pollution and climate change, we need to be taxing ‘land’ rent away (i.e. the rent of all our natural resources) to curb monopoly and over-exploitation: for people and the planet’s sake.

Dr Cameron Murray calls Glaser and Gyourko out on nonsensical papers.

Hey! Land is free only when its full economic rent has been taxed away, messrs Glaser and Gyourko!

Neoclassical economics has recently been taking quite a battering from heterodox economists prepared to examine facts properly. Murray’s case is another fine example of this exposition.