Swan sells tax cuts

The families hit hardest by recent rate rises can expect relief, on the tax front, from July 1.

 

That’s the message the Treasurer, Wayne Swan, is trying to sell to the Australian public.

He says Treasury modelling shows that the government’s tax cuts “are focused fairly and squarely on low and middle income earners.”

“That is the people on modest incomes who havee been left behind in recent years by previous governments,” Mr Swam said.

(It’s never too late to blame your predecessors).

Mr Swan also told the public, in his home state of Queensland, that this includes shop assistants, mechanics, people who are working in clerical occupations, childcare workers

.

“They will be the significant beneficiaries of these tax cuts,” Mr Swan said.

But he broadened his message to include all Australians.

” There are something like 1.8 million women who work part time and earn less than $20,000 a year,” Mr Swan said.

“They will receive significant tax cuts as a percentage of their income.”

Mr Swan said, too, that the tax cuts are “affordable.”

“We will only deliver tax cuts that are affordable,” he said.

Expect much more of this kind of talk, in the months ahead.

Mr Swan did not explain, though, just how some $30 billion worth of staged tax cuts, directed largely, as he said, to hard pressed low to middle income earners, will help to curb Australia’s now  troublesome inflationary pressures.

These people, after all, are also the most likely to spend any extra money that might come their way.

They have little choice, on that front.

But that must add to aggregate demand.