What I have come to realise in reading responses to my posts, is that for Labor and many of its supporters, this budget is a bit of a moral crusade.
They see “workers” as virtuous (sweat and toil). And they have an innate suspicion of investors, who they seem to think are just rich people who got wealthy through special treatment and “handouts.”
In this frame, workers “earn” their wages. By contrast, capital income passively rains down from the heavens while the investor sits on a beach sipping martinis.
“You’re free to invest, just pay a bit more tax,” they say. But incentives are everything — if you punitively cap the upside while leaving the investor with most of the downside risk, less jobs will be created.
What frequently gets lost is that investment is not simply money appearing from nowhere. Capital comes from people who defer consumption, take risk and allocate savings to productive activities. Every business, factory, mine, software company and startup exists because somebody was willing to put capital at risk. These are the people that employ the workers.
Because this is a moral crusade, it’s hard to change people’s minds by talking about the economics of risk taking, cost of capital or real effective tax rates.
The great irony is that the fastest path for “workers” to become wealthy is to invest their savings on the side. Into productive businesses and other growth assets. These new tax rules will make it that much harder for the average worker to build wealth.
Good morning!
As promised… posting every day until the whole of Australia has seen it.
Show your friends.
Share it round.
Watch it again.
Oh… and for the rest of the world? Have pity on us. It’s our Finance Minister.
Drizzle v1.0.0-rc.1 is out 🚀
▪︎ Effect v4 native support
▪︎ JIT row mappers to reduce ORM overhead to ~0
▪︎ Reworked casing API (breaking change)
▪︎ Drizzle for LLM agents (preview)
Drizzle is now as fast as using raw driver and mapping(or not mapping) results by hand 🙃