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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim McMannis who wrote (122332)	5/12/2008 12:26:58 AM
From: Moominoid	Respond to of 306849

The Australian Federal budget will be released tomorrow. My sense is the government is going to try to force the Reserve Bank into cutting rates by cutting net expenditure. There are big tax cuts that they promised in the election campaign which they will carry through with, but these will be countered by spending cuts and reduction in various loopholes, raising of taxes like the tax on luxury cars (preannounced). OTOH they are going to cut the tax penalty for not having private health insurance (there is free government health care in Aus but incentives to get private insurance) by raising the threshold for this tax from $A50k p.a. to $A100k p.a. The fall in the stock market is reducing the take from capital gains tax this year, but company profits keep growing in the mining boom. So the net effect of all this on the surplus (the federal government has run a surplus for many many years) is unclear at this stage.