I thought we had full employment
Posted by Dave Bath on 2007-10-16
The Liberal’s $34B (over 3 years) tax cuts are, inter alia, increase the job participation rate. It seems odd that they also talk about record employment, unless they are also willing to admit that there is quite a bit of underutilization out there.
Personally, I think that the nation’s economic performance (bottom line things like earning export dollars to stop the record national deficit) would be improved to a greater degree if we actually got some infrastructure in place, and maybe gave some proper R&D grants as long as the results were manufactured in Australia and profits/dividends weren’t repatriated overseas.
Maybe that would create more jobs by removing capacity constraints and boosting exports, and even make people happier because they’d have more interesting jobs that used their skills. (10% of graduates don’t have jobs requiring a graduate 12 months after graduating – they are instead working in Starbucks, pubs, McDonalds…).
See Also:
