| > This is incoherent - both oil and mining resources require labor to extract. Again, what is special about oil is that profits from extracting oil are very large, but the profits from mining coal are quite small. Therefore a nation sitting on a pile of coal has a great jobs program for employing coal miners, but not a lot of surplus industry income that can be taxed to give everyone in the country an extra 200K. A nation sitting on a vast pool of oil can do that. > If we lack the surplus income of Norway, how have we managed to create a pool of wealth 3x as big from surplus incomes, in spite of wasting much more of it on fees each year? Australia's large retirement funds are the result of a larger population saving for retirement. They are not obtained by taxing excess profits of the iron/coal industry, but by individual households cutting their spending and saving for retirement. > Norway's SWF is literally a pension fund, and explicitly has the goal of creating equally shared wealth. This is a non-sequitur. I am saying that we shouldn't confuse the policy goal of fixed versus individual savings programs with whether or not SWFs are used - as one is a retirement policy and the other is funding mechanism. A nation may want a defined pension but shouldn't have an SWF, or vice versa, or neither. The fact that you keep mixing them is not some rebuttal. It's like when I point out you shouldn't confuse colors with gender of animals, and you say "False, this is a blue, male bird!" At this point I have to disengage. |
Are you aware of how Australia's superannuation system works? Contributions are literally paid from company income. You are saying it would be impossible for Australia to save trillions from surplus income when this has already happened and is the basic design of the scheme!