In today’s THE AGE Clancy Yates says the RBA Gov has a tough job getting us a pay rise.

He’s right, of course, because the LNP and ALP are beholden to banking, real estate and property investors being tied to these escalating high land prices, despite Henry George having proven that wages and earned profits are what’s left after publicly-generated land rent is capitalised into high land prices by private interests.

Some would say that intense property speculation is what capitalism is all about, but it hasn’t always been so. During the Progressive Era, following the 1890s depression, most revenue in the USA was derived from taxing property values at state and local government levels. In Australia we did it even better, capturing land tax also at federal level from 1910 to 1954.

What if tax regimes are promoting non-productive asset price increases at a vast cost to most people and productivity?

But we’re faced with the canard that the central government is more powerful today, needs to tax more, and there’s not enough rent.

Rubbish! It’s 50% of the economy. There’s plenty there and it wouldn’t involve generating the excess burden/deadweight losses of other forms of taxation.

Time to revisit the recommendations of the Henry Tax Review which recommended we abolish some 100 damaging taxes and look to a better use of land tax?