I’m still not that interested in general, but these two bits looked interesting in their specifics:
- Looking at Bryan Palmer’s “Day 6 report,” it seems that the betting markets have started moving sharply in favour of the Coalition. Labor is still being billed as the favourites, but it’s narrowing fast.
- Andrew Leigh has looked at the distributional implications of the two parties’ tax policies. The result: Including Labor’s education credit, the Labor policy would be better for 93% of income earners, the same as the Coalition policy for 4% and worse for the top 3% of earners. Andrew’s summary:
* The action is really at the top. The only difference between the Howard and Rudd tax cuts is that Rudd wouldn’t cut tax rates from 45% to 42% for those earning over $180,000. Assuming the same rate of wage growth that we’ve had over past years, only 1.4% of adults in 2010-11 will have an income in that range, while only 3% of families will have an income-earner in that range.
* This means that the richest 1% of families get 7% of the Howard tax cuts, but only 4% of the Rudd tax cuts. The richest 10% get 28% of the Howard tax cuts, but 25% of the Rudd tax cuts.
* The education credit is fairly evenly distributed across the income spectrum (as Labor pointed out on Friday, 2/3rds of families with children are eligible for it). So the Rudd package looks more even – but only a little – if you take account of it.