Tax wealth to fund Australia’s ageing population

The Australia Institute (TAI) has released a new paper questioning the efficacy of Treasury’s Intergenerational Report (IGR) and why it ignored wealth and capital gains as a potential source of tax revenue to fund an ageing population:

Since September 198818 series net worth has been growing at 7.5 per cent per annum and, as mentioned above, is now (March 2021) $12,665 billion. At that rate in 40 years it would be $228,521 billion or roughly $89,160 billion in 2021 prices. Figure 1 plots household net worth over the period from March 1989 to March 2021 (the latest figure available as at the time of writing). These figures are shown in the solid blue line in Figure 1. Because of the volatility in the data a trend line has been included as the dotted line in Figure 1…

While household net worth at March 2021 stood at 6.37 times GDP, in March 1990 it was a more modest 3.58. That would seem to suggest Australia has experienced a very substantial shift in the structure of the economy. Wealth now looms so much larger than it did three decades ago…