Mumbo jumbo on economy

With his now shop-worn “jobs and growth” mantra, uttered endlessly in parliamentary question time to howling backbench approval, Malcolm Turnbull insists that corporate tax cuts are the only way to increase wages and employment levels for working Australians (Paul Bongiorno, “Aspiring squad lines up its targets”, June 23–29). In the simplistic model of complex social and human reality that is called “economic theory”, this is true. It has to be. It is logically and deductively necessary. In that closed world it follows because it must, and all conventional economists accept it. It is a basic presupposition of their trade. But is this so? Always? Under what conditions? Some credible empirical evidence, as distinct from doctrinaire theoretical and ideological assertion, needs to be produced to show how much of any dollar of tax “encouragement” to business – big, medium and small as their different cases may be – finds its way into employment opportunities and remuneration for the employees of these businesses. And how much goes to other things, including the maintenance and improvement of the lifestyles of businesspeople and their families. How much of their “aspiration” is merely a self-indulgent conviction that they are entitled to live in the pleasant conditions to which they feel entitled to become accustomed? The time for endless incantations of neoclassical economic mumbo jumbo and its credo by Turnbull and the voluble archbishop of that pure faith, Scott Morrison, is long gone. Facts please.

– Clive Kessler, Randwick, NSW