I realise that people have a holiday drive coming up for Easter, so I managed to persuade Richard Holden and Steven Hamilton to give me an hour so I could record and share them discussing a couple of their tax policy proposals.
Note: These are also the authors of Australia’s Pandemic Exceptionalism - so feel free to give that book a read, and shout out if you want a review or a podcast on this.
To warm everyone up, both Richard and Steven gave thoughts on “mortgage interest deductions for first home buyers”. Then Richard discussed his work on negative gearing and housing. While Steven talked about his proposal for a standard deduction for labour income.
In all three cases, both economists gave a full set of views about these policies, and why they agreed or disagreed based on a set of economic principles.
If you want to hear these views, give it a listen.
A key learning for me is that even when policy proposals sound fairly different (i.e. views on the treatment of negative gearing), the views are often based on a solid framework of taxing income types consistently - and the level of difference is much smaller than public discourse would make us believe.
If I had an extra hour I would have liked to test out some hot takes - if that is something you’d like to hear be sure to comment below.
Note: I’ve been told that these podcasts can be hard to listen to through Substack, so here are a couple of other links that might help:
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