The future of taxes

Why taxes would rise under Abbott

Ross Gittens does some useful number crunching about why the tax take has to increase somewhat if either side wins the election.

Should Labor or the Coalition wear the most blame for not being up front about this?   This gets confusing.  Labor has run a scare campaign on Abbott and the GST.  Abbott & Hockey deny emphatically that it is at risk.  But then, Abbott and Hockey have run, of course, a 5 year scare campaign on the deficit and their ability to get back to surplus faster than Labor.  Yet they do not face up to the fundamentals.

I think the best outcome may be that either Abbott or Rudd gets replaced in the next term, and the new leader gets realistic on this.

Folks are dumb where I come from....

Rudd fails to rally voters in his home state

Well, how harsh should I be?  It's not as if I supported a return of Kevin Rudd, and I have puzzled many, many times over why he was ever popular in Queensland.   The State is not exactly renowned for supporting urban quasi-intellectuals.   Did they think his "folkiness" was genuine?

Anyhow, after first encouraging Labor's party machine that Kevin was going to do well in Queensland, people polled here have decided they don't like him much after all.

What's more, they are apparently looking at voting in fairly significant numbers for Clive Palmer's nutty rich man act, and he seems to have taken over the "Eccentric Politician We'll Vote For Because We Don't Like Politicians" role from Bob Katter.

If they collectively have 15% of the vote, their preferences are going to be pretty important, and the article claims that more of those voters claim they will preference Labor.  Especially those voting for Clive Palmer.

This is all very peculiar.  But the State that continued voting for Joh endlessly has always been a bit of a political mystery.

Barry's depressed, with justification

Barry Jones: the 2013 election and the death of rationality

The article is taken from a lecture, and so wanders a bit, but his end take on Joe Hockey seems particularly accurate:

I have watched, with some pain, election telecasts being given by the shadow treasurer, Joe Hockey, somebody who I have always had some regard for, balanced, recognisably human, and not a fanatic, with touches of self-mockery.

He could have taken a more subtle, nuanced approach in his pitch, saying, perhaps, “while it is true that Australia has had some outstanding successes, such as the AAA rating and 21 unbroken years of growth, nevertheless there are some worrying indications that…”, and go on from there.

Instead, he plays the catastrophist card, that the past six years had left the Australian economy as a smoking ruin, and the rest of the world is looking to see when Australia will turn the lights back on. Catastrophic? Disaster? Tsunami? The clear suggestion is that practically every nation, with the possible exception of Somalia, is performing better economically than Australia.

Does Joe Hockey really believe what he is saying? I hope not.

Uncertainty Queen's failure

Well, there you go.  Tamino has a good post about that "ENSO masks global warming paper" paper, and points out that Judith Curry has mis-read it spectacularly.  

I predicted that she would soon be shot down, remember.

The biggest mistake Julia Gillard made

...was in not promoting hard the argument that a fixed price for carbon permits for an introductory period is not a carbon tax.  

Listening to Rudd agree with journalists that this was a mistake only confirms this.  He gets no traction from saying that - people who have been brainwashed into thinking its the worst thing ever done by a government are not interested in his half baked apology for it.  

Labor would doubtlessly have been better off by arguing it is not a tax, and not a broken promise.

Let them eat oysters

To Live, the Oyster Must Die 

I had read before that oysters used to be the food of the poor in England, but I didn't realise it was quite to this extent:

As the population of London boomed, doubling again and again from the 16th century onwards, these little nuggets of protein became an irresistible way for the fishermen of anywhere within reach of the capital to make a living....
 
The oyster boom expanded as industrialisation accelerated, with oysters fuelling industrial Britain’s industrious workers. Modern machinery made them easier to catch, store and transport, and oysters became the signature food of Victorian Britain.

“The poorer a place is, the greater call there seems to be for oysters. Look here, sir; here’s a oyster stall to every half dozen houses. The streets lined with ‘em. Blessed if I don’t think that ven a man’s wery poor, he rushes out of his lodgings and eats oysters in reg’lar desperation,” remarks Sam Weller in Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers.

That was published in 1836, and Londoners were only just getting going. In 1864, they consumed 700 million oysters. That’s five oysters a week, every week, for each man, woman and child in the city.

The same was true elsewhere in Britain, with predictable results. Oyster fishing began to collapse in Scottish waters in the 1870s, and had all but ceased there by 1920. In the 19th century, fishermen discovered a 200 by 70 mile oyster bed on the seabed between England and Germany, and had cleaned it out within decades. 

And we have still not learned from our mistakes. In the 1970s, fishermen found oysters in the Solent, the channel between the Isle of Wight and the South Coast, giving hope that the industry could be reborn sustainably, but we ate them all instead.

Of course...

Tony Abbott willing to break emissions pledge over funding hole

Malcolm Turnbull on, I think, The Drum last week, called Abbott an "intelligent skeptic" on climate change.

No: Abbott is not smart enough to take sensible policies to reduce CO2 seriously.  He is the triumph of political opportunism and shallowness over making a genuine attempt to deal with an important issue in a sensible way.

Turnbull should be appalled at this, but there is a possibility, I suppose, that he could still be leader if Abbott implodes.  His keeping quiet might therefore be good in the long run.  At least, I hope so.

Update:   I had forgotten how outspoken Turnbull used to be on this issue.  From 2009:

....the fact is that Tony and the people who put him in his job do not want to do anything about climate change. They do not believe in human caused global warming. As Tony observed on one occasion "climate change is crap" or if you consider his mentor, Senator Minchin, the world is not warming, its cooling and the climate change issue is part of a vast left wing conspiracy to deindustrialise the world.

Now politics is about conviction and a commitment to carry out those convictions. The Liberal Party is currently led by people whose conviction on climate change is that it is "crap" and you don't need to do anything about it. Any policy that is announced will simply be a con, an environmental figleaf to cover a determination to do nothing. After all, as Nick Minchin observed, in his view the majority of the Party Room do not believe in human caused global warming at all. I disagree with that assessment, but many people in the community will be excused for thinking the leadership ballot proved him right.

Remember Nick Minchin's defense of the Howard Government's ETS was that the Government was panicked by the polls and therefore didn't really mean it.

Tony himself has in just four or five months publicly advocated the blocking of the ETS, the passing of the ETS, the amending of the ETS and if the amendments were satisfactory passing it, and now the blocking of it.

His only redeeming virtue in this remarkable lack of conviction is that every time he announced a new position to me he would preface it with "Mate, mate, I know I am a bit of a weather vane on this, but....."

Yes, that's the pathetic political calibre of the  man about to be PM, apparently.

Politics and singing noted

It seems that Rudd got good reviews for his campaign launch speech, but with Newspoll doing another leap, this time in the wrong direction, no one can envisage the possibility that Labor will win.

But I did think the Abbott attack ads I saw while watching X Factor last night with my daughter were pretty good.  Even on a very soft interview on Insiders yesterday, Abbott still hesitates and ums and ahs like there is no tomorrow whenever a journalist asks an even mildly difficult question.   This makes for pretty good ads, for Labor.

Speaking of X Factor:  it's a very good show for parents to watch with pre-teen daughters, I reckon.  It leads to easy conversation about the inappropriate dress, make up and song choice of teenage contestants, and the silliness of raunchy choreography.   This year is better than last year:  there are far fewer tattoos on display in the judging panel, and on stage, and there are fewer contestants about whom I cannot comprehend why they are still there.

I have only seen a bit of The Voice - I thought it was pretty awful in comparison.  The X Factor has more likeable judges (it's not even clear this year that they have one in the role of "contrary and hard to please" judge), and (I think) less of an intrusive concentration on the personal lives of the contestants.  Now if only the show could fire the person who applies eye make on all of the females with a trowel, it would be perfect. 

This year, the star is no doubt Dami Im, whose amazingly powerful voice seems so incongruous coming out of a modestly proportioned Asian body.  And she's just married, Christian (I think - she has made brief reference to singing in Church), almost certainly free of tattoos, and appears a very genuinely nice person with a very happy husband. What's not to like?

My wife said she has seen on TV that she has had lots of publicity in Korea now too, due to her performances here.    Barring a nervous breakdown, or a vocal cord catastrophe, they may as well hand her the recording contract now and finish the show early.   But the producers probably have an entire store room full of short female skirts, and eye make up in 44 gallon drums, that has to be used up, so it won't happen.

Physics of interest

I wonder how many readers are actually interested in my posts pointing towards odd physics papers that I usually don't fully understand myself.  Who knows, but here's some examples of recent physics stories I liked for their novelty:

*  Great title here: Can the Higgs Boson Save Us From the Menace of the Boltzmann Brains?

I can't be the only person who thinks of the Futurama episodes with giant floating brains whenever I hear "Boltzmann Brains", can I?

In any event, the paper notes that one of the simplest present explanations for the universe carries with it a serious "Boltzmann Brain" issue, and asks whether there is a way around it.   The answer seems to be:  maybe.   Here's co-author Sean Carroll giving an easier to read explanation of the paper.   I should have read that first.

*  The Economist, of all places, notes a paper that argues that dark energy, causing an acceleration in the expansion of the universe, does not exist at all.  Instead, the universe is just getting heavier:

In Dr Wetterich’s picture of the cosmos the redshift others attribute to expansion is, rather, the result of the universe putting on weight. If atoms weighed less in the past, he reasons, the light they emitted then would, in keeping with the laws of quantum mechanics, have been less energetic than the light they emit now. Since less energetic light has a longer wavelength, astronomers looking at it today would perceive it to be redshifted.

At first blush this sounds nuts. The idea that mass is constant is drilled into every budding high-school physicist. Abandoning it would hurt. But in exchange, Dr Wetterich’s proposal deals neatly with a big niggle in the Big Bang theory, namely coping with the point of infinite density at the beginning, called a singularity, which orthodox theories cannot explain.

Dr Wetterich’s model does not—yet—explain the shifts in the shapes of galactic clusters that the Dark Energy Camera, SuMIRe and ACTPol are seeking to clarify. But perhaps, one day, it could. Dr Wetterich is a well-respected physicist and his maths are not obviously wrong. Moreover, his theory does allow for a short period of rapid expansion, known as inflation, whose traces have already been seen in the CMB. Dr Wetterich, however, thinks this inflation did not happen just after the beginning of the universe (the consensus view), for he believes the universe had no beginning. Instead, a small static universe which had always existed turned into a large static one that always will exist—getting heavier and heavier as it does so. There was thus no singularity.

Probably, this theory is wrong. As Cliff Burgess of Perimeter Institute, a Canadian theoretical-physics centre, puts it, “The dark energy business very easily degenerates into something like a crowd of people who are each claiming to be Napoleon while asserting that all the other pretenders are clearly nutty.”

 I like to think that God has given us a direct clue to this, by ensuring that from middle age, a mass increase takes place in nearly all human bodies for no obvious reason.   So goes the universe too, possibly.

*   Someone from CERN complains that the LHC has not come up with any significant surprises for the Standard Model of physics, which is very annoying for physicists.  Here's the abstract:

The first three years of the LHC experiments at CERN have ended with "the nightmare scenario": all tests, confirm the Standard Model of Particles so well that theorists must search for new physics without any experimental guidance. The supersymmetric theories, a privileged candidate for new physics are nearly excluded. As a potential escape from the crisis, we propose thinking about a series of astonishing relations suggesting fundamental interconnections between the quantum world and the large scale Universe. It seems reasonable that, for instance, the equation relating a quark-antiquark pair with the fundamental physical constants and cosmological parameters must be a sign of new physics. One of the intriguing possibilities is interpreting our relations as a signature of the quantum vacuum containing the virtual gravitational dipoles.

 As with many papers on arXiv, you should read the introduction, which paints a comprehensible summary of the problem before venturing into scores of equations and terminology which are hard to follow.

*  Someone (I have no idea who)  from Hungary seems to think he has found a way that you can get Einstein's results without Einstein-ian physics.  The paper has a charming title:  A simple minded question: Do we live in the four-dimensional spacetime? and starts in a very modest fashion: 

The author of the present paper is not sure that the following ideas are worth for publication or they are more similar to a somewhat lunatic conception.

 I don't really follow the argument at all, but have only looked at the paper quickly.  Still, if this is ground breaking new physics, you read it here first.

*  If you are interested in the "fine tuning of the universe" issue, Catalyst on the ABC had a pretty good 30 minute summary last week, which features some short interviews from some of the big names in physics.   There are the more extended interviews with them here, I think, although I haven't watched them yet.

I saw from the show that Paul Davies, who moved from Adelaide University to Arizonia State University (he seems to showing greater affinity for "dry and remote" as he ages) finds a sort of backwards causation causation appealing, although I don't really understand the mechanism he thinks might work.  As Frank Tipler's similar idea, that the future God causes the past, seems to have sunk under the experimental finding of the mass of the Higgs boson, I should look up what Davies is saying on the topic.

That was un-necessary

I liked a couple of recent articles about the [lack of] merit in much modern writing.

The first, in the Fairfax Good Weekend magazine (get your digital subscription now, and be hip and fight the Murdoch hegemony, like me) is about a spate of 20-something "hyperconfessional" women writing autobiographies, sometimes making much money in the process.   The question is - should any 25 year old who has done nothing extraordinary really think they should be writing autobiography?   The obvious answer is "no":

Summerlandish reads like an engaging blog; the prose is restless and flecked with Gen-Y pop-culture references, as if Carrie Bradshaw wrote it after a night in with a bottle of Prosecco and The O.C. box set. She has the "cute girl with the dirty mouth" routine down pat. A certain audience will love it. But good or bad, the question remains: is Summerlandish necessary? Are any of these 20-something memoirs necessary? If acclaimed British singer Adele, 25, could turn down a seven-figure book deal because she felt she was too young to say much of anything, what do these Oscar-less, Grammy-less writers think they can offer the world?

The other article was in The Guardian, by a publisher who wishes people (be they successful authors or not) would just stop writing for a while:

According to Google, some 130m titles have been published since the first books took form on the desks of monks. This overwhelming catalogue is today being supplemented at a rate never before seen in the history of the book. Another industry statistician, Bowker, reports that nearly 1.8m new titles were published in 2012, an increase of half a million in just three years. As the constant thrum of laptop keyboards in coffee shops across the nation testifies, nearly everyone, it seems, wants to be an author. And, according to the New York Times, 81% of Americans feel they have a book in them. New technology plays its part here. So too, perhaps, does writing's attraction as a way of asserting one's existence in a world where the traditional terrain for being acknowledged by others – the workplace, family or neighbourhood – is increasingly under strain.

But if writers today are ubiquitous, readers seem an increasingly endangered species. A recent survey revealed that one in four Americans had read not a book in over a year. Again, technology is a significant factor in this (electronic Scrabble entered my life like a new drug a couple of years back). Bye-bye bedtime novels.

Paradoxically, the deluge of writing itself contributes to declining readership. It's not just that if you're writing then you can't be reading. It's also that the sheer volume of what is now available acts as a disincentive to settle down with a single text. The literary equivalent of channel surfing replaces the prolonged concentration required to tackle a book. Condensed capsules of digital communication are infecting all forms of reading. But books, the longest form that writing takes, are suffering disproportionately in the reduced attention spans of readers.

I sometimes have a creative story telling urge, usually while thinking idly in the shower.  But for as a long as I can remember, when I am thinking about story ideas, my mind rushes back to past books or movies I have liked a lot, and gets stuck in reverie about how good they were.  I don't seem to have anything resembling a truly creative gene, and it puzzles me how people develop the skill to come up with engaging, realistic characters in interesting plots. 

 

Some novelists do it via continual drawing on life experiences (either their own, or of others in their circle - I remember reading a biography of Evelyn Waugh and thinking that people he had met could more or less be assured of turning up, not necessarily favourable, in some fictionalised form in one of his books sooner or later.  And his contemporary Graham Greene had a ridiculously complicated personal life that provided lots of source material.)

 

Writers in the field of science fiction and fantasy perhaps have the harder task of coming up with characters who have to react to things which have never happened anywhere to anyone real, and I suppose that may mean that when they do characters well, they deserve special credit for their feat of imagination.  It's just a pity that fantasy generally leaves me cold, and science fiction is not all that well known for well detailed characters.

I would like to be able to do science fiction, if only because I find myself dissatisfied with nearly all of it these days.  But the skill set is not there, I'm sure.

And anyway, it probably is true - too much of everything is being written these days...

 

 

Disagreement with the Uncertainty Queen

Learning From the Hiatus | Climate Abyss | a Chron.com blog

Judith Curry's "blown mind"about the recent paper on the East Pacific being behind the hiatus in global surface temperatures has been criticised as in error by conservative climatologist John Neilsen-Gammon.  His post above contains a detailed look at the issue, and is not all easily understood, but his strong belief that Curry is wrong is clear.

I still expect others to weigh in on this.     

But it's a dis-aster

Life is much better under Labor after all, says study

From the above article:

Politicians of both persuasions will always, during election campaigns, claim that they know "families are doing it tough".  But that's just politics.   John Quiggin had a column recently about the false perceptions that flourish and why, and ended with this:

Another possible explanation of the ‘doing it tough’ perception arises from inconsistent responses to price variation. Despite sustained low inflation and falling interest rates, many Australians perceive themselves as facing ‘cost of living’ pressures. Over the past decade some highly salient prices such as the retail price of electricity have risen sharply, but consumption continued to grow until recently, driven largely by the increased use of airconditioning. By contrast the cost of telecommunications services has fallen , but households have responded to lower prices and the availability of new products by increasing their total expenditure. It is easy enough, though misleading, to see this as a story of ever-increasing bills for everything.

Despite all of these partial explanations, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the ‘doing it tough’ perception is nothing more than a manifestation of some of our less appealing human propensities: envy and chronic dissatisfaction. This can be seen all the way up the income scale, to the point of British bankers who complain that they can’t live on a million pounds (roughly 2 million dollars) a year.

News media have an obvious commercial interest in telling stories that make their audiences feel victimised, and politicians have made the judgement that telling voters the truth is too costly. At current rates of growth, incomes will double by 2050, but we will doubtless still be living on Struggle Street.

Amazingly, too, I note how little attention there has been in the media (and how unsuccessful Labor has been in talking about) the reductions in government family support the Coalition is committed to (such as ending the School Kids bonus) while at the same time promising that families will be $500 a year better off because of the carbon tax going.

Families, do your maths! 

Introduced last year, the bonus provides eligible families with $410 a year for each child in primary school and $820 for each in high school.

 If you intend voting Coalition, you probably think you are "doing it tough" and that your electricity bill is a dis-aster.  Yet if you have kids at school, this one item alone shows, what the Coalition "gives" is going to be more than taken away.   

Good news

Remember the awesome trailer for Gravity?  The movie has opened in Venice, to pretty much ecstatic reviews.

It's a must see for me....

Labor policies people might like, if they ever heard about them

Amongst all the "it's a disaster!" analysis coming from News Ltd and Fairfax and now even Lenore Taylor at the Guardian (Lenore, pull yourself together!), it seems to me there are some policy things that are more Labor than Coalition, and which most common sense people would support, with little need for explanation:

1.  an emphasis on high speed rail from Sydney to Canberra, and then perhaps Sydney to Newcastle.  The Sydney to Canberra route is particularly apt - the distance seems too short for a plane flight, it takes too long to get through the outskirts of Sydney in a car, and people are always going to need to travel there.  If the train connected to Sydney Airport, it would be perfect.  Why doesn't someone commit to that, at least?

2.  the commitment to bring some Navy ship construction forward at Williamstown.   Everyone thinks we should be able to build ships, don't they?  It's manufacturing, it's a bit high-techy; it's the next best thing to having an aircraft industry.

3.  the support to the car industry.   Everyone sensible likes the fact that we can design and build cars, and I gather that lots of countries give support to car builders in one way or another.   The Coalition presumably thinks it is quite OK that we attempt to emulate New Zealand, which is trying to build an economy on making frozen food, soap and Hobbit films, as far as I can make out.  The way the Coalition is going about the FBT has let them off the media scrutiny hook on this one - it's a disgrace.

The other odd thing is that ideas which Rudd has flown seem to be being treated in media talk as if they would actually happen - the Northern Territory tax reduction, and the wholesale removal of the Navy from Garden Island.   In fact, these were kite flying exercises and don't need to be treated all that seriously.  There is plenty of scope for them not to happen at all, or on reduced scale.

But no, it's a disaster.

Pretty much how I see it

From The Economist:

The choice between a man with a defective manifesto and one with a defective personality is not appealing—but Mr Rudd gets our vote, largely because of Labor’s decent record. With deficits approaching, his numbers look more likely to add up than Mr Abbott’s. Despite his high-handed style, Mr Rudd is a Blairite centrist. A strategic thinker about Asia, he has skills that will be useful, especially as Australia has to balance its economic dependence on China with its security dependence on America. It would be nice if he revived his liberal approach to asylum-seekers. And, who knows, he may even live up to his promise to be less vile to his colleagues.

An upset possum

The Possum who runs Pollytics is very cranky about the reporting of the costing issue yesterday.  It is fun to read an argument between two furry animals:

Surely the problem that Possum alludes to is the "sound bite-ese" which is used in all political reporting, but particularly at election time.  That elevates an exaggerated bit of rhetoric into an unqualified claim, and both sides of politics both use it, and are victims of it, all the time.   (Even Malcolm Turnbull, who has been happy to repeat a claimed  $90 billion plus estimate for the NBN many times, completely without running through the questionable assumptions.)  But this time, an out of context Rudd made some public servants worry that people might think they had been used inappropriately, and they made it clear they hadn't.

Meanwhile, the fact that the Coalition is playing silly buggers with paper that is already in their hands gets ignored in headlines.

Free Advertising

Having paid for a digital subscription to Fairfax, I have put the App on the Samsung and iPad at home. 

I had previously used the apps without paying for the subscription, and found the advertising intrusive and the navigation a bit annoying.

The subscription makes it a much, much better experience, and my wife is happy that she a supply of suduko.

Go on. Do it.

Headlines, headlines

Fairfax has had its fair share of "it's a disaster for Rudd!" headlines this campaign too; often with the headline sounding more extreme than the article itself.

And Tim Colebatch, who I have been quoting a lot over the last 12 months, actually said at the Hockey/Bowen press club debate on Tuesday that he assumed Hockey would be Treasurer. 

So is it much surprise that he is running a "it's an absolute disaster!" column today about the costings issue yesterday?

It's interesting this self fulfilling prophesy business.  I suggested a couple of times at places like John Quiggin's blog that if you keep talking down how Gillard is a failure, of course you're helping the public perception of that and assuring a Labor loss, even when you think the Coalition would be the true disaster.

It's also interesting how clearly David Koch on Sunrise this morning was doing what I would do - telling Hockey, who has transformed himself into a unlikeable s*#% for the purpose of getting government, that the real problem here is that the Coalition is sitting on papers which they claim support them, and could release them anytime to support their argument.  The Coalition is hiding its assumptions, except, it would appear, to selected friendly journalists.

Mind you, Rudd himself did this in 2007.   He faked his way into government, and Abbott and Hockey are doing exactly the same this time.

I was unhappy in 2007; I am very unhappy now, because the Coalition will seek to disassemble some decent policies and replace them with crap ones.

The Coalition trusts Rupert, but not you?

So, according to The Australian, Treasury is perhaps a bit peeved that Rudd is using some figures they did before the election was called to contradict Coalition costings of savings.   But, says Treasury, their work wasn't a true costing of Coalition policy: it was more a hypothetical exercise and different assumptions would give different results.

OK.

But here's the thing:  The Australian is saying it has seen the Parliamentary Budget Office costings on public servant cuts that Abbott and Hockey are refusing to release.  (Maybe next week you'll some of their work?):

The costing, seen by The Australian, assumes that natural attrition would see the size of the federal public service cut by 6,000 positions by June 2014 and another 6,000 by September 2015.

So who leaked this to The Australian - the surest source of a sympathetic account for the Coalition that is possible?

I think I should assume that the Coalition is leaking to Rupert what they won't give directly to the public.

How ridiculous is that?

It is done....

Inspired by the appalling standards of the Murdoch press (and, I have to admit, the paywall that kicks in after 30 visits in a month) I have just for the first time ever paid for a digital news subscription to Fairfax.

Go on, join me.  Keep alternatives to Murdoch alive (at least while ever Gina isn't telling them what to write.)  

But please - don't pay for the AFR with their Murdoch escapee Stutchbury.  He should not have been let into the place.

New subscribers will be sent my entertaining video "Hey Kids! Make your own Tony Abbott Voodoo Doll!" in time for the election.